Your Wicked Heart (12 page)

He was right. But it made no difference. She took a deep breath. “Yet I do forgive you. I have come to think of you as a . . . dear friend. My lord.”

He took a sharp, audible breath. And then, very abruptly, he pivoted away from her to look down the deck. “I should go see the captain,” he said. “You’re right: there may be word of my cousin on that boat.”

“Yes, do go, then,” she said. But the speed of his retreat left her unsettled and oddly despondent.

Biting her lip, she turned away. She did not like watching him go.

CHAPTER TEN

Isle of Gibraltar

Spence returned late from the governor’s dinner, moving quietly through the hotel garden along the path that led toward his rooms. The night was dark, the sliver of moon veiled by clouds, and only by the dimmest hint of starlight did he make out the solitary figure sitting by the fountain, passing her hand through the cool, musical trickle of water.

Her hair was down.

He came to a stop, struck by . . . some nameless feeling, larger than his body seemed able to contain. Her hair cascaded down her back like moonlight, thick, glorious tumbles of curls, and with the statue behind her, and the white flowers shivering all around her in the warm wind, she looked timeless, a figure in a tapestry or an ancient painting of a pagan princess waiting for the gods to arrive.

Her head turned. “Any news of your cousin?” she asked.

That mundane inquiry broke the spell. He slowly released his breath. “No. If he passed through Gibraltar, he concealed himself from the governor’s notice.”

“How odd,” she said. “Why would he have wished to do that?”

He bit his cheek. Careless remark. Perhaps he should tell her of his suspicions—that Charles and her false betrothed might be one and the same. If those suspicions proved correct, and she ever learned that he had guessed it beforehand, she would be furious with him. Rightfully so.

But even if Charles was guilty of deceiving her, she would never know, would she? Their paths would not cross again once they were in England.

He took a hard breath against whatever emotion wanted to stir in response to that notion. Such was life. No use dwelling on the inevitable.
None.

Clearing his throat, he said, “I’ll have to think of some new strategy for the search once I’m back in London.” In fact, he hoped that Charles would be waiting for him there.

If she noticed how he had evaded her question, she did not remark on it. “You might go to Scotland Yard. I’ve heard that some of the detectives will take private work, and they’re said to be very discreet.”

“That’s one idea.”

She paused. “At least the dinner was pleasant, I hope?”

“Staid,” he said. “Some very tedious talk of Spanish politics.” He had missed her. They could have traded speaking looks at the sour-faced remarks of the hostess.

But the hostess would have aimed some of those remarks at Amanda. Pointed observations of her simple gown. And he would not have tolerated that.

“I should like to see the governor’s house,” she said. “The guidebook says it’s quite beautiful.”

“Mold on the walls,” he said. “I noticed it in the dining room.”

Her laughter was soft. “What do you not find to be overrated, Ripton?”

The question silenced him. Perhaps she was right. He was as stuffy as the crowd he’d just left. Bored out of his mind, he’d contributed little to the elevation of the talk. Right now, no doubt, someone in the governor’s house was commenting on how tiresome the viscount was.

“Dinner parties do not please you.” She rose from the fountain and came toward him. “Nor do the Great Pyramids, or the look of Malta from off the coast. Your duties don’t make you very happy, do they? I wish I could show you how to be lighter of heart.”

You do show me,
he wanted to say. More than that, even.
You make me
feel
lighter of heart.

She came to a stop an arm’s length away, a breathless little laugh trailing from her. “But how presumptuous you must think me. That I, a jilted secretary, should be lecturing you on happiness . . .”

He would not dignify that with a response. “Why were you sitting out here?”

A cloud broke free of the moon, and the strengthening light revealed her face, grave and composed. “I was lonely,” she said.

The admission struck him like a fist in the gut.

He had thought her foolishly brave before. But it seemed to him now that it took greater courage yet to confess loneliness so plainly, without shame.

Certainly he could not do it, though as he stared at her, he felt the truth of it:
I am lonely, too
. His aunt had been right. Though he had a family, and so many responsibilities, he felt more often alone than not. And . . . he did not want to be alone.

Not when he might have a companion like her, who saw the world with such wonder that her view became contagious, filling his own with colors to which he’d been blind before.

Around her, he never felt alone.

“The man who jilted you was an ass,” he said. “You will find someone better. Someone to adventure with.” The thought blackened his mood. “Within a year, I’d wager.” A woman like her could not escape the notice of some honorable, upstanding man. Not in the world into which Spence would put her—a world of decency, away from those who did not deserve her.

“Will I?” Her shrug was barely perceptible. “I am no one out of the ordinary—”

“You are beautiful.”

Her silence seemed flavored by astonishment.

“You are.” He stepped toward her, close enough now to touch her. Though he wouldn’t.

“You’re mad,” she said unevenly. “Or drunk.”

“Beautiful,” he repeated. “You see beauty everywhere you look. Do you never look in the mirror? Or do you require a guidebook to explain even this? Trust your own eyes, Amanda; or, if you won’t, then trust mine.” Slowly—
restraint
; he would exercise the greatest restraint—he reached out to catch a stray tendril of her hair. “Imagine the passage in that guidebook: ‘hair like the summer sun.’” So soft between his fingers. “‘Softer than silk.’” He smiled slightly. “The author, mind you, is known for clichés.”

“Oh, no, I . . . quite like the author.” Her eyes on his were rapt.

“But I suppose clichés become so for a reason.” He placed his thumb on her cheekbone. “They are time-tested truths. ‘As blue as the Mediterranean, as deep as pools’ . . . that is a precise description for your eyes.” The warmth of her exhalation along his wrist raised the small hairs on his nape, causing his body to tighten painfully.

Restraint.

“The neck of a swan,” he said, and brushed his knuckles down her throat. If he were a poet, he would do so much better. But he meant every hackneyed word. “Graceful, regal: you carry yourself like a queen, Amanda.”

She swallowed. “This is too much.”

“But I’ve only just begun.” He laid his thumb on her collarbone. “The guidebook would dwell on this angle, you know. Would direct admiring gazes to the hollow here. The elegance of your bones.”

“I fear this guidebook would disappoint,” she whispered. “Young bachelors do not look for the elegance of a woman’s bones.”

“Oh, this is the censored version,” he said. “The other version—it would require brown wrapping at the bookshop. And it would be twice as long. You would object to the language, I fear.”

She bowed her head. For the life of him, he could not remove his hand from her. He felt her presence along every inch of his skin. It brought his skin alive.

From the depths of the garden came the cry of some unseen bird and the chittering of small insects in the grass.

Move away.

In a moment, he would.

“You should know,” he said, “that you will have my support, once we’re in London. I’ll find you a position. You needn’t worry for letters of reference.”

For the space of three heartbeats, she made no reply. And then her hand rose to cover his, and she lifted his hand to her mouth.

His fingers flexed in pure surprise. With the simple press of her lips against his palm, she knocked the breath from him.

“You are wonderful,” she said softly.

Back away.

Her hand tightened to hold him in place, and then she stepped forward, into him, and kissed his mouth.

For a moment he let his worst nature run untrammeled; he closed his eyes and kissed her back, putting every skill he lacked in words into the message of his lips and tongue.
You are beautiful; you are beautiful; you are beautiful.

And then, as the lust in his belly uncoiled like a snake and the message abruptly grew hotter, he stepped backward.

“I do not want your gratitude,” he said hoarsely.

“You idiot. Gratitude? Hardly.” Her deep breath was audible. “Kiss me again.”

“No.” His mouth had gone dry. “You’re an innocent. I have no intention—”

“I’m an
adventuress,
” she said. “You were right—an adventuress, and you are my adventure.
You,
Ripton.” A strange laugh edged with wildness slipped from her. “And also, it seems, my safety as well. So catch me!”

She leapt toward him. His arms closed around her by instinct; her weight sent him staggering back a single pace. Her hands hooked into his hair—“Soft,” she said—and then she took his mouth again.

And the hunger of her kiss shattered his resolve. He bent and picked her up, his mouth on hers swallowing her laugh.

Yes, he would be her safety. Tomorrow he would be her safety.

Tonight was for adventure.

*   *   *

It was her eighty-year-old self who had persuaded Amanda to seduce him. As she’d sat in the garden under the starlight, the warm breeze coasting over her and setting the pale flowers around her to nodding, laughter had drifted over the high stone wall. Listening to it, she had felt suddenly how the night teemed with possibilities . . . magical possibilities that waited just out of reach, being enjoyed by other people, as she sat here alone.

In that moment a vision had come to her of herself, white-haired and raddled, looking back on this night from a distant future. And that old woman had whispered,
You could have seen more, done more, felt more. You could have been so much wilder. What was there to lose?

The thought had magnified her loneliness into a terrible ache, for it was true that she hadn’t much to lose: no position, no money, no reputation, no family, no particular aim beyond security . . . which sounded, when one thought on it, such a dry and lifeless hope.
Security.
What was the purpose of a life in which one strove only to get by, to get through, to continue on?

But that was the task ahead of her. In a few days’ time she would be in England again, and her main business would be survival.

Only these last few days remained to truly
live
. And how many of them she had already squandered! From the moment she had given her resignation to Mrs. Pennypacker, she had been, however briefly, free. But she had realized it too late. When Ripton had kissed her in the alley, and she kissed him back and come alive to the world, and to the mysteries in herself—
then
she had realized it.

But now so little time remained.

His entry into the garden had interrupted these thoughts, and as she had looked at him, her intentions had crystallized. He’d seemed wearier than any elegant dinner rightfully should have left him, but she had understood, intuitively, why that might be. She had understood
him
. Like her, his main business was security, stability—for his family, if not for himself.

And as with her, that task had muted his spirit, for security was never about
living,
really. It was never about one’s own desires, the desires of one’s . . . heart.

But until they reached England, he, too, was free.

And her heart wanted him.

Did he feel the same? For she could sense now, in the way his arms wrapped so fiercely around her as he carried her across the threshold into his room, the great urgency gripping him. She could see it in his riveted expression as he laid her across his bed; could feel it in the way his hand shook slightly as he cupped her cheek.

They kissed, a long and languorous kiss in which his body came over hers. Sweet, blissful pressure: to feel his weight atop her, to feel the solid, strong contours of his flanks and ribs, the bulk of his upper arms, the tautness of his waist. She stroked his back and he caressed her throat; they kissed for long minutes, as though there could be no end apart from this: his tongue in her mouth, the softness of his lip between her teeth; the shape of his ear, his lobe so startlingly soft, a precious discovery beneath her curious thumb.

At length, his mouth shifted to her temple, his ragged breath hot against the sensitive skin there. “Are you certain, Amanda?”

She did not pretend to misunderstand him. “Yes,” she said. She had never been so certain. This was her chance. She would not return to England unchanged. She would have a grand story to tell herself when she was eighty.

Perhaps that story would be one of heartbreak, in the end. As he pulled away to shrug out of his coat, she suddenly thought it possible. She had never seen such a beautiful sight as his broad-shouldered body, the stern, sculpted line of his mouth in the starlight that fell through the window. Even if she did manage to travel to Egypt, the Pyramids would not awe her so much as her ability—her
right
—to sit up now and touch him, kiss his shoulder, run her hand down his abdomen, and feel the muscles beneath his waistcoat contract.

So. Heartbreak, perhaps. But it would be well earned.
The mad summer when I fell in love with a viscount.