‘Even when you were wee, then, you haunted the Clyde docks?’
‘Not so much the docks but the river, the ships—it was a window onto the world.’
‘Escape,’ Kirstin said softly, deeply moved by the image this conjured up. ‘Is that what you were after?’
‘Aye.’
Cameron was staring off into the distance, perhaps picturing another dock, on another river, many years before. She tried to imagine him, a foundling, with heartbreaking good-looks, dreaming of another life, far from whatever brutal reality he’d endured, and her heart wrenched. ‘Was it so very bad?’
He gave himself a shake, blinked, looked down at her with a twisted smile. ‘I survived. No, more than that, I flourished against all expectations. You’d probably say I succeeded against the odds, and I wouldn’t disagree with you in this case.’
‘Will you tell me your story, Cameron?’
‘Why do you want to know? As you’ve been at pains to point out, when we find Philippa we will go our separate ways once again. What difference would it make?’
Looking into his eyes, the strangest feeling took hold of her. Yearning. There was no other word for it. A longing for something she couldn’t even begin to define mixed with a sharp, unmistakable and undeniable pang of desire. She forgot that they were standing in the middle of a crowded dock. Turning towards him, she reached her free hand up to caress his cheek. ‘It makes all the difference in the world to me.’
He looked at her strangely, then caught her hand. He turned it over, pressing a fervent kiss to her palm. She could feel the heat of it even through her glove. He didn’t kiss her mouth, but the look he gave her was enough to make her shiver as if he had.
Then he smiled crookedly, taking her arm again, and heading towards the tobacco warehouse. ‘In that case, how can I possibly deny you? You’ll need tea to sustain you, though. Come on.’
* * *
The Prospect of Whitby tavern lay at the far end of Wapping High Street, right on the Thames. Cameron secured an ornate wood-panelled private room on the top floor, with a view across the river to Rotherhithe and Bermondsey. It was, according to the landlord, the same room in which the diarist Samuel Pepys had once dined, a fact that Cameron found singularly underwhelming but which seemed to impress Kirstin. He ordered an early dinner to be delivered later, and coffee, tea and a platter of bread and cakes to keep them going in the meantime.
Kirstin, having discarded her coat and hat, warmed her hands at the roaring fire, leaning over just enough to give him a delightful view of her rear, and the desire which had caught him unawares a few moments before gripped him again. What was it about this woman that made him want her so much? Was it simply the result of his months of abstinence?
What did it matter? he thought impatiently, hurriedly glancing away from the enticing view as she stood upright and made for the tea tray. What mattered was that he did, and the feeling was mutual. What they would do about it—if anything—he had no idea. But he was damned if it would be nothing.
The coffee she poured for him was like tar, the way every sailor liked it. The landlord knew his clientele. Cameron took a happy gulp, wincing as it burned its way down his throat and into his gut. Kirstin, waiting for her tea to do whatever alchemy it did in the pot, shook her head at his impatience and poured him a second cup.
‘Garrioch House?’ she prompted, when they had been sitting opposite each other for a few silent minutes.
‘Aye, Garrioch House. My home. For the first twelve years of my life, at any rate.’
Now that it came to it, although he wanted to talk about it, there was so much he didn’t want to remember, aspects he preferred not to recall, details his memory had coloured and distorted over the years.
He decided to stick to the bare facts. ‘A home for foundlings, it was—and still is to this day, like enough. I was handed into their care when not more than a few days old. Whoever left me gave them my name and a small purse of money, but nothing else.’
‘Whoever left you? You mean it wasn’t your mother?’
He shrugged. ‘Unlikely, given what I know now. A nurse, a midwife, a maid, or simply some poor messenger paid to deliver me, it could have been anyone.’
‘And there was no other information to indicate your identity?’
‘From the minute I was handed over to Garrioch House, my identity was fixed. I was a bastard.’
‘Cameron!’
‘What would you prefer? Illegitimate?’
‘I prefer—I prefer...’ Kirstin swallowed. To his surprise, her eyes held a sheen of tears. ‘I prefer not to use any such term. A child should not be condemned for the lack of a piece of paper declaring her—his parentage.’
‘True, but unfortunately neither society nor the law would agree with you.’
‘Then both are wrong,’ she said fiercely. ‘You should not be punished for an accident of birth, Cameron.’
‘Though punished I was, nonetheless.’
‘You mean physically? That’s outrageous!’
‘Physically, mentally. It’s the way of the world, I’m afraid.’
‘But not now, surely?’ Kirstin leaned forward, her perfect brow deeply furrowed. ‘Now you are a successful businessman, a man of status, your own man. You’re not going to tell me being illegitimate still affects you now?’
Of course it didn’t. That was what he’d have said to anyone else. But Kirstin wasn’t anyone else.
‘I have no family, no heritage, and in the eyes of society and the law I am stigmatised for ever by my illegitimacy. I cannot change that. I had come to terms with it though,’ Cameron admitted reluctantly. ‘It’s why the letter knocked me sideways.’
‘Letter?’
‘From my mother.’
He leaned back, closing his eyes, fighting the gut-wrenching pain which the memory of that day could still elicit. His hands gripped the arms of the chair. For a moment he was back there, on the doorstep in Edinburgh’s New Town, Louise Ferguson’s words ringing in his ears.
Then there was a soft touch on his arm, the rustle of skirts, and he opened his eyes to find Kirstin kneeling beside him.
‘I had no idea this would be so painful for you. I am sorry I asked.’
He sat up, covered her hand in his. ‘I’ve never spoken of that day to anyone,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to speak of it now.’
‘I want to. The letter was from my mother. Sheila Ferguson.’
‘Louise’s mother?’
‘She was married to Louise’s father some years before she had me, and remained married to him for over forty years despite my very unwelcome appearance. When she wrote, he’d been dead a year.’
He could see her beginning to piece the sorry little tale together, but she made no effort to speak, for which he was grateful, as he was grateful for the comfort of her hand, clasped so firmly in his.
‘It didn’t say much, the letter. Only that she was my mother, that she’d managed to trace me through the records at Garrioch House for they kept the name she’d given me. She wrote that I was the result of an “indiscretion”, and though she’d been forced to give me up she’d never stopped thinking of me and wanted to meet me.’
‘Oh, Cameron, that is—What did you feel?’
‘Angry that she’d left it so long. Disappointed that I had incontrovertible proof that I was, as I’d always been told, a bastard. Wildly curious as to the other half of my parentage, and at the same time desperately determined to dampen any curiosity of any sort. I was thirty years old, a self-made man with my own business, content with my life—’ He broke off to rake his hand through his hair. ‘And yet I still needed to know. Does that make any sense to you?’
Her cheeks were flushed. He’d have put it down to the heat of the fire had it not been for the fact that she had suddenly dropped her gaze to their clasp
ed hands.
‘What have I said?’
She shrugged and shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. Please carry on.’
‘Sheila Ferguson—my...my mother—was ill when she wrote to me. Dying, though I didn’t know it. The letter was sent to my offices in Glasgow, but I was abroad. It took many months to reach me. By the time I read it and made my way to Edinburgh—’
His voice cracked. He coughed. His eyes smarted. Devil take it, after all this time!
‘She was dead,’ Cameron finished baldly. ‘I never got the chance to meet her.’
‘But you met Louise instead?’ Kirstin said ominously.
‘Aye.’ He managed a crooked smile. ‘Louise, who informed me that I’d ruined her father’s happiness and destroyed her parents’ marriage.’
‘How on earth did she come to such a conclusion?’
‘I asked her that. She had grounds,’ Cameron said, looking deeply troubled. ‘It seems that my mother had an affaire. Or, reading between the lines of what Louise told me, something more than an affaire. She was planning to leave my father for her lover, but he abandoned her. She was expecting me. She had no one to turn to, nowhere to go. Her husband, Louise’s father, agreed to keep her on, but the price she paid for respectability was to give me up.’
‘Dear heavens. How absolutely awful. But why does Louise blame you?’
He sighed heavily. ‘It’s not so much that she blames me, Kirstin, as hates my guts. My mother wasn’t only planning to leave her husband, she was leaving her daughter behind too.’
Kirstin’s eyes widened in shock. ‘So in Louise’s eyes your mother chose you and her lover over Louise and her father?’
‘Aye. You see now why I feel I owe her?’
‘I certainly see now why she wants nothing to do with you. What I don’t understand is how she comes to know such a thing? She must have been a child when it happened.’
‘Her father, the good, saintly man, saw fit to enlighten her one day. He sounds like a right vicious—Well, whatever his reason, he told her.’
‘Oh, Cameron, that is absolutely awful. So this is the debt that Louise claims you owe her, then? That is why you are so determined to move heaven and earth to find her daughter? Because by your innocent birth you ruined her childhood and made her feel rejected? Yet still, however she suffered, I can’t help feeling it was nothing, nothing compared to what you endured. You have been economical with the details of your childhood, but I know it must have been utterly miserable.’
‘It’s not a competition to see who suffered the most.’
‘No, because no matter what she suffered it does not compare to...’ Kirstin caught his hand to her cheek. ‘You are an honourable man, while Louise...’
‘Is simply a mother desperate to find her child.’
‘Yes. Yes, you’re right,’ she said looking stricken. ‘I beg your pardon. I take it, then, that she wanted nothing to do with you?’
‘I neither saw nor heard from her again until Philippa disappeared. It took me a long time to come to terms with it, but I do understand her feelings. And I’ve no expectations of them changing,’ he added hastily. ‘I don’t want her to feel obliged or grateful.’
‘But if she came to know you...’
‘She made it clear that she would not make any such effort over six years ago.’
‘Six years ago?’ Kirstin’s eyes widened. ‘Cameron, do not tell me that it was that very day—’ She broke off, frowning. ‘I assumed you were in Edinburgh on business. I remember now you said you weren’t.’
She got to her feet and made for the window, staring out at the Thames. ‘You said then that I was a welcome distraction,’ she said when he joined her. ‘I had no idea that was what you needed distracting from. You must have been in turmoil.’
‘And yet distract me you did. In fact you turned out to be far more of a distraction than I ever imagined. Kirstin, you do know that that night was—Ach, I don’t know how to describe it, to be honest. I don’t even know how it happened. Afterwards, I couldn’t quite believe it had, and I had no way of finding you again. You never did leave me a note of your address as I asked you to.’
‘I never thought for a moment that you were serious about wanting it. Besides, I didn’t have an address at that point.’
‘You could have found me, though, if you’d wanted to, couldn’t you? It’s how you make a living...finding people who don’t want to be found.’
She flinched at this. ‘That night, we both of us agreed, was a moment out of time, nothing more.’
She was right, and it was unfair of him to press her, yet it mattered. ‘So you never thought of me?’
‘You asked me that before.’
‘You didn’t answer.’
She continued to stare in silence at the view. A huge barge sitting low in the water due to its cargo of coal was making its precarious way against the tide.
Finally she turned towards him. ‘I thought of you,’ she said. ‘Happy now?’
He was, suddenly. Happy to have unburdened himself. Happy to have had her as his confessor. Happy that she had taken his part, though he hadn’t thought he cared one way or the other.
‘I’m happy to be here with you, if nothing else,’ he said.
She slanted him an odd little smile. ‘Taking dinner alone with me in an inn. Again.’
‘It’s not the same. We’re very different people.’
‘You can have no idea how different.’
‘Oh, I think I can. You’re every bit as beautiful, you’ve not changed physically, but in every other respect—more than six years of making your own way in life, and making a success of it too. You’re a very different woman from the one I met that night.’
‘And you? Are you a very different man?’
‘I’m my own man now, in every sense. We’re both older and wiser, I reckon.’
He traced the gentle plane of her cheek, his hand coming to rest on her shoulder. Though he didn’t urge her to, she stepped into his embrace. Desire was like the insistent beat of a drum between them, impossible to ignore.
‘I think fate has brought us together full circle like this.’
‘And fate will send us spinning off back to our own lives, once our business is complete.’
‘Do you think so, Kirstin?’
‘I know so, Cameron.’
She spoke with such certainty, yet her eyes burned with the fire which smouldered inside him. He was not interested in arguing with her. Instead he bent his head towards her, pulling her gently to close the tiny gap between them. She could have resisted. She did not. With a soft sigh that gave him goosebumps she slid her hand up to his neck, pressed her body against him, and tilted her face for his kiss.
The touch of her lips on his made him shiver. He curled his fingers into the indent of her waist, striving for control. She went to his head like a good malt. And, like a good malt, she should be savoured slowly, treated with respect.
He kissed her. A deep, slow kiss. His tongue stroking along the tender flesh of her lower lip. He felt her shudder and blood coursed to his groin, and for long, delicious moments their kiss went on and time seemed to stop. Then she sighed again, her body moulding itself to his, her fingers in his hair, her hand sliding under his coat-tails to rest on the small of his back, and his own hand slid down to the curve of her bottom, and he was lost.
They kissed, his hands roaming over her body, cupping her breasts, the throaty moan she gave in response making him achingly hard. She pulled him tight against her, and his own guttural cry in response startled him. Still they kissed, staggering back against the table, where she braced herself, wrapping one leg around him, impeded by her skirts, driving him mad with frustration.
Her hands slid under his waistcoat, tugged his shirt free from his breeches, fluttered over the skin of his back. Her own clothes were
a barrier to the yielding skin beneath. He yearned to tear them from her. And still they kissed, panting, clutching, until a sharp rap at the door sent them springing apart and the dinner Cameron had ordered, and neither of them could have given a damn about now, arrived.
* * *
The door finally closed on the waiter and Kirstin, who had been staring determinedly out of the window while the various dishes were laid out, turned around and burst out laughing. Cameron had tucked his shirt in, but his necktie was askew and his hair looked as if he’d been standing in a gale.
‘I suppose he might have imagined that you were shadow-boxing and lost,’ she said.
Cameron grinned. ‘Were it not for the fact that you were so obviously trying to look invisible. He’s obviously well used to it, though, for not only did he knock very loudly, he waited for about five minutes before entering the room.’
‘I cannot believe that we allowed ourselves to—I am thirty-one years old, for heaven’s sake, well beyond such antics.’
‘Well beyond? You don’t mean that, surely?’
Flustered, she sat down in the chair he held out for her. ‘I have not—I am not—I don’t—’ She concluded, mortified to hear herself sounding more like a fifty-year-old spinster than a mature woman of the world.
Cameron sat down opposite her, busying himself with lifting the lid from several platters. She knew that his silence was a tactic designed to force her to fill the gap. Well, two could play at that game!
‘I will have some of that pie, if it is rabbit, please. And the winter greens.’
He served her, filling his own plate with the same food before pouring them each a glass of wine. Cameron raised his glass in a silent toast. She took a delicate sniff of hers before taking a deep swallow. He was eating with relish, not making a pretence as she was, and she was horribly conscious of his eyes on her, watching as she cut up a piece of rabbit saddle into tiny pieces.
She loved rabbit. The gravy of this pie was delicious, flavoured with mustard and thyme, and the crust a flaky golden brown. She lifted a piece to her mouth, then set it down with a resigned sigh.
A Scandalous Winter Wedding Page 12
