Brushing her fingertips across her lips, she wondered why she dreaming not of her father kissing her mother, but of St. Albans kissing her in the woods.
With a groan, she turned her face into the lavender-scented feather pillow.
Bad enough to have to resist his charm during the day, but now she had to fight her own dreams as well?
But she could not escape the feeling that lay in her bones and wrapped around her still from her dreams that he had once loved a woman deeply. And the shadow of it lay over him still.
Ah, but he was a man who lived in too many shadows, so many that sunlight never would warm his heart, and she would do best to remember that.
With that in mind, she rose to dress for the day, and to see what plans this high and mighty lord had for her.
* * *
Everything changed—too much so, all too fast. And it was all she could do to remember that there was a pattern to it—a reason why she must endure.
The Earl brought a short, giddy blond woman to measure her for dresses, and a man who smelled of too much rose scent to cut her hair—which she refused.
His servants tried to steal her faded blue gown, so that she had to sneak down two nights in a row take it back. The third time she caught Gascoyne with it, and so she showed him the pistol St. Albans had given her and promised to shoot the next person who touched her dress.
That she would not give up. It felt far too tenuous a tie to her real self—her real life.
Ah, but this took more courage than had thought it would, to step into this earl’s world and have everything about her change into nothing she knew.
Except for the Earl of St. Albans.
A kind word, a sympathetic look, and she would have been in his arms. The thought of it tempted as nothing ever had in her life. Her throat ached with the need for comforting arms about her. And in the dark of her room at night, she curled up tight and lay there, her eyes open, telling herself this would not go on forever, and feeling so very alone.
If it had been only for herself, she would have fled. She would have run back to her Gypsy life and would have forgotten the fine clothes that lay light as gossamer on her skin. She would have left the soft bed, and the foods whose smells made her mouth water. She would have even left the hot baths behind.
She ached for something familiar. The hard ground. The owl’s hoot, and the crow’s sharp caw. The smell of the air after rain. She wanted something to hold onto, for she felt as if she was falling. And she wanted someone to hold her and to tell her that it would be alright.
Ah, but it would not. Not until this was done. Fate had put her feet upon a path and she must ask God to give her the strength to walk forward.
And all the while her gaujo smiled so charming, and acted as if he lived for nothing other than to please her.
When her new clothes arrived—clothes that fit her almost too well, she thought, for they showed every curve of her body—he took her driving in the park. She craned for a glimpse of Lord Nevin’s carriage, but St. Albans merely smiled and told her to be patient.
Bah—patience! If—when—this ever ended, she wanted never to hear the word again.
And the Earl took her out with him in the evening, to places that left Glynis’s eyes wide for how little the women wore. She stayed very close to St. Albans on those nights, for she did not like the look in other men’s eyes as they stared at her in her low-cut silk gowns. She glared back at them, until they grew uncomfortable and turned away. And she knew, when this was all over, it would be a relief to live anyplace in England except this city that smelled of too many horses and people and chimneys. She longed even more for her simple house in a village.
Each night, she left her bedchamber windows open, and peered out into the darkness before retiring.
But Christo did not come.
Had he lost track of them? Had something happened to him? She fretted even more about that.
On her sixth night with St. Albans, she pleaded a headache after their drive—he had made good on his promise that day to take her about London, and had done so, spending the whole day on her, as attentive as any girl could wish for. He had smiled at her, and had even made her laugh with his comments, and she knew that she could not dine with him alone that night. She was starting to like his company too much. She was starting, in fact, to crave his presence. To depend on him. And that was not a safe thing at all, she knew.
So she told him she was tired, and she gave him a smile, and she fled, her heart in her throat, and half wishing he would follow her up to her room.
He did not.
Rake! What sort of rake was he that he left a woman alone in her chamber night after night, her bed empty of anything but those dreams that plagued her.
Ah, but it was better this way, she told herself fiercely as she brushed out her hair. She had learned to allow the maid to help her dress, but she undressed herself. It was the one pattern left from her old life. She clung to it as dearly as she held onto her worn blue gown.
Wrapping herself in one of the high-waisted brocade dressing gowns that the Earl had provided for her, she opened the window and leaned her elbows on the sill. The faint sweetness of jasmine lay in the air, offering a promise of summer heat soon to come. Spring was slipping by so fast.
Going back to her bed, she curled up, her candle still lit.
She did not want to sleep, and she while had raided his lordship’s library for a selection of novels, none of them appealed tonight. She wanted company. She wanted to talk to someone—to St. Albans, in fact. She wanted to tell him more of her life, and she wanted to ask him about his.
She wanted to trust him.
“Oh, don’t be a fool,” she muttered to herself.
A scrabbling noise outside her window pulled her upright.
Getting out of bed, she padded across the floor and peered outside. Her heart lightened as she glimpsed familiar broad shoulders; her pulse raced as she saw how perilously he clung to the ivy that climbed the wall beside her window.
“Are you going to help me, or are you too fine a lady for that now?” Christo growled.
“Hush. You’ll wake someone,” she said, taking hold of his arm.
The vine trembled as if the trellis would collapse, but Christo grabbed for her window and caught the ledge. Grasping his belt, she pulled him in. They tumbled into the room with him on top of her.
Immediately, she swatted at him. “What took you so long?” She wrapped her arms around him and hugged tight. “Ah, I’ve missed you so.”
“Dromboy tume Romanle,” he said, offering the Romany greeting with a smile in his voice and his arms about her.
From the doorway, a deep, lazy voice from the doorway cut across Glynis’s joy, and she could not mistake the icy anger that lay underneath. “My dear, if you wish to have visitors, I must insist that you invite them in through the front door.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
St. Albans lowered the pistol he had brought with him. After Gascoyne’s alert that an intruder had entered the gardens, he’d had a suspicion he would find this Gypsy fellow here, and caution seemed in order. It was a touch tempting, however, to shoot the fellow and toss his lifeless body out the window. But, to judge by his Gypsy’s welcome for the fellow, he could not do that without alienating her affections. He would have to endure.
His Gypsy rose to her feet, as did her companion, moving with easy athleticism. “I didn’t think I would be welcome,” the fellow said, his tone insolent and his expression even more so.
St. Albans raised an eyebrow, and turned to Glynis. “You are hardly a prisoner. And while I have been aware that your...”
He hesitated for an accurate description, and as he did, his Gypsy’s chin rose. “My Lord St. Albans, I think it is time you formally met my brother, Christopher Chatwin Dawes—the rightful Lord Nevin.”
The rest of St. Albans prepared speech went out of his head. Every muscle stilled. And an unaccountable relief mixed with his astonishment.
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The rightful Lord Nevin? What in blazes would she next be inventing—castles in the sky? And yet...had she not said that she was after an inheritance from Nevin? Hers and her brother’s it seemed.
At the moment, her brother was hissing something at her in his Gypsy tongue, and she was answering back, her eyes dark and flashing.
A brother, eh? The tension eased from St. Albans’s shoulder. The fellow would no doubt prove a nuisance—family always did—but he had disliked excessively the thought that his Gypsy might be sneaking a lover into Winters House.
“I do hate to interrupt this family squabble,” he said now. “But I suggest brandy, a fire, and then explanations.”
Without waiting for any agreement with his plan, he moved to the bellpull. His Gypsy’s brother—this Christo fellow—began to mutter something else to her, and after ringing for Gascoyne, St. Albans gave the fellow a cold stare. “And you may either keep quiet, or speak for all to hear. I have had enough of your poor manners.”
The man’s jaw tensed, and he glared at St. Albans, but the Earl took no notice of it. He still held his pistol, after all, so let the fellow be surly. However, he was done with them sharing secrets in their Gypsy language.
Gascoyne arrived, prompt as ever.
Giving orders for a fire to be laid and brandy to be brought, St. Albans put his pistol on the mantle in the salon and waited for more candles to be lit.
When they were comfortable enough—the fire blazing, glasses and decanter on a satinwood drum table, his Gypsy curled up on the couch with her brother next to her—St. Albans leaned against the mantle, within reach of his pistol. His Gypsy’s brother, after all, had come rather close to skewering him, and the fellow’s black eyes still glittered darkly.
“Now you may explain this claim of yours,” St. Albans said.
Silence greeted him as brother and sister exchanged a glance, the brother’s stare glowering and suspicious, the sister’s questioning.
Now that he was looking for them, St. Albans saw the strong resemblance between them. Not just in dark coloring, but in the arch of eyebrows, the strong nose and high cheekbones, the slanting shape of their eyes. Glynis was the far more fetching—her features more refined, her ears small, her chin more rounded—but this Gypsy fellow would clean up well enough if his hair was trimmed, the dark stubble on his cheek shaved off, and his clothes cut to fit.
The silence stretched until only the hiss of coal burning filled the room. St. Albans gave a small sigh. It would have to be up to him, it seemed. “There is no point in keeping anything from me. I have my own ways of finding the truth. For example, I am well aware that your brother here has been skulking about for the past few days.”
“I was not skulking,” Christo said, teeth gritted. “I was keeping a watch.”
“Well, if you were also doing the same with Lord Nevin, you have no doubt set his staff on alert as well.”
The Gypsy fellow gave a derisive snort. “Those fools. They know nothing.”
“Arrogant of you to think so. However, I will grant that Lord Nevin is—”
“He is not Lord Nevin, my brother—”
St. Albans held up a hand. “Yes, I know, your brother claims that title—the imperative word here being claims. However, to prevent argument, we shall keep to given names and leave titles out of it. And while Francis Dawes—whom you do claim for an uncle—is no doubt full of his own conceit, he does not lack intelligence. If you were lucky, his staff took you for no more than just another garden-variety thief.”
The impudent fellow smiled and leaned back. “My sister is the one with the light fingers in the family.”
St. Albans’s irritation with this fellow deepened. This Gypsy lounged here, brandy glass in hand, as if he honestly was a lord. Instead, he was likely an imposter, a liar, and very much as bad as his host.
So what did that make his sister?
Glancing at his Glynis, St. Albans found her frowning at a pillow, tugging on its gold braid, and uncharacteristically quiet. If he did not know better, he might have thought her pensive stare held a touch of shame at this mention of her past. That seemed unlike her. But he found he also did not like that she had been made uncomfortable.
St. Albans turned back to the brother. “I am well aware of your sister’s...borrowing abilities.” He smiled, recalling how they had met—and how she had looked half undressed. And he had to forcibly drag his attention back to this moment. “That is not under discussion. What I wish to hear from you is as much of the truth as can fall from your lips. Just who was your father, and why should you think you are legitimate heirs of the Dawes family?”
The fellow’s black eyes glittered again, hostile and bright. With his disheveled hair and jaw shadowed by beard, he looked a hang-gallows. “Why should we tell you anything?”
St. Albans smiled. “Because you are both in my power, and I can do you a good deal of harm, or good, as my whim takes me. It is quite up to you which direction I am swayed.”
“Let me tell him, Christo. It is time. And he has no reason to betray us.”
Pressing his lips thin, St. Albans kept back the words that slipped into his mind. In truth, he had every reason to prefer that his Gypsy remain a Gypsy. If she became the recognized, legitimate sister of the Baron of Nevin, that gave her a measure of protection from him that he would just as soon she not have.
However, he had never allowed a lady’s birth or status to interfere with her ruination—not if the lady willingly participated. But it was an uncomfortable thought that she might not be the wild Gypsy that he wanted her to be.
“Well?” he asked. Pulling out his snuff box, he helped himself to a delicate pinch. It was a habit he had taken up over a decade ago, when he first came to town and shortly after the one disastrous entanglement of his life. Its use really was more as a prop, something to do with his hands, so that he never fidgeted, a habit he had deployed in himself when he was as young as these two.
His Gypsy shot her brother a glance. The fellow looked as if he wanted to say something—no doubt in Gypsy. St. Albans kept his stare fixed on the fellow. He really would shoot the man if he said a word that was not in English. The fellow’s jaw worked, his mouth pulled down and at last he waved his hand at his sister and turned to stare into the fire.
Glynis glanced back to St. Albans, an expression of relief upon her face, as if this was a secret that had become too heavy to carry.
“My father was Edward Dawes—the late Lord Nevin’s eldest son. He married my mother—honestly married her—at a small church in the village of Nevin, near to the Welsh border.”
“And how do you know this—your mother told you?” St. Albans asked, trying to keep the skepticism from his voice.
Christo stiffened. “Are you saying our mother is a—”
“Christo, he is only asking! And, yes, she did tell us. But she also showed us her wedding ring.”
“Ah, iron—or in this case, gold—clad proof.”
Christo thunked his brandy glass down on the table. “If we had proof, gaujo, we would not be here. This is useless, phen! This one, he would find lies more believable.”
St. Albans regarded the young hot-head with dispassion. “Please, do feel free to leave at any time.”
For a moment, the Gypsy fellow glowered, his body tensed as if he would fling himself from the room. But he glanced at his sister’s worried expression, huffed a breath, and leaned back against the couch again.
“I’ll stay, gaujo.”
St. Albans turned to his Gypsy girl. “For argument’s sake, we shall assume that a marriage took place. It is not unknown, however, for such unions to be—shall we say, right-handed affairs? And very far from legal. Did your father ever do anything to recognize you, or take you to his family? And why did your mother not come forward years ago?”
Glynis’s face darkened. “You met Bado. You saw the scar on his face. And you have met my mother.”
St. Albans frowned. “Yes, but what—”
“Francis Dawes gave him that face, the night Bado saved my life, and Christo’s, and my mother’s from Dawes’s men. A club swung by one of his men struck my mother and stole her sight. To him, a pair of poshrats—half-gypsies such as we—are a cancer to be cut out.” She leaned forward, her expression intent, her eyes black pools. “Now tell me that my mother was wrong to hide us from a man who by law would have been given his brother’s children to raise. I was four. Christo one. Tell me we could do anything but hide until we both were of age and strong enough to challenge him.”
St. Albans swirled his brandy. Well, that part of her story he could believe. Particularly if, after Edward Dawes had died, the mother had gone looking for what she could get from the estate. It would be like Francis Dawes to think himself doing right by the world to rid it of a few, such inconvenient, dirty Gypsies.
However, a few details still remain unexplained, such as why would any Dawes marry so far beneath him? St. Albans had had no acquaintance with Edward Dawes, but he found it difficult to believe that a man of his class would look for a wife in the woods.
Of course, here was his own Gypsy, sitting here, looking desirable as sin. If her mother had been anything like this, he could see the attraction that Edward Dawes would have felt. But a legal marriage? Why, the man would have had to have been ready to give up the world—his own world.
That seemed quite unlikely.
However, what mattered here was that his Gypsy believed this tale.
She stared up at him, her wide mouth fixed with determination, her dressing gown parting slightly to show that tempting valley between her breasts where he so ached to rest his head.
And there seemed but a single method to rid her mind of this obsession.
He was going to have to get that blasted box into her hands so she could see it contained no legal marriage lines. He was going to have to ruin her dreams, and then he could show her how to take what pleasure she could from this life.
Of course, her being an illegitimate Dawes offered a certain appeal—no wonder she had the look of quality upon her face and her voice. And he would convince her that she could still have revenge upon Nevin through lording over London as the Earl of St. Albans’s mistress. Yes, that would be amusing for them both.
A Much Compromised Lady Page 9
