He pocketed it again without drinking. “I may, as well.”
That was the first time she’d heard anything that might be reluctance from him. “I didn’t mean to drag you into anything,” she said quietly, abruptly disappointed—not in him, but in herself. This adventure scheme of hers must be terribly boring for someone of his experience and reputation. “I can hire a hack if you don’t—”
“That would be a sight,” he interrupted, eyes shadowed in the dim carriage. “You arriving home, sopping wet, in a hired hack.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“I rarely know what I mean, Eleanor. Don’t let it trouble you. I never let it bother me.”
She smiled despite her nerves. For someone so dangerous, he had an uncanny knack for putting her at ease. And always at times she never would have expected it. “Very well. Are we going to Hyde Park?”
“That’s what you requested. I wouldn’t let a duck bathe in some of that water, much less a pretty young lady, but I found a nice, secluded pond in the northwest corner. And it has the additional attraction of being at the farthest possible point from Griffin House.”
“Oh.” Secluded and far from home and safety. For a moment the realization left her distinctly uneasy.
Valentine seemed to sense the swaying of her courage, because even as he sank back in his seat, he offered her a calm smile. “I told you how I pursue chits,” he said. “It must be mutual, or I’m not interested. And any time you wish to turn around, tell me, or tell Dawson, and it will be done. He has instructions to take your orders over mine.”
The gesture surprised her, and though she would never admit it, it calmed her immensely. “So what if I should tell Dawson to leave you behind and return me home?”
“Then I will be walking. And not very happily.”
“I shall try to refrain from doing so, then.”
“Thank you.” His gaze, which had been steady on her face, wandered down the length of her body and back again. “Interesting choice of wardrobe.”
Eleanor fought to keep the blush from her face, though she couldn’t help the warmth spreading beneath her skin everywhere his eyes had wandered. “I thought something simple would be appropriate.”
“Since you won’t be wearing it long, you mean. Unless you plan to swim fully clothed?”
Hm. “I do trust you, Deverill, but it seems to me the less you know about my precise plans, the better.”
“As you wish. I’m merely curious, anyway. I can’t recall a single chit of my acquaintance who has made a point of swimming through a London pond. Not on purpose, anyway.”
“Then I shall feel sorry for all of them when I’ve done it.”
“I feel sorry for them now, just for being well-enough acquainted with me that I should know of their bathing habits.”
“You’re not so bad, Valentine,” she said, keeping her voice as distantly friendly as she could manage, considering that she was torn between fleeing home and throwing herself on him. “I don’t mind being acquainted with you.” Not at all. What would he do, she wondered, if she altered what she wanted for her adventure?
His teeth shown in the dimness. “You’ve only seen my good side. Think of me as a triangle. What you’ve witnessed is the narrow point. To the rest of London I show my broad backside.”
She grinned. “But you’ve forgotten two other complete sides. If you’re isosceles, which I assume you are.”
The expression in his eyes softened for a brief moment. “Thank you for noting that I might have them.”
“I’ve seen them, Valentine. What you’ve done for me wouldn’t fit on the point of a triangle.”
The marquis shifted. “Yes, well, the thing with triangles is that you can never see all three sides at the same time.” The coach bumped, turning sharply. “We’ve reached the park. Do you care to enlighten me about the general plan? Am I to lead you to water and then turn my back and stand guard? Or should I wait in the coach and let you splash about in peace?”
She wanted him to be there, even though it seemed like the worst idea in history. “I would feel…better if you would remain somewhere in earshot, but once you point out the direction of the pond I shall proceed on my own.”
He nodded. “And a blanket? Something to cover your wet body?” Valentine moved again. “Not that I’m trying to discover details, but this coach does have rather expensive leather seats.”
Eleanor flushed. “I forgot a blanket.”
He produced one from the cabinet beneath his seat. “I didn’t.”
Their fingers brushed as he handed it over. It might have been an accident, but since their last kiss, she couldn’t be as certain any longer. Nor did she truly wish to be. Wondering whether the Marquis of Deverill lusted after her made life seem much more exciting. “Thank you.”
“No detail forgotten. That’s my motto.”
She couldn’t help smiling. “I thought your motto was carpe diem.”
“Actually, it’s carpe femme, but I’m expanding my repertoire.”
Glancing toward the curtain-covered window, Eleanor couldn’t help a nervous fidget. “What time do you think we’ll be back? Stanton rises before five o’clock, I believe.”
“We can be back in twenty minutes or less, so I suppose it depends on how long you plan to go swimming.”
“And that would depend on how cold the water is.”
He grinned. “I found a location; I make no guarantees about temperature.”
“Fair enough.” For a moment she debated whether to ask the next question, but with the dark and the coach and her companion, she couldn’t help thinking about a similar situation last week. “Have you heard anything new from Mr. Cobb-Harding? I have to say, I expected to see him present at the Caster soiree.”
“I haven’t heard anything. And I don’t expect to.”
“So you sent him your letter. What, precisely, did you say in it, Valentine?”
He liked when she used his Christian name. Females used it often in his company; they seemed to find it romantical. For as long as he’d known Eleanor, though, she’d only begun using it over the last few days, only since they’d started this odd partnership, and that made it seem somehow more…significant.
“Nothing to worry about,” he returned. “Unless he’s shot himself, of course. One can always hope for the best, I suppose.”
“Valentine! I may find him disgusting, but I certainly don’t wish him to kill himself.”
“Then you may hope he doesn’t, and I will hope he does, and we’ll all have done our duty.”
“But what did you say?” she insisted.
Eleanor had a tendency to be very hard to distract. Valentine blew out his breath. “That I had discovered his level of indebtedness and made him responsible to me for it. And that unless he wished me to force repayment and the consequences thereof, he needed to make plans to leave the country.”
Her soft lips pursed. “Thank you. I have to confess, though, that the further I get from the actual incident, the stronger my desire to confront him myself and deliver a punch to his nose.”
There she went again, expressing that odd independent streak, that desire to do for herself. Considering how much experience he had with females, the level of confusion she caused in him was astounding. And as few morals as he had, he was still aware that the level of arousal he felt around her was completely unacceptable and best throttled and killed. A damned difficult prospect for someone far more used to indulging his passions than stifling them.
While she sat silently opposite him, Valentine concentrated on thoughts of ugly old chits and losing at faro. It didn’t help much, but the more he had to think about, the less opportunity he had to dwell on any one thing.
The one thing stirred in her seat. “How much did you have to pay?” she asked.
“For what?”
She made a frustrated sound. “For Stephen’s papers. To take over his debt. How much did it cost you?”
How could he tell her
that the amount of Cobb-Harding’s debt appalled him? And not merely the amount, but the carelessness of it? The bastard’s idea of a solution to his monetary troubles had infuriated him, but he didn’t want to let her know that, either. The Marquis of Deverill didn’t get angry or upset over other people and their dilemmas—not unless they directly affected him. “Why the interest?” he said instead. “Unless you wish to find a way to repay me and take them over yourself. I wouldn’t recomm—”
“It’s a simple question,” she interrupted, folding her arms across her lovely bosom.
“Yes, I suppose it is. And I’m ‘simply’ not going to answer it.”
“I think I have a right to know.”
Valentine shook his head. “I said I would take care of a problem, and I did. The details are my affair. Suffice it to say that Stephen Cobb-Harding is a reckless man who wouldn’t have deserved you under the best of circumstances.”
That seemed to stop her for a moment, but just as he began to relax a little, she leaned forward and touched his knee. “You are a very nice man,” she whispered, her voice shaking a little.
The emotion in her voice bothered him. “Good God, don’t go about saying that. I’m taking more pleasure from torturing Cobb-Harding than from helping you. That’s not nice.”
“Tell yourself anything you like, but you’re wasting your breath if you’re trying to convince me. You’re forcing a man to leave the country because he attacked me.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Your faith in me is somewhat dismaying. I’ll have to do something nefarious to convince you of my poor character.”
She laughed, a sound he’d recently become surprisingly attuned to, and absurdly pleased to hear. “Just not tonight, if you please.”
“Very well. Another time, then.”
Eleanor settled into silence, and for the moment he let her be. A declaration of a wish to go swimming might sound innocent enough, but he knew her well enough to realize that she had to be supremely nervous about it. Ladies might take the waters in Bath, but that was considered medicinal. The shore at Brighton also attracted bathers of the female persuasion, but in addition to the god-awful attire they wore, that setting obviously lacked the solitude and the propriety-flaunting dimension that interested Eleanor Griffin.
As for himself, he could only admire the great restraint he’d been showing in her presence. Mentally he’d been undressing her and making love to her for days, but that didn’t count. He was being good. “Nice,” as she’d called him. Probably the oddest label he’d ever had applied to him, but on occasion he almost enjoyed it.
The coach turned onto a bumpier stretch of road, and he leaned over to brush aside the window’s curtain. “We’re nearly there,” he noted, surprised at the low tremor of excitement that ran through him. For Lucifer’s sake, she was the one going swimming; he wasn’t even going to watch.
“Good. I’ll try not to be long.”
“Take as much time as you like, Eleanor. This is your moment of freedom.”
He heard her quiet sigh. “Yes, I’m being so terribly bold, aren’t I?”
Valentine sat forward. “You are. I’m beginning to understand that this isn’t about making a statement to the world, but to yourself.” He conjured a smile. “And besides, if this doesn’t satisfy your cravings, I can still arrange a balloon ride or a voyage to the Congo for you.”
With a chuckle Eleanor glanced out her own window. “I shall keep that in mind.” The line of her mouth straightened. “It’s very dark out there, isn’t it?”
“I’ll set a torch at the edge of the pond. And I’ll be close by, standing guard. But if you don’t want to do this, I—”
The coach bumped to a halt, and she stood. “I want to do this,” she returned, turning the handle and pushing the door open herself.
The driver flipped down the steps, and Eleanor emerged before Valentine. He would have preferred it otherwise, just in case someone might be in the area, but he hadn’t chosen this pond by accident. It was neighbored by an old church, and was used for the occasional baptismal on Sundays and otherwise abandoned.
“This way,” he said, removing the lantern from one of the coach posterns and offering her his free hand. She took it, her bare fingers warm in his and shaking just a little.
They walked across the narrow stretch of meadow between the pond and the road, then entered the small, dark stand of oak trees that circled the water. Eleanor stopped at the sloping edge of the pond to gaze about at the lantern-lit darkness. “This is what I imagined,” she said, her voice quiet.
That pleased him to an absurd degree. “It’s used as a baptismal, so the bottom should be fairly firm.” He set the lantern down on a rock, then straightened again. “I’ll be just outside the trees. Call me when you’re ready to return.”
“Thank you, Valentine.”
He shrugged, watching as she set down the blanket and then went to work pulling pins from her hair. Brunette waves cascaded over her shoulders, caressing her smooth cheeks and stirring in the slight breeze. With a swallow he turned his back. “Have fun.”
Jesus. After he’d seen a hundred women letting down their hair, this one doing so innocently shouldn’t have the ability to make him hard, but it did. She did. And with an obligation both to her and to her brother, he needed to put some distance between them immediately.
After striding away so quickly that he nearly brained himself on a low-hanging branch, he stopped at a convenient tree stump and sat down. “Stop it, Deverill,” he mumbled at himself, rubbing his hands over his face. So he’d told her to have fun; it was far from the wittiest thing he’d ever said, but at least it had gotten him away from her before she could see his groin straining at his trousers.
Behind him he could make out the dim, broken light from the lantern, but he refused to look more closely than that. And he wasn’t certain whether he could hear the swish of her gown as it softly fell from her shoulders or whether that was just the sound of the breeze, but he definitely knew which sound he wanted it to be.
He did hear the splash of water as she entered the pond. Keeping his gaze resolutely on the new moon, he refused to imagine her thin shift rendered transparent and clinging to the soft, wet curves of her body. This was about her freedom, damn it, not about how attractive he happened to find her. He’d already stepped too far by kissing her, and he wouldn’t make that mistake again. Not even if it killed him.
Chapter 14
Eleanor held her breath as cold water rose up to her thighs. A warm afternoon would have been more ideal for this excursion, but that would played into the ruination clause Melbourne had put into their agreement. She took another step forward, gasping a little as the water rose to her hips. Her shift clung to her legs, making her feel clumsy and weighted, and the slap of the cold, wet material against her still-dry parts made her gasp again. With a glance over her shoulder in the direction Valentine had vanished, she yanked it over her head and tossed it onto the shore.
She shivered. “Oh, stop it,” she muttered, and deliberately sank to her knees, letting the water flow up past her bosom to her neck.
The shock of the cold froze her there for a moment. As her body grew more accustomed to the temperature, she acknowledged that it wasn’t that bad. She drew in her breath and submerged completely, stroking toward the center of the pond. The fingers of cold water sank in through her thick mane of hair, pricking and electric as they touched her scalp.
Swimming through darkness was an eerie sensation, as was the realization that her body felt different moving through the water than it had when she’d been a young girl. As she surfaced she smiled and flung hair from her face.
Tomorrow when she went down to breakfast she would know that she’d gone swimming naked in the middle of London, and that she’d done it simply because she’d wanted to do so. Her brothers had said they would serve as her escorts anywhere she wanted to go, but she seriously doubted they would have agreed to this. Certainly if Melbourne knew what she wa
s doing, and who was standing guard, he’d drop dead on the spot.
Out here in the dark she could admit to herself that at least half of her excitement was from knowing that the Marquis of Deverill stood close by. Valentine Corbett, the notorious rake—and her surprisingly loyal friend. While she appreciated the friendship part, she’d be a fool to deny that she spent more time thinking of his kisses and wondering what would happen if she dared to bait him again.
She swam until her arms and legs began to tire. Even then she was reluctant to leave the pond, but she couldn’t very well stay until daylight. Still, she would never do this again, and it was difficult to name the last moment of her freedom. Finally, though, she waded back to the point where she’d first gone into the water. And froze.
A pair of beady eyes, red in the reflected lamplight, gazed at her from beneath the skirt of her gown. It was probably a squirrel, she told herself, taking another step toward shore and waving her arm. A squirrel, or a hedgehog. “Shoo.”
A low growl answered her. Eleanor yelped, backing into the water again. Hedgehogs didn’t growl, as far as she knew. And naked, she didn’t feel nearly as brave as she might have otherwise.
Something crashed through the shrubbery toward her. “Eleanor?”
With another shriek she sank down in the water just as Valentine emerged from the trees. He skidded, nearly sliding down the muddy bank into the water before he came to a halt.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his unabashedly curious gaze fixed just below the waterline in the direction of her chest.
“There’s a…a thing under my dress.”
His lips twisted. “I’ve actually had a chit tell me that very thing before.”
“I’m serious, Valentine! It growled at me.”
He gave her pile of clothes a dubious look. “Are you certain?”
“I’ve never had muslin growl at me before. Get rid of it so I can come out of the water.”
Valentine looked around for a moment, then set aside his nice walking cane and instead bent down and picked up a hefty stick. Rather than shooing away the growling hedgehog, he hooked a strap of her shift and lifted the damp material into the air. “You’re naked,” he announced.
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