Kate Moore (19 page)

“Hello, Meg,” he managed. He did not move any closer.

“You have seen your father?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied, getting his voice under control. In the dim evening light he could not see her eyes as well as he wished to. He advanced a few steps in her direction.

“I’m glad,” she said.

He couldn’t answer; he was too occupied with taking in the sight of her, the curve of her lashes, the flush of her cheeks, a loose curl against her neck, the lace edge of her gown at her breasts. When he had gone so far in his perusal, a thought occurred that recalled him to a sense of his position. He could not be as certain of her as he wished.

Perhaps, having helped him to regain his father’s trust, she felt quite free of any obligation to him. Her actions implied no particular attachment to him. Much that he had done she could complain of, much of his past might disgust her. Yet his father had made a point of mentioning her prolonged stay at Haddon.

“Meg, will you answer a question?” he asked. She nodded. “Why did you want me to meet you at Vauxhall?” Heartened by the deepening color in her cheeks as she explained her plan, he took a few more steps toward her.

“Why did you wish to see me vindicated?” he asked. Her hesitation, and the confusion in her eyes encouraged him to come closer still. But she didn’t answer after all.

“If you are going to ask questions,” she said, “it is only fair that I should be allowed to ask one of you.” Her gaze challenged him. He nodded, and his throat felt dry. “Why have you come here tonight? I mean
here
,” she emphasized, “to me.”

He was still too far from her to say what he most wanted to say. A thought came to him that had quite gone out of his head the minute he had seen Meg through the window. “I came, of course, to tell you that Wellington has won a great victory at Vittoria, and that you and I may feel we contributed to his success by foiling the Viper.”

“Wonderful,” she said, but she stiffened, and her face appeared to lose some of the color that had suffused it a moment before. Her gaze dropped from his, and she fumbled with the book in her lap as if she did not really see it. He took advantage of her distraction and crossed the room to stand not more than inches from her. Then he reached down and lifted her chin. Her eyes were glistening with unshed tears.

“I came to ask you to marry me, Meg. Will you?” he whispered. He could see the doubt in her eyes.

“Meg,” he said, “if this is your first offer and you are going to ask me if it counts, be assured that it does. Though I don’t know what reasons another gentleman might have for making you an offer, I’m offering for you because I love you, and I’m most impatient . . .”

“Yes,” she said, startling him out of any further speech.

He took the book from her hands and pulled her to her feet. He steadied her, though to have his doubts answered with such a joyful certainty left feeling distinctly unsteady. “You know that your saying yes permits me to say and do things I could only dream of before.”

“What things?” she asked. Her eyes, still bright with the glitter of unshed tears, were trusting and curious, her lips too near to resist.

“Things like this,” he replied, pulling her to him and slipping his arms around her waist. “And this,” he said, tightening his hold so that he felt her softness against the full length of his body. It was the first time their circumstances allowed him to savor this press of bodies, which was in itself a kiss. It was the first time his advances had not made her blush. Her clear gaze met his. Her lips parted lightly so that their breaths mingled. “And this,” he whispered, touching his lips to hers.

For some time, which was inadequately measured by the earl’s very modern clocks, Drew contented himself with kissing Meg. He found that the girl from whose lips he had ever had the truth was no less open and honest in this wordless language. She withheld nothing of her love, following him fearlessly into further intimacy. Her very willingness first alerted him to the danger he courted. Daring as he had always been, he had counted on Meg’s resistance as a check on his own desires. But she did not stop him when he lowered his lips to her throat, and she made no protest when his trembling fingers released the tiny buttons that secured her bodice, allowing one hand to caress the softness there. The further movements he was then inspired to make at last brought him to his senses. He took hold of her upper arms and gently pushed her away from him, but he could not bring himself to let go.

Margaret watched her love closely. He had broken their embrace, but she sensed that he had done so only because they had been on the verge of some irrevocable step into passion. His grip on her arms was, hard, and his breathing uneven. His coat of blue superfine stretched as, smoothly as ever across his shoulders, his cravat still looked like a creditable version of a gentleman’s neckwear, and his golden hair was hardly disarranged. In short he still appeared in all external ways to be the cool gentleman. But he had uncovered his heart to her, and she knew there would be no more lies between them. Now was the time to offer her thief the special license.

“I must stop, Meg,” he managed. “Even our betrothal does not allow me to go on.”

“But I may allow you, may I not?” she asked, recalling Ned’s advice.

“You do not know the things I want to do.”

But she thought she did. “I can imagine,” she dared to say.

“No,” he protested, and she read in the vehemence of his denial how strongly he was tempted. More calmly he said, “We must be married before I give in to such desires.”

“Then let us be married tonight,” she suggested, as if after all nothing could be more reasonable.

“Tonight?” He looked properly astonished. “You can’t mean to elope,” he continued. “Gretna is days from here, and our traveling alone together now would not be the least bit conducive to virtue, I’m afraid.”

Margaret was enjoying her power to surprise him. “But I don’t mean Gretna,” she said, reaching into the pocket where she kept her father’s remarkable gift. She unfolded the somewhat creased document and handed it to him. “With this we can be married in the village tonight,” she concluded.

He took the paper from her, and reading it over, groaned. “Meg,” he said, “think of the trouble and grief I have caused by acting impulsively—going to that masquerade, stealing the papers, kidnapping you. I promised myself I would yield to no more impulses if you would have me.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” she said, but she smiled at him, and she could see he was confused and suspicious when she didn’t try to press him further. She slipped the document into his coat pocket. “Ned says you always were a ‘sudden’ sort of person, and he did not think you would care to wait until the mourning period is over.”

“What else did Ned tell you?” he asked, and Margaret felt an unworthy but entirely human satisfaction at the wariness in his tone. She would repay him a bit for all the times he had teased her. She did not answer.

Instead she asked, “Does my saying yes to your offer permit me to take liberties?”

She felt his fingers loosen in surprise when she spoke, so that she was able to close the distance between them and raise her hands to his face.

“Meg,” he questioned, “what are you about?”

“Does my saying yes permit me to do this?” She touched his temples lightly, tracing the line of his brows, brushing his eyes closed with her fingertips, and outlining the bones of his cheeks. “And this?” she queried, stroking her thumbs across his lips. He stilled her hands, taking them into his own. His next words were strained and sad.

“Meg, I have no ring to give you. You have no luggage. If I take you to an inn tonight, you will be subject to the worst sort of conjecture and insult because of me.” He paused. “As you were once before.”

“I have your ring already, and we need not go to an inn.”

“You are not suggesting a barn, I hope. I have too much to reproach myself with over the last barn we entered.”

“There is Humphrey’s cottage. You have a bed there.” The hands holding hers were very strong. She had felt their strength often enough to rely on it entirely. Thus she could not miss the tremor that now shook them. He was resisting very hard, but he had not let go of her. She did not believe he wished to wait for their marriage any more than she did. And she believed his spirit, however chastened and subdued by loss and disgrace, was ever a bold one. There were things she had vowed to tell him to lessen his grief, but they could wait. Only one thing was needful now.

“I love you, Drew,” she whispered. Then with a single swift motion he caught her about the waist and behind the knees and scooped her up in his arms to hold her against his heart. He strode to the window and stepped easily over the low sill out into the night.

“You do not need to carry me off this time,” she protested as they crossed the wide lawn.

“But I do,” he replied, “for Ned is holding Phantom for me in the wood.” He grinned.

“Wretch,” she cried. “You meant to elope all along.” She squirmed lightly in his arms, and he stopped.

“No,” he assured her solemnly, “I did not know you were here at Haddon, but I meant to ride to Wynrose tonight to find you, for I could not wait another day, Meg.”

Margaret smiled, and though she could not know it, her smile was that particularly warm, shining sort of smile which expresses not mere gaiety but lasting joy. Her thief had not changed after all.

“I love you,” she repeated, and this short, oft-repeated phrase delayed their elopement for some time as the Earl of Haddon’s second son expressed himself in similar terms.

Read on for a special preview of

Blackstone’s Bride

Available August 2012 from Berkley Sensation

Prologue

The English Channel, February, 1825

Lyle Massing, Baron Blackstone, was losing at cards, a situation he could only attribute to the rise and fall of the ship under him. The HMS
Redemption
, a naval vessel of questionable seaworthiness, had been pressed into service to bring Blackstone and a few other survivors of the Greek misadventure home.

He tried to concentrate on the cards in his hand and not think about home. At the moment he didn’t have one. Blackstone Court, the ancestral seat he’d inherited from his father, had been mortgaged to pay his ransom to the Greek warlord Vasiladi. The house was now leased to a wealthy maker of crockery. Blackstone’s widowed mother and sisters had removed to a modest townhouse in Bath. His mother made no complaint, but in her letter about the move, his sister Elena had double underlined the words “thirty feet,” the distance between their two drawing rooms in Bath. When he thought of his mother in such narrow circumstances after the vastness of Blackstone Court, he grew a little reckless with his cards, and already a pile of his vowels littered the table.

Beating its way across the channel to Dover, the
Redemption
lurched and shuddered, making the yellow light waver in the smoky compartment. Blackstone blinked at the unforgiving cards in his hand. His opponent, Samuel Goldsworthy, a large mound of a man with thick red hair and beard and a green silk waistcoat that glowed in the swaying light, grinned at him. The fellow seemed incapable of ill humor or of losing. It was he who had proposed a little harmless game of cards. Hours earlier, the endless card game and the rolling seas had defeated the other two passengers. Only Goldsworthy and Blackstone remained at the table.

The big man could not conceal his satisfaction with the situation. “Son, those cards you’re holding are worthless. Let me offer you a way out.”

Blackstone felt an unsettling prickle of wariness as if the man could see his hand. He made a joke. “Is this the moment when you suggest that I marry your quiz of a daughter?” If Goldsworthy had such a daughter, Blackstone might do it. He had few options to recover his estate.

Goldsworthy gave a head-splittingly hearty laugh. Blackstone had suggested a marriage in jest, but as if in protest at the idea of his marrying, his careless memory threw up a flash of laughing black eyes and soft creamy breasts. He shook it off. That opportunity had long since passed. No doubt Violet Hammersley had married while Blackstone was in the hands of the bandits.

“Nothing so clichéd, lad. All I ask is that you enter my employ for a year and a day.”

Blackstone noted the fairy-tale phrase. A year and a day was also the amount of time he had been a captive, a year and a day, in which Byron had died, and the Greek freedom fighters who had sought to throw off the Turks had fallen into rival factions, apt to cut each other’s throats.

He peered again at Goldsworthy. The man looked ordinary enough in spite of his oaklike size and the absurd invitation to employment. He was taller than Blackstone by four inches or more, and wider than any of the berths offered on the ship. Blackstone put his age at somewhere between forty and fifty. He looked like a great leafy tree with his russet coat, walnut trousers, and the green waistcoat. For all the stirring of Blackstone’s instincts at the man’s odd turn of phrase, the fellow was most likely not an enchanter out of a fairy tale, but an ordinary London merchant. He probably had a warehouse on the Thames stuffed with bolts of muslin or sacks of coffee beans.

But Blackstone’s year with the bandits had taught him to be wary of appearances. He could not help a suspicion that Goldsworthy was not what he appeared to be. The timing of the arrival of Goldsworthy and the
Redemption
in Koron harbor at the singularly delicate moment in Blackstone’s negotiations with the bandit, when the money was about to change hands, was more than fortuitous. It was miraculous. At that moment, Blackstone had realized there was no reason for Vasiladi to follow through with the release of his hostages, including a score of young girls and boys who had been pressed into slavish roles by the warlord’s army. Blackstone’s whole mission to Greece had hung in the balance.

He tried again to determine Goldsworthy’s true nature. “I suppose you’re a cesspool cleaner or a shambles operator.”

“Nothing so fragrant, or so tame, I assure you, lad. Something rather more suited to your talents.”

“We didn’t meet in London, did we?”

“Not at all.”

“Why offer to hire me? You can’t have a high estimate of my talents based on our little game.”

“You are a charming fellow—”

Blackstone shot Goldsworthy a skeptical glance. “I’ve hardly charmed you.”

“Still among your own, among the ton, you move with grace and ease, wear a well-cut coat, show a pretty leg on the dance floor, and perhaps off of it, drive and ride to an inch.”

“You’ve heard of me then. What you’ve heard can hardly recommend me for anyone’s employ.”

“Except mine. You’ll be invited everywhere, and I want you to attend as many of the season’s events as you can.”

Maybe there was an ugly daughter after all. Maybe she was so plain and so awkward that Goldsworthy needed to prevail on a man of Blackstone’s reputation to escort her to balls and routs. “And for submitting to the endless social whirl?”

“I will pay off all your debts, including the mortgage on Blackstone Court.”

In captivity, Blackstone had learned not to betray the least sign of discomposure, but he felt a rush of mortifying heat. The pile of scraps on which Blackstone and his luckless fellow travelers had pledged their funds to Goldsworthy lay on the table. Blackstone glanced from them to the dismal cards in his hand. Luck had been against him all night, and now the stranger who had managed to fleece them all was offering him what he most needed.

“I beg your pardon.” Blackstone stared hard at the man who seemed to know more of his business than anyone, outside of his solicitor.

“Come with me to my club, and I’ll explain.”

“Your club?” The blunt fellow did not strike Blackstone as a clubman. Goldsworthy might be English to the core, but he was no gentleman.

“The Pantheon Club in Albemarle Street. I’ve a post chaise meeting the ship. It will take us directly there.”

Not to Bath and his mother’s reproaches, but to London and a chance to repair his fortune. Goldsworthy certainly knew how to dangle temptation, but Blackstone needed to know what was behind the man’s apparent generosity.

“Who are you?”

Goldsworthy frowned. “You can’t have forgotten already.”

“Not your name. Who are you? What’s this mysterious position you’re offering?”

“Quite right to ask. Service to king and country, that’s what it is.” Goldsworthy’s good-humored expression remained unimpaired. “It’s spying actually.”

“Spying? On whom would I be spying in the drawing rooms of London?”

Goldsworthy’s expression turned grim. He shook his great, lionlike head. “It’s a black world we live in these days, lad. England’s enemies pass themselves off as friends every day and move among us, high and low. And secrets have a way of falling into their hands. It’s our job to prevent those secrets from going astray.”

Blackstone blinked at the man, as if his eyes were not working properly in the dim, smoke-filled cabin. He was being asked to become a spy for England.

The ship paused on a peak. Then the treacherous ocean shifted, and they fell into a stomach-seizing nothingness as if the world had vanished. Goldsworthy calmly clamped a hand around his ale pot. Blackstone caught the lamp. Everything else hit the low ceiling. In that moment of free fall, nothing to grab, nothing to lose that wasn’t lost already, he saw again the flash of laughing black eyes and wanted against all reason to see them once more, which was madness.

The long fall ended as the
Redemption
slammed into another wave, shuddered mightily, and decided not to splinter into driftwood.

“I’ll do it.”

“That’s the good lad. A year and a day, then you’ll be free and clear.”