The Forest Lord (40 page)

Claudia had made sure he
did
.

Mrs. Byrne leaned back, her lean, wrinkled face sharp with rebuke. "You're double the fool for turning your back on your sweetheart without letting her speak for herself."

"I have underestimated
Eden's aunt as an enemy," he admitted.

"And you have done
Eden a great injustice. She and she alone
knows
the truth of her heart." Mrs. Byrne refreshed her dish of tea. "What is it that you wish, Hartley Shaw? To enjoy yourself with the lady of the manor until you tire of her? Or do you love her enough to want more for both of you?"

The housekeeper knew him only as a servant, an unsuitable match for a lady such as
Eden. What was she suggesting? That he ask her to marry him?

"I have much to think about," he said, rising. "Thank you for your hospitality… and your wisdom."

"Do not think too long, lad." She picked up her knitting. "You will find Lady Eden in the garden."

He smiled wryly at her endearment, knowing himself to be many hundreds of years older than she. Yet he had, on more than one occasion, behaved like a youth of less than twenty summers.

Had he learned enough?

Eden
walked in the garden, her head bent in thought. Hartley stopped before she saw him, struck to the heart by her beauty and her loneliness.

She
was
lonely. For so many centuries he had not really understood what loneliness was, content to be alone and free of all ties. That had changed. He had hoped to return to Tir-na-nog out of loneliness, but now he knew that he had hardly begun to recognize the meaning of the word.

Loneliness was being without
Eden—for a day, an hour, a minute. Loneliness was discovering that one needed companionship after all. That one might even need love.

"
Eden," he said softly.

She looked up, and her countenance unfolded like a newly bloomed rose.

"Hartley!
Where have you been?" She ran halfway to him, paused, and reassembled her dignity. "I had feared… had thought… the intruder—"

"Is gone and has not returned." He held out his hands, and she took them. They gazed at each other at arm's length. Hartley would gladly have found some sheltered place and loved her there and then, but that must wait. "I should have sent word, but you know that I would not allow any harm to come to you or Donal or any of the folk here."

"I know." She squeezed his hands. "But I worried for you. I would have come looking, if not for my son."

Shame bowed his head like antlers in autumn. "I could come no sooner."

"Thank God you are well." She glanced toward the garden doors—old habit, now that Claudia was in residence again—and led him to a bench behind a rhododendron. "I still do not understand what happened or why."

If he told her everything, here and now, she would be able to understand why a hunter with iron-headed arrows might pursue him. But this was too public a place. "Can you come to the wood tonight, after the others are asleep?"

He could tell by her breathing that her thoughts followed the same paths as his, but she shook her head. "I cannot. I promised my aunt that I would look at fashion plates she brought from
London and select several new gowns."

Claudia. "I had thought such matters as fashion and vanity were no longer important to you."

She blinked, startled by his tone. "They are not. But I have obligations to my neighbors, and I must be respectably dressed in their company."

"Your neighbors?"
He tightened his grip on her hands. "Like the ones you had in
London?"

"The local gentry, landowners—people with responsibilities similar to my own." She smiled uncertainly. "Surely you can understand the necessity of my associating with those from whom I can learn so much. Now that my mourning is nearly over, I can do more to help the people of Hartsmere."

"How much more can you do? The folk here are prosperous enough." He tried to modify the harshness of his voice, but it refused to obey his will. "Are you sure it is not because you miss your old life of carefree pleasures?"

A frown creased her brow. "Why do you speak so, Hartley? I have spent the past few days worrying about you, we have been apart, and these… accusations… are all you can offer?"

"Ah. That is it, isn't it? I can offer so little, and the marquess so much."

"I do not understand you, Hartley. We have been through this before—"

"Without having reached a satisfactory conclusion. Is that not true?"

An odd, fleeting expression crossed her face. "I had not thought that you wished to reach a conclusion. Has that changed?"

Yes
, he bellowed inwardly.
Yes
. But the words—human words—caught in his throat. The letter had burned itself into his memory. What emerged from his mouth bore no resemblance to what he'd intended to say.

"Did you accept an invitation to stay with the marquess?"

Her lips parted and then pressed together. "How did you know of that? The invitation only arrived the day of… the day the trespasser attacked us."

"I saw the letter you wrote to him
. '
I hope and trust that my visit to Caldwick will go a little way toward making up for any wounds my poor judgment may have incurred,' " he quoted savagely. "How will you make it up,
Eden?"

She pulled her hands free of his. "What
right have
you to go through my private correspondence? Lord Rushborough has been my friend for many years, and I shall not cut him as if he were an importunate mushroom."

"Do not see him. Stay away from him, Eden."

"Hartley, you are behaving as if—"

"I
forbid
you to see him."

She laughed. Perhaps it was only surprise, but his emotions had snapped their leash and there was no recalling them. He heard it as mockery. He surged to his feet.

"I forbid it,
Eden. I can enforce my commands."

"Oh? I have seen you behave intemperently, Hartley, but never with violence. You have no reason for jealousy—"

He recognized her overture for peace and swept it aside. "You do not love him, Eden." He loomed over her. "You love
me
."

Once more her lips parted, as if she invited him to kiss her. Her face flushed, and her eyes grew soft and vulnerable. Only the barest veneer of sanity kept him from laying her down on the bench and branding her as his.

"Is that what this is about?" she whispered, searching his eyes. "You never demanded such declarations from me. And you have never given them."

"And if I did, it would change everything, would it? You would give up your Society—the marquess, all of them—and stay here with me?"

Even in his blind ferocity he saw that he had pushed her to the brink of her composure. "Do you think that you can buy my love?" she asked, her voice shaking.
"That you can command it?
Oh, Hartley. Can you give me what
you
demand? Can you speak the words?" She smiled unsteadily. "Can you?"

Behind the throbbing in his temples, beyond the demon in his mind, he knew perfectly well what she asked. What she
demanded
. She, a mortal, demanded it of
him
.

"Will that be enough for you, Eden?" he asked hoarsely. "Will that ever be enough for the great Lady Eden Winstowe, who sleeps with a servant but pursues a marquess? The
lady
who bore a fatherless child and would deceive the world rather than sacrifice even a portion of her social position?"

Eden
stopped breathing. Her face went pale and still. Slowly she drew herself up, never averting her gaze.

"I can see that our passions have had the better of us both. Perhaps we must reach a new understanding of what we want from each other."

"Have I not made clear what I want from you, Eden? Let me remind you."

He kissed her, and all the anger and frustration and confusion in his own heart was transformed into punishment for the woman responsible.

But he could not sustain it. He could not hurt her. His lips gentled, and he drew her into his arms and tried, in earnest, to show her what he could not express and had come so close to destroying.

From the corner of his eye he caught a whisper of motion at the double doors. The curtain twitched back into place, but not before he saw the eavesdropper's face.

Claudia. Was she gnashing her teeth at the failure of her scheme to separate them?

Eden
laid her cool hand on his cheek. "Let us not quarrel. Let us not ruin what we have."

The look in her eyes could bring a strong man to his knees.
Or a Fane.
"Will you see Rushborough?" he asked stubbornly.

She sighed and stepped back. "We come from two different worlds, you and
I
. I will not sever all ties to mine, not even for your sake. I have Donal to think of now. That does not mean…" She shook her head and looked away. "Perhaps you cannot understand."

Perhaps you are right
. Yet when he spoke, it was if a stranger composed the words.
A humble, desperate stranger unwilling to lose the two most precious relationships in his life.

"I am not eloquent like your marquess. You say that we come from different worlds, and you are right. But something has happened to my world,
Eden. Once it was complete unto itself, needing nothing, no one. I was absolute ruler. If another attempted to enter, I drove him away. Then you came, and it shook to its very foundation."

She looked up. He smothered his rebellious pride and continued. "I fought back as any conquered monarch fights, with every brazen tactic I could employ. But I discovered that my world could no longer thrive without you. It shriveled and died where your touch did not nourish it."

She said nothing. A nightingale called from the direction of the forest. Hartley's pulse pounded in his ears. He began to turn away.

"Hartley."
She raised her hand, and it hung suspended between them, like the words that remained unspoken. "How can say you are not eloquent? It is I who
have
only the simplest phrase to give in return." She laid her palm over his drumming heartbeat. "I love you, Hartley Shaw."

He had not truly comprehended, until this moment, how much he had wanted to hear that phrase. His heart swelled until it filled his chest, crowding out every other organ, making air and water and nourishment and all the necessities of life unimportant.

No time was better to reveal himself for what he was.

But he was afraid. He, who had seldom known fear in his long, long life, feared transforming that adoring look to one of terror and loathing.

Tell her he must, and soon.
But not yet.
Not yet.

He leaned forward, took her face between his hands, and let his lips speak for him.

"
There," Aunt Claudia said with satisfaction. "The
gown is absolute perfection. No one at Lord Rushborough's house party will believe that you have passed your twenty-fourth year."

Eden
accepted the compliment with a bowed head and ran her hands over the expensive violet satin of the evening gown. Of those dresses and trappings that Claudia had insisted she purchase, this was the finest and had given her the greatest qualms in ordering. Its rich color was vastly unlike the blacks and dull hues of mourning. She felt almost naked in it.

But this gown, like the others, was a necessary investment if she was to be a proper lady of Hartsmere and mingle with her fellow landowners. Left unvoiced was her aunt's assumption that such a rusticated situation was temporary, and soon the wardrobe would be put to much better use in
London… when she was Marchioness of Rushborough.

So Claudia hoped.

"It is still a wonder to me that Lord Rushborough purchased die estate near Patterdale," Claudia remarked. She began to undo the tapes along the back of
Eden's bodice. "He has no love for the country, and I can conceive of only one reason that he would do so."

Eden
bit the inside of her lip. She knew that her aunt had a large part in the invitation to Lord Rushborough's grand house party, but she had not yet found the heart to tell Claudia that her principal reasons for visiting Caldwick did not include encouragement of the marquess's suit.
To the contrary.
It was time to lay Rushborough's marital hopes to rest.

She had another purpose in maintaining some connection with the marquess, however platonic. Rushborough's continuing friendship meant connections for Donal, and those she must continue to establish, no matter how small her interest in resuming her old way of life.