That Scandalous Summer (16 page)

“Ah,” Michael said. “You’re right. I don’t want a torch.”

Her laughter was the sweetest reward that cowardice had ever received. “Yes, it’s a peculiarly Cornish skill; I do not recommend that northerners attempt it.”

“Perhaps this northerner should not have left his doctor’s kit in the vehicle.”

“Oh, there’s no medicine so strong as Cornish pride.” Amusement danced in her voice as she turned toward him. “Nobody will get burned tonight. But I would advise you to rise early tomorrow, if you can bear it. You’ll have more than a few patients, then.”

He had never seen someone so animated by enjoyment. She had a talent for happiness that struck him, suddenly, as childlike. He had a brief inkling of how she must have looked as a young girl, inclining toward the hearth on the eve before Boxing Day, roasting her chestnuts and dreaming of tomorrow’s presents.

The wistful flavor of this vision left him uneasy. He had no interest in children, and he certainly did not see her as one. God, no. The light playing over her drew a shadow beneath the plump curve of her lower lip, and he did not feel fatherly in the least.

“I cannot imagine you in London,” he said without thinking.

Her mirth visibly dimmed. “What do you mean?”

What could he reply that would not betray him? A country doctor would not know that the
ton
’s upper circles discouraged such vivacity—that the beau monde required ennui, not enjoyment, from its fashionable beauties. Certainly rumors of their frolics with farmers would not elevate their reputations.

“You seem to belong here,” he said instead. And that, too, was true. What a curious creature she was. He’d always imagined himself freer as a second son, liberated by his lack of obligations to the family legacy. Yet somehow she managed to find pleasure in the very duties that made his brother’s life seem so constrained.

“But I’m not this way in London,” she said. “Perhaps you wouldn’t recognize me there.”

He wondered if the new soberness in her regard was only an effect of the flame-light around them. “What are you like in London?”

A reveler called out her name, and she returned the greeting with a nod and an absent smile. “Not . . .
happy,” she said. “Not recently, at least. You guessed rightly, you know—that day outside the post office. I
was
looking for a marriage announcement. Or a betrothal, rather.” Her mouth turned down at the corners, a rueful little grimace. “And I found it.”

“Ah.” Suddenly he wasn’t sure he wanted to know any of this. The thought of her pining after another man made him feel . . . restless. He frowned toward the bonfire—then winced as yet another young idiot took the plunge.

Yet curiosity was an emetic. It brought words out of his mouth that he more wisely would have swallowed. “Whose announcement was it?”

She pulled a face. “A man not worthy of the ink spent on him—much less the year I wasted, imagining he might turn out to be honorable.”

If her breezy delivery was intended to reassure him, it worked the opposite effect. “He did wrong by you.”

“Nothing so Gothic.” She shrugged. “My own fault, really.”

He thought again of his brother. “Don’t blame yourself. Love makes a poor judge of character. Best avoided, all around.”

She laughed softly. “Indeed. Champagne is so much quicker, and
its
aftermath only lasts for a day or so.”

He took her arm. There was no forethought in it: he simply wanted to touch her. “Shall we walk?”

They began to stroll through the crowd, past the fires. “Is that your policy, then?” she asked. “To avoid love? I suppose that explains how an upstanding doctor remains so long a bachelor.”

Au contraire, my dear. Marriage makes the quickest cure for love.

He pressed his lips together, oddly irritated. He’d spoken that line to any number of women, sweetening the warning with a wink and a smile. But it did not seem like something a country doctor would say. In fact, it seemed far too close to what a cur like her former lover might have preached.

“Perhaps it’s a matter of laziness,” he said. “Cynicism, unlike love, rarely disappoints.”

“I will confess, love drove me to some terrible moments,” she said slowly. “Public moments, I should say. Moments that . . . rather shaped my reputation.” She bit her lip. “Which is not, if you must know, particularly genteel.”

Why, that was
bashfulness
on her face. The professional beauty was shifting her weight for fear of what he might think.

A strange feeling stirred in him—protective and tender and angered, all at once. He could not imagine the bastard who would willingly disappoint this woman, but he certainly could imagine several fitting punishments for such idiocy. “People say a great deal of nonsense. A wise man rarely listens.”

“Oh, don’t mistake me, Mr. Grey—I don’t give a fig for what people say. That is
my
policy.”

She gave him a cheerful smile. He might have believed it once. But what he had originally taken for brazen sophistication now seemed to him more like bravura. It felt familiar to him, for he’d once employed it himself, the better to endure the sly taunts of fellow schoolboys who had kept apprised, via the newspapers, of his parents’ particular foibles.

The slope steepened beneath their feet. A misshapen pile loomed up against the night sky, an ancient cairn
whose huddled stones were a monument to someone long since forgotten.

“A beautiful night,” she said as they reached the cairn. She slipped free of his hold to set her tankard on the ground, then turned back to face him. Her features, in the darkness, blurred into an indistinct paleness, impossible to decipher. “A beautiful night, on which Mrs. Broward will live.” She spread her arms and tipped back her head. “I feel like screaming it to the stars: A very nice try, but we foiled you! These specks of dust had their victory, after all!”

He laughed. “Go on, then. Scream! I’ll never tell.”

He heard her take a great breath. But after a pause, she exhaled gustily, and her arms dropped. “No. Mustn’t tempt fate. I should hate for Mary to have my punishment.”

He reached for her cheek. So smooth. “I can’t imagine you would deserve one.”

Her hand covered his, a warm, soft pressure. “Oh, but you have no idea if what they say is true. For all you know . . .” He ran his thumb over her cheekbone, and heard her breath catch. “For all you know, I’m a very wicked woman,” she said.

His fingers slid easily into her hair. He could pull her toward him now . . . or tilt up her head to expose the line of her throat to his mouth. “I had been hoping so,” he murmured. “Since the time Mr. Pershall chided you for failing to attend church, my expectations have grown quite wild.”

Their breaths mingled. “I begin to think you’re not a northerner at all,” she whispered. “You’re far too charming.”

The words echoed his brother’s. The coincidence felt
eerie. A strange foreboding tapped at him, like a finger on his spine.

The urge to kiss her still gripped him. But would that not make him as a great a cad as the man who had jilted her? For the intimacy born of recent days had led her to divulge intimacies he did not deserve. Had led her to trust him when she did not even know his true name.
Mr. Grey,
she called him.

He slowly loosened his fingers from her hair. God, what a tangle. Had they met in London, openly, he would have had her in bed by now. To
both
their satisfaction. “My name is Michael,” he said. That was one piece of truth he could give her. The rest . . . he must think on. Wisdom told him that one did not share secrets until one was willing to hear them broadcasted. “If I’m to call you Elizabeth, you must return the informality.”

She cleared her throat. “I would be honored,” she said. “But only . . . only if I may also call you a friend.” She caught his hand and his attention divided, half of it fixing on her words, the other riveted to her touch. “I know I’ve not always been kind to you.” Her fingers were warm, as light as the brush of a butterfly. “Can you forgive me for that?”

The uncertainty in her voice fascinated him. Perhaps the true cause for his continued masquerade had nothing to do with discretion. He simply wanted to discover how far this odd affinity between them could extend. A society beauty and a country doctor . . . He had a way with women, but he was a realist: he knew that his family connections aided his seductions. Yet she, knowing nothing of them, still stood here in the darkness, touching him . . .

“Come,” he said. “There’s nothing to forgive.” When
insulted, she took her own pound of flesh: he liked that about her. “You have spirit; there’s no sin in that.”

Her fingers tightened. Much like her stature, their strength was deceptive. He’d meant what he’d said; in spirit, in strength, she was outsized. And he was a doctor, after all. He’d never found frailty appealing.

He laid his free hand over hers, wanting with an almost animal intensity to move her hand to his hip, to feel her grip tighten as he pulled her against him. Hell, that was not where he wanted her hand. He wanted it gripping his cock as he leaned over her in bed, his tongue deep in her mouth. God, the things he would do to her.

Friend
was a pale, pale word.

He caught her hand and lifted it to his lips, a gesture chaste enough to be performed in public. But between them, it could not remain chaste. He had ideas . . . and as he breathed into the web of her fingers, he gauged her pulse with his thumb, and felt how it began to thrum faster.

Doctorly skills: good for multiple endeavors.

He opened his mouth and bit her, very lightly, on the web between thumb and finger.

He heard the breath shudder out of her. “Perhaps . . .” But she did not finish the thought; her voice trailed away, turning the word into an invitation.

“Perhaps,” he murmured against her skin, and tasted her again—slowly, tracing the ridges of her knuckle with his tongue, then settling his teeth very gently around her fingertip before closing his lips on her.

Salt and skin. The flavor of her. “Oh,” she whispered. “I don’t think—”

Thinking was the problem. They’d both done too much of it. He lifted her hand and placed it on his nape,
then took her by the waist and pulled her into him. From down the hill came another explosion; overhead, bright lights glimmered briefly among the stars.

He saw her face by that brief flash—her wide eyes, her trembling mouth. He lowered his mouth to hers . . .

And she averted her face.

“Friends,” she said breathlessly, “do not . . . kiss.”

He tongued her earlobe. “Then perhaps we shouldn’t be friends.”

The line of her jaw tightened, telegraphing stubbornness. “What else can we be, sir?”

The question seemed disingenuous. He should not have to explain the alternatives to a widow, much less this one.

A very disagreeable idea struck him. “Do you still love this fellow, then?”

Her hesitation seemed to last minutes. “No,” she said finally. But she did not sound convinced of it.

He let go of her. She took a single step back.

God help him, but he wanted to hunt down the bastard and throttle him. “What’s his name?” he asked.

She blinked. “What difference? You wouldn’t know him.”

“No matter,” he said. “It’s the sort of thing
friends
tell each other.”

“Oh, excellent. We
are
to be friends, then?” Her arm slipped through his again; she pulled him back down the hill toward the fires. “I should warn you, though, I’m a terribly
interfering
kind of friend.”

What in hell had just happened here? He could feel her nerves in the way her fingers danced nervously on his arm. For that reason alone, he let her tug him along as she continued to babble.

“I’ll always be hanging about,” she said, “forever badgering, wishing to know every detail of your business. You’ll have to grow accustomed to that.”

“My business, I promise you, is beyond tedious.” Unless it involved her. Her pulse or her skin. Her mouth.
Friendly.
“I will spare you those details.”

“Yet I will insist on knowing them.” As they stepped back into the range of the firelight, he saw that she was giving him the brightest of her smiles—the one, he was coming to understand, that she used to smooth over those moments in which she felt uncertain. She felt as much out of her depth here as he did. This current between them . . . neither of them knew how to manage it.

And that, more than her words, made him take a breath and control himself. For her comfort, he discovered, was important to him—and the sight of her so rattled stirred an instinct that felt strangely protective of her.
Shh,
he wanted to say.
You needn’t smile.

He set his hand over hers, forbidding himself to stroke the soft skin over her knuckles, and made himself say only: “Very well. If that is what friends do.”

•   •   •

Friends,
Michael learned, finished their ale and then walked decorously, arm in arm, back to their vehicle. Friends made comfortable conversation on the drive home, and shook hands before parting. Friends traded notes over the next few days, solicitously inquiring after each other’s health, exchanging tidbits of news: Mrs. Broward’s health continued to improve. Havilland Hall’s strawberries were proving particularly sweet this summer. The weather continued very fine. Should they meet for tea on Friday at five o’clock?

Friends paid calls. They waited in the foyer as the butler went to confirm that the mistress was at home. They then concealed their surprise when shown upstairs, away from the drawing rooms, to a boudoir done up in pink silk, where three ladies sat in their morning gowns, folding paper roses, embroidering, and laughing so loudly that their voices carried all the way into the hall.

“Mr. Grey!” cried Elizabeth as he paused in the doorway of the small, sunlit room. “How good of you to call. Now catch!”

He reacted just in time, plucking a paper rose from the air.

“That is for your damaged rosebushes,” she said. “Take as many as you like. There is glue, somewhere, if you wish to attach them.”