The Reckless One

by Connie Brockway

  What did she mean by that? And what had Thomas had to do with her?

  “Lady Fia?” She kept her voice calm.

  “She insists on being provocative,” Carr spoke before Fia could reply, his manner disgusted. “It’s a child’s trick but then she is a child. You’d be wise to remember that, Tunbridge, next time she involves you in her games.”

  If Carr thought to vex Fia he was doomed to disappointment. She lowered her head, a little smile playing about her lips.

  “A child? Games?” Tunbridge trembled on the verge of saying more. His chair legs scraped the floorboards as he shoved his chair away from the table. He stood up, snapping forward slightly at the waist. “Forgive me, Miss Donne. I fear I am inadequate company tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Favor barely heard Fia say. Beside her Carr snickered. Favor’s head swam, trying to find her way through all the undercurrents she perceived. She dined with jackals. Tunbridge, gutted and hung, could only turn and leave.

  But Janet would be used to such behavior. And while Janet had not approved much of what Carr had done and said, she had never publicly chastised him. She had ignored what she did not approve. So said Muira.

  “Wherever do you find pears in the Highlands, Lord Carr?” she said, and bit into the succulent fruit. It tasted like clay.

  * * *

  The night would not end. The clock struck the witching hour but the revelry wound tighter, like a watch in the hands of a feckless, spoiled child. Fia disappeared, her inexplicable interest in Favor as quickly gone as it had appeared.

  The one-sided smile had petrified like rigor mortis in Favor’s cheek. Her spine ached from trying to appear taller than she was and the belladonna Muira had dropped into her eyes to dilate her pupils caused her head to throb and her vision to swim.

  Carr, too, had distanced himself. Ordinarily, Favor would have retired but though Carr had left her side, he still watched her. Intently, covertly, hour after hour. So Favor ignored her throbbing head and aching back and listened to Muira who bobbed and grinned and hissed instructions at her.

  At two o’clock Carr finally approached her once again and asked her to dance. She obliged. He was a superb dancer, guiding her expertly and wordlessly through the intricate steps. At the end, as he led her back to where Muira sat feigning sleep with her chin sunk upon an ample false bosom, he finally spoke. “I found your scarf.”

  Favor scoured her memory for some point of reference, some scarf that Muira had told her about that Janet had owned. She could recall none. Perhaps he sought to trick or test her?

  “I have lost no scarf, Lord Carr. I fear one of your other lady guests is missing it.”

  His face stilled. It had been no trick. He had expected some other reply. Damn Muira for this over-sight.

  Too late to claim the scarf now. At least until she found out from Muira what it meant.

  “Ah. My mistake. Thank you for the dance, Miss Donne,” he said, and bowed before disappearing into the crowd.

  “What was that all about?” Favor looked down. Muira’s expression was muddled, like someone coming awake, but her low-pitched tone was hard-edged.

  Favor was in no mood to accept Muira’s carping criticism. She, too, could hiss through a smile. “The next time you leave one of Janet’s scarves laying about for Carr to find, I suggest you inform me first.”

  Muira’s genteel mask evaporated, leaving a hard middle-aged face staring at Favor in angry consternation. “I didn’t leave any scarf anywhere.”

  Moonlight bathed Favor’s sleeping form, embossing her features with blue-white alchemy. Her head burrowed against her pillow, the inky hair spilling across the coverlet and down the side of the bed. Her lips parted slightly and a little frown puckered the skin between her brows.

  The tall, dark figure standing at the foot of the bed angled his head, studying her intently. She looked tired, even in sleep, Raine thought.

  He’d watched her from above the ballroom most of the night. Her shoulders had drooped with fatigue long before the evening had ended. Even from where he’d been standing the white face powder had not concealed the dark smudges beneath her eyes. And she’d held her head as though it ached.

  She shouldn’t have come here, he thought. She shouldn’t—

  She moaned and stirred unhappily. The small sound of distress sent him forward, out of the shadows, his hand poised to bestow a comforting caress. Abruptly he stopped.

  No, he realized. It was he who shouldn’t have come.

  Chapter 16

  The afternoon sun slanted through the stained-glass oriel, piercing the cool dimness of the Lady’s Chapel and casting a mosaic of warm color on the gray stone floor. Overhead, shallow niches flanked the small, grimy rosette window. Within these a pair of dust-mantled saints kept vigil. Though the castle’s chapel had long been denuded of bench and altar, it had always had a certain solemn dignity. No longer.

  Raine had finally found where his father had banished his mother’s possessions. “Damn you, Carr.”

  He looked about, unprepared for the wash of sadness recognition brought with it. So many memories. Here was a blue dress she’d worn one Michaelmas. He recalled how lovely she’d looked hastening down the stairs, her crisp petticoats rustling. Now it was limp and yellow and housed a family of mice.

  Near the bottom of a heap of haphazardly stacked furnishings he spied the bench that had sat before her dressing table, its red petit point tulips dull and moth-eaten. Her favorite fan lay atop it, the painted silk tatters clinging to it, ivory frets like the fragile bones of an ancient corpse.

  All jumbled and discarded and abandoned. No careful folding of Janet McClairen’s things. No sweet lavender sprigs to retard the inevitable march of decay—The chapel door opened on a loud protest and Favor swept in.

  “So, ’twas you! I thought I heard something down here,” she announced triumphantly. “This part of the castle echoes strangely, don’t you think? I swear I heard you say ‘damn’ all the way at the other end of the corridor.”

  Her voice was bright with interest, as alive as these things were dead. She brought with her all the ruthless practicality of her youth. And she swept the sadness from his soul as heedlessly as the riptide scours the shore.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  She’d angled her head back, looking around. “This is where the McClairens wed and were christened and from where they were buried,” she murmured. “That rosette window was brought from Paris.”

  “How would you know that?” he asked dryly, curious as to how she would wiggle out of this revealing statement. Clearly she could not afford for anyone to discover she was a McClairen. Carr would have her ousted within an hour.

  But Raine had underestimated her. Her wistful expression evaporated. “Oh, it’s all in the diaries and journals I’ve found,” she said. “Oh, my! Look. I believe this is Venetian lace. ’Tis criminal someone would leave it to rot like this.”

  The pleasure she found in the task to which he’d sentenced her was as unaccountable as it was captivating. This was her fourth day helping him search for McClairen’s Trust and each day she appeared, she sparkled more. Of course, were he to charge her with such a thing she would deny it. But he doubted she’d deny it to herself. She was a gifted liar, but as with all gifted liars, she would have an uncanny ability to be truthful with herself.

  “You’re early.” He’d told her noon and it was not ten o’clock yet here she was, eager and ravishing and vulnerable. So very, very vulnerable. She had no idea the thoughts taking root in his imagination.

  “Sooner begun; sooner done,” she quipped, but the sparkle in her eyes belied the indifference in her voice.

  Damn his misplaced chivalry. He should seduce her and be done with it. But he wouldn’t. For while he was all too certain of his reaction to her, he was uncertain of hers to him.

  He assumed she found him somewhat attractive. He’d a wealth of memories that taught him the signs of female interest and Favor, ble
ss her, met the criteria. But he knew nothing of what a convent-raised girl did with such an interest.

  And, too, Raine wasn’t certain he wished to jeopardize this … this whatever this was. In his experience such camaraderie between the genders was unique. He’d never been in a young woman’s company without the specter of imminent seduction transforming each word they exchanged into double entendres and each look into mental disrobing.

  The young women in his past had been interested in one thing, for one reason, which even then Raine had realized had more to do with his reputation than with any personal recommendation. They’d sought him precisely because of his inability to curb his wild impulses—

  “Well?” Favor asked impatiently, her tone suggesting she was repeating herself.

  “Pray, pardon me. What was it you asked?”

  “Why are you staring at me?” She looked down at her dress in some consternation. “I couldn’t very well wear that filthy smock again and it’s cold in here.”

  “I’m not staring. I’m trying to decide how best to put your rather negligible skills to work.”

  She accepted his excuse, completely unmoved by his criticism. She looked about the room and spied the book he’d placed on a shelf in the huge, teetering armoire near the door.

  Like a cat drawn by a piece of yarn, her expression sharpened with interest, she hastened over to it. Gingerly, she opened the first page, catching her lower lip beneath the edge of her slightly crooked front teeth. They added a piquant note to her countenance. A once fierce countenance, he thought, deploring the artificial arc that stood in place of the once proud, slashing brows.

  She read avidly and he watched her, feeling ridiculously pleased. He purposely sought such items for her to find, hoping to give her access to the history her clansmen hadn’t lived to relate.

  If he recalled correctly her father, Colin, had been a second son who’d left the Highlands early in life to seek fame and fortune. Instead, he founded a family—a wife and three children whom he’d sent home to Scotland while he continued seeking that ever-elusive fortune.

  He came home in disappointment some years later to find his sons imprisoned for their part in their uncle Ian’s Jacobite plottings. Ian had already been executed, and for a short time Colin had been laird.

  Favor, Raine recalled, had never even lived at Wanton’s Blush, her mother, dispossessed by Carr, awaiting her husband’s return in an old deserted tower on the headland. The tower where Raine had been dragged so many years before.

  The memory diminished his earlier pleasure. As though she sensed his darkening mood, Favor looked up from the page she’d been perusing. She closed the book, the resultant puff of dust causing her nose to wrinkle. “It’s a sort of account book with personal notations. But it’s not by Duart McClairen.”

  “Pray who might Duart McClairen be?”

  “The little boy whose diary I found the other day.”

  “I see. And why did you think it might be young Duart’s?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She shrugged. How the holy Sisters must have bemoaned that particular mannerism. “I guess it was wishful thinking. I was rather hoping to discover what happened to Duart after he grew up.”

  “As I recall you were good for no work that day, your nose being stuck between the pages of the little heathen’s memoirs.”

  “How do you know Duart was a little heathen?”

  Because whatever interests you, I find interests me.

  “There’s not much to do come nightfall. Sometimes I read. Pray, try to compose your expression into bland acceptance, Favor; such ill-mannered surprise speaks poorly of the good Sisters. I can read … if I take care to sound out the words. But pray, don’t let me interfere with your own reading.”

  If she noted his sarcasm, she did not reveal it “No, thank you. I’ll read it later. In my room.” She tilted her head sideways. “Who exactly are you, Rafe?”

  Since that night in the carriage in Dieppe she’d never asked him anything personal. It was as though she feared what she would discover. He turned up his palms. “You already named me. I am a blackmailer and a thief. There’s nothing more to tell.”

  “You are awfully well spoken for a common thief.”

  “I should hope there’s nothing common about me,” he said haughtily, drawing a smile from her.

  “Then you must be the, er, unacknowledged progeny of some personage?”

  “Why, Miss Donne, are you asking whether or not I am a bastard?”

  “Excuse me,” she mumbled, blushing fiercely, the unexpectedness of it charming him in spite of himself.

  “I’m not a bastard. But I’m no longer acknowledged by my father.” It was near enough the truth.

  “Because of your thieving propensities?”

  He stood very still, thinking. He could tell her the truth. It had started out so nobly, so simply. He would anonymously aid the girl to whose life he had brought tragedy. But it was quickly becoming a deeper game he played and he wasn’t at all sure what he’d anted or what was at stake. He should tell her who he was and let the chips fall where they may.

  But then she would leave.

  “Just so,” he said.

  She nodded, her smile an odd mixture of relief and suspicion. A naive liar; an innocent jade. She presented a riveting enigma.

  “What about your mother?”

  “She’s dead.” It came out more sharply than he’d intended. He looked up to see Favor’s stricken countenance and immediately realized her conjecture.

  “No, Favor, she didn’t die from heartbreak over her son’s criminal propensities. She died well before my entrée into the criminal underworld.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice was tender with commiseration. “My mother died when I was young, too.”

  He could not think how to answer her. He remembered well Favor’s mother’s death.

  “What was your mother like?” Favor asked.

  “Beautiful. Capricious. A bit vain. Too romantic. Perhaps she was callow. She struggled mightily to believe in fairy tales.” He remembered being angry when she asked him and Ash how they’d come by their bruises. She never hesitated to ask but then they’d never hesitated to lie. She never pressed; they never offered more.

  “You did not like her very much.”

  “Like her?” He considered. “I don’t know. She was totally absorbed with my father. But when she was with us … no one was more entertaining. She was cultured and honest and irreverent.” He looked down at the fan in his hand. One could still make out part of the Greek temple painted on one of the sections. “For example, though she loved classical things, she didn’t pretend to venerate them. She christened the Greek folly in our garden the Part of None, after the Parthenon, mocking her pretensions.”

  “You loved her.”

  “Yes.” He set the fan down. “Come, we’ve work to do and you won’t wriggle out of it by such transparent devices.”

  She grinned. “Since you are so determined to press me into service, O Master Most Severe, where wouldst thou I begin?”

  “Did you bring my clothes?” he asked, knowing his tone would dampen her whimsical mood but having no idea how else to alleviate its effect on him.

  Either I suppress some of that brilliant vivacity or you pay the consequences, little falcon, he silently abjured her. She’d saved his life and he would not repay her by seducing her no matter how often he flirted with the idea.

  “No.” She turned away but not before he saw the hurt in her expression. Better a small hurt than a deep wound. “I have no idea where I am to find clothes for you. You’re too”—she flung her hand out—“large. Besides, even if I should find some monolithic dandy, I can’t very well sneak into his room while he sleeps and pilfer his small clothes.”

  Monolithic dandy?

  “You’re a resourceful girl,” he returned. “I’m sure you’ll think of something. By tomorrow. I’m getting tired of wearing these clothes and I refuse to trick myself out in bygone gl
ory.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “It seems a commendable notion to me. There are so many clothes here.”

  “It would amuse you far too much,” he answered loftily. “Add to that the fact that you are—or so you tell me—my victim. Victims are not allowed to be amused by their victimizers. ’Tisn’t done. I’m certain if there were a rule book for victims and their victimizers, it would be one of the first principles cited.”

  Her extraordinary eyes widened during this speech and at the end she burst out laughing. Good God, he was losing what little mind he possessed. First, he purposefully depressed the girl’s spirits and then, not a minute later, unable to bear the downward tilt of her mouth, he wasn’t content until he’d returned it to merriment.

  “You can help me over here,” he said. “The furniture is stacked too high. I cannot reach the top.”

  “How can I help?” she asked.

  “Come here and I’ll show you.”

  She approached him warily, which was amusing seeing how he’d come damn near electing himself to sainthood on the merits of his self-restraint where she was concerned. “Well?”

  “I’ll lift you up and you take down the smaller items.”

  “You’ll lift me?” she repeated, eyeing him doubtfully.

  “Yes. Enough wary glares, Favor. Come here.”

  She shuffled up to him, tilting her head back and looking squarely in his face, trying to gauge his intention. He glimpsed the edge of that crooked front tooth, a sliver of white in the warm, dark secret of her mouth. At the base of her throat, her pulse fluttered. Her skin there would be warm and satiny.

  They were alone.

  No matter what he’d told himself, he was no saint, had never aspired to sainthood. She shivered and he felt every muscle in his body tighten instantly in response, a cat watching a fledgling suddenly beat its wings.

  If she shivered again he would pounce, as intransigently as that cat lured by that fledgling’s helplessness. Dear God. He was a prison-hardened knave. What the hell was she doing here with him? He lowered his head, his gaze hooded and alive to opportunity. Any opportunity. Let her pulse quicken, let her eyes darken, let her part her Ups …