A Measured Risk (17 page)

“Welcome to Applecroft House,” Kean said with smile and a flourish of his hand, then he went to sit on a blue settee by the large, unlit stone hearth surrounded by several copper pans.

Restless, Anne couldn’t sit. Goodness, it was so small. And it would be her home for the next month. She spotted the sideboard. Yes, she was dying for a long, soothing drink on her parched throat. She hurried over and opened the doors to find it well stocked with claret. Well, at least they had the essentials. She poured herself and Kean a glass. While she was taking a drink, a grey stripy cat came running down from the loft. He looked quite fat. Thank God. Hopefully there would be no mice.

“I suppose Nellie left without a hitch,” Kean said, as someone speaks just to fill the silence.

Nellie had left in the carriage with her older sister
,
dressed in Anne’s clothes, before dawn. They would travel to Norfolk to visit their mother for the month. All the subterfuge had Anne’s nerves stretched tight the night before. Now she shrugged. “She would have already sent a message if not.”

“Good, good—” Kean’s voice broke off as the door opened.

The door opened. She whirled.

Ruel stood in the doorway, his azure eyes focused on her so intently that she sucked in her breath and held it.

Chapter Ten

Anne drank in the sight of Jon. He was dressed in nankeen breeches paired with a shallow cutaway
,
charcoal wool jacket and a pale grey waistcoat that had broad lapels. Both were quite out of fashion and slightly shabby. He could easily have been a common country squire.

She’d heard the gentlemen exchanging greetings
,
yet comprehended nothing they’d said. Then he turned back to her, smiled with a wink and held out his arms to her.

She wanted nothing more than to run to him and throw herself into his embrace. To press herself against his tall, hard body. However, she resisted. And not just because Kean sat there watching.

In Ruel’s absence, it had been easy to rationalise that her intense emotional reaction to him in her chamber had simply been a game. Now, with every particle of herself attuned to him, it seemed something deeper.

Grinning, Ruel came to her and took her by the waist. One quick jerk forward and she found herself crushed to his firm midsection. Her breasts brushed his broad chest. For a moment, he looked down at her, the skin taut over his cheekbones, his eyes glittering with desire. Then he pressed her head to his shoulder. His wool coat scratched her cheek. He smelt of cigars and horses and leather.

He bent his face into her neck.

“I missed you, wench,” he whispered in her ear, a faint chiding note to his voice, as if it were somehow her fault that his feelings had inconvenienced him. Then he nipped at her earlobe
,
none too gently. The sudden sting made her gasp. His tongue, hot and wet, flicked the lobe. The easing of the pain sent a shudder through her and
,
forgetting herself, she giggled. Heavens, she never giggled.

“Well, sounds like that’s my cue to leave,” Kean said.

“Close the door on your way out,” Ruel said. He had just closed his lips over hers when she heard the door shut.

It seemed terribly rude, letting Kean leave like that with no words of farewell. But she couldn’t find the will to care for long. The two weeks apart had passed slowly—far more slowly than she’d like to admit.

A love
affaire
. What a heady business.

He lifted his head. “You must be tired and hungry.”

After her avid agreement, they shared a simple meal. Cold chicken, cheese and bread, washed down with Madeira. They spoke of mundane things. Afterwards, she was yawning and having trouble holding her eyes open.

“You’d probably like a bath,” he said, his voice all consideration.

“Yes, that would be lovely.”

He stood and walked towards the door. At the sight of her trunks, he paused and turned back to her. “I was surprised when Kean brought these yesterday. I told you that you need only bring yourself.”

The slight chiding note in his voice made her catch her breath. “Those are my books.”

His face lit with amusement and he laughed. He looked a decade younger. “You brought your books here
,
to a rendezvous in the wood?”

Heat washed over her face. She glanced down, a smile tugging on her lips for no reason she could fathom. “It’s just a few books.”

“A whole trunk full, my lady? Do you think I shall leave you that many idle hours?”

She felt foolish and twisted her napkin in her hands. “I need my books.”

“All your dead philosophers. Your friends.”

The smile pulled harder on her face. She couldn’t resist it. He was laughing at her
,
yet she couldn’t help joining him. “They comfort me. They help me understand.”

His boots sounded on the hardwood floors. He crouched beside her. Her heart began to flutter. He reached up and touched the coiled braid of her hair. “And you must always understand, eh?”

Expecting to see him still laughing at her, she whirled to face him. His expression was tender, his eyes full of sympathy. “Why are you so afraid of that which you cannot understand?”

Her heart fluttered all the harder. She wanted to turn, to hide her fear from him. Yet he cupped the side of her face, preventing her movement.

“Tell me. Share your fear with me.”

The gentleness of his tone compelled her. “When I cannot understand something, I feel helpless. I do not like feeling helpless.”

“Not everything can be understood. Some things can only be experienced, felt.”

“That’s a very defeatist and bleak outlook.”

His brows lifted. “Defeatist? How?”

“You are suggesting we ought to just submit to being helpless.”

“You don’t understand. Sometimes the way to take control of a situation is to feel your way through it.”

“
The endeavour to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.
” She quoted Spinoza. “
Only through proper understanding can we find ourselves free.
”

“
We feel and know that we are eternal.
” He intoned the words as if they were a quotation.

“Whoever said that?”

He looked at her blandly for a moment. “Spinoza.”

“I don’t remember that quote.” She couldn’t help the sharpness in her voice.

“I am not surprised.”

“But I have read those books over and over. I know everything they contain.”

“Your memory is selective.”

She frowned. “Wait…You’ve read Spinoza?”

“I did. Back at Whitecross. I wanted to see what your favourite book was.”

“How did you know my favourite?”

“It’s very easy to see. It is the one with the most wear and has the most folded pages.”

Of course—she should have thought of that.

“Reason is not more important than instinct and our senses, Anne. You should read
The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and Beautiful Lily
.”

Coldness settled over her. “I’ve read it. I don’t think very highly of Goethe.”

“You should broaden your intellectual horizons, my lady.” He stood and left the cottage.

She didn’t know whether to feel invaded or touched that he had investigated her books like that.

* * * *

She watched, amazed as he hauled in and heated her bathwater without blinking an eye. She couldn’t imagine her father or William ever stooping to such a menial chore. They’d practically refused to pour their own drinks.

He’d told her not to bother with a valise. Now he presented her with a soft, thick flannel wrapper dyed a rich crimson. “The nights are promising to get cooler now.”

“Yes.” She clutched the flannel bundle tight, suddenly shy.

His eyes softened and he leant down and kissed her, gently and lingeringly. Then he left her alone in the cottage again.

He returned when she’d just come from the tub and insisted on towelling her dry, as if he were Nellie. Only he wasn’t. The act seemed somehow too intimate. Having a lover was certainly more invasive than having a husband. She wasn’t sure what to think about it and she was bone tired. Therefore, she stopped thinking and gave herself up to the rhythmic motions of the towel over her skin.

Afterwards, he carried her to the huge bed that dominated the bedchamber. It occurred to her that he’d somehow managed to have this cottage painted and furnished in a fortnight. He massaged her feet and legs with some sweet
-
smelling oil.

“It’s coconut oil. I developed a partiality to it when I was in Jamaica.”

“When were you in Jamaica?” she asked drowsily.

“On the way to New Orleans, with my regiment.”

“I didn’t realise you’d fought in New Orleans as well.”

He laughed softly. “It’s not something one tends to dwell on. The Americans beat us to our knees.”

His history fascinated her. “How many years were you in the dragoons?”

“Thirteen years, love. I enlisted when I was seventeen.”

“Goodness, so young.” She recalled herself at sixteen, perfectly petrified by all the staring eyes in her first season. She couldn’t imagine facing battle at just a year older
.

“My grandfather, the old earl, had cut off my allowance to force me into divinity school. I had other plans.”

“But how could you afford the commission if he controlled your funds?”

“His wife—my dear grandmother—provided me with a purse, to gamble on cards
,
and I was lucky.” He laughed, this time a hollow sound without humour. It sent chills down her spine. “You see
,
he had put her to no small amount of public humiliation over some comely little baronet’s wife he’d been frigging. Therefore she hit him where she could. They were unfailingly polite at the dinner table and
,
under the surface, constantly at war. And that
,
my dear
,
is the ugly truth of marriage—especially for those at our rank.”

Anne hugged her pillow tighter. “My parents didn’t even communicate enough for arguments or wars. I rarely saw my father except when they trotted me out on those occasions when they wanted to show the duke as a loving father. After he lost interest in the horse farm, I saw him hardly ever at all.”

Ruel dropped a kiss on her neck and made a sibilant sound, as if to quiet her.

However, she couldn’t stop the flow of words. “With his guinea
-
gold hair and patrician handsomeness, he was quite regal. He frightened me when I was little. As I grew, I learnt not to take him seriously. Mama explained how dukes were different from the rest of humanity. How they are raised so abnormally that they cannot be expected to be able to relate to life and other people in the same way as others do. Eventually, I learnt not to think of him as anyone really connected to me.”

He resumed massaging her back, the circular motions lulling her into silence. “It’s all in the past now, Anne. You’re wealthy, you have rank. You may live as you wish but you must learn to stand up in society. You are not to kneel to anyone—I mean anyone.”

“I knelt to you.”

He gripped the back of her neck. “Yes, you did and you shall again, very soon. But that’s different and you know it. You know what I mean. Now get some sleep. Tomorrow, in the morning, we start accustoming you to horses once more.”

* * * *

Upon rising, Anne found a chest full of simple muslin and wool dresses that buttoned down the front. Ruel had provided for all her needs for the month, all of it very practical
,
right down to woollen stockings and a pair of sturdy women’s leather boots.

She delayed over breakfast, listlessly stirring the spoon in her uneaten porridge as long as possible. Finally, she could delay no longer. Jon had said she must show herself by eight. As her feet dragged on the little
,
worn path to the stable, her stomach twisted into knots.