Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress

by Louise Allen

  Ross lay in the gloom deliberately flexing his thigh muscles so the pain would provide a distraction from the ache in his groin. He shifted on to his side to ensure the evidence of the effect of that kiss was not visible through the thin sheet. What was the matter with him? He’d kissed the woman when she needed comfort and she had responded, that was all. He had not thought for a moment of it leading anywhere and he was certain Meg had not.

  But it was easier to tell his mind that than it was for his body to understand. He was not an undisciplined adolescent, according to Meg. It was a good thing she could not see the proof that he was responding to her like a randy seventeen year old. He did not even have the excuse of a long period of abstinence; up to the eve of the battle he had kept any frustration at bay with the willing camp followers who were the army’s constant companions and sources of comfort. It occurred to him that he had been aroused by her since he met her.

  The curtain flapped and the light went out. Even Meg’s soft huff of breath as she breathed on the wick was provocative. Her lips, soft and pink, would have formed a circle as she blew, pouting…

  Stop it. Ross conjured up the fat woman’s round, rather foolish, features, her thin lips and her nondescript brown eyes, her inconsequential chatter. That was better. The sheet was tugged as Meg wriggled up from the bottom of the bunk into the space between his back and the wall. The narrow space. Wriggling. The image of the other woman vanished as the scent of warm female and plain soap reached him.

  Ross controlled his breathing and resigned himself to a long night. He had lain still and endured silently when the surgeon dug the bullet out of his leg—once the shouting match over the man’s intention to cut the limb off had been won—he could endure this torture now.

  But this was a stimulating kind of agony, he had to admit that, he thought as he resisted the urge to get out of bed and pace about on the deck. Meg Halgate was a frustrating, opinionated, infuriatingly commonsensical thorn in his side, but she was giving him something to think about besides his own woes. Eyes open in the darkness, Ross admitted that he had thought about little other than himself from the moment he had been carried off the field and into the surgeon’s tent, with the battle and his men entirely out of his hands and the future he had been trying to ignore inescapable in front of him.

  He woke in the morning in exactly the same position as he had fallen asleep, which was a miracle. He had slept, he had managed to stay still and Meg had not unwittingly wrapped herself around his suffering body in the night. He felt, in fact, quite calm and in control of himself.

  Ross turned over and found himself nose to nose with her. Her eyes were open, the dark pupils dilated. She looked nervous. His own reflection stared back at him. She had every reason to be uneasy. His feeling of calm control vanished, leaving him wanting nothing more than to reach out for her, take her, lose himself and the darkness in her softness and light. Bury himself in her, make her scream with needing him…

  ‘Good morning,’ she remarked with caution. ‘You slept well?’

  ‘I slept.’ He felt like a randy bear with a sore head. ‘I am getting up today.’ Let her protest, then they could argue to clear the air.

  ‘Of course.’ Meg slid down to the end of the bed and disappeared behind her curtain. ‘A little light exercise will help your leg now.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to wait for the hot water?’ Ross thought about his preferred form of exercise, then caught a glimpse of himself in the scrap of mirror she had propped up on the trunk to help her plait her hair. Now there was an effective antidote to lust. No wonder she was wary of him—Beauty and the Beast just about summed it up. Last night she had been frightened and needed some affection—that was all. The last thing a woman like her wanted was a maimed, ugly killer like him.

  ‘No. This is fine.’ There were sounds of splashing and the curtain billowed. Ross closed his eyes and endured. For some reason his body would not give up as easily as his mind. ‘I’ll get dressed and go up on deck until you are ready—if you come and find me we can take breakfast together.’

  ‘You do not want to check my bandages?’

  ‘Not unless the discomfort has become worse. But I can if you like.’

  ‘No.’ He had only asked so he had fair warning to get his unruly body under some sort of control before she laid hands on his bare flesh again. ‘No, thank you.’

  They were both speaking as though that kiss had not happened. Perhaps that was for the best. He was not used to living with a woman, and he did not understand this one’s moods and the way she dealt with awkward situations. But Meg was used to living with men—two, at least. She had been a wife and a close companion, so perhaps she understood him a lot better than he understood her. Or thought she did. If Meg could see inside his head, she would take her bag and go and sleep on the upper deck for the rest of the voyage, he was quite certain.

  Is he feeling any better or is he just learning to hide from me? Meg walked up and down the deck, pretending a lively interest in Signora Rivera’s children and their characters, fads and charms. José, who was being made to suffer for his accident, was held firmly by the hand and his constant whining had given Meg a headache half an hour since.

  Ross, seated on a hatch cover, continued the systematic assault he had begun that morning on the pocket books of any of the male passengers who would play piquet with him. Fortunately he set low stakes—chicken stakes, one man had grumbled before proceeding to lose hand after hand. He had stopped complaining about the stakes after the second hand.

  Winning did not, however, seem to please Ross any more than the sunshine on the waves, the occasional school of dolphins playing in the bow wave or the blue sky. His play was ruthless, efficient and merciless. Meg began to wonder if he insisted on the low stakes because he expected to be accused of cheating if he played for anything higher.

  James had tried to teach her the game, but her incomprehension of the complex strategy involved would always drive him to frustrated irritation with his inability to drum even the essentials of discards into her head.

  ‘Repique,’ Ross called as the ladies’ strolling walk brought them past once again.

  ‘Your husband is an excellent player,’ the Spanish woman observed.

  ‘Indeed. I think piquet appeals to him because it is so strategic.’ Meg watched Ross’s narrow-eyed concentration. The good players in the regiment had been the strategists, she recalled, and the major was fighting each game as though he were commanding troops in battle.

  Playing cards was never going to be a substitute for the army life he had lost. She only hoped that whatever challenges the home he seemed so reluctant to reach held for him, they would satisfy him. Somehow she was coming to doubt it.

  Ross put down another winning hand and money passed between the two men before the merchant he had just trounced got up and walked off, trying to put a gracious face on his losses.

  ‘Excuse me.’ Meg recalled an excuse to remove herself from Signora Rivera and her grizzling son. ‘I must ensure the major takes his exercise.’

  Ross looked up as she approached him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, my dear?’

  ‘Time for your walk,’ Meg said with wifely sweetness for the benefit of the nearby passengers. ‘Dear.’

  ‘I am not a lap dog requiring a stroll around the deck,’ he retorted, low voiced, as he gathered up the cards and his winnings.

  ‘More like a mastiff needing a run in the park or looking for a bull to savage.’ Meg maintained her smile. ‘Frequent gentle exercise is what that leg needs now; besides, if I leave you to clean out every mark on this ship we will find ourselves dropped overboard before we sight land again.’

  ‘You think I am prigging the cards, do you?’ Ross asked. But he put the pack in his pocket and got to his feet.

  ‘I am sure it is all your skill and there is no sleight of hand involved,’ Meg assured him, falling into step beside him and deliberately dawdling to restrict his limping stride. He needed to slow
down, control his impatience as he had controlled the need to take her last night. He had been aroused, however well he thought he could hide it. And that in itself was arousing her, an effect that unfortunately did not seem to be wearing off.

  Meg reminded herself, yet again, that she could not afford an entanglement with a man she would never see again once they landed. For him it would be a matter of satisfying a physical urge. For herself, she did not think she could deal with it quite so simply. Perhaps it was her old, foolish romantic spirit again, but the thought of that intimacy without a mutual affection, without emotion, frightened her.

  They got to the bows and were halfway back on the circuit that she had decreed was a suitable distance before she ventured another remark. Ross, she was certain, would maintain a stony silence for the rest of the voyage if she allowed him to.

  ‘What will you do when you return home?’

  For a moment she thought he was not going to answer her. Then, two steps later, he said, ‘Learn to be a country landowner.’ He sounded less than enthusiastic, although the note of utter indifference to his own fate that had so worried her before was missing. It had been replaced with distaste, which she had to suppose was better.

  ‘Is it a big estate?’ It could be nothing very impressive, not if he had come into his inheritance four months ago and had not bought so much as a new shirt.

  Ross shrugged. ‘Big enough for someone who doesn’t know the front end of a pig from a stook of corn.’

  Pigs and corn sounded considerably less intimidating than town life and society, but then she had been brought up in the country. No doubt for a soldier it must seem both dull and difficult. Oh well, a small estate would give him plenty of leisure for recreation. He would hunt and fish, like all country gentlemen, find himself a wife—one who could manage without smiles or affection—and father a brood of dark, scowling children.

  ‘What?’ Ross enquired, catching sight of the amused twist of her lips. ‘You know the difference, do you?’

  ‘Certainly I do.’ Meg made for the hatch cover again, their walk at an end. ‘The stook of corn has more ears than the pig.’

  She was brought up short by a crack of laughter. ‘Now what is it?’ Ross enquired as she turned, hardly able to believe her ears.

  ‘You laughed.’

  ‘You made a joke,’ he countered, once more poker-faced.

  Perhaps, if he could remember how to laugh, she need not worry about Major Ross Brandon when they parted company in Falmouth.

  Chapter Six

  Ross leaned on the port rail of the Falmouth Rose and stared at Pendennis Castle in the early morning haze. At the shoreline the gun emplacements and Henry VIII’s old battery were all still manned, all still flying the Union flag. It would be a while before the commander of the castle felt confident enough that the peace would hold and he could pull back his men.

  He was trying to find some sense of his feelings about this homecoming, but the sight of familiar shores from an unfamiliar angle was not much help. They had sailed into the Carrick Roads at dawn on the fifth day after leaving Bordeaux and he had been up to see it, to watch the steep, gorse-covered slopes of St Anthony Head slip past before the captain dropped anchor to wait for a pilot and the harbourmaster’s gig to come out to clear them to enter harbour.

  It had not been any nostalgia that had driven him on deck, but the now-familiar discomfort of waking up next to Meg’s warm, slumbering body. She appeared to have no trouble sleeping in the same bunk, once she had recovered from her awkwardness over that embrace. That kiss. He wanted her and yet he wanted her gone. So you can wallow in your own misery again, he sneered at himself.

  ‘Coffee, Major?’ It was Johnny, bright as a button, grinning his gap-toothed smile.

  ‘Aye. Then take coffee and some hot water down to Mrs Brandon. Here,’ he added as the lad turned away, ‘I’ll pay you now.’ He counted out the three pence a day he had promised, then added a shilling on impulse.

  ‘Cor! A whole borde! Thank you, Major!’ Johnny thrust the mug into his hands and was away, not risking Ross changing his mind over the munificent tip.

  Ross was still brooding when the anchor was raised and sail set again.

  ‘Home!’ Meg said beside him. She came to lean her elbows on the rail, her mug clasped between her hands. There was a cool breeze, without the heat of the sun in it yet. ‘Are you glad to see Falmouth?’

  ‘I’ve never seen it from the sea before.’ Ross avoided a direct answer. ‘When I left England I sailed from Portsmouth.’ Without any intention to confide he found the words spilling out of him. ‘I was terrified, but I was damned if I was going to show it. You should have seen me.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to conjure up the boy he had been. ‘A lanky seventeen year old with his hair in his eyes, feet I still had to grow into and filled with the terrible triumph of thwarting my father and all his plans for me.’ And guilt. But he was not going to talk about the guilt that rode him still.

  ‘So how did you get a commission? And you must have been so upset at leaving your mother, at least.’

  ‘I had no commission, not then. But I was in the Rifle Brigade, a private, and that was all that mattered to me, even though I was as wet behind the ears as they come. It wasn’t until we were well out to sea and I’d finished casting my accounts up over the side that it occurred to me that my mother would worry.’ God, but he’d been thoughtless—or perhaps, just a typical boy—but he’d salved his conscience with the thought that he’d written to his godfather and told him what he was doing.

  Of course, it did dawn on him after a few weeks that he had landed Sir George Pierce with the unenviable task of dealing with his parents. ‘My godfather got my letter, broke the news.’And, mercifully at the time, kept it from him just how anguished his mother had been. It had not been until she died and her last letter had reached him that he realised what he had done to her peace of mind and her health. It was his first lesson that he could kill at a distance of several hundred miles without needing any weapon, as well as face to face with his finger on the trigger.

  ‘And when I was eighteen, when he discovered that I hadn’t managed to get killed or flogged, my godfather bought me a commission.’ Stick to the facts. His mind skidded away from the dark, deep hole of his conscience. Away from Giles. ‘Since then I’ve made my own way, spent my money on my own advancement.’

  ‘I should imagine that merit had something to do with it as well,’ Meg observed. ‘I have asked Johnny to bring us food out here; I didn’t think you would want to be down below, not now.’

  She still thought he had been driven out here by the pangs of homesickness, Ross realised as the cabin boy put a tray on the hatch cover and the smell of fried pork wound its way through the air. He slapped some rashers between slices of bread and went back to the rail, leaving Meg to make a more decorous picnic. That way he did not have to talk. Meg’s simple, direct questions had extracted more from him than he had confided in anyone else, ever, but the urge to recount his past history had fled as fast as it had come upon him.

  Sailors were beginning to bring baggage up on deck, deploying the nets that would swing it ashore. Ross drew Meg out of the way of the men who came to the sides to lower sail and throw ropes as the harbour wall loomed larger.

  ‘I hope the signora has a firm hold on young José,’ Meg said, and he realised she was eyeing the narrowing strip of water between the ship and the dock apprehensively. ‘That was so brave of you.’ She gave a little shudder. ‘The tide was ripping out so fast—’

  ‘I have seen enough death, too much to leave a child to drown,’ Ross said starkly. But the memory still troubled Meg, he could tell. How much courage had it taken to climb down that ladder into the swirling water and hang on to an unconscious stranger for the time it took to get him out? A stab of remorse told him that afterwards he had been unthinking and probably unkind. His own exhaustion, pain and depression were no excuse; if it had been one of his men he would have spok
en to him, shown he understood what guts it had taken, made sure he was all right.

  Too late now to go back. ‘What will you do when we land?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Where will you stay?’

  ‘I will find a decent inn while I find out about stagecoach routes, plan my journey.’

  ‘It is quite some distance. You have adequate funds?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She held up her reticule. ‘Doctor Ferguson insisted on paying me. It isn’t much, but enough.’ She opened the bag and reached inside. ‘See…’ The blood left her cheeks and she began to rummage. ‘It has gone! The roll of notes!’

  ‘Are you certain? Did you not notice before?’

  ‘Yes, I am certain.’ Meg stared at the bag, upended on a barrel, its contents spread out. ‘The coins are heavy, I never noticed the difference. And I have had no cause to open it since I came on board. I have not needed money.’ She pressed her hand to her lips, visibly fighting for composure. ‘I dropped it with all my things when José fell in the water. Someone must have taken the notes then.’

  ‘Let me.’ Ross reached for his wallet.

  ‘No. Thank you, but, no. I have no idea when I could pay it back.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Meg! A gift—I probably owe you my life.’

  She shook her head and he could see his persistence was upsetting her. ‘I will find some work for a week or so. I will find an employment office, register my name with them. Someone will want practical help, I am certain.’

  ‘As what?’ Ross turned his back on the dockside and studied Meg properly for the first time that day. She was wearing a gown he had not seen before, one she must have been saving for the occasion. Her hair was neatly braided under her plain straw bonnet and she looked both subdued and compliant, not at all like the managing, competent, arousing woman who had been saving his leg and wrecking his sleep. ‘A governess?’