I am so sorry, my dear, Celine had said as they’d trudged through the mud and the pouring rain. I could not help what I saw. Terrible things happened in that house. The inhabitants of the house obviously had not wanted to be reminded of those terrible things.
How different to walk into an inn and have the innkeeper’s wife welcome Violet with a smile, telling her she’d make up the best bedroom while Violet waited by the fire in the parlor. The innkeeper brought Violet warm wine, and prepared a cup for Daniel to await his arrival.
Daniel had charmed these people before they’d even met him.
Violet pulled Daniel’s coat closer around her shoulders as she drank the thick wine. The room was not yet warm enough for her to remove the coat, and besides, she didn’t want to. The wool had captured Daniel’s warmth and the scent of him. Violet closed her eyes and breathed it in, the wonder of this marvelous day still with her.
Daniel came in a half hour later. She saw him through the window, approaching the inn surrounded by the farmers and woodcutters. Daniel was swapping jokes with them—a few of them off-color, Violet could hear—all laughing like old friends. They entered the inn together, the men happy to stop for a jug of wine.
Daniel strode into the parlor, followed soon after by the innkeeper’s wife bearing a tray loaded with full platters and crocks. The odor of hot food made Violet’s stomach growl in longing.
“Thank you kindly,” Daniel said in French as he stripped off his gloves. “Flying is hungry work. Mmm, are those roasted potatoes I smell? In garlic and cream? My favorite.”
He took the heavy tray from the innkeeper’s wife and set it on the table for her, keeping up a conversation with her as he helped her lay out the food. Violet watched mutely from her place on the sofa. When the table was laden with steaming dishes, Daniel walked the innkeeper’s wife to the door, carrying the tray for her, onto which he tossed a few coins before handing the tray back to her and thanking her profusely. The woman was blushing and smiling as she ducked out and closed the door.
Daniel turned back, rubbing his hands. “I’m starving,” he announced in his big voice. “Ate far too early for my good this morning. Aren’t you joining me?”
Violet would have to lay aside his coat to join him and eat. She hated to give it up, as though she’d be giving up a part of him.
But the food called to her. Violet rose and hung Daniel’s coat on a hook on the wall, running her hands over it until the last possible minute. Daniel didn’t notice, still standing over the table and admiring the food.
Daniel waited until Violet sat down at the table before he took the seat closest to hers and started dishing out the food. He filled a plate with sausages, potatoes, greens, and sauce, and added cheese and bread before he laid the plate in front of her. “Grub smells good.”
“You’ve landed on your feet,” Violet said. She took up the bread and spread soft cheese on it as Daniel loaded a plate for himself. “I imagine you always do.”
“Not always.” Daniel shoveled creamy potatoes into his mouth and washed them down with the rough-tasting red wine. “When you laid me out with that vase, I landed on my back.”
Violet looked up at him, stricken. “I will apologize forever for that. It was horrible when I thought I’d hurt you so much.”
Daniel’s eyes glinted with good humor. “Stop. I was teasing you. Mackenzies are hard-headed. Difficult to kill. I imagine I’ll tease you about it for a long time to come.”
Implying they’d be friends for a long time to come. Friends who kissed, flew in balloons together, and shared dinners at out-of-the-way country inns.
Violet had never had such a friendship, especially not with a man. And she’d never desired a man before, but she couldn’t cease thinking about the kisses he’d given her. She thought again of how Daniel had cupped his hands around her backside in the balloon, pulling her hard up into him. The experience of wanting was entirely new, entirely strange, and left her confused.
“Do you think the balloon can be repaired?” she asked, switching to a safe topic.
Daniel returned to his food. “No. And if I’m right, the woodsmen and farmers will make themselves feel better about me destroying their trees by cutting up the silk and selling it or turning it into new clothes. Come summer in this place, everyone will be wearing yellow and scarlet.”
“You don’t seem bothered.”
He shrugged. “As I said, I’ll give Dupuis the price of it. His next balloon will be even better.”
Violet licked cream from her spoon. “It’s the mark of a rich man to be able to give up things so easily. You let it go and buy something new, no worry at all.”
Another shrug. “They’re only things. Besides, these people will save the cost and labor of new cloth. If ye’ve noticed, the innkeeper’s given us the very best in the house, which means they don’t have much overall.”
Careless kindness and generosity flowed from Daniel so easily. He was a man who gave and thought nothing of it.
A gust of wind hit the window, banging a shutter into it. The wind was followed by rain, icy fine, with snowflakes mixed with it. The sunshine outside had gone.
“You were right about the weather changing,” Violet said. “I’m glad we came down before this.” She shivered, feeling winter cold permeate the room, in spite of the fire. “Quite a squall.”
“Ye’ve seen nothing of squalls until it’s the snow whirling around Kilmorgan Castle in a wild white blizzard. But Kilmorgan’s a fine place in the height of summer, when the light never really goes away. ’Tis beautiful. You’ll like it.”
Violet stopped, her fork halfway to her mouth. Daniel went on scraping the last of his sauce from his plate, not noticing her hesitation.
Again he was implying they would be friends for a while. That he’d show her this place with the lofty title of Kilmorgan Castle, in the summer when light lingered into night.
“You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said lightly.
Daniel looked up at her, his smile rich and hot. “Oh, sweetheart, I always keep my promises.”
The innkeeper’s wife entered again before Violet could think of a reply. The woman started piling empty dishes onto the tray, taking their compliments on the food in stride. “Just a bit of home cooking,” she said. “Now, we’ve fixed the bedroom upstairs for you. The day is short, the storm is upon us. You’ll not be flying anywhere tonight.” She chuckled. “To be sure, when Jean ran in to tell me a man and his lady wife had been flying high and were now stuck in a tree, I thought he was having fancies. But you’re foreign. What you get up to is beyond me.” She shook her head at them, more amused than dismayed.
Here was another difference between Violet’s life and Daniel’s. People were instantly kind to Daniel, as though his charm were contagious. Violet had not forgotten the cruelty of the villagers who’d forced her and her ill mother out onto the road and into the tempest. These people seemed kind and caring, but Violet knew that if she’d arrived alone, without Daniel with his charm and wealth, they would have regarded her with deep suspicion.
“Thank you,” Daniel told the innkeeper’s wife. “I confess, it would be better to rest our weary bones here than to try to make our way back to the coast tonight, even if my man could reach us with a cart. Which he can’t. He’ll have been cut off by the gorge—I’m sure Simon and Dupuis sensibly returned home. We’ll spend the night here and return in the morning.”
Spend the night. Violet ceased to breathe. To rest in a warm, soft bed, tucked away with Daniel, hidden from the world . . .
“I can’t.” Violet jumped to her feet, speaking rapidly in English. “My mother won’t know where I am. She’ll worry herself frantic.”
Daniel lifted his hand. “No matter, my love. We’ll send a message.” He switched on his smile as he spoke again in French. “Do you have a telegraph office nearby, Madame?”
“There’s a train station in a village three miles from here. They have a telegraph.”
Violet felt obligated to put forth one more argument. “If there is a train three miles from here, then we can go back. Three miles is an easy journey, even in a storm.”
The innkeeper’s wife chuckled again. “City folk. It’s not the Gare du Nord, Madame. Train stops twice a day, once each way, and you’ve already missed both.”
“Ah, well, that decides it,” Daniel said, not worried.
“That decides it,” Violet echoed. She was going to spend the night here, as Daniel’s wife, no matter what.
The innkeeper’s wife took them upstairs to the first floor, and unlocked a room that was about ten feet square. An enormous bed, which took up most of the room, rose under the beams, a bright fire danced on a hearth, and a tray laden with hot coffee and cups lay on a table near the fire.
“I’ve brought you out a nightgown, Madame,” the innkeeper’s wife said, shaking out a long, slightly yellowed cotton gown. “I’ll help you undress, same as a lady’s maid. And my husband will do for you, Monsieur.”
“I don’t need much doing,” Daniel said. “You get comfortable, Vi. I’ll take care of the message to your mum. She doesn’t need to worry about us.”
He kept up the verisimilitude well. No stammering, no embarrassment, no forgetting parts of the fiction he was weaving. But at the same time, he was giving Violet time to change out of her clothes without him near in this tiny room.
Daniel departed on his errand, the innkeeper’s wife agreeing that mothers worried—she worried every day about her son off working in Aix-en-Provence instead of helping them tend the inn.
“Not that we have much to do here,” she went on. “City folk come out seeking country air in the summer, and sometimes the shooting parties get this far, but in spring, with the planting, and city folk keeping to their theatres and operas, not many come out to see us.”
And the inn was a bit away from the railway, Violet finished silently, and those with money took the fast trains from Paris to the coast. Not much call for a coaching inn these days. Daniel had been right that these people could use extra money.
Still chattering, the innkeeper’s wife unbuttoned and unlaced Violet’s dress and petticoats, helped her out of her corset, and slid the warmed and pressed nightgown over her head. Violet hadn’t been waited on in such a very long time . . . or had she ever been, like this? As though she were a true lady, married to someone like Daniel.
Daniel returned in little over half an hour. By then it was fully dark, and he came noisily into the bedroom, bringing with him a wave of cold and the smell of wood smoke.
Violet had curled up on the soft chair before the fire after the innkeeper’s wife had gone, and remained there, too tired to rise. She’d wrapped a borrowed dressing gown and a blanket from the bed around her, her feet pulled up under them. “You walked three miles there and back awfully fast,” she said to Daniel. “The coffee is still warm, I think.”
“I met a boy from the next village halfway along, and he carried the message back for me. He was expecting me. Gossip must be spread by carrier pigeon between these villages.”
He came to pour himself a cup of the coffee, which put him close to Violet. His coat still held the cold of outside, but the wool of his kilt smelled warm. The heat of him slid through Violet’s blanket and made her draw herself closer.
“The innkeeper’s wife brought a nightshirt for you,” Violet said, clutching her cup. “It’s laid out on the bed.”
Daniel shucked his coat and hung it on a hook, caught up the nightshirt, and sat down in the other chair, resting the nightshirt on his lap. “Kind of her.”
“They’re being very kind, I’ve noticed.” Violet kept to English, knowing anything overheard in French would be all over this village and the next by the following morning, presumably by carrier pigeon. “They like you, and perhaps sense your aristocratic connections.”
Daniel grinned. “They sense my jingling pockets. Remember this country’s history—these folks’ great-great-grandparents rose up and threw the French aristocrats out on their bums a hundred years ago. Forty years ago, they sent the last emperor rushing for the safety of England. They’re not awed by my proximity to a title. If they like me, it’s because they know the benefit of a paying guest.”
Violet wasn’t so certain. Daniel did carry a certain weight of authority she noticed aristocrats had in any country, the knowledge that lesser beings would get out of the way for them. It wasn’t an arrogance with Daniel—he just knew.
Daniel took a last sip of coffee and set down his cup. “Now then, the night is cold, the villagers go to bed with the sun, and I’m beat. Why don’t you get into the bed and cover up while I slip into my sleeping togs? I’m not modest, but you might be.”
The thought of Daniel peeling off his clothes while she lay in bed made Violet nearly swallow her tongue. He would be too near as he slid off his waistcoat and the shirt she’d earlier seen dampened with sweat against his well-honed arms. He’d bare all his skin, which would likely be as liquid tanned as his face and arms.
Violet masked her sharp intake of breath by fumbling her way out of the chair and clattering down her coffee cup. She kept the blanket around her until she reached the bed, then she tossed it on top before climbing the steps to the high bed. She found the covers warmed with wrapped bricks that had been slid to the bottom of the bed.
“Where will you sleep?” Violet asked Daniel. She settled under the quilts, trying not to look his way. “There isn’t a sofa, and the floor looks hard. There aren’t many covers up here to spare either.”
Daniel laughed. “I’m sleeping in that bed with you, lass. I’m exhausted, and the floor, as you say, is far too hard. I’m an aristocrat, remember? I like things soft.”
Chapter 12
Violet peered over the top of the covers in alarm. Daniel was just settling the nightshirt across his broad shoulders, the garment too small for him. It bared his forearms and the flowing tattoo, then fell to just above his knees. His legs were as tight and strong as the rest of him, his bare toes pressing the board floor.
“That bed’s big enough to float a battleship,” he said, not bothering to hide his near nudity. “We’d never find each other if we wanted to.”
He didn’t give her time to argue. Daniel climbed up the other side of the bed and slid under the covers while Violet stared at him, the quilt clutched to her chest.
Daniel laughed at her as he lay down. “Go to sleep, Vi. You’ll need your rest for tomorrow.”
He punched the pillow into shape, then flopped the covers over him, a man settling down for a winter’s nap. The rushlight on the other side of the room, which hadn’t emitted much glow in the first place, burned out with a sharp smell. The only light now was from the fire, which was licking at fragrant wood to warm the small room.
Violet lay down again, remaining on her side, facing him. Daniel reposed on his back, one arm behind his head, the other holding the covers to his chest. He closed his eyes, the lines of his face brushed with firelight.
She watched him awhile longer but he never moved. Confusing. Daniel had brought her here, posed as her husband, and insisted they share the bed, but now drifted to sleep as though they were trusted friends. Casual, comfortable, in the same way he shortened her name. No drama, no fear. Just Daniel’s warmth between Violet and the rest of the world.
She liked it. Violet had never felt safe and protected, not since she’d learned the truth of life.
Up here in their aerie, in this bed of cozy warmth, Daniel belonged to her. For a little while, Violet could pretend she was Daniel’s, that he loved and cherished her, that today was only a small part of a long life of happiness. Tomorrow, they would return to reality, but for tonight, he was hers, and she his.
A fine dream. One Violet would hold ti
ghtly to herself against the hour she’d have to let it go.
If Daniel got through the night with his sanity intact, it would be an astonishing thing. To have the most beautiful woman on earth in his bed, three feet away from him, and not touch her, was going to kill him.
The courtesans at the very expensive houses Daniel visited to keep his needs at bay would laugh if they knew he kept an arm’s length between himself and Violet. He’d set up the tale that they were man and wife not only to keep the villagers from treating Violet poorly, but also so that no one in this house would think it odd if they heard him easing his passion with her.
But when he’d seen her look at him worriedly over the covers, he remembered her profound terror when she’d struck out at him in the London house. Daniel had scared her senseless. Not for anything he’d done, he’d come to understand, but because Violet had been hurt by someone else. She’d reacted to Daniel because he’d put her in mind of that incident.
Daniel wished he knew what had happened, and who’d dared to frighten and touch her. He’d coax the story out of her when she was ready, and then Daniel would visit that gentleman and explain a few things.
For now he lay quietly next to Violet, scenting her, feeling her warmth, and did nothing. His cock was so hard he could lift the covers with it. He wanted to squeeze himself and relieve the pressure, but he knew that if Violet woke to Daniel stroking himself off beside her, she’d be as terrified as she’d been in London, and likely even more disgusted. Plenty of weapons for her to use on him in this room.
Besides, he didn’t want to hurt her. He liked the way Violet had looked at him today, as though everything he did pleased her. He wanted to spin that out as long as he could.
She’d been amazing up in the balloon. Violet had been afraid, but also excited. He remembered how she’d screamed and then laughed when the balloon did something unexpected, how she’d called him the most bloody incorrigible madman she’d ever had the misfortune to meet. But she’d followed Daniel’s orders to the letter, no arguing, no falling in a weeping fit, no demands that Daniel take her to safety immediately. She was no wilting violet, his Violet.
Highland Pleasures [6] The Wicked Deeds of Daniel Mackenzie Page 13
