A Lady Betrayed (22 page)

The afternoon was rainy, and since Adrian had already
decided it was better that they stay indoors while the shooter was somewhere in the neighborhood, it gave them an excuse to miss their usual stroll through the garden. They played spillikins with Felicity, and the viscount made silly jokes, trying to lift her spirits, Maddie knew. She tried to keep up her end of the game, and as she did, she asked questions about his childhood. She had suddenly realized there was so much she didn't know about him, and time was running out. She would have little opportunity to ask, to hear stories such as these about his first pony, his first trek out of his own courtyard.

“I thought I was a prime adventurer,” Adrian told them while he tried to extract another straw from the pile. “I made it all the way up the hill before my nanny found I had slipped out and she raised the alarm. A stableboy came running to bring me back, thus ending my adventure on a depressingly ungallant note.”

Both the women laughed. Maddie had a mental vision of Adrian as a five-year-old, his handsome face cherubic and innocent, and her heart melted. She smiled at him across the small table they had gathered around.

“Were you punished?” Felicity asked, practical as always.

“Oh, yes, I had to sit in the corner for the rest of the morning, which I thought most unfair,” Adrian told them. He pulled out two more of the long straws.

“A mere bagatelle,” Maddie told him. It was her turn next. She reached for a straw, but she was looking at Adrian instead of the pile, and it collapsed.

“Oh, dear,” she said belatedly. “Meanwhile, you have beaten us again.”

Although she cared not a whit about the game, Maddie kept her tone cheerful with the greatest effort. She would lock him in the corner if she could, she thought, but that would hardly serve. And anyhow, he was no longer small and innocent, but an adult, and much less amenable to taking orders from anyone, no matter how well-meaning that person might be.

She glanced at him, and his gaze back was rueful, as if—as so often—he understood the direction of her thought.

Felicity shook her head. “You two,” she said. “You're not attending to the game at all. I'm going to sit in the corner and read. You might as well hold hands and bill and coo; it's obviously where your thoughts are.”

Maddie blushed, and Adrian laughed. Maddie put away the game as Felicity picked up the book of ancient history that she had borrowed from Mr. Applegate and took a chair in the far side of the sitting room. Then Maddie rejoined the viscount and settled down to hear more tales of his juvenile misdeeds. Just hearing his voice was a comfort, much more so sitting next to him, holding his hand. She would take any part of him she could get.

At dinner that evening conversation was light, and they all were careful to keep the flow of talk cheerful. If she watched Adrian covertly, observing small details and adding them to her mental library, no one had to know. Perhaps she was going mad, too, Maddie thought ruefully. But it was a madness made up of love and a surfeit of coming loneliness, and she did not know any other way of coping.

Later, when they had all come up to bed, and the house had quieted, she washed and blew out all but one candle. Sitting up in bed, she waited, almost holding her breath, until at last the door to her bedchamber opened, and she could smile at her lover, her dearest love, when he came over the threshold.

The next morning, despite the fact that she had dropped
off to sleep only a short time before dawn, reluctant to sleep away the precious hours spent in his arms, Maddie woke early. She also did not mean to miss any of the day before the wedding, the last day she knew for sure that he would be with her. After the wedding was solemnized, who knew how soon Adrian might feel compelled to leave?

They had argued about it in the middle of the night, after more glorious lovemaking. “If we roused the neighborhood and gathered all the men to search for your cousin the would-be assassin,” she proposed, “surely with a large group of men, we could find him and confine him.”

Adrian argued, “I would be loath to have you subject to that kind of gossip, Madeline, and besides—”

“What is gossip compared to your life!” she interrupted, throwing herself upon his bare torso where he lay on her mattress after their lovemaking, as if she could shake him into compliance. Then, remembering the particle of metal in his chest, she shivered and slipped down to lie beside him instead.

Frowning, she saw that he noted the motion, but he did not comment on it.

“He's too sly to be that easily trapped,” the viscount continued. “As we spread the word to gather your neighbors together, he would be bound to hear and suspect our plan, and he would simply slip away, coming back later when the good folk were tired of lying in wait for him.”

Adrian sounded too depressingly pragmatic. Maddie lay her cheek against his side, feeling the warmth of his skin, the slight sheen of sweat, which they had well earned. Every night he showed her something new. Every night she found that she could enjoy loving him even more, and every night she thought how much more she would miss him.

Today she washed and dressed quickly. Almost running down the staircase, she found the viscount still before her in the dining room. Bess was setting the first plates of food on the sideboard.

“Morning, miss,” she said. “All excited, I guess ye are, about the big day tomorrow.”

“Yes, indeed,” Maddie said, but she looked at the viscount as she spoke, smiling into his eyes.

He gave her an answering smile back. When the servant left the room, he bent and gave her a fast, hard kiss before anyone else came into the room. They parted just in time; she heard the faint creak of wheels as her father's chair came down the hall, with Felicity soon behind him.

Her cheeks a little warm, Maddie spun to put eggs and bread on her plate and to give her color time to cool before she turned to tell her father good morning.

“A lovely day outside,” Mr. Applegate said, greeting them all.

Maddie poured her father a cup of tea and then fixed him a plate, putting on his favorite foods.

When she set it down, he gave her a slight pat on the cheek. “Not much longer now,” he said, smiling.

“No, Papa,” she said, smiling back at him, though her heart dropped a little at his words with their double meaning.

One more day.

The eggs had suddenly turned tasteless in her mouth. After tomorrow, if the shooter tried again, would Adrian pack up and ride away?

Could she persuade him to take her with him?

No, then who would tend to her father? She had promised her mother she would take care of her father. How could she break a deathbed oath?

She had never thought
all
her sisters would marry. Of course, poor Lauryn had been widowed so young, but she would likely marry again.

So it really was up to her. Since Papa's accident…and it didn't matter if he wasn't her birth father, he had saved her mother from scandal, brought Madeline up, and treated her lovingly; she loved him like a father—he was her father!

She couldn't walk away and leave him.

But her heart was going to break in two when Adrian rode away.

Oh, God, why did this have to happen?

Maddie put her fork down. She couldn't see her plate. She blinked hard—she could not disgrace herself, nor upset her father, by crying over her eggs and ham.

The ridiculousness of that drove a little of her melancholy away.

She sipped her tea to avoid having to make conversation and let the talk flow around her. Her father was talking about a neighbor's cow, it seemed. She had nothing to add to that.

Felicity chatted about the best way to churn butter, and Maddie nodded absently, though she had few thoughts on that subject, either.

When everyone had finished eating, the two men disappeared in the direction of her father's study, and she and Felicity helped Bess clear away. When Maddie came back to the sitting room, she was surprised to see the viscount there with her father's chess set arranged upon the small card table.

“Have you moved your game to the sitting room?”

“Your father suggested you might like a lesson in chess,” Adrian told her, grinning.

“I can't imagine why,” she said. “He tried to teach me when I was twelve, and I drove us both to a nervous frenzy.”

She sat down across the table from him nonetheless, happy for any excuse to gaze at him. “And where is Felicity?”

“Ah, I suggested that Mrs. Barlow might like to discuss with your father the book of ancient history that she borrowed earlier from his collection. She was happy to agree. I wanted to assure him some congenial company, so she is sitting in his study with him just now.”

“Thus leaving us alone in the sitting room?” she suggested. “I begin to see why you are so good at chess! You are a master of strategy, my lord.”

“That, too,” he agreed, his eyes glinting with laughter. “And while I fear we shall have to be—ah—prudent in our behavior, at least we can have a few minutes of private conversation.”

So he, too, wanted any scrap of comfort he could get, Maddie thought. In an odd way, that cheered her. Adrian was also dreading their approaching separation.

Quite without thinking, she leaned forward toward him over the board.

“The white pawn always moves first,” the viscount said. “Do you have any faint interest in chess, by the way?”

“Not the slightest,” she said.

“Good, then I will tell you instead that your breasts look quite lovely from this vantage point,” he pointed out.

She blushed and straightened. Her neckline was not very low, but still she had been bending over the table.

“No, no, that removes them too much from my view,” he said, his tone teasing.

“Very well.” She leaned forward again. “Anything else you like about the vista?”

“Everything,” he said. “You didn't do that half-braid thing with your hair today.”

She was almost surprised at how observant he was. “No, I was rushing, so I just pinned it up, and not very well, I'm afraid. I'm sorry it's a bit untidy.”

“I think it's lovely any way you do it. But I admit, my fingers are longing to pull out those pins that are showing themselves so temptingly.” He gestured, and she was surprised to see that he was gazing dreamily at her long hair. “I'm thinking I could release it and let it fall free about your shoulders. I have just realized that even at night, I've only seen you with your hair—and it's a lovely golden brown hue, you know, soft and gleaming and wonderful to touch—I've only seen it braided or somehow restrained. I'd love to see it free about your shoulders.”

For some reason, this made her blush again; the thought of her hair flowing unrestrained seemed very sensual.

If her father came in…

Oh, for heaven's sake, she told herself. It was only hair.

If he wanted to see her hair flowing…

She reached back and found the first pin.

“Oh, no, let me!” Adrian said. He stood and reached across the small table, and his eyes danced. She smelled his clean linen and the scent of male flesh as he brushed her cheek with his arm; she shut her eyes and enjoyed his closeness. Very gently, he pulled out another pin, and another until she felt the weight of her hair shift, and the knot of hair gave way and slipped free of its mesh. She shook the snood and the rest of the pins away.

“Oh, fair lady,” Adrian said, his voice low and husky, almost a caress. “You look as if you've just swept out of some fairy tale, as you did that night in the gazebo when I thought you might be a wood nymph, come to tempt me into faery land. You stole my heart then, and you've never let it go.”

“I never want to let you go!” Although she felt her throat ache, Maddie smiled up at him, and he leaned to kiss her lips, firmly, sweetly, his tongue probing and lingering for a faint delicious moment.

Then he stroked his fingers through her thick locks, weaving them through her hair and holding her head back so he could kiss her again, and again, and kiss her yet once more, while Maddie put her arm behind his head and pulled him toward her so that she could kiss him back properly.

“You are so incredibly lovely, sweet Madeline,” he murmured. He touched her cheek, and the light touch of his fingertips caressing her skin sent goose bumps up and down her spine.

She swallowed as he moved slowly away, but he traced his hand lightly down her cheek, around her lips, over her chin, each touch sparking sensations that warmed her, chilled her, thrilled her.

He moved one hand down to cradle her breast, straining through the thin muslin and aching for his touch. Deep inside her, other parts of her body were wanting him, wanting completions they could not achieve in her sitting room in clear daylight.

Oh, dear, they should never have started this, she thought. She would be aching all day until he could come to her tonight.

He grinned at her. “We shall drive ourselves into Bedlam at this rate,” he told her. “But it's a better game than chess, you must admit.”