The Scarred Earl (12 page)

‘So he believed you would behave so to a woman he supposedly loved and attacked his own brother on her say so? How could he put Corisande and all her lies and whims before his own flesh and blood?’ Persephone asked.

Dislike her as she might, common justice made Persephone admit to herself Corisande wouldn’t be the first female, or the last, to fantasise over Alex Forthin. Since the younger maids at Ashburton used to hide at the very top of the grand main staircase to gawp at Mr Alexander Forthin when he came to spend a few weeks of the school holidays with his friends, she supposed she could see why her cousin had wanted the youthful Adonis he had been back then so very badly. If she’d been a few years older,
she might have crept out of her schoolroom to join in and felt the tingle of excitement he’d provoked in her even then fire into complete infatuation.

‘You have too much faith in family loyalty, Miss Seaborne,’ he broke into her abstracted thoughts. ‘My half-brother was twelve years my senior and my mother had the bad taste to be sole heiress to her father, the Earl of Tregaron. How could poor Farrant
not
hate the only child of a woman he loathed? Our falling-out was about as inevitable as night following day and Forthins have always been very good at despising each other. Your cousin made the situation between us worse, but she certainly didn’t create it. Anyway, I decided to leave the country before Farrant could murder me in my sleep, but I truly never thought he would take out his fury on Annabelle as he appears to have done once I was gone.’

‘I doubt you were much more than a boy when you joined Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army yourself, so how could you anticipate the vile conduct of a rogue like him?’ she defended him brusquely and he fought the warm appeal of having such an unlikely champion as Jack’s fiery cousin on his side.

‘I was seventeen. I joined the first regiment I could find that was about to be posted overseas and Annabelle was only ten when I left. It never occurred to me she might have to run away before she even had a chance to come out in order to avoid his …’ He let the words trail off and shrugged, unwilling to name the beast his brother had become to Persephone.

‘Did he actually ravish the poor girl?’ she asked and did it for him.

‘No. I know he tried to, but it’s my hope and belief she ran away in time to escape that fate. Although Penbryn was still controlled by first my father, then my brother as my trustees at the time, I really thought she would be safe. I was a fool.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you to wonder if your cousin eloped?’ she asked gently, as if the notion might hurt him in some obscure way.

Alex asked himself whether she could really think he loved Annabelle as a man rather than as a cousin and supposed guardian, and tried not to spin into a fine Forthin temper at the very idea. It was a notion he’d first seen in Jack’s watchful gaze during their initial encounter this summer and
then he had found it almost laughable. He’d been home on leave only once during his ultimately ill-fated army career, when Annabelle was fifteen and beginning to blossom from schoolgirl to woman. They still had the same deep affection for each other that made them truly family as the rest of the Forthin clan could never be, but the idea of more had never occurred to either of them.

‘I suppose it’s possible,’ he mused, letting the idea simmer as he wondered why it had never occurred to him before.

‘Such a young girl, brought up so secluded on your late grandfather’s estate, might find it too terrifying to run from the danger your brother represented alone. You might do well to try to speak to any friends she managed to make, despite their efforts to keep her close, my lord. Young girls have a habit of confiding in each other that makes me glad I chose darling Jess as my bosom bow at a very early age, because I know she will never hold my secret and silly hopes and dreams over me as a less scrupulous person might do.’

‘You think one of them might be holding on to her secrets out of a sense of misguided loyalty to Annabelle even though she’s been gone so long?’

‘Having been a very young girl myself and knowing how passionately silly they can be, yes, I have to say I think it very likely,’ she replied. ‘Although we could have discussed this problem any time of the day or night, since her disappearance doesn’t seem to be a secret, could we not? I thought we risked this highly improper meeting to talk about my brother’s disappearance and not your cousin’s,’ she added, as if once more afraid his quest would override hers.

Alex found himself suffering from a snaky little glimmer of hurt that she could still suspect him of such selfish guile and did his best to squash it flat.

Little did the Earl of Calvercombe know how oddly the intimacy of a queen’s private chamber in the middle of a dark August night affected her, Persephone concluded gratefully. She knew from the sense of distance she suddenly felt yawning between them that her clumsy reminder of why they were here had hurt him. It had been meant to remind her they were not close friends and would certainly never be lovers as something in her constantly wondered if they could be, despite her proper upbringing and revulsion at apeing
Corisande’s wild example. Being closeted here in the middle of the night with him had sparked far too many wanton ideas in her silly head, but that was hardly his noble lordship’s fault.

So was it worth losing his friendship, if nothing more, to distance herself from the notorious Mrs Beddington and feel safe from the ultimate temptation he offered elegant but proper Miss Persephone Seaborne to behave very improperly indeed?

The scandal sheets thinly disguised Corisande’s identity with initials and made up comic aliases for her lovers, but society laughed at her nearly as often as they gasped at her reckless misdeeds. Persephone had tried to pity her cousin, who had made the mistake of falling for a handsome rogue at a very early age, then eloping with him. Corisande openly rejoiced when her husband drank himself into an early grave and how could anyone pity her after that? Was Persephone guilty of going to the other extreme to prove how unlike her distant relative she was? Probably, she realised, and it felt as if she had stamped on something as delicate and promising as it had been unlikely between
her and Alex Forthin and she tried not to mourn it.

Instead she did her best to douse the wisp of heat somewhere deep inside her at being here with him in the middle of the night, while she waited for him to snap back at her deliberate insult. She ordered herself to be grateful to Corisande for an example of all she least wanted to be. So she kept her eyes averted and did her best to close down the rest of her senses. If she really tried, she could refuse to take in the scent of him, the fact of him, the mere whispers of sound his soft breathing made in this luxuriously enclosed space. Somehow she had to keep to her corner of the room and avert disaster. Although disaster would require him to be as sensitive to her every move as she was to his. She could see no sign she meant more to him than a casually met female he had trouble being polite to—and shouldn’t that be a good thing?

‘I spent two days searching up hill and down dale across this county and half each of the next to try to find some hint of where your brother’s abductor has got off to and where he might have hidden him in the meantime. I found nothing but wild-goose
chases and one elusive whisper of a rumour,’ he told her, frowning as he pondered that rumour and seemed to find it very unsavoury.

‘What did the gossips have to say? Was it the story that has Jack disposing of all possible heirs one by one? I thought that piece of nonsense would die a timely death once he married Jess, since he’s now in a perfect position to raise heirs of his own without recourse to either of my brothers,’ she said wearily.

‘No, not that particular piece of spite, although I agree it’s idiotic.’

‘Which one, then?’

‘The one that insists I have spirited Marcus away myself. I’m supposedly incandescent with rage that Rich appears to have run off with my ward and cousin, and I have kidnapped your younger brother in order to flush him from cover, presumably so I can take my petty revenge on one of my oldest friends and cause his family even more anguish than they’ve suffered already.’

‘Well, I suppose it’s a plausible enough tale if—’

‘You believe it?’ he barked, hot fury in his eyes and a hard look of contempt contorting his face into a bitter mask. Now she certainly
had his full attention and it made her shudder that he could misunderstand her so badly.

‘I was going to say, “if I didn’t know you”,’ she added with as much cool dignity as she could when she wanted to slap him for believing she was taken in by a spiteful rumour.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said stiffly, a flush of colour slashed high across his cheekbones, presumably because he had to admit he was wrong to a mere woman. No, a mere lady, she reminded herself and gave him a cold look that refused to take such a half-hearted apology far.

‘I don’t know you though, do I? I doubt anyone truly does and I’m sure that’s how you like it.’

‘What’s to know?’ he said with an impatient shrug.

It told her he believed he could drop out of the hearts and minds of his friends without more than the odd speculation of ‘Whatever became of that reclusive young lord we once thought so fine and promising?’ She passionately wanted to disagree.

‘I can hardly decide where to begin,’ she argued. ‘You have to trust someone or you will end up as a recluse. Someone has to
know you, my lord, however little you might want them to. You could start with telling Jack what you went through in India, since he’s a man and your friend and you need to speak of it to someone. Next you could credit my mother and both my brothers and sisters with genuinely worrying about you when you hide away in that castle of yours as if nobody in the world cares about you. You were Jack and Rich’s best friend when you were younger and nothing like as cynical, my lord. That means a lot to a Seaborne, even if it’s apparently of very little matter to a For thin.’

‘And what do I mean to you, Miss Persephone Seaborne, since you have left yourself off that list of my well-wishers and friends?’ he asked silkily and suddenly the silence in this inward-looking room was alive with questions and answers she dare not explore.

‘You’re a gentleman of contrary temper and a fathomless mystery to me, my lord,’ she made herself joke lightly.

‘Much as you are to me, Miss Persephone Seaborne,’ he returned grimly.

‘Am I?’ she squeaked, shocked to find she passionately wanted to be more than a closed book or a bad-tempered virago to the aloof
lord impossibly handsome young Alex Forthin had become.

‘You are, Persephone,’ he replied implacably, his gaze steady on hers.

‘I thought you were completely indifferent to me,’ she managed lamely.

‘Impossible—no adult male with red blood in his veins could be indifferent to the Divine Persephone.’

She flinched, unable to hide her instinctive response to that hated nickname on his lips. ‘You have no idea how deeply I wish my parents had named me Jane, or Ann, or Mary, or something equally simple,’ she managed to say almost carelessly.

‘Then you would have been the Divine Jane, or Ann or Mary, even if I have to admit that it sounds a lot less goddess-like. A name is just a name, sweetheart. No female with your allure and beauty could escape the notice of the opposite sex, even if she wasn’t named for spring herself.’

To Persephone, who had grown up surrounded with images of Seaborne women and the women Seaborne men wanted and captivated as their wives, her looks were another version of a common set of family features. It had never occurred to her growing
up among them to think herself a spectacular specimen.

‘I’m not particularly beautiful and certainly not your sweetheart,’ she replied, wishing she didn’t care so much how she appeared to this cynical mystery of a man.

It felt as if they were walking on pins round each other in the dimly lit closeness of this intimate space. Hidden from the common rules and regulations of the world, she felt isolated with him by the night and everyone else’s slumbers, as if only their thoughts and actions mattered in a sleeping world.

‘You are possibly the loveliest woman I ever beheld and any man can dream of until he drives himself nigh mad with longing. Even you can’t stop one doing so about you all too often, Miss Seaborne,’ he replied and there was something very serious in his steady look that made her heart thump heavily, then race on.

‘Did you do that when you were held and tortured and endured all the other shameful mistreatment they wreaked on you, Alex?’ she asked painfully, somehow unable to halt the question on her lips and wondering at herself for wishing he had.

‘Not then,’ he said with a shake of his head
that spoke of honesty and regret. ‘Don’t forget you were a very cross little schoolgirl when I left for the army, forbidden to play with your brothers, cousin and friend and ordered to attend to her lessons, Persephone. I dreamt of someone very like you are now—a someone who could reach inside my tortured heart and join her clean, bright soul to my bitter one and insist on doing me good, despite all they did to me there to make me hate. I was getting ready to dream of you and only you every night from the moment I finally did lay eyes on you as a grown-up goddess. I’ve got so into the way of it now that I don’t think even your displeasure will stop me doing it any more.’

‘Maybe I don’t want to stop you,’ she murmured and suddenly found it impossible to meet his gaze full on without a host of huge possibilities humming between them like warm lightning after all.

‘A man-made monster like me?’ he questioned roughly, as if he actually believed he was hideous when he was so far from it she was shocked into meeting his eyes with far too much of her own feelings on show.

‘To me you’re just a grown-up and infinitely more powerful version of the youthful
and arrogant Alex Forthin I first met, my lord,’ she assured him, passionate sincerity in her gaze as she dwelt on his slightly imperfect classical perfection and smiled tenderly at his skewed opinion of himself to make him see how wrong he was. ‘Wouldn’t you have been a little too perfect without that?’ she asked him with an airy gesture at the fine scarring he seemed to find so burdensome.