The Captive (19 page)

She leaned into him, her arms around his neck. “It wasn’t. I’m fine, I’m just…”

She shuddered, then let out a great sigh and stayed in his arms atop the horse, clinging to him while he clung to her.

“I can walk,” she said at length.

“Nonsense.” He hiked himself over the cantle then slid to the ground over Chessie’s rump. “Your mare has regained her senses by the bridge. You stay right where you are while I fetch her.”

They returned to the stables with Christian riding the mare bareback, her saddle left behind for the grooms to retrieve, while Gillian remained awkwardly perched on Chessie. When Christian assisted the lady from his horse, he paused, arms around her again, this time in full view of the lads and the house.

“Christian?” Her voice as she burrowed against his chest was tentative. “Your Grace?”

“Hush, you’ve had a fright. I’m reassuring you.”

“Quite.” Her tone held humor, enough to suggest she was as reassured as she would permit herself to be.

“I think a medicinal tot is in order,” he said, not stepping back but turning her under his arm and starting her off toward the house.

“For my nerves?” The woman seemed utterly composed but for the slight dishevelment of her hair.

“Yes, damn it, for your nerves.”

“That’s what I mean, about regaining your passions.”

“I beg your pardon?” She was going on about his passions, when less than thirty minutes ago, that damned saddle…

“When I met you in London, earlier this summer, you would not have sworn at me. You were too controlled.”

He could not grasp her point, and it was all he could do to refrain from grasping
her
. “I wasn’t swearing at you. I was swearing at the situation.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have. Might we adopt a bit more decorous pace, Your Grace? I will soon grow winded.”

He slowed down, hadn’t even realized he was hustling her along. “You regard my colorful language as a positive development?”

“I do. Maybe you’re getting adequate rest and proper nutrition, maybe you’re healing in more subtle regards, but you’re making great strides.”

They’d reached the back terrace, and when she tried to march out from under his arm, he let her get a few paces off.

“I want to kill Girard,” he said, having no earthly idea where the words came from. “I could get passionate about that, about choking the man to death with my bare hands. Slowly. Lethally passionately.”

Her expression didn’t change, save for a slight raising of her eyebrows. “Such thoughts are to be expected.”

He laid an arm across her shoulders and resumed a more sedate progress across the terrace. “I lie awake at night, and instead of reliving the torture, I think now of putting Girard where I was and watching impassively while what was done to me is done to him. What I want to do to Anduvoir ought to shame me. This is not a fit topic for a lady, particularly not for a lady who nearly came to harm in my care. You will please give me your opinion of the roses.”

She shrugged against his arm and brought them to a stop. “Bother the roses. In all likelihood, I would have come to no harm save for a few bruises. I’ve come off my share of horses, and I tend to heal quickly. You were about to fetch me a brandy.”

She took him by the wrist and steered him toward the French doors that led into the library.

“God, yes, a drink.”

She was hauling him along barehanded, she’d called his name from the back of her horse, and she hadn’t turned a hair when he’d mentioned his most recent and bloody version of a lullaby.

Of course he needed a drink, preferably several.

***

His Grace downed a finger of brandy in a single swallow. Gilly, by contrast, took a cautious sip of her drink and let the heat slide over her throat. Why, when heat in quantity galloped through her veins, was she imbibing spirits?

His Grace was regaining his equilibrium and not merely regarding the mishap with the saddle.

While Gilly was losing hers.

“If you actually imbibe the drink, the benefits are more apparent, though even the feel of the glass in one’s hand can be steadying too,” he said.

He imbued his words with more force, his step with more energy. On the occasion of St. Just’s parting, His Grace had smiled. By the week, if not by the day, he was less the man who’d survived torture and captivity and more the man…

Whom Helene had termed “aggravatingly virile.”

Oh, Helene.

A tap on the door spared Gilly further scrutiny from the duke, though she wasn’t expecting a footman to come in bearing her sidesaddle.

“How old is your saddle, my lady?” Mercia asked. He took it from the footman, dismissed him, and hefted the whole business onto a reading table.

“Less than ten years. I brought it with me when I married, so I took it when I decamped from Greendale.”

“Does Lucy use it?”

“No, Your Grace. Sidesaddles are usually built to a lady’s particular measurements, and the horn wouldn’t be placed properly for Lucy.”

He gave her a look that meant he—a decorated cavalry officer—regarded the information as suspect simply because it hadn’t crossed his notice previously.

Aggravatingly virile, indeed.

He peered at the girth and waggled the fingers of his left hand at her in a beckoning gesture. “Come here.”

“You might at least append a palliative question mark to your commands,” she said, but she went to him and set her drink aside.

“Look at this.” He pointed to the billets that held the girth’s buckles. “You see the stitching here and here is in perfectly good repair, but it broke here, or was cut.”

“Cut?”

“The leather’s not stressed, and we see no unusual wear on the greater area, no rub marks. Believe me, my lady, the night before a battle, a cavalryman inspects his gear and puts it in as near perfect working order as he can. Your saddle was tampered with.”

A feeling went through Gilly, like the shock when her coziest socks scuffed over a thick rug. The sensation startled, like a bad scare, and made her insides tangle uncomfortably. She recognized the sensations as first occurring on her wedding night, a condensed and physical form of dismay with not a little panic thrown in.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Who knew when you were traveling down from Town?”

“You think somebody loosened the coach wheel?” She picked up her drink and took a preoccupied swallow, only to take too much. As she set the glass back down and tried to keep the coughing ladylike—and how did one do that?—His Grace patted her back.

“You need water,” he said, drawing her closer to the sideboard.

“I’m
fine
,” she countered, dragging her feet on general principles. “Stop towing me about like so much cargo, and the wheel was not tampered with, and my girth just…just broke.”

“You’re trying to be brave.”

Gilly might have hit him, but he was passing her a glass of water. She made herself take a deep breath and let it out, lest she grab the glass and dash the contents in his face.

Except he looked so…concerned, and she knew he was right: she was trying to be brave or rational or something. Trying to cope when she thought the worst of her coping days were behind her.

“Just a sip.” He scolded like a mother hen, as if he expected her to do exactly as he said even though she was no longer coughing.

She took one sip, set the glass aside, took two steps closer to the duke, went up on her toes, and kissed him.

Her actions hadn’t been the result of any mental process identifiable as a decision, and thus made no sense to her mind, but to her body…oh, to her body, kissing was the logical reaction to any and all situations involving proximity to Christian Severn, much less a situation that had left her frightened and flustered.

She’d meant this kiss like a slap, an abrupt, riveting departure from expected behavior. A means of disconcerting a fellow who showed every sign of assuming command without Gilly’s consent.

But his arms came around her slowly, carefully, and his tongue traced her lips as he groaned a sort of sigh, and his embrace alone was enough to have her clinging back, tucking herself closer to him to feel how their bodies pressed together.

“Kiss me.” His voice was low, just above a whisper, and his mouth tasted of the sweet brandy when he opened it over Gilly’s.

His tongue came gently exploring, and Gilly’s insides collapsed in on themselves, like a house of emotional cards disintegrating when a window bangs open in a stiff breeze. Had she not been gripping him tightly, her knees might have given up the job of holding her upright.

And then she was scooped up, hoisted against the duke’s chest, and carried to the sofa, where he laid her down, her head propped on the brocade pillows.

She wanted to protest the loss of his warmth—of his mouth—but he was back, perched at her hip and leaning down close enough she could see the variations in the blue of his eyes. This was much better. Prone, she needn’t worry about standing; she need only concern herself with pulling him closer, getting his hair loose from its queue, and fusing her mouth to his as he invited her to do exploring of her own.

“Gilly, we have to stop.”

She blinked; his forehead was pressed to hers. “Why?”

“Because the door is unlocked.”

Well, that was plain enough. Gilly thought about sitting up, but that would precipitate an awkward discussion and mean she couldn’t lie there, inhaling ginger-and-lemon aftershave while her fingers stroked over silky golden hair and her heart thudded against her ribs.

He left her to lock the door and came back to sit at her hip. “You started it, my lady.”

Must he look so pleased?

And yet, he was so
dear
when he was pleased.

“No denying that,” she said, hoping he’d think the flush was from the brandy—not the kiss. And it wasn’t a blush. Was. Not. “But you were hovering.”

“I shall hover more often.”

“I do apologize.”

“There’s no need for that,” he said, and she hoped that was the start of a smile in his eyes, except it was a fairly fierce expression for it to be a smile. “Can you explain, at least?”

“I wanted to stop your hovering.”

“Interesting strategy. Has it worked?”

“Well…no. Here you are again.”

“Let me propose another theory to explain your rash actions.” He traced a finger over her brows, a gentle, even sweet gesture Gilly felt in her vitals. “You fancy me.”

“I fancy…?” She blew her hair off her forehead, intending to blow his hand away. He repeated the caress instead, further threatening her composure. “I’ve never heard such a taradiddle.” She fancied him the way some women fancied shoes, bonnets, and chocolate. She fancied him like sunlight and water, like air, like—

And that would not do.

“You fancy me, you were overset by the topic under discussion and by the events of the day, and you sought my arms as a result.”

“I wasn’t kissing your arms.” She muttered the words as she struggled to sit with her back against the armrest, and knew a little consternation. He sounded entirely too calm, given the content of his words.

And the idea that he could possibly have put a ducal finger on a small truth…

Oh,
feathers
. Oh, damn and blast, a real truth.

“There’s no fancying involved,” she said, swiping at a lock of hair that insisted on dangling against her nose. “You’re good-looking enough, and underfoot. I’m a widow. Widows are allowed queer starts. You mustn’t feel the need to start blathering on about honor and poor relations.”

She’d hit him if he gave her that speech again. The smile he directed at her was so gentle, she knew he wasn’t fooled. He scooted closer and took her in his arms.

“Calm yourself, Gilly. I fancy you too.”

Gilly. How she loved to hear him say her name, to verbally caress a part of her Greendale had found plebeian and unimpressive.

And Christian fancied her. She let the pleasure of that admission wash over her for a moment, the way she’d enjoy sinking into a hot bath before tending to her ablutions.

“Are you about to launch into homilies on the topic of my hating you for compromising me, and grief and honor and more masculine rot?”

“No.” He pulled back a few inches too, which created for Gilly the disadvantage of being studied when she’d rather do the studying. “I ought to, but I’ve had a shift in perspective regarding certain matters, or I think I have. Besides, some fairly tame kissing does not a lady compromise.”

That
was fairly tame?

“I’m capable of discretion,” she said. “And I’m sensible of my duty to Lucy.”

He frowned, as if her words were somehow complicated and layered with meaning when they weren’t.

“I’m not sure I’m capable of discretion,” he replied, his expression disgruntled. “Not where you’re concerned. And if you wanted to distract me from the fact that somebody has tried twice now to cause you serious harm, that will take even more than your considerable charms, my lady.”

“You fancy me.” She could not believe she’d said it aloud, and not in reply to his very stern tone of voice, but it caused him to gift her again with that gentle, wicked smile.

“I fancy you, my dear. Alive and whole is a particularly fetching combination. You’ll humor me if I insist on some measures intended to keep you safe.”

“I’m not going back to Greendale.” With each passing day, Gilly became more determined on that. “The memories are not cheering, and I would not crowd Easterbrook—Marcus—as he’s trying to establish his household.”

“No, you’re not going back to Greendale. You’re staying here, where I can keep you safe from all save my own mischief.”

She liked the sound of that, though she shouldn’t. A more prudent woman, even a prudent widow, would be appalled, and lecture him sternly about overreacting to minor accidents, suffering paranoia, and turning up ducal on her over nothing, but she didn’t.

She leaned into his embrace and was silent.

Torture bore an intimacy, similar to that of a bad marriage. Only the tormenter and his victim knew the exact, awful course of the misery suffered. Those two participated in the dark duet of pain and manipulation to the exclusion of any spectators or seconds.

Though to be fair, Girard had eschewed physical pain as his preferred means of extracting information from Christian. With scientific precision, Girard tried to induce compliance by alternating pain and pleasure, abuse and care, setting himself up as the god of both dungeon and daylight.

More than anything, Christian had feared coming to love his captor. In a calculus known only to the captive, such a thing was possible, even inevitable. The bonds formed outside captivity faded to improbable memories, leaving only the relationship based on deprivation and hurt, balanced with an equally insidious appearance of mercy and generosity.

The prisoner, in an effort to maintain his sanity, lost his connection with a universe created by a just and loving God, where questions had rational answers, and pain was expected to be productive of some end. He existed, cast out of all light, all reason, save what kept breath soughing in and out of a battered body and a despairing spirit.

Girard had offered women at various points, and Christian had been relieved to his bones to feel no reaction. Not to the vacant-eyed slatterns recruited from the French army camp, not to the apple-cheeked dairymaids, and not—thank a merciful Deity—to the rare women taken prisoner and thrust into the dungeon to share Christian’s fate.

Early in his captivity, he’d noted the occasional morning salute resulting from a need to heed nature’s call. Even those responses had been reassuring, initially, but then they’d faded, and indifference to everything—sexual functioning included—had become a necessity.

And then, the circumcision as St. Just so baldly pronounced it, a surgical Latin term for what Christian privately regarded as intimate mutilation.

Anduvoir’s wielding of the knife had felt like the mutilation of Christian’s soul, but in an odd way had given him back his life. Thereafter, he’d truly stopped caring, truly stopped wanting to speak, to scream, to rail against his fate. He’d become stronger for the absence of any emotion save the will to live, and even that…

The countess shifted in his arms, making a sound that suggested she was descending into sleep as she cuddled against him on the sofa.

He let her drift away.

Napping had been one means by which he’d coped with the long, uncomfortable nights, and just at that moment, he needed to hold her. He’d been convinced until recently he could not be an adequate husband to her. If his scars didn’t scare her witless—and apparently they did not—then there had been the continuing lack of animal stirrings from his base urges.

Until recently.

And then he’d discounted what he felt as mere biological habit, not enough to sustain a wedding night, until St. Just, with a soldier’s blunt kindness, had made his little comment about a full complement of Hebrew children throughout history.

The man was right. Disfigured did not necessarily equate with dysfunctional.

And if this last kiss had proven anything to Christian, it had given him incontrovertible evidence that his heart was not the only part of him once again taking an interest in life.

***

Gilly awoke to the novel and lovely sense of being held in a man’s arms, and realized Christian had shifted her as she’d dozed. She was cradled in his lap, supported by his arms, Christian’s chin against her temple.

“Sleeping Beauty awakens.”

His tone was bemused and teasing, and she felt the words in low down, unmentionable places. A prudent woman, even a prudent widow, would have scrambled off that sofa.

She nuzzled his arm, catching scents of soap and linen from the sleeve of his shirt. “I must look a fright.”

The silliest words a female ever uttered, though usually, she uttered them while patting a perfectly intact coiffure. Gilly blew the stray curl off her cheek and tried to find her common sense.

“You look delectable, if a tad pleasantly disheveled. We’re about to talk though, so you’d best get comfortable.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” She closed her eyes and snuggled down, letting her use of his title serve to chide him. That same tone had never failed to make Greendale—

She would not think of Greendale.

“Will you still be Your-Gracing me when I’m inside you, Gilly? Will you call me Mercia when passion overcomes your reason and you cry out in pleasure?”

She opened her eyes, and what she saw in his expression did have her scrambling off his lap. He wasn’t teasing; he was genuinely looking forward to learning the answer to those questions.

Perishing
feathers
.
Now
he called her Gilly, her very name a seduction. That was what came of impetuous kisses.

She retrieved her glass of water, relieved he’d let her put even that much distance between them. From the look in his blue eyes, he considered enticing her to dally in the same vein as he did stalking particularly juicy—and doomed—prey. She took a sip and sat on the hard bricks of the hearth, across a low table from the duke lounging on the sofa.

When had he become such a well-muscled specimen, and how was she to look him in the eye now that she’d attacked him not once but twice?

“You must allow, two accidents befalling you in a span of days is at least a dangerous coincidence.” He took a sip from the water glass she’d placed on the table.

The dratted man watched her over the rim of the glass the whole time, drinking from the same spot she had, and Gilly felt panic welling up at the implications of such a simple action.

Such drama, and over a few kisses.

Except—this awareness thumped into her mind, rather like a blow—he hadn’t meant the two incidents of kissing as the accidents he’d referred to. Something had shifted in Christian’s regard for her, and not because the girth on her saddle had broken.

“I will allow those mishaps are unsettling accidents, but only that. Coaches lose wheels, riders take the occasional tumble. Those are everyday occurrences.”

“In the eight years of your marriage to Greendale, did either occur to you even once?”

“No,” she said, trying to focus mentally on the topic of her safety. This was difficult, when her body had developed an acute and inconvenient physical awareness of the duke.
When
I
am
inside
you…

“Then you will indulge me, my lady, when I ask you not to leave the house without either my escort or that of at least two footmen?”

She mentally reviewed the words independent of his leonine stare.

“You’d make me a virtual prisoner of the house.” Indignation gave her some purchase against the fog in her brain and the lassitude in her limbs. “I spent eight years bowing and scraping to Greendale, denied my liberty. I shall not exchange his domineering possessiveness for another man’s, not ever.”

That sounded convincingly clearheaded, and was even true.

“I seek to keep you alive,” he countered, running his finger around the rim of her glass. He had her drink cradled in his lap, resting against his falls. She looked away as he continued to speak.

“You agreed to join this household, so you should consider yourself bound by my dictates. I’m not suggesting we lock you in a tower for the rest of your days, only that you exercise some reasonable caution for the nonce.”

Reason was not her friend, and never had been.
But
you’ll be a countess, Gillian. A countess…

“You make it sound so simple, to be again attended everywhere as if I were a child of Lucy’s years.”

“You make it sound so awful, to have the company of brawny fellows—or me—dedicated to your welfare when you’re out-of-doors. Can you detest me so much as all that?”

His lips quirked, as if he’d made a jest, but those eyes of his were watchful and serious, and Gilly realized abruptly she’d swum into even deeper waters than she’d feared.

“You are good-looking,” she said, her tone resentful. “Too good-looking and good-smelling and good-sounding,
and
now you’ve become nigh brawny yourself. I cannot think straight when you’re giving orders and duking about, and when you turn up charming and reasonable, I am even more befuddled.”

“Is to duke a verb now?”

“Don’t distract me, and yes, when you’re underfoot, there’s duking going on.”

“And some countessing too, I suspect.” His finger stopped moving round and round on the glass. “For the next little while, indulge me, Gilly. Let me give you my arm when we’re out of doors, let the footmen carry your basket when you’re in the garden. I’ll assign you the handsomest of the lot, my only aim to keep you safe from harm.”

She nibbled her lip, hating him for being so believable.

“Please, love…I wasn’t here to keep Helene safe. I wasn’t here to look after my own son when he fell ill. Let me protect you.”

And listening to him, listening to the low, utterly serious words, it was easy to forget how closely protection could resemble possession. He believed what he was saying, and he had a point: Gilly was under his roof. Her choices were to leave, or to obey him.

She could leave later, when Lucy was in better spirits; when memories of captivity didn’t have the duke seeing threats in every shadow.

For now—only for now—she’d obey him, and only in this matter of permitting an escort out of doors.

Only for now.

***

The countess was not a sedentary detainee, but Christian had hardly expected she would be. He would come in from his morning ride to find her dragging two bleary-eyed footmen all over the gardens, even as the sun was peeping over the Downs. By late morning, she was on his arm as they made their outing with Lucy. She spent the afternoons on the back terraces or again in the gardens, embroidering, reading, tatting lace, or working at the social correspondence Christian delegated to her in such volume.

He decided to take pity on his footmen and joined her as she once again headed for an afternoon out-of-doors.

She set her basket at her feet and crossed her arms. “I thought George and John were to assist me.”

“Alas for you, you’ll have to make do with a mere duke,” he said, picking up her basket. “What are we about today, Gilly? Gardening, I see.” He winged his arm, and a martial gleam came into her eyes.

“I’m tending the graves.” She took his arm, looking pleased with her strategy.

“More transplanting, then?”

“Yes, though it’s too late for the lily of the valley to bloom.”

“There’s always next year.” Her tactics wouldn’t deter him. Graves were part of a soldier’s life, after all.

She marched along beside him in silence, but it was a beautiful summer day, and Christian was content simply to bear her company. He’d grown accustomed to looking out his window and seeing her in the gardens, to listening for her footsteps coming to fetch him to the nursery, to seeing her across the candlelight at the evening meal.

“Is somebody tending Greendale’s grave?” he asked.

“That is not my concern. He would not allow me to garden while married to him. I’m not about to turn my skill in that regard to his benefit in death.”

She wasn’t an unkind woman—far from it—but her antipathy toward her late spouse was intense to the point of puzzling Christian.

“By rights, you should have hated Helene,” he said, hoping to turn the subject. “She had much that might have been yours.”

“A tiara?” She stopped while Christian opened the gate to the family plots. “I had my title, little good it did me.”

“Helene had a young man for a husband, one who sought to indulge her at least initially, and who left her in peace when the marriage foundered. She had children, a boy and a girl each, she had many friends and gallants, she had tremendous wealth, and staff to wait on her hand and foot… She had every reason to live.”

His countess preceded him through the gate, and he was relieved she didn’t respond to his last observation, or to the puzzlement in his tone.

“I’ll take the blanket,” she said, holding out a hand. He passed it to her from the top of the basket and watched while she spread it out, not near the headstones, but near the wall, where a bed of irises was going dormant after blooming profusely earlier in the year. Their scent had comforted him on more than one long, quiet evening.

“We’re to separate those?”

“It’s early,” she said, “but yes. They’ll do better for setting down some roots before winter comes, and in autumn, the Holland bulbs will demand lifting and separating. You needn’t bother to help.”

“I brought riding gloves.” He dropped to the blanket beside her and passed her one of his gloves, then put up his left hand. She held out the glove, though he’d developed the knack of putting on his own over the past few weeks.

“Your hand looks better,” she said, working the glove over his fingers. “The nails are growing in, the fingers not so bent.”

“The hand wants use. It hurts to use it, it hurts if I don’t use it, but at least then it has some strength and flexibility.” He got his right glove on by himself, because she was regarding him with an entirely too thoughtful frown.

Her ladyship gestured with a hand spade. “You start on that end. I’ll start on this one. They’re likely choked most tightly up against the wall.”

He had a momentary vision of bloody bodies all jumbled together at the base of some Spanish town’s siege walls while a hot wind whipped across an arid plain and flies buzzed in a malevolent cloud.

The Forlorn Hope they’d been called, the volunteers who had led the charge when the guns had breached the walls. For those who survived, it was a good chance at a field promotion, which meant a raise in pay, but it was near-certain death as well.

Still, volunteers had never been in short supply, and they’d broken every siege Wellington had put them to.

“Christian?”

He stared down at the hand spade she held out to him. “Woolgathering.”

“Go gently. The roots are tender.”