A Reckless Beauty (9 page)

“Thank you, Fanny,” he said, stepping closer to her, putting his hand on her arm.

She tried to look away from him, but couldn’t. “Where…where will you be? If there’s a battle?”

“Probably doing what your brother would be doing. Taking messages to and from Wellington. Reporting on action beyond his vision. And, because I’ve done this before, making suggestions as to where to best deploy our forces to counter moves made by Bonaparte and his generals.”

“Then you’ll be in uniform?” Fanny asked.

Valentine smiled. “Hardly. I’m just a lone man on a horse, moving fast in the distance, just at the edge of sight. I leave that sort of sartorial flamboyance to Uxbridge and the rest.”

“I would imagine you’d look…very fine in uniform,” Fanny said, wondering why they were talking about uniforms when what she really wanted to say was
be careful, please, be careful.

“Not half as fine as you, my dear,” he told her. “I find myself still thinking fondly of the sight of you in trousers, your face brown with road dust, your expression indignant. Daring.”

Fanny felt her cheeks burning. “I think Shamus Reilly had fleas,” she told him. “Wiggins told me he was forced to hang the uniform in a burlap bag over a smoky fire.”

“I’d rather he’d burned it entirely. Where is that uniform, by the way?”

Fanny looked him straight in the eye. “I left it with Wiggins. He was going to bring it to me, but I told him I had no further use for it.”

Lying. The girl is lying.
“Very good. I’ll order him to dispose of it for you.”

“You do that,” Fanny shot back at him. “You seem to order everything for everyone anyway. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m tired, and would like to go upstairs to my bed. With your permission, of course.”

She curtsied, turned to leave him, and he tightened his hold on her arm, not knowing when, or if, they could ever be private again.

“Fanny. These are trying times. Nervous times. The world is so…intense. Moving so quickly toward God only knows what. People say—and do—things they wouldn’t ordinarily say or do. Think things they wouldn’t ordinarily think. Imagine things. Risk things. Not always rational actions. But they seem rational, at the time. Even necessary. Inevitable. Like now, for instance. If you’ll forgive me…”

She waited for him to make his point, but he said nothing more. He just looked at her. Stepped closer to her. Bent his head to hers.

Fanny closed her eyes as his lips touched hers, lightly, brushing gently. Lingering a moment, then leaving her.

She was twenty years old. Others her age were already married, already mothers. Yet this was her first kiss on the mouth, freely given, hesitantly accepted.

She kept her eyes closed. “Again,” she whispered. “Please.”

Valentine slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her closer, slanting his mouth against hers once more. This time bolder, but not daring too much intimacy, as the last thing he wanted was to frighten her.

She tasted young, fresh. Innocent. Three things he hadn’t been in a long, long time.

He drew back, cupped her head in his hands, lightly rubbed her cheeks with the pads of his thumbs. “Interesting,” he said quietly. “Now who, I wonder, is to guard you from your guardian?”

Fanny opened her eyes at last, suddenly, and very wide. “You’re laughing at me, Brede, aren’t you?”

“No, sweetings, that’s the very last thing I’d do,” he told her, dropping his hands to his sides. “I’m cursing myself for the fool that I am. Because the very last thing I need on my mind these next days is you. And yet, here you are.”

She watched him leave via the gate at the back of the small garden, and then lifted a hand to her mouth. Not to wipe away the feel of him, but to savor that feeling.

She loved Rian. She always had. She hadn’t questioned her feelings, not since she’d been a very young child.

But she’d never before felt like this.

A battle was coming, one Brede wasn’t sure they’d win. Wasn’t it enough that she was frantic with worry for Rian? Did she now have to fear for Brede, too?

What had he said?
But they seem rational, at the time. Even necessary. Inevitable. Like now, for instance.

He’d believed kissing her to be rational, inevitable?
Necessary?

“Yes,” Fanny said, settling back down on the bench, hugging her arms around her, as the evening was growing cool. “I suppose it was, wasn’t it…”

F
ANNY HAD NEVER BEEN
to a ball, so she could not know that this one was quite modest compared to London standards, held in a large square room once used to store carriages, its walls hastily papered over in a trellis pattern with roses, the guest list numbering only a few dozen over two hundred.

There were several gaily laughing young ladies clad in virginal white or pale pastels present, along with a sea of men of all ages, dressed in scarlet uniform jackets, gold epaulets, dark trousers and high black boots, and a scattering of more sober evening dress.

Musicians were already sawing away on violins, the center of the floor filled with couples in the dance, when Fanny entered the room a few paces behind Lucie, who was dressed once more in stylish lavender, trailing scent like bread crumbs. Fanny’s gown was more sedate, a soft lime silk she thought rather beautiful, if possibly too short, but that, Lucie had told her, was the price a female paid if she not only had forgotten to have her maid pack her own gowns for her, but had also insisted upon growing so unfashionably tall.

Fanny searched the room for any sign of Rian, but he wasn’t there. Oh, wait, there he was. On the dance floor, smiling down into the face of some petite redheaded girl who was chattering at him each time the moves of the dance brought them together.

He looked happy, a bit mischievous, and achingly beautiful in his finely brushed uniform. He and the redhead stepped closely together in the move of the dance, their hands held up high between their bodies, and he bent to whisper something in her ear.

The redhead laughed.

Fanny turned her back on the pair of them, pretending an interest in the lavender-tipped feathers stuck in Lady Whalley’s hair.

“I shan’t dance, of course,” Lucie told her, looking wistfully at the couples moving around the floor. “It would be unseemly, with William not yet in the ground a year. But I already have four names scribbled on my card, with each of the gentlemen expressing no reservations about sitting with me rather than dancing. Oh, look, isn’t that your brother? Ah, and that’s Sally Pitney, making calf’s eyes at him. Well, why not? He is delicious. Oh, don’t frown, Fanny. My stars, even a sister has to know when her brother is more handsome than even broody Byron himself.”

Fanny forced a smile to her face. “My other brothers say he is much too pretty, and needs a few scars. They regularly volunteer to give him some.”

“Oh, my stars, no! Mar that handsome face? That would be criminal in the extreme. Ah, but never mind. Look, there’s the Duke. Now there is a fine hatchet face for you.”

“I think him handsome,” Fanny said, looking at the tall man who had paused just inside the doors, to bow over Lady Richmond’s hand. “Rather like Brede.”

Lucie looked at her owlishly. “Like Valentine? Don’t be ridiculous, Fanny. They’re nothing alike.”

“Not in looks, certainly,” Fanny said, her gaze still on the door, as Valentine had just entered behind Wellington. “In manner, in the way their eyes seem to look nowhere, yet see everywhere. They…they’ve
lived,
experienced things, and you can see that on their faces. My papa would call them both seasoned, I believe. My old nurse, Odette, would call them both dangerous, and delight in that danger.”

“Seasoned? Fanny? Is the heat bothering you? I admit, it is close in here. You’re saying such odd things.”

Fanny drew her gaze away from Valentine, smiled as she shook her head. “I’m sorry, Lucie. I believe I’m having some difficulty comparing the gaiety of the dancers with the rather severe expression on his grace’s face. See him? He’s smiling, yet he isn’t smiling. Do you suppose the French are on the move again?”

“Smiling, not smiling. Not looking, but seeing everything. My stars! If I knew you were going to be so maudlin, girl, I would have left you at home. Now smile,
really
smile, and then laugh as if I’ve just said something witty. Call some attention to yourself. Bat those absurdly long lashes at one of these scarlet-coated young gentlemen. My stars, I’ll not have you sitting like some pale wallflower wilting next to me while I’m flirting with my beaux. It would put a damper on my fun. Think of me, if you can’t think of yourself.”

“Lucie, you’re incorrigible,” Fanny said, pulling out a word Elly and others had used on her from time to time. “But the dance is over and Rian has seen me. He’ll bear me company.”

Fanny held out her skirts and dropped into a small, pert curtsey as Rian bowed to them both. “Well met, brother.”

Rian grinned at her. “Don’t you look fine as nine-pence, Fanny-panny,” he said as Lucie wandered off a few minutes later with the soldier she’d been talking to the other day, at Wellington’s headquarters. Rian held out his arm to her, and Fanny slipped her gloved arm through his elbow. “His lordship has provided well for you, hasn’t he? You’re not driving him mad in order to thank him, I hope.”

“If I’m driving him mad, Rian, it’s only because he’s a maddening man,” Fanny told him as they walked toward the perimeter of the room, for another set was forming. “Have you heard anything more about the French? Brede says they’re moving faster than anyone had hoped, while the Russians and Austrians are still a long march away from joining us.”

Rian rolled his eyes. “Not tonight, Fanny. I’ve ridden Jupiter from here to there and back again, twice, at least a dozen times today. No talk of war tonight, all right? Besides, Wellington won’t go out, engage Bonaparte, not until it’s absolutely necessary. He needs time for Blücher to get his army to us. Now, did you see that girl I was dancing with a moment ago? What do you think?”

Fanny frowned, her mind still very much on Bonaparte and his
Grand Armée.
“What do I think of what?”

“Of
her,
of course,” Rian said, dragging Fanny behind a blatantly fake marble pillar wrapped in ivy. “Granted, she giggles, but she’s pretty enough, isn’t she?”

“Ah, but if she giggles?” Fanny did her best to smile, keep her tone light. “Could you really abide a woman who giggles?”

“Probably not for long, no,” Rian said, frowning. “But they’re all being so friendly, Fanny. Driving out to our headquarters, bringing baskets of food and drink. Charles Battenly—he’s also an aide—says you pick the flowers when you can in times like these.”

“Flowers,” Fanny said, looking at him intensely. He was six years her senior. When had become so young? When had she grown so old? “You’re comparing these young women to flowers, ready to be
picked?
”

Rian flushed to the roots of his hair. “I knew you wouldn’t understand. I never should have said anything. Let’s discuss you, instead. His lordship told me you’ll take his sister and leave Brussels with Wiggins, if things start going sideways. He said you promised. Did you promise, Fanny?”

“Are you asking me to make sure we take up your Miss Pitney with us?”

“Who?”

“Miss Pitney. The flower you plan to pluck.”

Rian grinned, looking abashed. “Is that her name? I don’t care a fig about her, Fanny. I was only telling you what my friend Charles said.” He took her hands in his. “Don’t make me have to worry about you, Fanny-panny. Promise me?”

“Promises. All I seem to do is be asked to make promises,” she told him, trying not to look at him as if she was memorizing his features, as if she might never see them again. “Don’t worry about me, Rian. I’ll be very careful, I
promise.
Now promise me that you’ll also be very careful. Promise me you’ll come home.”

He bent and kissed her cheek. “You know I will, Fanny. We’ll go home to Romney Marsh together in triumph once old Boney’s been beaten. I promise.”

“Home. Becket Hall seems so far away, doesn’t it?”

Rian saw the quick shadow in Fanny’s eyes. “No. Our lives seem so far away from Becket Hall. Isn’t that what you really mean? What seemed so certain there, isn’t so certain anymore. Is it?”

Fanny averted her eyes. “You…you mean, how I…How I feel?”

Rian’s heart squeezed tight in his chest. She was so young, for all her intelligence. “Yes, Fanny, that’s just what I mean. I love you. You love me. We’ve been close as sticking plaster our whole lives, you and me, out there, in the back of beyond. You’re my best friend. That will never change. But there’s this whole world out here now, isn’t there? So many things we’ve never even thought of, much less experienced, so many things we’ve never seen. So many people we haven’t met. So—” he spread his arms, fisted his hands as if grabbing something tightly in them “—so much
life
to live, Fanny-panny.”

“So many pretty, young, willing redheaded girls,” she said, hating to admit the truth in his words, adding silently,
and a man like Brede, who is like nothing or no one I’ve ever dreamed existed.
“Yes, Rian, you’ve made your point. I’m a silly little girl who believed something just because I had nothing else to believe. But I still love you, you know.”

“You’d better, or I’ll just have to go throw myself on the first French sword I see coming toward me,” he warned her, lightly striking her chin with his fist. “You’re growing up, Fanny. We’re spreading our wings, both of us, like birds finally escaping the nest, away from the necessary secrecy of Becket Hall. But you’ll always be my sister, and I’ll always be your brother. We’ll always understand each other as no one else can.”

“A special bond,” Fanny said, blinking back tears. “Yes. We have that, don’t we? Nobody can take that from us.”

“Nobody, Fanny,” Rian said, looking deeply into her eyes, so proud of her, and realizing that she was no longer the little girl whose hand he’d held, the little girl who’d chased after him everywhere he went, driving him mad, flattering his slightly older self terribly. “Nothing and nobody could ever do that.”

“Such serious faces. Am I interrupting a family chat? Good evening, Beckets.”

Fanny turned to see Valentine standing beside her, glorious in his evening clothes. “Good evening, Brede,” she said, unable to meet his eyes. “As you did not visit your sister today, I had thought you might not be in attendance this evening.”

“I said I’d be here,” Valentine reminded her. “It was…
necessary.
Lieutenant, I’ve heard a compliment about you.”

Rian pulled himself up very straight. “Yes, sir?”

“Yes, indeed. Sir William Ponsonby told me you aren’t half-inept,” Valentine said, smiling. “High praise, indeed, from Ponsonby. Fanny? How would you like to meet his grace?”

“The Duke?” She would adore meeting Wellington, at any other time. At the moment, she had no desire to do anything more than go back to Lucie’s town house and bury her head under the covers, hope to understand why Rian’s defection didn’t bother her half so much as Valentine’s casual way of speaking to her, as if they’d never kissed last night. “I’d be delighted, of course,” she said brightly, accepting his offered arm.

“You go, Fanny,” Rian told her. “I’ve seen enough of the man these past few days.”

“Your brother’s hot for battle,” Valentine told her as they made their way around the perimeter of the large, square room. “And he is doing well, Fanny. He’s already made one suggestion Wellington has taken under consideration, pointing out what he believes the best position to make good use of our cavalry if attack should come from the west. I should have known Jack wouldn’t have asked me to do a favor for an idiot.”

“He’s not inept, he’s not an idiot,” Fanny said, looking up at Valentine. “Such high praise. Is that the best you can do when handing out compliments?”

Valentine stopped, and then guided her behind a potted palm, took her hands in his. “How’s this, then, Fanny,” he said, his voice low, intimate. “I’ve thought of you every moment since last night, even during a few moments when I most definitely should have been thinking of anything and anyone but you. And now here you are, looking so young, so fresh, so very beautiful, and I know what a bastard I am to want to take you from here, now, take you back to my own house, and kiss you, hold you, until we’re both too exhausted to do anything but sleep. I don’t know, Fanny, if you’d consider any of that a compliment, or even know what it means for me to make such an admission. But that’s how I feel, and the world is moving so fast, the future is so uncertain for any of us, that I had to say it all, say it now. So you’d understand.”

Fanny’s heart was pounding so loudly in her ears that his words seemed to come to her from a great distance. She didn’t know how to answer him, what to say. So she told him the truth. “You frighten me. I hate that you frighten me.”

Valentine sniffed slightly, smiled. He felt young, foolish, and yet older than time itself. “Well, then, we’re even, Fanny. Because you frighten me. Shall we blame it all on the moment? Danger everywhere, Bonaparte on the march? Those damn trousers you were wearing when I first saw your dirty, smudged face? Yes, let’s blame it all on that. Now, I believe I was about to introduce you to the Duke.”

“Brede, I—”

“No,” he said quickly, lightly pressing a finger against her lips. “Don’t say anything more, Fanny, please. I’ve disgraced myself enough as it is now. Another day, another few weeks, the world back where it belongs, Bonaparte back where he belongs, and I’ll be sane again, I promise.”

“And mean, and cuttingly sarcastic and odiously arrogant?” Fanny asked him, aching to help him climb out of the hole he’d so unexpectedly dug for himself. “In other words, Brede—more like yourself?”

His smile widened. “Unquestionably,” he agreed, leading her out from behind the palm. “I’m much happier with myself when I’m biting off heads.”

“And you’re quite good at it,” Fanny told him as they wended their way around the perimeter of the overheated room. “Do you practice?”

He sliced her a look. “I beg your pardon?”

“I asked—do you practice? Being mean, and cutting, that is. Agreeing with me when I said I needed a bath, for instance. That was very mean. I laughed, because it was also funny. But I imagine you frighten quite a few people, don’t you?”

“But not you, I believe,” he said as they stopped about two feet away from Wellington and the Duchess of Richmond, who were deep in conversation. “I don’t frighten you. Except, of course, for when I’m being a jackass.”