Jane Feather - [V Series]

by Violet

  She hadn’t expected Julian to bring everything to a close so abruptly. If only it hadn’t come on the heels of her encounter with Cedric, she knew she would have responded differently. But she’d been too absorbed in the encounter that had opened the game of vengeance to think clearly, to respond intelligently to anything outside her immediate preoccupation. Cedric had known who she was—the recognition had been clear in his gaze as he had picked up the glove she’d thrown at his feet. She had wanted to play with him a little, let him see her moving comfortably in this society, let him wonder what she intended, wonder about her history. And Julian had blundered into her excitement, dropping a bombshell into her carefully constructed scheme, throwing all her plans awry. So instead of analyzing his proposal, working out how it could bring them closer together, she’d heard only the words and reacted with blind emotion. And blind emotion was an indulgence she could not afford. Not in her schemes of vengeance, and not in her schemes of love.

  She climbed into bed, pulling the bedclothes up to her chin.

  If Julian was going back to Spain, then she would go with him. Half a loaf was better than none, and half a loaf could grow.

  Rolling over, she blew out her candle and lay in the darkness, listening to the rain now beating heavily on the window. The crash of the surf could be heard clearly above the rain, and the night grew ever wilder.

  She loved him, loved him as Cecile had loved the baron. The only love of her life … a love for all life. And if he could only offer her half of himself, then for now she would take that. But she had to tell him so. And then she had to deal with Cedric. But in the light of this new scheme, how was she to do that?

  An answer would come to her in the morning. As soon as she’d rested and was calm again, she would tell Julian that she’d changed her mind.

  The storm abated just before daybreak, and in the damp chill Julian swung onto Soult, his portmanteau strapped to the saddle behind him. The sky was gunmetal-gray, the sea dark, the lawns sodden, the gravel of the parterres studded with puddles. He glanced upward at the east tower, at the ivy-garlanded window overlooking the drive. Then he turned his face north and cantered down the drive.

  Tamsyn, hollow-eyed after a sleepless night, stood at the window and stared into the rain-dark morning as Julian rode away. Had he gone so soon? How could he be so perverse as not to know that she would change her mind once her temper had died down?

  She moved in a whirlwind, racing out of her room, down the back stairs, out into the stableyard, and up the stairs to Josefa and Gabriel.

  “Och, little girl, steady now,” Gabriel said, leaping from his bed as she came in, her eyes wild. “Tell me, now.” He wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly against his barrel chest so that she couldn’t have spoken if she’d wished to.

  But at last she was able to tell them what had happened. “I have to go after him,” she said simply, sitting on the end of their bed, her hands twisting in her lap. “I love him … it’s like Cecile and the baron, it’s something I can’t do anything about. It hurts.” She looked between them. Josefa’s eyes were bright and sharp and Gabriel pulled at his chin.

  Slowly, he nodded. “Then we’d best be on our way. Josefa will stay here. She’ll no’ relish charging around the countryside riding pillion behind me.” He glanced at the woman, who nodded phlegmatically. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d waited behind while they’d gone off on some campaign or another.

  “I’ll tell Lucy that we have some vital business in Penzance and we’ll be back in a week or two.”

  “You’re coming back for the Penhallan, then?”

  Tamsyn looked at him in helpless uncertainty. “Yes, I must. I promised the baron … and Cecile … in my mind, I did. But I don’t know anymore, Gabriel. I don’t know what will happen.”

  “Och, aye, dinna fash yourself, bairn. What will be will be,” he said comfortably. “I should go and ask Miss Lucy for the direction to the colonel’s house in London. Best we know where to find him.”

  Tamsyn flung her arms around his neck. “What would I do without you … without you both?” Tearfully, she hugged Josefa, who had been calmly dressing herself all the while.

  “We should pack some clothes,” the woman said, patting her back. “It’s not seemly to make such a journey without clean drawers.”

  “No, Josefa,” Tamsyn said meekly, allowing herself to be hustled out of the loft room and into the dank morning, hearing Gabriel’s low, reassuring chuckle behind her.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  THE HOUSE ON AUDLEY SQUARE HAD A SMALL GARDEN AT the back, reached through a gate from the mews. Lucy had said that her brother’s book room opened onto the garden.

  Tamsyn sat in the railed garden in the center of Audley Square as dusk fell, waiting for Gabriel to return from his reconnaissance. She was pleasantly weary after five days of riding close to fifty miles a day. Their horses were now stabled in a coaching inn near Charing Cross, where Gabriel would also stay that night, while Tamsyn sprang her surprise on the colonel.

  She hoped a pleasant surprise.

  She could, of course, walk up to the front door and bang the knocker, but she had a taste for something a little more dramatic, something in keeping with the shocking abruptness of Julian’s departure.

  The click of the gate made her jump, and she realized how very nervous she was—as apprehensive as if the man she was intending to suprise was a stranger—someone whose reactions she couldn’t predict—instead of a man whose life and bed she had been sharing for the last four months.

  Gabriel’s boots scrunched on the gravel path winding through privet hedges to the middle of the garden where Tamsyn sat on a stone bench.

  “Well, it seems simple enough,” he said without preamble, sitting beside her. “The gate from the mews is locked, but I can put you over it without difficulty. The colonel’s book room has two windows, both low, easy for you to hitch yourself up without my help.”

  “Not open, I suppose.”

  “They might be. If they’re not, you’ll have to break one of the panes. You can do it easy enough with a stone wrapped in cloth. It shouldn’t make too much racket.”

  “Unless the colonel’s in the room,” she mused. “If he is, then I can simply knock on the window.”

  “You wouldn’t consider the door, I suppose,” Gabriel remarked mildly. “Seems so much simpler.”

  Tamsyn smiled. “Simpler but a lot less amusing.”

  “Aye, I daresay. And I suppose it’ll be less amusing in broad daylight, too.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “So let’s get some supper and come back when it’s full dark … about ten o’clock.”

  They ate in a dingy chop house in Piccadilly, and Tamsyn drank several glasses of porter, trying to quiet the little devils of anxious excitement dancing in her belly. She couldn’t understand why she should be so nervous. She knew the man; she knew his body almost as well as she knew her own; she knew his moods and the way the light changed in his eyes; she knew what it meant when he held his body in a certain fashion, when his mouth quirked, when those mobile red-gold eyebrows twitched and his eyelids drooped lazily, half concealing the bright-blue eyes.

  And she knew his anger. But why would he be angry? She was simply here to tell him she’d changed her mind, and she was ready to go back to Spain with him … ready to accept the limited liaison that was all he thought he could offer.

  Gabriel said little, concentrating on his mutton chops and wine, but his mild gray eyes were sharply assessing. He wasn’t at all sure about the wisdom of this enterprise, and if the truth were told, he wished Colonel, Lord St. Simon to the devil. Tamsyn may have decided she’d found the love of her life, but he could wish she’d settled on someone easier to handle and more conveniently situated than this uncompromising English lord.

  If the English lord hadn’t turned up, Tamsyn would have found some man like the baron, and they’d all be living contentedly in the mountains, doing what they were good at.
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  And pigs might fly, Gabriel thought with a dour smile.

  “Let’s get on with it, lassie.” He pushed back his chair. “You’re fretting yourself into a frazzle.”

  “No, I’m not,” Tamsyn denied, but she couldn’t hide her relief that the waiting was over. “You’ll wait in the mews until I’m in the house?”

  “I’ll wait until you let me know I can seek my bed,” he asserted.

  They walked briskly and in silence back to Audley Square. St. Simon’s house was lit up, and a lantern hung over the front door. “Perhaps he has visitors,” Tamsyn said, the possibility occurring for the first time.

  “Once you’re in the house, you can wait until they leave,” Gabriel said calmly. “If there’s only a skeleton staff, you should be able to dodge them, and you’ve a decent plan of the house.”

  “Yes.” Tamsyn slipped her hand into the pocket of her britches. Lucy had said that Julian kept a very small caretaking staff in the London house because it was used so rarely. It had been very easy to engage her in a casual discussion of the house, and with very little prompting she’d sketched a floor plan to illustrate her description. The paper now crackled reassuringly against Tamsyn’s fingers. If Julian was not alone, or wasn’t in the house, then she could make her way upstairs and into his bedchamber.

  The mews was quiet, only the soft shufflings and whickers from the horses bedded down for the night. The night was overcast, but a lamp glowing in a round window above the stable block where the head groom lived threw a puddle of golden light on the clean-swept cobbles. Tamsyn and Gabriel slipped soundlessly through the shadows, Tamsyn’s bright head covered by the hood of her dark cloak pulled tight around her.

  The gate into the garden was locked as Gabriel had expected. “Up you go.” He lifted Tamsyn easily, setting her atop the gate.

  She dropped from sight immediately, then whispered from the other side, “There are lamps lit in the book room.”

  “Buena suerte,” Gabriel whispered back, and stepped into the shadows.

  Tamsyn crept around the edge of the walled garden, once catching her cloak on a thorn from an espaliered climbing rose. She stopped and painstakingly pulled out the thorn, flattening herself against the wall beside the rose. Light poured from the windows of the book room, illuminating neat flower beds and a square of lawn, and she prayed the shadow of the wall was sufficient concealment if anyone was looking from an upstairs window.

  Free again, she flitted forward until she was pressed against the wall beside the lighted window. It was closed but the curtains were open. She sidled sideways until she could peer into the room. Her heart was thudding and her palms were slippery, but she couldn’t decide whether it was nerves or excitement.

  Julian was sitting at a desk with his back to the window. He was writing, his pen flowing over the parchment. As she watched, her heart in her throat, he paused, leaned back in the chair, and stretched, arching his neck; then he dipped his quill into the inkwell again and resumed writing. Her blood seemed to speed through her veins as she watched him in his absorption, imagining his face when he turned and saw her. He would be delighted … of course he would.

  Tamsyn scratched on the window, then stepped back into the shadows.

  Julian was preparing a report to present to the prime minister in the morning. Lord Liverpool had asked for yet more information on the action and casualties of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajos to bolster the Peer’s request for more men and more money.

  At the first scratching sound he glanced over his shoulder at the window. A branch tapping against the pane, presumably. Wearily, he rubbed his eyes. He was finding it difficult to concentrate, and he couldn’t seem to connect with the words he was writing. He kept hearing Tamsyn’s sensual chuckle in his head, and her smile, mischievously inviting, hung disembodied in his mind’s eye. He supposed the images would fade in time. Once he got back to Spain, he wouldn’t have time to think about her. But even as he told himself that, he knew that in Spain it would be even harder to forget her. The memories would be even more achingly vivid in the land that had produced that extraordinary, impossible creature, with her Penhallan blood and …

  Frowning, he squeezed the back of his neck, trying to massage a crick; then resolutely he returned to his report.

  The scratching came again, more insistent this time. He ignored it. Then it changed to a drumming, a rhythmic tap-tap-tap. He spun round in his chair. There was nothing at the window. Impatiently, he pushed back his chair and went over to the window, flinging it wide. There were no bushes or trees near enough for an errant twig to be scratching the pane. He stared into the garden but could see nothing.

  Then an unmistakable voice said from somewhere below him, “Good evening, milord colonel.”

  He dropped his gaze to below the level of the windowsill. Her eyes gleamed purple in her pale face, the hood of her cloak had fallen back, and her silver hair was a beacon in the shadow of the wall.

  “I was beginning to think you’d never come to the window,” she said when he seemed dumbstruck. Turning her back, she reached up to rest her hands on the broad sill, then jumped her backside up. Turning in the window, she smiled, and if he’d been less stunned, he would have read the anxiety behind the smile. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “You … you imp of Satan!” He found his voice. “How the hell did you get here?” Catching her around the waist beneath the cloak, he lifted her off the windowsill into the room, but instead of setting her on her feet, he held her up as easily as if she were a rag doll, his large hands spanning her waist, her face on a level with his. Her cloak fell to the floor, revealing the britches and shirt of the brigand.

  “On Cesar, of course,” she said, smiling.

  “Don’t play games, girl!” He shook her as he held her off the ground, but she couldn’t tell whether he was really annoyed or still just surprised. Either way, though, he didn’t seem overjoyed to see her.

  “I had to come,” she said. “You went off without a word and—”

  “I was under the impression we’d had all the words necessary,” he interrupted flatly. “You’d made it very clear—”

  “Yes, but you took me by surprise,” Tamsyn protested, still dangling from his hands. “How was I to know you would just waltz off into the night without a backward glance?” She tried an experimental kick to encourage him to put her down, but it didn’t seem to have any effect.

  “Oh?” A red-gold eyebrow lifted. “So that little exchange in the salon was merely an opening skirmish? You tell me with that goddamned arrogance of yours that you want no more to do with me, and I’m supposed to interpret that as an invitation?”

  “It wasn’t quite like that,” she said, her voice low. “You were the one bringing everything to a close, not me.”

  “I thought I was suggesting the opposite,” he replied quietly, his gaze fixed steadily on her face.

  This wasn’t getting them anywhere. He was still holding her as if she were a scarecrow stuffed with straw, and she was damned if he was going to put her in the wrong when it was as plain as day to anyone with eyes open that he was the one causing the difficulties. He was the one who couldn’t see straight.

  “You talk about my arrogance. Well I tell you, Colonel, that you’re stubborn and stiff-necked and twice as arrogant as I am!” she snapped.

  To her fury tears suddenly clogged her voice and filled her eyes. She wanted to say she loved him, but the words wouldn’t come. She wanted to tell him that he loved her, he had to love her, because she couldn’t feel the way she did if he didn’t feel the same.

  “You,” Julian said deliberately, “are a stubborn, spoiled, manipulative siren.” He thought he’d accepted that the adventure was over, that she would leave his life as decisively as she’d entered it, but now he knew that he hadn’t accepted anything of the kind.

  “Well, I’m sorry I came, then,” Tamsyn declared, sniffing crossly. “And if you’ll put me down, I’ll go away again.”

>   “No, you will not, you lawless hellion!” The wonderful, familiar urgency of passion was sweeping through him as he held her, feeling the lissome slenderness in his hands, inhaling the honeysuckle fragrance of her skin, losing himself in the great drowned pools of her eyes. And now as he held her and the silence became charged, he felt that seductive energy pulsing from her, and he realized that, as always, she’d caught his arousal and without volition was responding with her own. Her eyes were luminous, the long lashes dark and sticky with unshed tears, her lips now slightly parted as she acknowledged what was happening and waited for him to move.

  “Never let it be said I looked a gift horse in the mouth.” With a deft twist he tucked her under his arm, as he’d done in Badajos, and strode out of the room with her.

  He marched up the stairs, and Tamsyn, keeping very still, could only be thankful that they met no member of the household. Julian opened the door of his bedroom, stalked in, and dropped his bundle onto the bed.

  He stood looking down at her, his hands resting lightly on his hips, a smile playing over the well-shaped mouth.

  “Irresistible,” he said in a musing tone. “I don’t understand why such a scrawny, ill-schooled, unprincipled little manipulator should be irresistible. But it seems to be the case.”

  Tamsyn’s eyes narrowed seductively, but she said nothing. She’d done enough pushing and plotting and arranging for the moment. Maybe the time would come when he would no longer resist what was happening between them, would no longer believe that the currents flowing between them were only and ephemerally sexual … would look into his own heart. But until then she’d settle for what she had, and “irresistible” was a good start.

  She heeled and toed her boots, and they fell with a soft thud on the Aubusson carpet.

  Her hands went to the buttons of her britches. With a deft wriggle she pushed them off her hips, then eased them down her legs with her heels.

  Julian bent and helpfully yanked them over her feet. While he was there, he pulled off her stockings, then straightened to resume the voyeur role.