Joanna was helping Maggie Mae clear the few tin plates and utensils, when a hearty voice called out a greeting. “The Bagley family,” the newcomer said. “This is where I come to see the loveliest two women in the camp.”
“Ah, now, don’t ye be butterin’ us up, Cormac. We’re wise to yer charm,” said Maggie Mae with a big smile.
“Mac, come sit a spell with us, if ye have the time,” Domnall said to the other man. “You’ll have a drop o’ whiskey with us, won’t ye?”
Some clean tin cups were brought out and the jug was passed from hand to hand. “What news from the town, Mac?”
Cormac was a few years younger than Domnall. He had crisply curling black hair, sparkling dark eyes, and a merry smile. Cormac could charm the birds right down from the sky, as Maggie Mae put it. He had the gift of the gab—a joke or a story for every occasion. His good cheer was contagious.
Cormac also had a musical gift—when he played a sad song on the fiddle, everyone listening was moved to shed a tear. And when he played a lively song, you just had to stand up and dance. He was very valuable to the band of Travellers because of these two gifts. As they made their pilgrimage from place to place, the Travellers were usually shunned by the Outsiders settled in those areas.
But Cormac could walk into any public house in England, with his fiddle under his arm. He’d play for the Outsiders, and he’d sit and pass an evening talking and jesting with them, just as if he were one of them. As a result, he knew the lay of the land wherever their group went. It was valuable information to his fellow Travellers.
So Domnall now asked him, as people always did, “What news from the town, Mac?”
Cormac shook his head as if he had nothing good to say. “Tell me, Dom, what did you and yours have for your meal this night?”
Domnall looked at him as if he had lost his senses. “What? A few game fowl that I shot and bagged. Why?”
“The same supper as most everyone else in this camp, I’d wager. Dom, ye’d best spread the word. This land belongs to the Duke of Gresham, the law says, and his bloody Graciousness is on the tear about poaching Travellers. Told his man Brown to have their lads on the lookout for us. Says that any man, woman, or child among us caught taking so much as a rabbit will be horsewhipped, or have his right hand cut off, or worse.”
Joanna’s father smiled and poured out another round of whiskey. “He’ll have to catch us first. I don’t see that happening. Nay, his lordship’s attention will soon turn to something else, and we’ll be fine.”
“This time seems more serious, Dom. Seems the Duke thinks the bloody Prince is goin’ to come down here from London in the huntin’ season, and the Duke’ll be embarrassed if the game supply’s low. Means to keep his foot on our necks meanwhile, even if it means we starve. All I’m sayin’ is be careful, Domnall. Just be careful.”
A shiver ran through Joanna. That’s Christy’s father they’re talking about. The one who plans to horsewhip and mutilate and starve us. She was cold suddenly, as if with an evil premonition. She reached for the whiskey, but it did nothing to drive away the chill.
Chapter 4
Fever and Its Cure
Thus began the most agonising summer of either of their young lives. They could not bear to be apart, but it was pure torture to be together. Every movement, every casual touch or contact by one left the other on fire.
Lying on their separate beds at night—he in a manor house, surrounded by silken hangings and resting on the softest of sheets; she on a bare pallet in her father’s rickety caravan—they tossed and turned, and could get no relief from sleep.
They tried to do all the things that had brought them joy when they were children. They caught and roasted the fish on pointy sticks, but when he watched her slowly lick her fingers one by one, savoring the salty juices on them, the thought of her licking him the same way brought him to something very like madness.
He lay flat on his stomach on the grass, searching for the entrance to a woodchuck’s den, but to see him lying prone in that way made her imagine what it would be like to be under him just then, with his strong arms holding her down by her shoulders, and his knee wedging her thighs apart.
A saint could not have withstood it. Yet they carried on day after day in each other’s company, because it would be even harder not to see one another. And nothing happened. I might just make it through the summer without harming her. Damn it, though, she made it hard for a man to control himself.
Perhaps because they were so uncomfortable with each other, arguments flared up easily between them. Once they had seemed like two identical halves of one soul. Disagreement between them would have seemed impossible. Now they were like dry, parched timber, and any spark could start a blaze.
For Joanna, her secret deadline for action was late September, when the Travellers would leave Gresham on their age-old western trek to meet other clans at Stonehenge. There they would celebrate the Samhain festival, with rituals, feasting, and bonfires lit under the open stars. “Halloween, you’d call it,” she explained to a puzzled Christopher.
An argument broke out between them, though, when she learned that he would become nearly unavailable to her starting on the “Glorious Twelfth” of August, when the hunting season officially opened. That meant they would miss more than a month of their daily meetings.
“Joanna, I’ll slip away whenever I can to see you. But we’ll have house guests most of the time, and I can’t just disappear for hours without appearing very rude to the guests.”
“Rude?” she snarled. “You haven’t seen me in two years, and now we’re going lose half the summer together because you bloody well don’t want to be rude to a bunch of snooty strangers? How about maybe you’re being rude to me?”
“They’re not snooty strangers, Joanna, no more than the folk you’ll see at Stonehenge will be strangers to you. They’re the haut ton, the cream of England’s nobility, and we’re related to most of them by blood or marriage, if you look back far enough.”
“‘Oat tonn’ my ancient aunt. If you look back far enough, they’re probably related to me, too, even if you have to go back to Adam and Eve to find the kinship,” Joanna said sharply. “But you don’t see me running after them like a lap dog, saying, ‘Yes, My Lord,’ and ‘No, My Lοrd.’ I’d respect you more, Christopher, if you didn’t care so much what they thought of you.”
“Joanna, be reasonable. I have to care what they think. My family position, the marriages my sisters are able to make, and so many other things depend on my behaving as Society expects me to. I have responsibilities now.”
“Oh, la-di-da, responsibilities, is it?” Joanna taunted. “And to think this was the boy who was going to run away with me and roam the world with the Travellers.”
We were children when we said those things. She can’t really think we’d still be able to act like that.
He tried to reason with her—a mistake, he knew, when she was in such a mood. “The other thing, Joanna, is that the Prince of Wales may be coming. It’s an unbelievable honor. I have to be at my father’s side for that. It would be a grave insult if I were missing.”
“Oh, we wouldn’t want to insult your father, would we. Or the bloody Prince of Wales. You disappoint me, Christy.” She stalked off without a goodbye.
Yet when he reached their usual meeting place the next afternoon, she was waiting for him. It seemed they could not stay away from each other.
The rift between their separate worlds increasingly tormented them, almost as much as did their physical longing. The summer would be short, and then what would happen to them?
In truth, Joanna did try to meet him halfway. “When this royal crowd leaves, and when the Travellers have left Gresham for the autumn, I could maybe write to you, Christy.”
“How would you do that?” Christopher was surly. As much as he loved her, he sometimes felt these days that she was clinging too hard, a noose around his neck.
“Well, there’s a man among us named C
ormac.”
“What of him?”
“He makes friends among the Outsiders in the towns we pass through. Plays fiddle in the public houses, chats people up and all that. If I gave him a letter, he could mayhap meet someone who was headed back toward Gresham, who could leave the letter at The Shield and Crown here in town. You could check in there sometimes, couldn’t you? To see if there was a letter?”
“Oh, Joanna, I won’t even be here then. After the hunting’s over, I’ll be leaving for London with my family. For the Season.”
“What’s that?” Joanna asked suspiciously.
“All the best families gather in London when Parliament is in session. Most of the men have seats in the House of Lords, like my father. The wives and children come along, and there’s just one splendid ball after another. Sometimes fancy-dress balls, where everyone wears masks and costumes. It can be very jolly, particularly for the young ladies. My sister Lady Henrietta came out last Season.”
Joanna looked out of her depth. This is another world for her, as foreign to her as Samhain and all those other pagan festivals are to me.
“‘Came out’? From where? And why?”
“It’s more about what they’re coming out to. They’re being shown off to all the other highborn families. Sometimes, if they’re well connected, they’re presented at Court. In my opinion, it’s really just a marriage market. A girl tries to make a good match during her first couple of Seasons, while she’s a new face in Society.”
“A marriage market. And what do the young men have to do?”
“Well, just show up. Be a dance partner for the girls and cut a good figure among the men. Hold their brandy like gentlemen, lose at cards and dice without seeming to care. Dress like dandies and ride their mounts down Rotten Row every morning to show off. And pick the girls they’ll marry, I guess.”
A dark cloud passed over Joanna’s lovely face. Her eyes, so serene at other times, now flashed like lightning coming from a multicolored summer sky. “Pick the girls they’ll marry. And is that what you’ll be doing, Christy?”
He finally understood the reason for her anger, and he was grieved. For her, certainly, but for himself, too. The only girl I’ll ever want to marry is standing right in front of me. And I can’t tell her so.
“Joanna. Don’t you understand? I don’t want to go do the Season. My father insists I go, but I’m fighting him tooth and nail over it. I’ll do anything to keep from going. I was thinking of faking a dreadful illness—they wouldn’t want me out in Society in that case. Maybe they’d even quarantine me.”
The lightning bolts shooting from Joanna’s eyes suddenly subsided, and in their place was merriment. Oh, my quicksilver girl. How you can flit from mood to mood! But that’s one thing I love about you.
Joanna giggled with delight. “Oh, Christy. You wouldn’t do that, would you? Christy, you’d never get away with it, you can’t ever tell a lie with a straight face!”
He played the fool for her. “But what shall I pretend to have? Consumption, maybe? I could borrow from my sisters’ secret rouge supply, and paint myself some red cheeks. Or how about scarlet fever? That would require red spots all over. And maybe I should seem to lose my hearing for a while, if it’s to be scarlet fever.”
Now they were both laughing uncontrollably. Each tried to top the other with a more outrageous suggestion for Christopher’s mysterious malady.
They parted friends that afternoon, and peace reigned between them for a few days.
* * *
Christopher thought that with enough fondness and good humor, he might make it through the summer without giving way to his desires. But all his resolve fell apart one day in early August, when they were exploring the prehistoric caves at the other side of the forest.
The weather had been unusually hot and dry for England. People swore there hadn’t been such a sweltering summer since their great-grandparents’ time.
The heat cast a pall over everything. Everything seemed to be waiting, gasping, for the heat to break and the heavens to pour down rain.
The tension grew unbearable. Normally mild-mannered people snapped at each other and started fights; even the village’s dogs and cats seemed to have grown more restless and vicious. The forest became brown and sere. Streams dried up. All nature seemed at odds with itself in the relentless heat.
Joanna and Christopher felt the tension, too, and it again and again made them bicker over silly trifles. That larger issues were the true cause of the bickering was not something either cared to acknowledge. As much as they loved each other, it began to feel like they hated each other. Each secretly blamed the other for the desperate awkwardness between them.
They went exploring in the caves to escape the heat. Climbing down from a rock ledge in the darkness, Joanna made an uncharacteristically clumsy movement, and she fell forward.
Christopher was there to catch her, of course. When he grabbed hold of her body, she moaned and pressed her swelling breasts against his chest. It was beyond him to resist her. His mouth was suddenly on hers, and that very first kiss was sweet beyond imagining.
They were acting purely on animal instinct, for he had never kissed a girl before, nor she a boy. Her plump lips parted against the hardness of his unrelenting mouth, the insistence of his exploring tongue. She took his tongue into her as far as she could, sucking on it and licking it with her own tongue, biting at him with her strong young teeth.
He felt a frenzy overtake him. He pushed her to the cave floor, his hands seeking the opening of her bodice even as she reached behind him and stroked his buttocks. It was good, so good.
His fingers wanted to work on her bare breasts, if he could just get them loose. He wanted the feel of him against her, and he cupped her arse with his hands, pulling her upward to maximize the friction between their groins.
All of a sudden, the wave of insanity lifted, leaving him horror-struck at what he was doing. He pulled away from her and tried to sit up. She began fixing her bodice, making sure her breasts were once again fully covered. She was crying soundlessly in the darkness.
He was too inexperienced to realize she was crying out of sheer sexual frustration, now that they had uncoupled. He thought she wept because he had hurt her, dishonored her.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It won’t happen again, I promise. But we’re all right. Nothing really happened. We stopped before I did anything really bad to you. It was just a kiss and a cuddle, right? We’re still all right, aren’t we?” He was babbling, but he didn’t know the right words to say.
Her face turned as cold as the icicles in the cave. “‘Nothing really happened,’ you say? You self-righteous little prig. ‘Just a kiss and a cuddle’? What am I, the downstairs parlormaid, good for a kiss and a cuddle and nothing else from his high and mighty lordship? You hypocritical bastard. Get away from me. I never want to see you again.”
She stood up and left him there, open-mouthed.
Outside, the heavens opened and the rain finally fell. The summer heat had broken.
Chapter 5
The Price of Mercy
Joanna did not see or hear from Christopher again that summer.
The county held its livestock fair, and the Travellers bought and sold enough of their horses—some would say they stole a few, too—to fill their pockets with the Outsiders’ gold guineas. Soon it would be time for the Travellers’ autumnal pilgrimage westward, and she would have to leave Gresham. She would not see Christy for another year.
Why did he leave no note nor try to reach her before she left? Joanna checked the hollow old tree at least once a day, but there was no message for her. She was learning for the first time that men are less complicated creatures than women, and they often take a woman precisely at her word instead of inferring the very opposite.
She had told Christy she never wanted to see him again. Perhaps that would indeed be the final outcome. But Joanna didn’t really think so. She didn’t have “the Sight” many gypsies claimed
to have. She could not see the future, hers or anyone else’s.
But her intuition was keen, and she sensed that her young man was probably every bit as unhappy as she was, and he would remain so until he could take her in his strong arms again.
A year apart would only make him want her more, Joanna consoled herself.
Or meanwhile, would he meet some beautiful, titled lady during the London Season, a perfect match for him? And forget all about her?
For Joanna had no illusions about herself. She knew that she had beauty—there were plenty of lads among her own people who were infatuated with her. She knew her charm could do magic on a man.
But it was magic with a small “m,” the sort any lovely woman could work. It was not Magic, the secret gift that would allow her to compel Christopher’s undying love with spells and potions. For that, she had no talent.
Beyond her looks and charm, what did she really have to offer Christy? I’m uneducated. I come from among the lowest outcasts of this kingdom. I know nothing of the world but what I’ve seen while traveling the road in broken old shoes. And he’s a Marquess, for heaven’s sake.
Did I ever really think he would leave that world, turn his back on family, title, and position, for a vagabond like me? What a little fool I’ve been.
* * *
Joanna fretted and pined for Christy. Her eyes grew dull and listless, the spring was gone from her step. Maggie Mae hovered around her, trying to learn what was making Joanna so unhappy.
Old Sal, who had reared three daughters and seven granddaughters, was not concerned overmuch about Joanna. “Nae doubt but she’s been crossed in love. She’ll get over it, as we all did in our time.”
“But who?” Maggie Mae wondered. “She’s never seemed to favor any one lad over the others. And she could have her pick of them.”
Tamed By The Marquess (Steamy Historical Regency) Page 3
