Highlander Undone (7 page)

“My father was a member of the Pre-Raphaelites for a time. Before he turned to the Nabis.”

“Ah. And your uncle?”

“Another
avant-garde
.” She grinned. “Yes. I’m afraid the lot of them are bohemians. Along with myself, my mother is the sole practitioner of conventionality in our family, and she is not, I am afraid, very good at it. Which is why the hostess duties fell to me. Mother was always too . . . distracted.”

“You are conventional?” His tone bespoke skepticism.

“Relatively speaking,” she allowed laughingly. “Even when I was a child, Mother claimed I was always trying to bring order to our household. But it was like trying to bring order to a typhoon. People coming and going, showing up unannounced in the middle of the night and staying for weeks or months.”

“People? What sort of people?”

“Oh, every sort. Models and travelers, artisans and historians. They gravitated toward our house like iron to a magnet.”

“You enjoyed it?” It was not a question.

“More than I realized,” she replied softly. “I am afraid that like many young people I had scant appreciation for what I had and longed after that which I did not.”

“Which was?”

The flippant response she had been about to give faltered on her lips as she thought back to her girlhood aspirations. “Order, consistency, stability. A family that did all the normal things. You know. Tea with the vicar, servants one did not have to hush, decorous conversatio
n”—she
smiled—“decorous dinners.”

“You did not have these things?”

“Lord, no! Father hates the vicar. He keeps trying to have my father excommunicated.”

“Your father is an atheist?”

“No. The vicar just doesn’t like him. He created a stained glass for the church’s nave. Judgment Day.”

“That hardly sounds like a reason for animosity.”

“It does when the vicar’s face is plainly depicted next to Christ’s index finger,” Addie said and felt the corner of her mouth twitch. “His
left
index finger.”

“Good Lord!” Jack broke out.

“Exactly.”

“What of the family dinners?”

Addie shook her head. “They were more feeding time than dinners, always
en buffet
. Mother never knew how many would be sitting down, you see. Dinner parties were invariably forums for debate, people thumping their fists on the table, chattering, shouting.”

“And the servants?”

“Oh, we had them all right. But more often than not, they’d be called to join in to whatever debate was going on.”

He burst out laughing.

“What of your family?” she asked, pleased she’d amused him.

He shrugged. “The usual in Highland fare, I suppose. Hurl a few trees about to work up an appetite, chase down a rabbit for dinner, scratch at the odd flea and call it a night.”

Now it was her turn to laugh, though she realized he did not want to talk about his family. “I suspect you are embellishing a bit.”

“A bit.” His blue eyes found hers. True to her suspicions, he turned the conversation from himself. “You’ve told me what you wanted as a child. What do you want now?”

She smiled. “Now? The freedom I had in my youth, that sense of anticipation, of possibilities always unfolding. I used to wake each day and resent the fact that I did not know what it would bring—or perhaps I should say whom.” She paused a second. “What fools the young are.”

“I should think those things still possible.”

She shrugged. “No. I’m older now. Wiser.”

“Ah, yes. Decrepit,” he said solemnly. She smiled. “But surely—”

She interrupted him, suddenly aware of how self-pitying she must sound. “Besides, I would not really want the helter-skelter life I led as a girl. I suppose what I would really like to find is . . . balance.”

He cast her a troubled glance. “After the death of your husband, why didn’t you return to live with your parents?”

The abrupt question caught her so off guard that she answered him without hesitating, honestly. “I could not go back. The girl they raised no longer exists and to masquerade as her would be too painful. Both for them and me.”

And besides, they didn’t know. She’d never told them about Charles. He’d threatened to hurt her brothers if she did. Badly.

Only Ted had guessed and it had led to his crippling. And now, with Charles’s death, there was no reason to hurt them with the knowledge of what she’d . . . endured.

Her answer seemed to bother him. The clear blue of his eyes clouded over. He made a sound of frustration and turned in his seat, inadvertently jerking the reins.

It startled the mare and she sidled anxiously in her traces just as a pheasant burst from the hedgerow, cackling as it flew directly across her nose. Before Jack could react, the mare reared, pulling the reins from his ineffectual grip. He cursed and grabbed for the reins. Too late; the terrified mare already had the bit between her teeth.

Behind the carriage, Jack’s gelding neighed shrilly, dashing to the side of the rig, his trumpet of fear spurring the mare further. She plunged forward, spewing dust and pebbles from beneath her hooves.

Frantically, Jack flung an arm around Addie and pulled her to his side as, one-handed, he hauled ineffectually at the reins, unable to fight the mare back under control. She thundered forward toward a sharp turn in the road, her neck extended, ears flat on her outstretched head. The rig rocked and shook as it hit rut and stone, jolting them with each bone-jarring impact.

They were going to overturn.

Desperately, Addie
seized
the reins from Jack’s grasp, twining the leather straps around her fists and, setting her heels against the floorboard, stood up, pulling fiercely at the bit to drag the mare’s mouth down. She kicked frantically at the brakes, Jack holding tight to her.

“Pull!” he shouted in her ear.

She closed her eyes as he reached around her and grabbed the reins, adding his strength to hers. The mare bucked, fighting the bit, but slowly, inexorably, the pain in the mare’s mouth overcame her fear. She skittered to a stop, lathered and quivering. Behind them the gelding bucked unhappily a few times before quieting.

The air escaped Addie’s lungs in a whoosh of relief. She sank down, light-headed, her pulse racing. Around her ribs, Jack’s arm tightened convulsively. He’d been as frightened as she. She looked around at him.

He was pale, so pale as to appear white, and his eyes glittered fiercely as he stared at her. Silently, with trembling fingers, he reached up and touched her cheek. Then, his breathing rough, he gently tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

“It’s all right,” she reassured him.

“No, it’s not. You might have been hurt . . . killed. I couldn’t hold her. I couldn’t—I am not the man—damn!”

Angrily, he thrust his left hand out for her inspection and condemnation. The long, artistic fingers shook uncontrollably. Impulsively, she caught them in her own. The shivers in his warm hand translated themselves into some stronger emotion in her heart.

She laid her cheek against the back of his hand. He didn’t have to be a hero for her. He had tried. That was all that mattered.

“My God, Addie.” His voice was a hoarse rasp.

“It’s over. No one was hurt.”

“If only because of you, your bravery, your strength.” There was no prick of hurt male pride in his tone, only admiration.

Wonderingly, she studied him. She had saved them. She—timid, cowed Addie Hoodless—had met a crisis without fear.

“You’re an exceptional woman, Addie Hoodless,” he said. “Most women would have screamed that mare into mortal flight.”

She smiled, uncertain how to respond to his strange and heady admiration. It felt suddenly too intimate, this fragile thing between them too rare to examine now with danger so recently escaped.

“Well,” she said, “I wasn’t about to let that handsome lace jabot of yours be soiled.”

He stared at her, clearly confused. She slowly relinquished his hand and touched the fine lace on his chest. The casual contact sent a thrill of awareness through her.

He followed her impish gaze to the ruffles spouting from his pristine white shirt. And then, like an actor assuming a role, a mask slipped over his features, hiding his nature behind an instant caricature. She thought she understood. He’d learned to deliberately exaggerate his affectations as a defiant answer to what would have certainly been his family’s military expectations, and now it was second nature whenever his manliness was brought into question. She only wished she could tell him that, in her experience, manliness was a coded word for brutality.

He fussed with the jabot, plucking at the tatted edges, scowling heavily at the snowy white folds. “Thank God for your devotion to fashion, ma’am,” he drawled. “I am quite fond of this jabot.”

“It is so special?” she asked, uncertain how to call back the man who hid behind this posturing.

“Oh, yes. ’Tis a family keepsake, passed from son to son to son down countless generations.”

“Really?”

“Well . . . ” He sniffed and without ceremony withdrew his arm from around her waist. Instantly, she regretted the loss of its warm strength.

“Well?”

“Perhaps there was some paltry daughter who got her greedy little paws on it at some point in its history,” he said severely.

“I see.” She chuckled and he matched her smile, apparently gratified his silliness had met with success.

Having won her laugh, he snapped the reins sharply on the mare’s rump. They passed the rest of the ride in companionable banter, but Addie could not help feeling that something lovely, something precious, had been shunted aside and replaced with nonsense.

W
e will leave for London in a
f
ortnight,” said Lady
Merritt. She speared a piece of exquisitely prepared turbot and squinted at it. “Needs more cream. Remind me to speak to Cook.”

In his chair across from Lady Merritt, Jack offered thanks the servants had not yet lit the tapers. The cavernous dining room, steeped in shadows, masked an annoyance that had grown with each day. Though weeks of practice under Wheatcroft’s critical tutelage had honed his thespian skills, it still took conscious effort to eradicate fifteen years of precise military bearing.

A month of playing indolent jackanapes for Lady Merritt’s amusement was about as much as he could contrive. His strength was rapidly returning, and this forced inactivity was driving him to distraction. But going to London without Lady Merritt had proved impossible. She insisted he stay and unless he wanted to make an enemy of her—and making an enemy of Ted’s sponsor meant he would be excluded entrée to Ted’s atelier—it was necessary he oblige.

“A fortnight? So long?” Jack said. “I thought you wanted to be firmly entrenched in your townhouse by Christmas. That is the unofficial start of the Season, is it not?”

It had been over a week since Addie and her brother had left for London. A week since she’d secured his promise to visit them as soon as he arrived in London; a week since she’d teased him about his overlong hair and modishly pale complexion. He missed her; it didn’t matter that he had no right to do so.

“Ted seemed quite adamant that they arrive in London prior to the New Year,” he said carefully.

“I understand. Eager to get the bit between your teeth, are you, Jack?” Lady Merritt popped another bit of fish into her mouth. “But dear Teddy has portraits to complete before the Royal Academy opens its show in May. You are fortunate in that you have no tiresome old despots attempting to regulate your genius.”

He was still astonished by the fact that in all the time he’d spent with her, Lady Merritt had yet to request so much as a glimpse of a sketchbook. Not that he had one, but, in anticipation of that eventuality, he had manufactured a rather nice tale about its whereabouts. “It’s just that I am loath to keep the world ignorant of me any longer than necessary. ’Twouldn’t be Christian.”

Lady Merritt snorted in amusement. “You are a fool, Jack Cameron,” she said fondly. “And far more a pagan than a Christian.”

The sooner he could get to London and Ted’s studio, the sooner he might learn something about the men he suspected of treachery. And the sooner he would walk out of Addie’s life.

The thought speared through him, agonizing with its inevitability. Each day he had spent in her company had made it clear that in any other guise he’d never have been allowed through her front door. Addie greeted every reference to the military with a nearly physical withdrawal. Any mention of officers or regiments chased the animation from her face.

For weeks Jack had taken advantage of Addie’s perception of him as some sort of gelding.

While he’d not denied himself her company, he had been careful never to be alone with her again. Not after that eternal and torturous carriage ride.

It had proven that with her he could not trust himself. She awakened in him ungovernable desires, made him yearn after things he could not have, and would not allow himself to want.

Well, now Addie was in London. As were her brother and the officers he painted. And Jack was stuck here, acting the court jester for Lady Merritt.

“Aren’t you, Jack?” Lady Merritt’s self-congratulatory tone broke into his thoughts.

“Aren’t I what?”

“A pagan.”

“Naughty Lady Merritt,” he purred. “You’ve divined my secret. I am Bacchus’s creature!”

“Give over, Jack. How you do pose!” Lady Merritt chortled. “Bacchus, indeed. You rarely even indulge in a second glass of wine.”

Jack sighed dramatically. “As long as I contrive to amuse, I suppose I am not completely wasted here.” For a second he wondered if he’d pushed too far. Lady Merritt was not one to allow her largesse to be undervalued. She shot him a sharply assessing look.

“You feel you are wasting time? Languishing here?” she asked in chill tones.

“Languishing?” He paused as though considering the word. “No. Luxuriating, yes. ’Tisn’t safe to indulge so heavily in fine wine, opulent surroundings, and superb conversation with one’s charming hostess. Only see how I have been seduced into spending weeks of enervating bliss?”

Lady Merritt’s eyes widened.
Now
, thought Jack,
a subtle jig of the lure
. “Art,” he continued mournfully, “is a harsh mistress, dear lady, and a jealous one. She deserts those who do not regularly worship at her shrine. My art demands a price which I have too long neglected to pay.”

She’d not only taken the bait, she was gill-hooked. Her mouth formed a plump little circle of delight. “If you should want a place in which to practice your craft, I can prepare a room for you!” she gushed in such open apology that Jack’s much-abused conscience rebelled.

He squelched the insurrection.

“Dear Patroness,” he said, sadly. “If only it were that simple. But no. You must remember the reason why I have ventured from my own poor corner of Scotland: to brave your thronging towers, your milling
hordes”—Lord
he would soon be penning penny-dreadfuls at this rate—“your rife and rampant London! I need the inspiration of her teeming streets, her opulence and her squalor, her vice and virtue. My art, being no longer content with pastoral beauty and nature’s tranquility, demands a new stimulus. It demands . . . London!”

There were no two ways about it: he was getting damned good at this. Lady Merritt sat pressed against the back seat of her dining chair, her hand flattening her brocade-upholstered bosom, her eyes aglow. For a moment she just stared at him before breathing in a throaty sigh, “We’ll leave tomorrow.”

Addie sank back on her heels. Her paint-stained smock pooled around her as she eyed the wall panel before her. With a sound of satisfaction, she once more rose to her knees and dipped an ostrich fern into a tray filled with gilt paint, then pressed it onto the aubergine silk panel.

Slowly, she peeled the long frond back. A perfect impression of the leaf interlocked with the golden silhouette of a fern above it, trailing a graceful latticework from ground to ceiling. There! She’d transformed the second-story boudoir into her own private withdrawing room.

It had been a long time since anything had been well and truly hers. She would never have guessed that this house could ever feel welcoming. And yet, it did. For the first time since her marriage, she was able to please herself.

The thought gave rise to an impulse, one she would have never heeded a year ago. But she could be impulsive now. She could afford to be.

With a feeling of delicious abandonment, she slid her shoes off and peeled back her stockings from her calves, hiking her skirts so that her bare legs and feet lay exposed in the bright square of warm sunlight on the floor. Closing her eyes, she lay on her back, wiggling her toes.

She was rather surprised she was still capable of impetuousness. Indeed, she’d viewed the slow reawakening of her boldness with no little mistrust. After all, had she not been impetuous, she might have heeded the Hoodlesses’ loving warnings and never eloped with Charles.

It is Jack Cameron’s fault,
she decided, but could not find a frown for that conclusion.

Each day spent with the handsome, nonsensical, yet oddly vulnerable Scotsman had fanned to life a tiny ember of self-confidence. It was not altogether comfortable. Like finding out that a favor
ite gown you’d thought lost years before had merely been put
into a cedar chest.
You long to try it on, and yet you are afraid if you do it will look ridiculous. Or worse, it will no longer fit.

Oddly enough, Jack’s very vulnerability encouraged her own self-assurance. The manner in which he masked his self-doubt with such a provocative and blatant caricature stirred an inclination to nonconformity in her.

She suspected that she alone refused to accept Jack as the effete, overcontrived fribble he presented to the world. His conversation certainly never hinted at any weaknesses—oh, dear Lord, no! The thought made Addie smile. Jack was all arrogant disdain and witty repartee. Mr. Wilde himself would be hard-pressed to keep up with Jack’s drawled
bons mots
!

But then, just as she was upbraiding herself for romanticizing him, she would see it: a keen, thoughtful intelligence, a perceptive remark that belied his pose of absolute self-involvement, an unexpected gentleness in dealing with another’s frailties.

And then, too, even more rarely, but just as undeniably, she would surprise on his fallen-angel’s face a fleeting, hunted expression: a mixture of dismay, uncertainty, and awful longing.

She did not understand what authored that haunted look, but more and more often lately, she found herself wondering how she would feel if she was able to be the object of it.

When had she begun to anticipate his presence? When had his reaction to her—his physical tentativeness, his avoidance of her gaze, the tension of his body when she approached—begun to challenge her?

A sudden crash overhead disrupted her thoughts. Probably the workmen breaking through the rafters for the new skylight in Ted’s new atelier. Initially, he’d been hesitant to accept her offer to turn the top floor into a studio. But it only made sense that he should.

She was refurbishing the house anyway and the large upstairs ballroom, if drafty, had high ceilings and banks of expensive glass windows. Perfect for an artist’s use.

Also, the house was located close to the artists’ quarter but still was well within the boundaries of respectable addresses. Doting mothers of this Season’s debutantes would have no misgivings about trudging their bedecked and beribboned daughters here to have their portraits painted.

But most importantly, she hadn’t wanted to be alone here, with only Charles’s ghost for company.

A few days after they’d eloped, Charles had discovered that she was not the heiress he’d imagined. He’d demanded she give him control over what money she did have. She’d refused. He had been furious. Within minutes, her amazement at his transformation had become terror as he’d made her understand what her future held.

It had been a very physical lesson. The only thing for which she had to be thankful was that his abuse had never taken a sexual form. He had, after those first few nights of marriage, left her alone.

She’d been in the process of leaving him when he’d discovered her plans.

At first he was remorseful, but that had quickly disappeared when it became clear his contrition was not going to change her mind. So, he’d beaten her again and then told her point-blank that if she ever left him, he would seek his revenge on her siblings. She would, he swore, never humiliate him.

Fear for her family had kept her from fleeing, and over the next five years she had learned to an acute degree just what humiliation meant. Her only insurrection had been a covert one. When her grandfather had left her a small fortune, she had not revealed it to Charles. She had vowed to herself that he would not spend one cent of her inheritance.

It was only after the vicar had mentioned how accident-prone she’d become and suggested that she see a doctor for her “instability” that Charles realized how close he came to being revealed as a monster. His pride would not stand for that, either. He’d become mockingly cautious of her physical well-being thereafter. He found other targets for his rage. The tweenie and the boot boy appeared with bruises. Favored pets disappeared. Her mare went lame and had to be destroyed.

When he finally grew tired of her, he shipped her off north.

In some ways that had been even worse. He came unannounced, like a nightmare, upbraiding her and terrorizing her before disappearing as suddenly as he’d come. He’d known full well that anticipation could torture.