“Last night I overheard you speaking with him o’ personal matters.”
“Oh? Were you lurking outside the parlor?”
“Lurking is one thing a man o’ my height canna do.”
“I was not well acquainted with your cousin. My husband and he spent considerable time together in the months before Paul’s death.”
“Did they?” He didn’t care. “You’d no joy in that?”
“They were an unlikely pair. People remarked on it. But Paul enjoyed the friendship.”
He leaned back against a table and gripped the sides of it with his hands, lest he leave them free and available to take hold of her. Only when she invited it. And she would.
“Will you make me court you for nine weeks again, lass, or can we snip a few weeks off that total. Perhaps seven or eight?”
“Your teasing fails to rouse me, Urisk.” Her fingers were moving more swiftly now, patting the soil in place and brushing bits of it from the leaves.
“Then what can I do to rouse you—again?”
“My husband always wondered why, when we would pass your cousin in town, Mr. Brock would offer me such elaborate bows.”
Gabriel rubbed a palm over his face. “I said rouse. Not douse.”
“He became obsessed with it.” She set the pot on a tray and reached for another plant. “He spoke to me of nothing else for weeks. When his obsession became wearisome, I told him that you and I had been well acquainted.”
He paused in the act of crossing his arms.
She glanced at him.
“You needn’t be astonished,” she said. “I omitted the part at the end, those last two conversations we had. I daresay you don’t remember those conversations anyway.”
Abruptly, Gabriel’s heart was beating very swiftly. “I do.”
Her fingers stilled. “Do you?”
“O’ course I do.”
She began arranging dirt again.
“In any event, the details did not matter to Paul. He was not interested in Mr. Brock’s deep bows for my sake, it turned out, but for the sake of your cousin’s soul. He decided that his ministry had neglected planters in favor of enslaved people, but that it needn’t any longer, for both were needy of salvation. He chose to make your cousin his first project.”
“Project?”
“For reform. He believed that given your cousin’s many sins, he was ripe for a thorough conversion.”
“He wasna?”
“Within a month my husband was playing cards with him twice a week. For money. I think Paul even drank spirits with Mr. Brock, which he never did otherwise, not even wine.”
“What o’ the conversion?”
“Oh, it went in the opposite direction. Your cousin has always been persuasive, of course. There, I have finished. I have no idea what these plants are but Claire seems to believe that someday their fruit will be delicious.” Wiping her hands on a towel, she reached behind her to untie her apron.
Gabriel caught her hands. He bent his head. Wisps of her fiery tresses escaping her kerchief tickled his cheek.
“Those deep bows he gave to you on the street,” he said close to her ear. “I never introduced you to him. If you tell me that scoundrel was having sport with a lady—with you—I will find him an’ give him a taste o’ my displeasure.”
She swiveled, breaking his loose hold on her hands and bringing her body within inches of his.
“He and I were never formally introduced. But he had brought me the news, of course, so, yes, I was acquainted with him.” The sunlight made merry with her eyes, but the green was sober.
“The news?”
“The news of your death. The false news, that is.” She shifted to take up a pot on the table and the brush of her hip and arm were like the caress of a specter to his fogged thoughts.
“My death?” He hardly heard himself.
“You needn’t deny it. Though it was more than five years ago, it seems like a lifetime really. I was gullible then, as we have already established, so I cannot fault two young men of your habits for having a bit of fun at my ex—”
He grasped her arm and turned her to face him. “He told you I was dead?”
She tugged to free herself. “Of course.”
He released her. “I knew nothing o’ the lie.”
“Please.” Stepping to the side, she moved around the table. “I told you, it is ancient history.”
“Amarantha, I will willingly admit that I was every kind o’ fool then—more than a fool. But I had no idea he told you that lie.”
“Your Grace?” Maggie said behind him.
“I am occupied, Miss Poultney.”
“Reverend Clacher has been nipping at the rum. He’s fallen asleep on the foyer chair an’ is fixing to slide off it.”
He looked over his shoulder. “Then prop him up, lass.”
“Miss Iris an’ Miss Alice are placing bets on which direction he’ll tumble.”
“Well, place your bet too, then grab him before he lands on the floor,” he said impatiently.
“But there be the dog—”
“I am occupied, la—”
Amarantha swished past him, went around Maggie, and out the door.
Maggie dimpled. “No’ now, Your Grace.”
He scraped his hand over his jaw.
“Now that I’ve your attention,” Maggie said, “after propping up the reverend, would you be telling Cassie where she’s to do the ledgers an’ receipts in privacy, so no one discovers her about it?”
He frowned, but it only made her grin.
“An’ do you know when they’ll all be leaving, by chance?” she said.
Amarantha found Jonah Brock alone in the drawing room.
“Eschewing the grand tour of the distillery today in favor of mucking about in the dirt, Mrs. Garland?” His gaze slid over her stained apron. “I’d no idea you had a green thumb. But you are variously talented, I have learned.” His eyes were cold. He might have been drinking already; a wine bottle sat open nearby.
It made no difference to Amarantha.
“Yes, I am,” she said, whipping off the apron and balling it up. “You are upset with me that I believed the villainy those men claimed about you—regarding Mrs. Aiken. Aren’t you?”
“I am,” he purred like a sleek golden lion. “Although, admittedly, upset seems such a mild term for what I am feeling at present.”
“You have no right.”
“Yesterday I knew you could not be speaking the truth. You do blame me for your husband’s inability to hold his liquor, don’t you? Off of a ladder, our elevated man of God—of all ironies. Wretched way to go, though. Oh, I know you told everyone that he went from fever. But I—” His voice stumbled. “I heard the truth. And you have come now to demand that I find a ladder to climb, so that I might also fall to my oblivion.”
“You are horrible.”
His gaze slid away. “You will no doubt disbelieve me when I vow now that his death was an unpleasant shock to me. I had come to actually enjoy his friendship, you know.”
“I am not here now to speak with you about him.”
He floated a hand languidly in the air. “Enlighten me, madam.”
“After the Theia sailed—”
His gaze came to her abruptly and very clear.
“You told me he was dead,” she said. “It was a lie. You knew he was well. You lied to me intentionally. Cruelly. Without his knowledge.”
“I did.”
Chill crawled through her. But it mattered nothing now, really. The world had changed. She had. There was nothing left in her of the girl who had twice thrown her heart into love—first in passion with a man who made her world spin off-kilter, and then in hope with another man she had misunderstood until it was too late.
“Have you discovered only now that my cousin was unaware of that little mistruth?” he said. “How timely.”
“Timely?”
“Tate means for Gabriel to wed his daughter.”
; “The one has nothing to do with the other.” She went to the door.
“If it is any consolation,” he said, “I am being punished for it now.”
“Unless you anticipate a bolt of lightning to shortly strike you down, I really don’t see how you imagine I could be consoled by that.”
“I had imagined a preacher’s wife would be forgiving,” he murmured.
“If in your intimate friendship with my husband you did not learn that I was a thorough failure as a preacher’s wife, then you knew him very little after all.”
A smile slowly curved his lips. “You hid it so well. For years, I imagine. But you truly are all the spark and fire my cousin said you were. Until my ears bled. It was nauseating. It still is.”
She frowned.
“My cousin is as smitten with you now, Mrs. Garland, as he was then. If you cannot see that then you deserve your fate.”
“Fate does not rule me, Mr. Brock. No one rules me any longer.”
She left him. Bypassing Reverend Clacher, who napped contentedly on his footman’s chair in the foyer, she took up her cloak and went out.
The day was cold, the sky brilliant blue quilted in snowy white and every shade and shape of gray. The hills beckoned.
Wind greeted her on the slope. She strained as she climbed, her skirts tangling about her legs and her chest tight with the effort. Reaching the crown of the hill, she stared out across the valley speckled with sheep and thick woodlands and the wide ribbon of the Irvine.
The heavy beats of a horse’s hooves came to her. She pivoted to face him, hating that he understood her so well that he had known to find her here.
She tore the hair from before her mouth. “I believed you dead!”
He slowed his mount.
“No’ lately, lass.”
“The Theia had barely been gone a fortnight. He told me it was ambushed and you and your crew were killed. I believed him. I don’t know why I believed him. But perhaps I did so—so willingly, without question—because I had believed what you said to me before you left. I was naïve and impetuous. But you knew that. Indeed, you depended on that.”
Astride his great fearsome warhorse he said nothing.
“After he told me of your death, he claimed that it was secret information, that I was not meant to know it, that he could be jailed if I revealed it to anyone. Jailed! Of course I believed him. I had no reason not to—not then. I was acquainted with few men, and all of them men of honor. But I could not bear knowing so little about what had happened to you. I went to the naval bureau and asked for news of your ship, but they had none. So I returned the following day, and the day after that. Every day for a month they said they had no news of your ship.”
Gabriel could not doubt this. By then the Theia had been hundreds of leagues away, on his first glorious assignment as its commander. They would not have shared that information with a curious girl. And no one on the island except Jonah and an obliging vicar had known what that girl meant to him.
“Weeks later I finally learned that you were alive,” she said, “that the Theia had not been ambushed. Then I understood.”
“What did you understand?”
“About the letter.”
The letter.
She took his silence as lack of understanding.
“The letter that your cousin wrote, in which you supposedly declared your intention of marrying me immediately, and told me to wait for you.”
He remembered every word of it: three lines it had taken him days to compose, days without drink, without sleep, without enough time to prepare his green crew and patched-together ship for an assignment he had never anticipated—the assignment that would establish his career, the orders directly from London. Among all its vessels in every sea, the Admiralty had chosen Theia. Yet even in the heady cloud of pride and the press of preparations, he could not cease thinking of a girl in whose presence he had never felt more right in his own skin and right with the entire world. A girl who drove him mad with need.
“I wrote it,” he said.
“Make as many claims of honesty as you wish. Despite knowing better by now, I do find them alluring. But they will not convince me that a man who has lied to everyone in Scotland for years cannot still lie to me.”
“I wrote the letter.”
“You did not. You had promised that you would not write to me.”
“I never promised that.”
“I had asked you not to write to me. I insisted.”
“I wasna your lapdog to order about, lass.” He’d been a daft cub with a heart full of arrogance and a head fixed on having everything he wished, and damn the consequences.
Her brow was troubled, the cloverleaves clouded. “It hardly matters who wrote it.”
“It matters to me.”
“Eventually I understood it all, clearly,” she said as though he had not spoken. “Gossip, however wicked, can be enlightening. They said you had taken up with a woman in Montego Bay. Who was she?”
“Annabelle Lesson.”
Her eyes widened a bit. “You admit to it?”
“No’ to taking up with her.” She had been Torquil’s lover, the couple with whom he had spent his single day ashore before sailing east, the day he had thought would be his wedding day. “But she was a friend.”
“So, I had imagined, were we friends,” she said, subdued.
“An’ I.”
“I wanted to disbelieve the rumor. I wrote to you. I needed to know the truth. I never sent that letter, of course. By then I was married. In my thoughts I had betrayed my vows to my husband but I could not do so in deed. In any case, soon I came to believe the gossip. I had no reason to disbelieve it.”
“Except my word.”
“And your cousin’s, your dearest companion’s. Do you know what I wanted most then?”
“To forget we had met?” As he had that first night, the night that changed the course of his life.
“For you to be dead.”
“Given what you believed, I suppose your wish to hold a pistol to my head wasna unreasonable.”
“No, you misunderstand. I had no wish to do violence to you myself. I wanted the story your cousin told me—about the bandits—to be true. I wanted you to have died. I believed at the time that I could endure that grief, even as painful it was. But I did not believe that I could endure the heartbreak I had so impulsively brought upon myself. And”—she stared at the ground before his horse—“I think I did not want to ruin the memory. I knew fully that what I had done, meeting you privately, being with you when I felt as I did, that it was wrong. And I wanted you to be dead so that I would not hate you for playing me for a fool.”
“You’re mad,” he said.
“Probably. Then, at least.”
He dismounted, released the reins, and went to her. Her hair spun about in the wind and moisture sat upon each rosy cheek.
“Did you want me to be a scoundrel who had abandoned you, lass, or at the bottom o’ the ocean? You’ve got to choose one.”
“Why not both?”
With the pad of his thumb he stroked a teardrop from her cheek. But she did not lean into his touch as she had those years ago.
He withdrew his hand.
“Would you have wed him if you hadna believed me dead?”
“Yes.”
It was the final proof he needed. Despite the teardrop, and despite the passion of her kiss on the ramparts, she was cold, immobile, an alabaster statue of a woman who had discarded her heart. His hopes could not make it otherwise.
With thickness in his throat that he could not speak through, and a furious emptiness gathering in his chest, he turned away from her and moved toward his horse.
“Why did you write to my sister last autumn?” she said. “You did, didn’t you?”
He turned to her.
“She told me of the anonymous note claiming that I was here and in danger, bidding her come to Kallin and fetch me to England. You played on everyone’s fear of the D
evil’s Duke, hoping she would respond immediately. And she did. You wrote that note.”
“Aye.”
“Why?”
“I wanted you gone.”
“Gone?”
“Off my land. Away from Kallin. Out o’ Scotland, if I could make it so.”
Her lips fell open. “Why didn’t you simply come to the village and tell me that?”
“I didna want to see you.”
“You—? Not even for a brief conversation?”
“No.”
“But—”
“Never.”
She backed away. “You really are the worst sort of beast.”
“I am?” he exclaimed. “You wanted me dead.”
“No. I wanted you.” Her cheeks were two spots of crimson on cinnamon-dusted ivory, the cloverleaves brilliant. “I wanted you with all of the unguarded passion of a girl who did not know how to separate lies from truth. And when I believed that you died I wanted to die too. Do you wish to know the real reason I married four days after I learned of your death? Here it is: to restrain myself from swimming out to sea to die with you. That is what an idealistically naïve and ridiculously histrionic girl I was. That is how susceptible I was to the game that a cavalier young man played with me. I married not because I wanted a husband, but because I wanted a child. Because I needed a reason to want to live.”
Her words fell into the wind and were snatched away.
“Yes,” she said to his stunned silence. “I was that drunk on a fantasy I had invented myself. So you see—”
He took a step forward and pulled her into his arms and covered her mouth with his.
She responded without hesitation, her lips opening to meet his kiss, her fingers clutching his shoulders, her breaths mingling with his until the air was gone and there was only the heat of their mouths and the frigid wind swirling about them. His hand came around her jaw, surrounding her, drawing her into him, and he kissed her beautifully. His lips left hers to trail over her cheek and then her jaw, to her throat. She gripped him hard and struggled to breathe.
“You’re set to break my heart again,” he uttered. “I willna allow it.” He held her with both hands and pressed his lips into her hair, his teeth against her bone. “I willna fall again, witch.”
“Then why are you kissing me?”
The Duke Page 24
