The Black Sheep's Return (5 page)

‘I don’t believe Miss Rowan gives her name as easily to grown gentlemen as she did to you, my son. You must have charmed her quite wondrously well.’

‘Yes, he did,’ Freya insisted in the face of Henry’s slightly conscious flush at the memory he had actually demanded it of her rather rudely.

‘Eat,’ said Orlando Craven as if unable to argue with a lady just now.

Freya had never enjoyed breakfast so much, sitting on a tree stump in a forest clearing miles away from civilisation. Birds sang and Atlas snuffed politely about the edge of the clearing, pretending not to be lurking for leftovers. Every bite of crisp bacon, richly dark mushroom and deliciously herbed egg tasted like ambrosia and as the juices soaked into the bread underneath, it seemed no hardship it wasn’t fine and white as she was used to and she pulled pieces off it with the same glee she saw in the children’s rapt faces as they ate. Now and again she allowed herself a shy glance at Orlando and noted he ate with neat economy, but somehow the idea of him seeing her naked in his scullery not half an hour ago stopped her saying how she appreciated his cooking and the thoughtfulness that had made him do it outside and not disturb her. Because he had disturbed her, acutely.

‘Better?’ he asked at last, seeming to wake from some sort of reverie when she sighed and handed Atlas the still-savoury remains of the bread where the crust was too hard to eat without endangering her teeth.

‘Much better, thank you,’ she said with a
contented sigh. ‘Your dog has very fine manners, Mr Craven,’ she added as Atlas took the morsel with such polite courtesy she felt no fear as his impressive teeth and powerful jaws closed on it.

‘Nice to know I can flatter myself on one success in that area,’ he said with a stern eye on his angelic-looking offspring that argued he hadn’t forgotten their disobedience.

‘I wonder what time it is?’ she mused, more to divert him than from an urgent need to know.

‘About seven of the clock,’ he said without reference to a timepiece and she must have betrayed her disbelief, since Sally piped up,

‘Papa
always
knows what time it is.’

‘I’ve learnt the habits of the sun and the creatures around me,’ he said with a shrug, as if that wasn’t an unusual skill, and Freya felt guiltily at her own ignorance about the busy schedules of those who must toil for a living.

‘It must prove very useful,’ she said and heard self-consciousness in her voice as she couldn’t get the awkwardness of their last encounter out of her head.

‘It is,’ he said as if he couldn’t either.

‘Can we go, Papa?’ Henry interrupted as if growing tired of adult silliness.

‘So long as you stay within earshot,’ his father said with a straight look that said he meant it and his son returned it with a solemn nod. Sally gave an exasperated shrug at the sheer contrariness of men that made Freya long to laugh out loud.

‘And while my little demons are gone, we need to think about your day, Miss Rowan,’ Orlando said without looking directly at her.

‘I will try not to get in the way,’ she said, Lady Freya’s rigid dignity hard in her voice and she regretted the return to her old self more than she would have dreamt she could only yesterday.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snapped as if she was demanding he devote every minute of it to her comfort.

Now Freya knew what Sally meant to convey with her long-suffering gesture. She must know all too well what it was like to live with two such prickly males. Freya wished she had the faintest idea how to cope with this Craven male and bit back a weary sigh.

‘You still need to do whatever it is you do to earn your bread. I cannot see how my offer to let you do so is ridiculous, sir,’ she told him with icy dignity.

Hopefully he didn’t know how conscious
She was of sitting here with bare shoulders and a rather inept plait of hair hanging down her back. She did her best to stop her impromptu gown showing the length of her right leg to anyone who wanted to see it, even if he already had, along with the rest of her, and she tried hard not to blush at the very idea.

‘A day away from it won’t hurt me,’ he said gruffly as if silently agreeing he was being unreasonable, but unable to stop being so.

‘I don’t need to be entertained like a fractious child.’

‘Good, I already have two of those to cope with,’ he said and finally the wry smile that had made her trust him against her will last night broke through his dark mood. ‘We need to solve some practicalities before you hoe my peas to the ground or randomly chop down trees,’ he told her as if he had as little confidence in her domestic skills as she did herself.

‘Even I know this isn’t the time of year to fell whatever it is you usually fell.’

‘And do you know a pea from a bean?’

‘Not unless it’s on my plate.’

‘So you might as well agree to leave them where they are until I can teach you which is which, might you not?’ he said.

She wondered if he really thought Lady
Freya Buckle might dirty her hands and get blisters on her fine soft skin to repay his hospitality, or relieve her boredom in a household without the usual ladylike occupations. Freya nodded regally and wondered what on earth she
was
going to do with herself while she waited to be well enough to walk away.

‘It will all work out in the end,’ he reassured her as if he knew the reality of her situation had come rushing back as soon as she thought about the day she would have to leave here and go back to finding her way in the wider world.

‘I really don’t see how,’ she argued with a quiet despair that sounded very un-Lady Freya-like in her own ears.

‘With life and hope it’s remarkable what the human spirit can cope with, Perdita,’ he said and she supposed he must know what he was talking about.

‘I know and I will try to be more optimistic.’

‘And perhaps agree you need to sleep as well?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Then why don’t you do so while I take the children over to fetch some clothes for you?’

‘I don’t see why you should put yourself to so much trouble, sir,’ she said a little stiffly,
wondering where he was to get them and a ludicrous shaft of jealousy bit into her as some likely possibilities leapt into her mind.

O
rlando let his eyes rest on Freya’s smooth white shoulders and the swell of her breasts under the tightly knotted cotton, then the hint of a bare calf under her awkwardly shuffled-up draperies and she flushed. If he was one or two of the gentlemen she had met in society, or the two greedy-eyed villains of yesterday, she would shrink from his open masculine scrutiny, but this was Orlando. Part of her she didn’t dare to examine too closely was flattered if he thought her desirable and, given the banked-down heat in his eyes, she rather thought he did—whether or not he welcomed the fact was perhaps more open to question.

‘It will be no trouble,’ he assured her softly.

Freya had no idea if he meant he wanted
her covered up so he didn’t have to watch her with too many possibilities in his eyes, or because he knew she was uncomfortable with her bare shoulders and arms so blatantly on show. ‘Then I must thank you in advance for your trouble,’ she said and let her eyes meet his properly for the first time since he had seen all she was this morning.

‘You are welcome, lady,’ he said with a version of his son’s courtly bow that made her realise where young Henry got his grace and some of his swagger.

It was a bow that said
here is a gentleman of power and leisure who only bends his knee to anyone because he chooses to
. She could imagine him an immaculately dressed beau strutting up St James’s long after noon, to meet one of his select band of cronies for whatever elegant dissipation they had planned for the day. Frowning at the idea he might be even more of a mystery than she’d thought, she used the staff to get up and made certain no more of her showed than was inevitable in her state of semi-nakedness. If she had met him in a London drawing room when she first came out, might he have saved her all the petty humiliations of the last few years? He must have been wed and done with the stifling elegance
of the London Season by the time she came out, if he’d ever been tame enough for that in the first place, so it was just as well he hadn’t been there to confuse her even more.

‘Where are the children?’ she asked to distract herself from such silly daydreams.

‘About somewhere. They usually obey me in their own unique fashion and at least Atlas is with them,’ he said as he stood aside for her to precede him.

‘Would it not be better if you went ahead? I’m very slow, despite the staff you kindly found for me.’

‘Who knows what you might get up to if I leave you to make your own way, Perdita? You might even find a bear to chase you.’

She chuckled at the reference to the most unlikely stage direction in the whole of Shakespeare’s mighty canon—‘exit, pursued by a bear’—and decided to occupy herself by reading
A Winter’s Tale
from the volumes of the great playwright’s work from the shelf slotted in next to her box-bed, as he clearly had to use every inch of the small space the cottage allowed.

Rich fought the husky and totally unselfconscious appeal of the right sort of feminine
laughter. He vividly recalled the high-pitched titter of the débutantes and their older, freer sisters as they did their best to charm elusive Richard Seaborne, grandson of a Duke and close relative and friend to the wild and deliciously elusive Jack, Duke of Dettingham. Now the difference between those brittle, affected lovelies and his lost princess was so similar to the gulf between his Annabelle and the rest of her kind it should make him wary.

This odd mix of a girl–woman was so different from his love in so many ways the comparison seemed odd. Perdita was naturally arrogant as Annabelle had never been, but she had the same dauntless spirit. She was also much taller, her limbs long and slender and, despite her limp, he knew a little too well how sleek and seemingly endless her legs were under her draperies. That endless moment of wolfish desire in his own scullery had shown him her curves were more pared down than Annabelle’s. The thought of Perdita’s firm high breasts, with just enough richness to fit easily in a man’s palm, sent desire shooting through him in a warm shudder of temptation at the thought of her standing there slim, naked and perfect, and so very shocked by all the possibilities humming between them.

He was a man with huge responsibilities on his shoulders, he reminded himself. A father and protector who thought he’d buried such endlessly demanding urges to sink into a woman’s body and glory in her to their mutual satisfaction in his Annabelle’s grave. Still the sight of another woman’s neat
derrière
outlined by the fine cotton cover his wife had so carefully hemmed into a summer bedcover made his loins leap and his breath shorten and he had to send his thoughts somewhere compelling to stop himself becoming a complete satyr.

What is mad Jack Seaborne doing right now?
he quizzed himself and found it didn’t help him at all. Knowing his cousin, Rich had little doubt Jack would be making love to his wife at this hour of the morning. He allowed himself a wry smile at the thought of Jack and lovely, determined Jessica Pendle so wrapped up in loving each other they had no time for silly ideas about dynastic marriage so many of their kind suffered from. He knew as soon as he found out who Jack was going to marry it was a love match, despite all Jack’s raving against them. Jess would be so good for him, Rich thought, as he plodded behind another
decided female and fought the appeal of such a woman to a family cursed to love for life.

Which led him to his mother, who had shared a marriage of true minds with his noble father; better to consider how the other woman in his life might be going about her daily life than battling with the uncomfortable idea he might not be as immune to ladies of character and undeniable attraction as he hoped. His sources told him Lady Henry Seaborne had insisted on retiring to a neat house in Ashbourne village once her nephew Jack, Rich’s sister Persephone and his little brother Telemachus wed their own Seaborne obsessions one by one. How he wished he could see his mother again and tell her how much he loved her. Even the thought of her should make Miss so-called Rowan invisible, but the idea of how shocked Lady Henry would be at her eldest son lusting after a waif in need of his protection and not seduction only made her more of a problem.

Relieved they were nearly at his door, he tried to block out the feral fantasy of rushing this female thorn in his side inside the cottage to make hasty love with her on the box-bed. He wondered for a tortuous moment what her children would look like—would she have lion cubs to take on her golden-amber eyes
and that rich nut-brown pelt of hair hanging down her back, hers a silken lure he desperately wanted to feel under his stroking hand? Or would those cubs of hers share his green Seaborne gaze as stubbornly as most of his relatives insisted on doing? The potent idea of a mix of both was as utterly ridiculous as it was forbidden to Annabelle’s husband and a man who dared not even admit his real name.

‘Atlas will stay with you if you prefer not to be alone,’ he made himself say coolly, as if he’d been thinking of the state of the nation while they got here at her slow pace.

He watched her consider the idea with her head on one side as he realised she often did when weighing up her options. No need to find that appealing and at the same time worrying. She shouldn’t have to consider her next action or word might be reckless or wrong as she appeared to out of ingrained habit. His Seaborne blood rebelled at the idea of a strong woman so confined by her role in life that all spontaneity was drummed out of her.

Perhaps her misadventures had broken the cocoon so many aristocratic young ladies were bound in and he couldn’t think it a bad thing, even if she
was
in danger of turning into a siren. An unconscious and unwary one, he
reminded himself, but the idea threatened to remind him he was a wolf by nature, not the tame creature of hearth and home he currently appeared to be.

‘And miss the chance of a good run? I wouldn’t deprive such a truly noble creature of such a simple pleasure,’ she replied to his question and he had to rack his brain to remind himself what it was.

‘Atlas would see it as his duty,’ he remembered with relief.

‘I know, but sometimes duty makes us slaves and he takes them too seriously already. He is a true gentleman in dog form, Mr Craven, so where did he come from?’

‘He was a half-grown puppy back then and living with a rather gentle elderly lady I met on the Weald of Kent. He had been thrown out to shift for himself, but was too large and lively for her and she begged me to take him on. I brought him home and never regretted it, even when he ate Anna’s favourite pair of shoes and chewed Hal’s hobby-horse so badly I had to stay up all night to make another in the hope he wouldn’t notice.’

‘Since I don’t see tooth marks everywhere now I assume he got over the habit?’ she asked and he realised she was making polite conversation
to divert them from their odd situation and the strained atmosphere between them. Could she read the earthy thoughts behind his distraction, or was she too innocent to know he wanted her as he shouldn’t want any respectable female, let alone a lady he hadn’t even met this time yesterday?

‘Aye, he’s grown into a sober and responsible gentleman,’ he agreed, knowing she was right to try to make things as normal as possible between them.

‘Like his master?’ she suggested as if it might make him so.

‘Would that was so, Miss Rowan,’ he replied ruefully.

‘A gentleman who brings up his children as well as you appear to have done has to be so, doesn’t he, Mr Craven?’

Luckily her touching belief in his integrity and the name he had given Anna and himself in a fit of bitterness at having to hide from their enemies sobered him. He was still a coward to keep his children away from their heritage, but one who would keep on doing so as long as there was any threat claiming it back would endanger them. Until they were grown and able to deal with their foes they must stay hidden, he decided bleakly. Another fifteen
years of exile loomed endlessly and reminded him he had nothing to offer a lost vagabond, let alone a lady in distress.

‘They make a fine corrective against my more selfish needs and desires,’ he admitted as he cast his eyes round the room as he always had when Anna was alive, to reassure himself there was no threat to his lady and his love hiding in a corner.

Best not to even think about that fierce instinct to protect his mate, he ordered himself, as he climbed the stairs to check nothing lurked above. Annoyed to feel the dangerous knife-edge of caring what happened to a vulnerable female while he was absent once more, he told himself nobody could squeeze through the tiny squares of glass he had let into the gable walls of each cramped bedroom and there had been no need to look in the first place.

‘All’s well. You’ll be perfectly safe from intrusions if you bar the door behind us,’ he informed his amused guest, who was now sitting on the edge of the bed flicking through his volumes of Shakespeare.

‘I shall do very well,’ she assured him and, since half her attention seemed on the book, he suddenly felt awkward and in the way.

‘Would you like me to light the fire again?’

‘I’m not ill,’ she said as if the very idea was ridiculous and he concluded she’d been brought up with a host of contrary expectations.

‘A good many females would be after such an ordeal.’

‘But I am not a fragile flower.’

‘Let me hear you bar the door behind me anyway,’ he ordered and swung on his heel so he wouldn’t have to look at her any more and long to be on the wrong side of that door when she barred it to the rest of the world.

‘Yes, Papa,’ she said meekly and hopped to the door so she could do exactly what he’d thought he wanted her to and shut him out.

Rich listened to the thud of the stout lock he’d made to fit the equally stout door so he could leave Anna and the baby alone while he went off to sell the furniture and nick-knacks he made from the wood he felled in the forest and ‘bodged’ together. He stared at the stout oak planks for a long moment, rueing his folly. Time to remember real life, he reminded himself as he whistled Atlas and waited to see which direction the faithful mastiff came from, so he could find his children without having to yell and disturb half the creatures of
the forest as well as Miss Rowan. Like the first name he had given her, she certainly hadn’t been called by that one before she christened herself today. There, he was thinking about her
again
. Doing his best to slam aside the memory of the slender nymph he’d spied naked at her
toilette
this morning, he greeted his dishevelled children and promised them a piggyback ride by strict rotation as they set out for Keziah’s cottage, which lay just far enough away to suit their mutual liking for isolation whenever they weren’t feeling sociable.

Melissa Seaborne finally gave up trying to court sleep and padded to the windows in order to draw back the curtains and watch June sunlight flood the mellow landscape outside. She selected a book from the shelf before returning to bed and piling up her pillows behind her to make a comfortable nest. How she wished her Lord Henry was still here to share the easy intimacy of such an early morning, she thought wistfully, smiling regretfully at the thought that there would be little time for reading if only he was.

After six years of widowhood, she still missed him so sorely it could hurt like a knife to the gut at the most unexpected moments.
She let the memory of holding each of her grandchildren and her great-niece in her arms without her beloved Hal at her side to dote on them edge in. Wonderful occasions every one, but not to grow old with her love and her lover, never to share such joy with him again, was an everyday loss that was overwhelming at times like this.

She thought by moving out of Ashburton New Place, and refusing to tenant Seaborne House in the absence of her eldest son, this house would give her a home with no heavy reminders of the husband and father her two then-unwed daughters had lost to sadden them. Her lovely Helen was now blissfully content with a new husband and Penelope a happy and popular young lady who would be introduced to the startled
ton
as a beauty to rival her famously lovely elder sister, Persephone, Countess of Calvercombe, in a few short years. To their mama, all her chicks were extraordinary, but fifteen-year-old Penelope would fight beaux off the instant she came out, if not for the fierce protection of her cousin Jack, brother Telemachus and two brothers-in-law who didn’t suffer fools very gladly at all.