Patricia Rice (6 page)

“Your lust is showing, Harry. I’ll unbar the door
after
I’m done.”

Maidens shouldn’t notice such things, but knowing she did aroused him even more. With a muttered imprecation, he adjusted his breeches, grabbed his coat, and went down the stairs, shouting at the innkeeper to bring up the bath.

Harry’s black mood returned the next day as they rode into Sussex. As a boy, he’d loved growing up in the countryside, rambling through the Roman ruins that were scattered across the landscape.

The death of his mother when he was sixteen had sent him straight down the old Roman road into London in a desperate bid to escape his father’s grief. Rather than recall the pain of those days and his father’s subsequent mental deterioration, Harry watched Christina.

When he’d returned to their bed the previous night, she had been slumbering as if exhausted. Beyond an indecipherable murmur, she hadn’t noticed his arrival. He’d almost laughed at the man’s shirt she’d donned as nightshift. Only Christina would wear so outrageous a honeymoon garment. Her true nature might be utterly hopeless for a duchess, but Harry found her lack of pretension refreshing in an otherwise uncertain world.

Given the state of his arousal, he’d thought never to find sleep after he climbed in beside her. But these past weeks must have taken their toll on him. He’d slept the sleep of a babe with his wife snuggled against him.

This morning, she had been awake and dressed and ordering breakfast before he was ready to greet the light of day.

She was avoiding him like a skittish mare, sending him flirtatious looks, then skipping away. He wasn’t at all displeased with their courtship so far. It wouldn’t have been fair to bed her last night and then expect her to ride a full day’s journey today.

Seeing the familiar stand of oaks at a bend in the road, dreading what lay ahead, Harry dallied, letting the sway of Christina’s hips on the horse distract him. He was torn between opposing desires to wallow in lust or strike out across the field to relieve his tension in a good gallop.

Since clouds were forming out at sea, and he didn’t want Christina caught in a squall alone, he spurred his horse to ride beside her.

“The churchyard is in dire need of work,” she said, reining in as they passed the parish church.

Harry frowned at the overgrown graveyard and walkway. “Perhaps the village is no longer using it.”

He’d been visiting in Oxford when word had finally reached him of the tragic deaths of his father and brother. The winter roads had been impassable. By the time he’d ridden as far as London, his family had already been laid in the family mausoleum. Perhaps the vicar had used the estate chapel for the funeral.

He wished he could have attended. Some part of him still couldn’t believe he wouldn’t see stout Edward riding down the road to greet him, or that his father wouldn’t be leaning against the gatehouse when he rode up.

“The church roof looks rotted on that rear corner,” he noted, striving for unconcern. “I’ve not been this way in some years, and my father seldom wrote of village affairs.”

“It seems a shame. That’s a fine stand of rowans in the yard. I’d wager there’s been a church of some sort here since the beginning of time.”

“I believe they found traces of a Roman mosaic in the cellar. Maybe the villagers decided they didn’t wish to worship in a pagan place.” Harry didn’t believe his own words but rode on. Coming home incognito was an excellent idea, he decided. He’d sent word ahead that he’d be arriving, but everyone would be expecting a caravan of carriages. He could study the situation more closely arriving quietly on horseback.

“That must be the village.” Christina eagerly leaned forward in her seat to gaze upon the buildings at the bottom of the hill. “Will it have a stationery? I wish to keep a journal of events.”

“The mercantile used to sell books and papers. It’s a far cry from London, though,” he warned her.

She gave him one of those looks he was coming to think of as her “seer-look.” Anyone who believed in witches would certainly think himself hexed by now. Or bewitched. He thought that look enchanting.

“I love living simply. London is all artifice and not for me.”

Harry didn’t think she’d lived in the country long enough if that was her opinion, but he politely refrained from saying so.

Sheep gamboled in a nearby field, and Harry could see newly plowed furrows in the distance. The hedgerow could use some work. Perhaps the field hands were too busy with spring planting to clean up the roadside.

Christina examined the village unfolding in front of them as they rode down the hill. “How far is your home?”

“A mile or so by road. It can’t be seen until one comes upon it.” Harry frowned as the blacksmith’s cottage came into view. He remembered it as a bustling place where men gathered to discuss the weather and local gossip while Abraham mended their wagon wheels and shod their horses. The yard was empty and silent today.

The only reason he could think of for this oddly inactive street was a funeral. But if there was a funeral, everyone should be gathered at the church.

“Do you have no carpenters or thatch-menders?” Christina asked, slowing her horse to gaze around her.

“We employed several last I was here.” The wind picked up with the approaching storm, and Harry watched a loose tile slide down the vicar’s roof. The colorful flowers he remembered filling the vicarage yard had been replaced by the new green leaves of spring vegetables.

Shouldn’t there be some sign of the townspeople preparing a welcome for him? Or had it been so long since the duke had gone away that they’d forgotten the traditions he remembered from childhood?

“Is that a tavern?” Christina indicated a half-timbered Elizabethan cottage that had once housed a family of weavers.

A crudely-painted sign bearing a red lion swung over the door now. The wattle-and-daub paneling between the timbers had cracked, and gaping holes revealed the lathes inside. In the prosperous villages they had passed, failing wattle had been replaced by brick nogging or weatherboarding. Why hadn’t Sommersville prospered as those other villages had?

He could almost feel disapproval radiating off his new wife as they rode through a dirt street empty of all but a few dogs. Christina fell silent, but her head veered back and forth, taking in the deplorable state of the mercantile and grocer’s establishments, the tumble-down remnants of houses, the lone sheep tethered and grazing in someone’s front yard.

Behind the hedgerows and fences of backyards, women looked up from hanging their wash, but no one recognized him, Harry realized with relief.

Why hadn’t Jack told him that the village had come to this pass?

His steward was still in Scotland, looking for buyers for the hunting box. He’d have to have a word or two with him when he returned. Jack had told him the estate was in debt, but that was no reason for the village not to prosper. Unless the crops had failed, the tenants should have cash to spend.

He caught up with Christina after examining the dilapidated condition of a cottage. “I have distant cousins living on the estate property. I think you’ll enjoy their company. We all grew up together. My grandfather left them the use of the dower house. Margaret is perhaps a year or two older than you, and Peter is a year or two younger than me, so we should make an amiable group.”

“Your cousins have never married?”

“Not that anyone has told me, but it seems no one has told me much in some time. They came up to London several years ago, so Margaret could be presented, but she preferred the country. I don’t believe Grandfather left her a large dowry, and I assume Peter must earn his living if he wishes to have his own household. They live simply. I think they prefer the rural society of Brighton to London.”

She nodded without comment.

She was beginning to make him feel uneasy. Shouldn’t a woman chatter incessantly, or comment upon the countryside, or ply him with questions about the home that would be hers? What was happening inside that whirling dervish of a mind of hers?

“This is the drive.” After riding a mile or so from the village, Harry stopped to pull the bar to open a gate. The gatehouse appeared to be in good repair, and the gate swung readily.

Oaks lined the drive, blocking the view of the stately home ahead. Or the
once
stately home, he revised. In his youth, it had been a rambling structure of crumbling old castle harmoniously merged with a brick manor house of the 1500s. He remembered playing among the stone parapets of the castle and leaping to the slate roof to hide among the brick chimneys of the manor.

His mother had overseen the construction of a new wing and begun restoration of the old parts before she died of ague. His father had obsessively continued building and restoring after her death. Harry had left for Oxford the day his father hired workmen to dig a tunnel from the new wing to the stable so no one could see him when he left the house.

Every holiday that Harry had returned home, there had been some new and more grotesque “improvement.” He’d left for good when his father began constructing stairs to towers that no longer existed and windows overlooking a courtyard that had long since been built over. The towers that remained had doors opening onto thin air, and interior walls sported windows looking into the next room—sometimes through the ceiling.

He hadn’t been able to bear watching the deterioration of his once hearty, jovial father into the haunted architect of a nightmare.

Spring leaves whispered on the trees above them. The lush lawn spread down to the fields just as he remembered. He knew that the copse of woods on the next hill hid the remains of a Roman villa where he’d spent many a happy day hunting treasure.

He fell silent as the mansion rose into view above the trees.

Christina gasped in delight at the sight of pennants flying from a distant tower and row upon row of brick chimneys extending across a… She looked closer. A parapet? Castles had parapets. Houses had chimneys. Sommersville apparently had a lot of both.

She pondered the oddity of the brick dome over the stone portion that ought to be a castle, and the stone parapet that fronted the brick portion of the house that ought to be a Tudor mansion. She wasn’t an architect, but she’d seen many beautiful stately homes. This wasn’t one of them.

A new brick wing jutted out to the front with the evenly spaced windows and centered door in the current mode. The builder had used a tile roof to match that of the Elizabethan section, and the two parts might have blended harmoniously had the new wing not possessed an elegant portico entrance while the manor entrance was stripped to a single granite step.

Curious, she turned to Harry, but her question died on her tongue. His aura was streaked through with black. His face was a shuttered mask. He held his jaw so tautly, a muscle ticked near his eye. He rode with shoulders stiff and straight and nothing of his usual careless seat in the saddle. He looked every inch the formidable duke.

Harry did not want to go home, she concluded. From the looks of it, he ought to turn around and gallop back to London as quickly as his horse could take him. Biting her lip, looking longingly at the fascinating structure ahead, Christina halted her mount.

“If you did not wish to bring me here, you should have said so.” She tried to keep the hurt out of her voice, but she wanted honesty in their marriage.

“I know you’re used to better,” he said stiffly. “I’ll do whatever is necessary to make you comfortable here until we can return to London.”

She blinked and tried to analyze the white spike of light through his dark aura. Sometimes reading auras was even more difficult than reading expressions or tones. Perhaps she ought to just stick to words until she had a better understanding of her new husband.

“I’m comfortable in the woods.” She gestured at the copse of trees now dipping to the rush of the oncoming storm. “If it’s me you’re concerned about, you may smile now.”

That, at least, relaxed his thunderous expression. His golden-brown eyebrow shot up, and he wore that “what now” expression he sometimes adopted when she said something particularly odd.

She didn’t want Harry to think of her as an oddity, or as an “imaginative little creature.” She wanted him to see her as a woman worth loving. Uncertain how to go about that, she kicked her horse into a gallop and raced ahead of him.

To her satisfaction, he galloped his big black gelding alongside her, not pulling ahead as he could easily do but guarding her flank like an old-fashioned courtier. Delighted, she brought her mount to a dancing halt at the granite step and bestowed her best smile on him.

“I can’t believe this is my home and you’re a duke, Harry. This is like some magnificent fairy tale come true.”

He swung off his horse and stood ready to help her down. “Then let’s hope this isn’t the palace cursed by the wicked witch where the princess comes to grief. Come along, Rapunzel, let’s see what spell you can cast.”

Thrilled that he hadn’t called her foolish, Christina placed her hands on his shoulders and let him swing her down, even though she was perfectly capable of dismounting on her own. Harry’s hands tightened around her waist, and he brought her so close, she could see the whiskers on his jaw and smell the very male odor of perspiration from their long ride. She inhaled deeply, wanting to know more of his masculinity after being surrounded all her life by females. His heat felt good against the cool wind plastering her clothes to her body.

His hands lingered, and from the way he gazed into her eyes, she thought perhaps he’d kiss her again. She longed to explore the sensations he had taught her earlier, but just as he lowered his head, the front doors of the Tudor manor swung open.

“Harry! Where’s your carriage? We had no word of your arrival.”

Reluctantly pulling back from Harry’s embrace, Christina watched as a beautiful woman swept from the barren step down to the drive in a froth of lace, black silk, swinging panniers, and perfume. Behind her followed a gentleman in equally expensive mourning attire, although he wore an expression of amusement and interest instead of the sorrow of his companion. She immediately liked the looks of his reddish-blond hair and the shades of blue in his aura. She thought she could trust him.

The woman she wasn’t so certain about. There was a little too much dull gold in her aura that could indicate jealousy and selfishness, but she was radiant in black. Defensively, Christina clung to Harry’s arm.