Unmasked (25 page)

“You did not forbid her to tell anyone.”

“No.” Mari sighed. “But I trusted her…”

“And she trusted me,” Nick said. “I swear, I will not hurt you, Mari. I came only to talk.”

The way he said her name, with its caressing undertone, did nothing to help Mari’s self-possession.

“If you did not call at the gate, how did you get in?” She could scarcely believe that her haven had turned into a trap.

Nick laughed. “I climbed over the wall.”

Mari felt genuinely shocked. “You broke into a nunnery? This is not the Middle Ages, Major Falconer!”

Nick shifted slightly. The way he was standing, with his broad shoulders propped against the panels of the door, suggested that he would not be moving anytime soon. Mari noted his tough, uncompromising stance with misgiving.

“As I said, I wanted to talk to you. If that was what it took…”

“You risk a lot simply to talk to me.” Mari turned away. “I thought we had said all that we had to say to one another.”

“That is where we differ.” Nick straightened, moving toward her with deliberation. “I never thought everything was finished between us.”

His confidence shook her. Mari took a step back and almost tripped over the table. He put out a hand and caught her arm. His touch seemed to sear her skin and she pulled her arm away.

“You promised not to press me for the truth until I was ready to speak with you,” she said, stiffly. “If you have changed your mind, say your piece now and go.”

Nick shook his head. “No. Not here. This is too important. We need to talk properly and to have sufficient time. So you are coming with me.”

Outrage flared through her. “I am not!”

He shook with silent laughter. “Mrs. Osborne, you are. Surely you do not think I have gone to all this trouble just to leave you behind?”

He seemed so sure of himself and there was something different about him, she thought. She struggled to work out what it was. Throughout their previous acquaintance he had always had this self-assurance. That had not changed. The difference now, she realized suddenly, was that he seemed in some way more certain, more confident of her. It was almost as though…

“You know,” she said, on a whisper.

A shadow touched his face. “I know some things. Other things you are going to tell me. Come on.”

She folded her arms. “No. I came here for some peace. Leave me alone.”

“You came here because you were running away.”

It was brutal but true. She glared at him.

“Mari—” His tone had softened, again with that undertone of intimacy.

“Mrs. Osborne,” Mari snapped. “I never made you free of my name no matter how willfully you used it!”

“Mrs. Osborne—” Nick spoke with immaculate courtesy but his gaze slid over her, reminding her of everything they had shared “—this is not a matter for discussion. Either you come back with me of your own free will or I carry you out of here.”

“Back?”

“Back home. To Peacock Oak.”

Mari raised her chin and stared at him. “And how do you intend to persuade me? Or is that not a matter for discussion, either? You will simply carry me over the wall with you?”

Nick laughed. “Once I was on the inside I opened a gate. I can easily carry you through that.”

He could, too. She knew it. And he would do. She could see it in his eyes.

She could still hear the notes of the music from the church. If she screamed loudly enough, someone would surely hear her. It would cause a huge fuss and a scandal. More importantly, it would be poor recompense to bring so much trouble on Mount Grace when they had given her refuge.

She teetered on the edge of capitulation and saw him watching her deliberations with quizzical amusement.

“I did not have you down as a man who would abduct a woman from a convent, Major Falconer,” she said. “It seems I do not know you very well at all.”

He laughed again and Mari felt the attraction, ruthless, breathtaking. “You’ll know me better hereafter,” he said, and it sounded like a promise. “So? Are you coming with me?”

Mari felt a rush of panic. The nerves skittered in her stomach. This was all too sudden. “No—”

He laughed, took her wrist and pulled her to him, then slid an arm around her waist as he opened the door.

“Too bad,” he said. “I did warn you.”

The corridor was empty but for a convent servant hurrying along at the end of the passage, the slap of her sandals loud in the silence. She did not see them.

“If I screamed—” Mari began.

“Don’t.” He slanted a look down at her and she remembered someone—Hester?—saying that Nick Falconer had a reputation for ruthlessness. She did not doubt it for one second.

He picked her up. His arms were as strong as steel bands, her cheek was against his shoulder and it was the work of seconds to carry her down the corridor and out into the gardens, bundle her through the door in the wall and inside the carriage that was waiting on the other side. Mari waited for the cries of shock and outrage behind them, but they never came. No one had noticed. She had been carried off in broad daylight, and
no one had noticed.
She felt a little faint.

Nick banged on the roof and the carriage moved off.

“Have you done this before?” she demanded.

He looked pleased with himself. Too damned pleased. She felt annoyed.

“No,” he said. “It was a first for me.”

He was watching her with the same closed, thoughtful expression that he had worn before. Her stomach curled, melted with a mixture of nervousness and longing.

I know some things. Other things you are going to tell me.

She knew she would. They had gone too far now for lies and deception. Whatever it was that he had discovered in London put further pretence beyond her. He had gone to the trouble of fetching her from the nunnery and she sensed he would now go to any lengths to have the truth from her. So when they arrived back in Peacock Oak, she would tell him everything. Until then she had a little time, a little privacy.

“If you do not wish to speak until we are back in Peacock Oak,” she said, with dignity, “I will go to sleep. Excuse me, Major Falconer.”

N
ICK SAT AND WATCHED
Mari sleep all the way home. She slept neatly, precisely, curled up like a cat. He recognized this quality in her now. It was a defense in a way, an orderly way of keeping the rest of the world at arm’s length. Her head rested against the cushion and her eyelashes fanned across her cheek, dark against the pallor. Her breast rose and fell with the rhythm of her breathing. She looked restrained, collected, all that was buttoned up and tidy. He remembered the wild, passionate goddess swimming in the fountain, he remembered unfastening those buttons and exposing her nakedness and he wanted to tear away the layers and reveal the woman beneath, the woman he knew was there, if only he could find her. He knew now that she was neither the harlot from the tavern, Rashleigh’s shameless mistress nor the prim and respectable widow of Peacock Oak, but a woman who was a complex mixture of feelings and emotions. It was that woman he wanted to set free, if he could.

She moved slightly and made a soft noise of contentment in her sleep and his heart squeezed with a tenderness he could not deny. He was no youth; he was a man of two and thirty and he understood his own feelings too well for self-delusion.

He wanted Mari Osborne very much. He desired her. That was easy to understand. The awareness between them had been explosive from the very first. He wanted to bed her and explore every inch of that pale, voluptuous body until she was sated and he was, too.

But he also cared about what happened to her and that was less easy to explain. When he had left London, he had planned only to deliver the manumission form into her hands and finally hear the true story of her relationship with Rashleigh. Or so he had told himself. Yet the urgency with which he had traveled to Peacock Oak, the utter determination he had felt to take her from the convent and bring her back with him, the tenderness he felt as he looked on her now, argued a deeper and more complicated emotion than he had previously acknowledged. And it had taken root much, much earlier, when he had been in Peacock Oak before and seen Mari’s courage and her strength, her generosity and her compassion. It was the same feeling that had prompted him to protect her against Lord Hawkesbury’s investigation, to offer her his help.

He loved her.

He thought about Anna then and about the way in which he had loved her in his youth, more as a friend than as a wife. He had loved her but he had not been in love with her. He had taken her for granted, betrayed her, failed her in so many ways. And perhaps his absolute determination to put matters right for Mari was in some sense the result of his failure to give of his best to Anna. He had become a better man through knowing her, but the price had been too high. He hoped fervently that Anna would somehow know of his remorse and could forgive him. One day, perhaps, he could forgive himself.

They were reaching the outskirts of Peacock Oak when Mari stirred. She sat up and rubbed her eyes and looked out of the window as the last of the evening sun gilded the hillside. The road was winding down over the fells with the village in the dip below them and the open fields on either side. And suddenly, out of nowhere, Nick heard the sound of the hunt, and remembered Laura Cole saying that they were meeting and that she could not ride out with them because of her injury. He heard the raucous blare of the horn and the frantic yelping of the hounds as they streaked past in the field beside the road, with the riders pounding along behind them. The hunt in full flight was primitive, a wild thing barely under control. Nick sat still for a moment and watched them pour over the side of the valley and disappear. The baying of the hounds hung on the air, then died away, an echo around the valley until the rising breeze swept in to take its place. The air was hot and heavy still, even though it was evening now.

Then he heard Mari make a sound. It was halfway between a gasp and a sob. Her fingers were clenched so tight on the windowsill of the carriage that he could see the bone-white of her knuckles. She sat frozen still.

Nick put a hand out toward her.

“Mrs. Osborne?” he said. “What is it? Are you unwell?”

He stopped. She had made no sign that she had even heard him. She sat, braced and still, her arms wrapped tight around her now as though defending herself from the world.

Nick moved closer and put a hand on her arm. “Mrs. Osborne? Marina?”

This time she turned to look at him. Her face was so white it was almost transparent. She was shaking. Her eyes were blind.

“The hunt…” she whispered.

“They have gone now,” Nick said. “It is quite safe. I know it appears wild, but—”

He stopped. Once again she did not appear to hear him. Concerned, he moved across to the seat beside her and put both hands on her upper arms. He could feel the trembling that racked her body.

“Mari—”

She looked up into his face and the shock hit him in the stomach like a physical blow. She was terrified. He remembered suddenly the evening in Laura Cole’s drawing room when Mari had said that the hunt was barbaric and that he could have no idea what it was to be hunted. And further back in his memory, like the echo of a nightmare, he could hear his cousin Rashleigh’s drawling voice one day when he had been deriding Nick’s work.

Fighting for the forces of justice, Nick? Why bother? It’s such a bore. Summary justice is more my style. If someone angers me, I set the dogs on them and let them tear the scoundrels apart!

He looked down into Mari’s face and the final pieces of the jigsaw slowly came together to form the most appalling whole.

“Mari,” he said, and his voice was suddenly very rough. “He sent the dogs to hunt you down, didn’t he? Rashleigh
hunted
you. Tell me—” Suddenly it felt so urgent that he wanted to shake the truth from her, but he forced himself to be patient. “For God’s sake, Mari, tell me what happened!”

She closed her eyes for a second and he wondered if she had even heard him. But then she opened them again and looked at him, and her gaze was so clear and dark and soft that he caught his breath.

“It is true,” she said quietly. “You are quite correct, Major Falconer. I ran away from your cousin and he set his pack of dogs on me.”

T
HE FIRST FAT DROPS
of rain had started to fall as Nick dismissed the carriage and helped Mari into the shuttered hall of Peacock Cottage. Mari moved slowly, as though she was sleepwalking, and when Nick led her into the drawing room and closed the door behind them, she made no demur. She felt very tired, as though she had been traveling for a long time with no rest. She sat down on the blue velvet sofa and watched Nick go across to the table, light the candles and pour her a glass of brandy.

“I have given all the servants leave until I returned from Mount Grace,” she said suddenly. “There is no one here, though I think that Frank may be working in the gardens during the day….”

“Don’t worry about that for now.” Nick came across and sat beside her, handing her the brandy glass, but when she tried to hold it, it almost slipped from her grip. Her fingers felt cold, nerveless, and his hand closed around hers to guide the glass to her lips. Her teeth chattered against the rim and then the sting of the spirit was in her throat and it warmed her and she felt a little stronger.

“How are you?” Nick asked, and she looked at him, and it was as though all the emotions that she had repressed for so long flared into vivid life.

She loved him.

She had been in danger of falling in love with him all along. She had wanted to trust him, wanted to love him. And now that there were to be no more secrets between them, now that she knew him to be the man she had always wanted him to be, she could resist her feelings no longer.

But the thought frightened her. She had never been in love before and it felt dangerous and new, tempting but far, far too risky for her.