Lords of Honor-The Collection

by Christi Caldwell

  No scandals. No elopements or rushed marriages…

  Poppy continued. “Lord St. Cyr. I gather he is the gentleman who waltzed with you? The one Sin is disapproving of.”

  Prudence gave a short nod. “He is the one.” A fluttering danced in her belly. The one who’d danced with her but twice and kissed her once. Her lips tingled in remembrance and she touched her fingertips to the flesh.

  A sound of disgust escaped Poppy and she promptly dropped her hand to her side. Sir Faithful startled at her side and her sister promptly stroked the top of his coarse head, calming the dog. “Pish posh, there is hardly an honorable man to be found in London and I require a gentleman with a passion for pups.” She sighed. “I daresay we shall end up spinsters together.”

  Knowing her sister sought to spare her wounded feelings, Prudence managed a smile. “I thought you wished for Lord Maxwell?”

  Her sister snorted. “Bah, he has pure-bred pups. Whatever would I do with such a gentleman and his proper dogs?” Then Poppy’s levity faded, replaced by a mature, stoic concern that hinted at the woman she was becoming. “Your Lord St. Cyr, he was the one at the shop?” she asked, bringing them back to the matter of importance.

  Prudence hesitated and then gave a slight nod. “He was the one outside Madame Bisset’s.”

  “Ah,” Poppy said, inclining her head, as if she saw much from that admission. At least one of them saw something.

  Prudence did not know what to make of this maddening fascination with a man who’d dared Society and danced with her. Twice. And who read Sir Walter Scott. And who’d kissed her senseless in his gardens in the cold of a winter night. She sighed. Well, any lady would surely remember that first and very important moment.

  “And he is why we are visiting this boulder?”

  Goodness, with her tenacity, Poppy would make a better governess than all the first five to have tutored the Tidemore girls. “It is where Patrina met Weston.” Which had been what first brought her to the spot. So, it happened to be where she and Christian had also reconnected. Why, that only made it all the more special.

  “Humph.”

  At her sister’s pointed look, Prudence shifted. She really was better not asking. “Humph, what?” But she’d never been able to stifle her curious nature.

  Poppy snapped her eyebrows together. “I am not an oblivious Penny.”

  Even in the winter cold, Prudence’s cheeks burned with heat. “I merely thought this scenery would be beneficial to both of our artistic sensibilities.” Which wasn’t altogether untrue. It was just that Lady Drake’s suggestion had taken greater precedence today.

  Her sister snorted and stretched her legs out before her. “Do not insult me by taking me for Mother, who might believe that ladylike response.” Sir Faithful plopped down and burrowed against Poppy’s skirts.

  The lie died on Prudence’s lips and she stretched a hand out and petted Sir Faithful. “Very well. And he may be why we are here today,” she grumbled.

  Her sister looked off beyond Prudence’s shoulder. “And he is the one coming this way.”

  “And he is the one…?” Prudence swung her head about and followed her sister’s stare to the tall, familiar figure riding through the park. Nearly thirty paces separated them, but she could pick him out with the same ease this distance away as she could in a crowded ballroom filled with lesser lords. The reins of his impressive black mount dangled between his fingers as he strode through the park. “He is here,” she said breathlessly. Of course, that had been the expectation or, at the very least, hope. But the sight of him in the distance made this moment all the more real.

  “He is nearly here,” Poppy corrected with an infuriating calm.

  When he stopped beside a thick copse, she caught her lower lip between her teeth, worrying that flesh. “Perhaps he does not see me.” Indecision warred with this pressing need to see him once more. In her too-brief lesson, Emmaline hadn’t bothered to school Prudence on the very important aspect of making these carefully orchestrated meetings appear…well, not orchestrated. “I cannot walk boldly up to him.” Blast, he continued in the opposite direction. Did he see her and merely seek to avoid her? Her stomach tightened at that unwelcomed prospect.

  “Well, you are very nearly without an option of seeing him, Prudence,” her sister hissed. She shot a glance about for their maid who sat on a bench at the edge of the lake. “Go,” she whispered, giving Prudence a slight nudge between her shoulder blades.

  Prudence grunted and nearly tipped over from the force of that blow. The decision made for her, she climbed to her feet. After all, she’d not humbled herself before Emmaline only to play coward in the park.

  “Here,” Her sister tossed the sketchpad at her and Prudence caught it against her chest, wrinkling the pages. “You are sketching. You are nonchalant and you are not boldly approaching him.”

  Prudence wrinkled her brow. “Then what am I doing?” She found him again in the distance, loosely wrapping the reins of his mount under a willow tree.

  “Other than risking the wrath of Mama?”

  She nodded.

  “I was jesting.” Poppy dropped her head into her hands and shook. “Oh, must I instruct you on everything? You are searching out your next subject.”

  She stared dumbly back at her sister, blaming both Poppy’s confounded plan and this breathless need to see Lord St. Cyr for her inability to process this particular scheme. Prudence widened her eyes as, at last, Poppy’s muddied orders made sense. “Of course.” Goodness, if she’d maddened her mother and Sin with her disastrous Come Out, her sister would drive them both straight to Bedlam when the hoyden was unleashed on Society.

  The youngest Tidemore girl gave her head a relieved shake. “Now, go, before Judith sees you darting off.”

  With that warning imminent, sketchpad and charcoal in her gloved hands, Prudence scrambled to her feet and attempted her best efforts at nonchalance.

  Chapter 13

  Lesson Thirteen

  It is essential that a lady be a skilled spy…

  Staring at Lady Prudence Tidemore in the distance, Christian came to the immediate discovery—she would have made a deuced awful spy. Such a certain critique came as she proceeded to walk backward through Hyde Park.

  Christian stood beside his mount, stroking Valiant upon the withers, as Prudence strolled in his general direction with her head tipped up, staring at the early morning sky. She moved at a pace that alternated between a sprint and a too-quick walk.

  Despite his intentions to forget the lady, he remained fixed to his spot while she made her way toward him. He took in the sight of her, with her blue velvet cloak slapping against her ankles in the winter wind. No good could come from being near the innocent miss. Lynette had proven that all innocents were capable of deception; be it against the Crown or, in this case, against…him. Though what business did this lady have with one of his reputation? It would be wise to turn, as if he’d never spied her making a poor attempt at nonchalance. Not when the papers had paired their names together. Not when he’d waltzed with her, nearly two full sets. Not when he hungered for the honeysuckle scent that clung to her skin.

  But Christian had never done what was intended for him. Not with Lynette. Not upon the fields of battle. And not with this young woman. He furrowed his brow. A woman who was just now backing right toward the trunk of a wide elm. Tamping down a grin, he quickly closed the gap between Prudence and her unfortunate target.

  “Lady Prudence Tidemore,” he drawled, bringing her to a stop just as she would have collided with that white-grey trunk.

  She spun about and blinked wildly, searching about as if she’d had no hint of awareness of his nearby presence. Then she widened her eyes. “Christian!” she greeted him with such feigned nonchalance, he smiled despite himself. Yes, she’d have made a deuced awful spy. That same sketchpad from their previous Hyde Park meeting brandished in her hand, she waved it about. “La, how unexpected meeting you here this morning. At this t
ime. At this place.”

  Christian schooled his features into a collected mask, hiding all hint of humor. Since Toulouse, he’d filed women into two distinct categories: his mother and sister and…everyone else. From Lynette to the widows who’d had designs on him and his title, women had proven themselves ruthless where Christian was concerned. For all his reservations, there was a guilelessness to Prudence Tidemore that set her apart from all others. He sketched a bow. “I gather you are here to…?” He looked at her.

  She shook her head. He prodded her with his gaze. Prudence shook her head once again. Ah, so she did not know the practiced lines in this farce they both took part in. The woman he’d taken for an innocent before had always had answers and words. With Prudence’s lack of artifice, she challenged years’ worth of cynicism. Clearing his throat, Christian tipped his chin at the book clutched in her hands. “This is the part where you explain what brings you here today.”

  She followed his gaze and then widened her eyes. “Oh.” Her cheeks bloomed red, putting him in mind of a ripened summer berry. And God if that wasn’t her—sweet, enticing, and beckoning a man who had a taste for that delicious treat. “Sketching,” she said lamely. She held up her book for his inspection. “I was searching for the perfect place in which to sketch. And you were…?”

  “Riding.” Riding, as he did every morning at this time. He searched about for Maxwell who joined him on his daily rides, but found the other man uncharacteristically late. Staring at Prudence, he wished his friend remained away. Which was madness, particularly when the alternative was him being alone here with an unwed lady who had stars in her eyes. He’d ceased trusting in stars where he was concerned years ago. “What has inspired your artistic sensibilities today?”

  Her eyes lit, and she took a step forward, as if to show him her book, but then promptly tucked it behind her back. “Er…I haven’t begun a new drawing yet,” she said and he suspected those were the first true words put out by the lady during this exchange.

  Christian held out a gloved hand. She hesitated and then turned over her small leather book. They stood in companionable silence, their breath stirring puffs of winter air about them as he popped her book open to a random page, somewhere in the middle. He stared, frozen, unblinking at the image.

  “It is—”

  “An elm,” he supplied. Odd, the lady should put to page countless others he’d seen, others he could not discern, and yet this one should be so very clear. That image he’d carried from Waterloo that still haunted his mind. Feeling burned by the book, he snapped her sketchpad closed and quickly turned it over to her care.

  Her wide smile revealed a slight dimple in her right cheek. “You recognize it as an elm?” How had he not noticed that endearing mark before now? He clung to that question and revelation rolled into one for it pulled him back from the horror upon the page.

  “Is it not an elm?”

  She shook her head, knocking her bonnet askew. “Oh, no. Indeed, it is. In fact, it is that particular elm.” He followed her point to the tree just beyond his shoulder. With her book tucked under her left arm, she used her right hand to readjust her velvet headpiece. “I am merely surprised you identified it as such.”

  Standing there, he was staggered by the realization that the lady did, in fact, know the extent of her artistic skills.

  As though she’d followed the unspoken direction of his thoughts, Prudence said, “I know very well my ability.” She untucked her sketchpad and waved it about. “Or in this case, my lack of ability. I do not delude myself or others into believing I am one thing, or striving to prove I am something different than what I am.”

  Her words, unerringly accurate, ran through him with a shocking potency. How many years had he been hiding under the façade of one thing, while he, and a handful of others, all knew the truth about just the kind of soldier, and worse, the kind of man he’d been—and was?

  The fates putting that image upon her pages had merely served as a taunting reminder of his total lack of worth and the wrongness of encouraging interest in this wide-eyed innocent. At best he was a rogue. At worst he was a coward. Those truths alone were reason enough to steer clear of Lady Prudence Tidemore.

  A strong wind stirred the dry branches overhead and he momentarily looked at the grey, aged limbs. The morning sky painted white with winter’s grimness peeked through those branches. An elm. He squinted up and took in the wishbone shape of the barren tree and glanced to the book clasped in her fingers. “It was this tree,” he said quietly.

  She nodded. Her elm. It was the image upon her page.

  “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” Prudence’s softly spoken words pulled him back from his bleak musings.

  “I hate elms.”

  She started, looking at him with the same shock she might have if he’d told her there was no heaven. Feeling he owed her more than that cryptic handful of words, he said, “There was an elm on the edge of Waterloo. Anytime I see one, it,” reminds me of death. “Reminds me of that day.” It was why he came here day in and day out. In this way, he would never forget. As though he could. Never before had he shared that detail with any person; not even Maxwell, who’d dwelled in that very real hell alongside him. Yet, he’d wanted Prudence to know…for reasons he could not understand.

  She motioned to the tree beside them. “I love this particular elm. It is the reason I come here.”

  What irony that they two should be brought to the same spot, yet for two very different reasons. He came not for the beauty of this tree, but for the memories attached to another; of a particular, narrow elm on the edge of a bloodied Brussels battlefield. The roguish charmer he’d spent these years striving to be should have managed a half-grin and words of concurrence, but he could not bring himself to force out the lie. Instead, he followed her gaze skyward.

  “My sister, Patrina, was married here.” Her words startled him back to attention. He glanced skeptically about. “Well, not here, per se.” She motioned behind her to a large boulder in the distance. “She met her husband over by that very spot and he arranged for them to be married there.” A small, wistful smile played on her lips. It sucked the breath from his lungs at the allure of innocence he wanted to drown himself in. Goodness that still existed. Hope. Prudence wandered closer to the tree and brushed her palm along the roughened bark. “During their ceremony, I looked past Patrina and Weston and saw this tree. And I, of course, began to wonder about it. It looked so very old.” She looked at him as though expecting a response.

  “Indeed it is old, I’d wager.”

  She gave a nod of approval. “Yes, that was the thought I had. But then I thought about what it had seen.” Prudence continued to brush her palm up and down the gnarled trunk and he took in that slightly erotic gesture momentarily distracted from the hell of his past that she’d forced him to walk down with the talk of this blasted tree. “It saw my sister and Weston’s first meeting and their wedding. How many other loving couples met here?” Her words snapped him from his reverie and set warning bells clamoring. Talks of love were dangerous and presented risks he’d not enter in to with a good, innocent young lady such as Prudence Tidemore.

  Then, she suddenly stopped and examined the remnants of the tree’s bark that had flaked off in her hand, a little moue of surprise on her lips.

  Death. A chill ran through him that had nothing to do with the winter cold.

  Her innocent accounting of that bloody elm merely highlighted how very different they were. She saw love and hope beneath this ancient elm, but he saw nothing more than a nearly deadened tree that harkened him back to a chaotic battlefield and the metallic scent of blood as men had died around him. “It is dead.” His voice emerged in flat, hollow tones. “And it should be removed.” Purged from this park, his memory, and then promptly burned for all the hell attached to it.

  Prudence gasped, touching her fingertips to her lips. “Never.” The hint of a frown pulled her lips down in the corners. “That isn’t altogether true. S
ee?”

  Christian followed her finger skyward to a patch of brown, deadened leaves that clung to one branch. He peered up. “What am I supposed to be looking at, my lady?”

  She wagged a finger at the old elm. “You see, some of the magnificent tree might be aged and even dying, but it still lives and should be celebrated for that.”

  He locked his feet to the deadened, winter ground as with her innocent talk of elms, she shook the foundation of his world. “Perhaps.” Christian prayed with his noncommittal reply, she’d let the matter of the elm rest.

  Prudence tossed her head back and inhaled deeply. “I adore winter. The air is crisper, the sky painted in shades of whites and greys a person did not know existed within a color palate. And then there is snow.” She said that last part as if she spoke of some magical force that could cure all life’s woes.

  …I adore zee summer sun upon my skin… Lynette’s bell-like laugh trilled through his mind; as practiced as the words of love on her lips that summer day.

  When he spoke, his tone came out gruffer than he intended. “I thought all ladies enjoyed the warm summer sun?” he asked in a desperate bid to liken her to Lynette, that great betrayer. For only then would his ordered world be stabilized once more.

  Prudence held his stare. “Not all elms are the same, Christian.” And neither were all women. That staggering realization sucked the air from his lungs. “This elm was not your elm.”

  He shot a hand out and brushed his knuckles along her jawline. “Are you always this hopeful and optimistic?” And surely there must be a way to capture a hint of her essence and merge his soul with that innocence.