A Summer to Remember (14 page)

“Sometimes,” he said, “love dies.”

She did not believe that. Certainly it was not true in her case. But there was no point in feeling guilty. He
did
have a right to choose his own bride, and she could see that without this temporary betrothal he would be trapped indeed. This was the very reason for their bargain.

“What happened to your younger brother?” she asked.

He abruptly lowered his foot to the ground and turned away to bend over a nearby bloom as if he were examining it closely.

“War happened,” he said after a lengthy silence. “He insisted, against everyone’s advice and pleas, including my own, that our father purchase a commission for him in my regiment so that he could follow me to the Peninsula. The military life is the very last thing Syd was cut out for, but he can be remarkably stubborn when he chooses to be. I promised my mother faithfully—and foolishly, of course—that I would look after him and protect him from harm. Less than a year later I brought him home more than half dead after the surgeons and the subsequent fever had finished with him. It was touch and go whether he would survive the journey. But I was determined that if he was going to die, at least it would be at home. I can be stubborn too.”

She could just imagine how dreadful he must have felt. “But surely you do not blame yourself in any way,” she said. “In the heat of battle it must have been impossible for you to protect him.”

“It did not happen in battle,” he said curtly.

She waited for him to explain, but he said no more.

“Did anyone else blame you?” she asked. “Did
he
?”

“Everyone, including me. The judgment was unanimous.” He turned toward her suddenly and she saw the flash of his teeth in the darkness. He took her hand and drew her to her feet. “But that is all ancient history, Lauren, best forgotten. Syd survived. So did I. All is well that ends well, to coin a phrase that someone else must have coined before me. In the meantime we are wasting a perfectly decent moonlit night and the opportunity for romance that Grandmama has sanctioned.”

Best forgotten.
But it had not been forgotten by either brother. Or resolved. It must have happened the same summer he had fallen in love with Lady Freyja and then fought his elder brother when she had accepted his offer instead. Little wonder he had been so upset, if both his brothers had turned against him. And his father too. Yet it was understandable that the earl had sent him away—he had caused both his brothers physical harm.

Now he had come back to Alvesley, and as far as she could see all the old hurts were still festering. And now they had been made worse by this business of a marriage contract and his betrothal to her. What a mess she had walked into. Would she be able to do anything to put any of it right?

But this was not the time for such thoughts. She had not diverted his mind or his intentions after all. He meant to kiss her. She turned away from him, drawing her hand free of his. There was no need for this. This was not what she had meant.

But he stepped up behind her, wrapped his arms about her waist from behind, and drew her against him until the back of her head was nestled against his shoulder. She could feel all of his warm man’s body against the curves of her back and thighs. And it felt good, she admitted with an inward sigh of resignation. It gave the illusion of romance, the illusion of closeness, of intimacy. So much of life, by its very nature, had to be lived alone. Some of it—too much—in loneliness.

She
had
asked for adventure. Impulsively, without any forethought. She had never known that she wanted it. And what was it exactly she
had
wanted? What had she meant by adventure? This? Had she wanted to be kissed again? To be held again? She had never craved physical closeness with any man. Oh, with Neville, perhaps. But with him it had been more . . . affection, companionship, comfort that she had sought. She did not know what made life a vivid experience for some people—like Lily. That was what she had wanted to discover.

Lauren closed her eyes as the old unwilling hatred washed over her. What did Lily have that she did not? What did Lily know?

She turned in Kit’s arms, setting a little distance between them as she did so. She looked into his shadowed face and saw that he was watching her closely. She could never be like Lily. She could never be comfortable with the sort of embrace that had happened at Vauxhall. She was afraid that all those unfamiliar feelings would overwhelm her—and more afraid that they would not, that she would feel nothing if he kissed her again, that she would discover with absolute certainty that she was frigid. That he would turn away from her with distaste. That he would regret his bargain with her almost before it had begun. That she would know beyond any doubt that she was forever unlovable, undesirable, unwanted.

“No, no,” he said softly, leaning his head a little closer, his hands at his back, “don’t retreat into that iceberg. I have worked out that it is a mere defense, you see. I am not going to hurt you. I am not even going to kiss you, in fact. I have changed my mind.”

How absurd now to feel her heart plummet with disappointment and humiliation. It was better that neither of them discover the truth about her. But—he did not even
want
to kiss her?

Both his hands came up to unbutton her cloak, and one of them tossed it onto the bench where she had been sitting. The night air was cool on her bare arms. His hands, in contrast, seemed to brand her with heat as he moved his palms slowly downward from the scalloped hems of her short sleeves to the backs of her hands. He clasped them as she shivered, curling his thumbs into her palms, and raised them to set on his shoulders. Then he rested his hands lightly on her hips.

“Lean your body against mine,” he told her. “From shoulders to knees.”

It sounded shocking indeed—the more so as she was the one required to make the move, not him. There was no suggestion of coercion in his hands. He would not force the issue, she knew. She would not have that excuse. She felt a sharp, pulsing ache in her lower abdomen and swayed toward him, bracing herself with her hands until the tips of her breasts touched his coat and then pressed against it. She closed her eyes and set her forehead against his shoulder. She could feel his muscled hardness and his body heat with all of her upper body. She could smell his musky cologne and the very maleness of him.

He still did not move. His hands remained on her hips.

She leaned her thighs against his, and her abdomen and hips followed. His hands slid around to her back then, but lightly, without threat. She could have escaped at any moment.

He did no more than that. Neither did she. But her body felt and adjusted itself to the planes of his, soft femininity against hard masculinity, while her emotions were in turmoil. Behind her closed eyelids she could see him as he had appeared in the park that first day, stripped to the waist, splendidly muscled in his chest, shoulders, and arms, slender hipped and lithe in his
skin-tight breeches and boots. Vital and virile and male. The same body against which she now leaned. She could hear his heartbeat. She thought she might well be on fire.

Neither of them moved for what seemed a long time. But she knew one thing before she finally stepped away and bent to pick up her cloak. She had no experience with such matters, but she understood that physically at least he desired her. And she had discovered something else too. With her whole body—with her hot cheeks, with her tender, swollen breasts and pulsing womb and slightly trembling thighs—she felt her femininity. She knew that despite the discipline of a lifetime, she was not just a lady. She was also a woman.

He did not touch her or say anything, for which fact she was enormously grateful. She turned after a few moments to look at him, her cloak clutched in one hand. He was standing on the exact same spot.

“So,” she said in an attempt to restore some semblance of normalcy. “Your side of the bargain has been kept for one day. But I have mine to keep too, my lord. It would not do for us to be absent from the house any longer.”

She wished she could see his face more clearly as he regarded her in silence for a few moments. Then he bent to take her cloak from her hand, wrapped it about her shoulders and buttoned it at the neck, and offered
his arm.

“Yes,” he said, his voice brisk and cheerful, “duty accomplished for one day. Tomorrow I will apply myself again. We will ride. Early. At sunrise.”

She fought disappointment again at his tone. Could he not have said something a little warmer, more personal? Had she only imagined . . . ? But it did not matter.

“I very rarely ride,” she said. “And I almost never rise early.”

“Tomorrow,” he said, “you will do both. I am going to give you an enjoyable summer if I kill both of us in the process.”

“How absurd,” she said.

“Tomorrow morning early,” he told her as they made their way along the terrace. “Appear voluntarily—and alone—or I will come into your bedchamber and get you myself.”

“You would not dare,” she said indignantly.

He looked at her sidelong. “That is one word that is inadvisable to use in my hearing,” he said, “unless you are quite prepared for me to take you up on it. I would certainly dare.”

“You are no gentleman,” she told him.

“Why is it,” he asked her as they ascended the marble steps, “that you still say that as if you had just now made the discovery?”

9

K
it was out in the stables when Lauren appeared there. It was only a little after six o’clock in the morning. Before leaving the house he had sent his valet to instruct her maid to wake her, but she must have been up already to have arrived here so soon—and looking like elegance itself in a forest green riding habit with a matching hat set just so on her carefully styled dark hair, its lavender feather curling invitingly about one ear.

He had been looking forward to going to wake her himself. He
would
have dared. Her outrage would have been something to behold.

“Good morning.” He grinned at her. “I have had the quietest mare in the stables saddled for you. The only tamer animal would have to be lame in all four legs. I will be riding beside you. You have nothing whatsoever to fear.”

“I am not afraid of riding,” she said. “I just do not enjoy it as an exercise. I resent this, you know. You are supposed to give me an enjoyable summer—enjoyable to
me
—not force me into doing things I distinctly dislike, like rising at this hour to ride.”

“No, no,” he said, chuckling. “I promised you a
memorable
summer, and I always keep my promises. But if it will make you feel better, I can tell you that we will be riding only a short distance. I have something altogether more pleasurable planned for you. We are going to swim.”

“What?”
She looked disdainfully at him instead of recoiling in horror as he had expected. It was very difficult to ruffle the outer feathers of Lauren Edgeworth. Good Lord, he had been aroused by her last evening, and she had been standing flush against him and must have realized it unless she was more of an innocent than she could possibly be at her age. Yet she had appeared as cool as a spring breeze when she drew away from him and informed him that his duty was done for one day. “I absolutely do not swim, my lord.”

“Kit.”

“Kit. I do not swim,
Kit
. That is my final word.”

“Two strokes and a bubble?” he asked sympathetically, cupping his hands for her booted foot and tossing her up into the saddle. “You sink like a stone?”

“I really would not know,” she said, arranging her skirts and sitting so gracefully that she looked as if she might have been born in the saddle. “I have never tried.”

Never tried.
Good Lord! What kind of childhood had she had? Or had she skipped childhood altogether? Perhaps she had been born a lady.

“Then you will start this morning,” he told her, swinging up onto his own mount and leading the way out of the cobbled yard. “I will be your instructor.”

“I will not.” She rode after him. “And you will not.”

If Vauxhall had not happened, he might have been repelled by her. So coldly dignified. So perfectly ladylike. So lacking in spirit and humor. So absolutely joyless. Though even then, perhaps, he would not be able to resist goading her. But Vauxhall
had
happened. And he knew that somewhere beneath layers and layers of cool decorum, behind mask upon mask of gentility, lay a woman desperate to come out into the light but not knowing the way. Like a child waiting to be born but clinging to the familiar, confining safety of the womb.

Keeping his promise to her was the one redeeming act he could do in his life. One small act, which would bring him no personal absolution, but which might set a fellow mortal free. He could teach her to embrace joy. It was something he could never do for himself, though his acquaintances might be skeptical if ever he were to say so. He wore very different masks from Lauren’s. But it was possible to teach what one could not practice. It must be possible.

He led the way down the drive and across the bridge before turning to his right onto the path that followed the river and then skirted the bank of the lake. The trees were denser on this side than on the side closer to the house. Sometimes the path wove deeper into the wood so that the water was lost to sight altogether for a minute or two. He stopped at one such point and looked back to make sure Lauren was having no trouble following.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

She looked reproachfully at him. “I think,” she said, “that all civilized mortals are still in their beds at this hour. And I seem to remember that you promised to show me the formal gardens today, not the wild woods. If this is your idea of giving me enjoyment, I made a sad bargain.”

He was getting under her skin, then. The oh-so-proper Miss Lauren Edgeworth had allowed annoyance to creep into her voice. Kit grinned.

His destination was the temple folly. It had been built close to the water’s edge years ago for picturesque effect, mainly for viewing from the opposite bank, where its marble perfection could be seen reflected in the lake on a calm day. But it also had a practical function as a resting place for those energetic enough to stroll all about the lake’s perimeter. It had been used by his brothers and his boyhood self as a bathing hut. Bathing had always been permitted in the lake—provided they were supervised by an adult. The catch had been that only very rarely had any adult been available and willing to accompany them, and even then there had always been an adult voice yelling at them not to dive off tree branches, not to swim underwater, not to go out of their depth, not to ambush one another or squirt water at one another or pull one another under. So they had bathed here, where they were out of sight from the house and were likely to remain undetected.

He dismounted when they reached the folly and tethered his horse to a tree branch. Then he lifted Lauren down before untying the bundle that he had secured behind his saddle. He led the way around to the front of the folly and up the shallow flight of marble steps to open back the double doors beyond four pillars.

A wooden bench lined the three interior walls. The floor was tiled, the walls plain except for an intricately carved frieze, across which naked, curly haired youths chased fleet-footed nymphs through unlikely groves of riotous flowers and ripe fruit. He and his brothers had more than once stood on the bench in order to ogle and snicker over the nymphs, whose flimsy, diaphanous garments hid nothing whatsoever of the feminine charms beneath. Small wonder that the youths were in eternal pursuit.

“Have a seat,” he offered, and Lauren sat against the inside wall, facing out toward the lake view, her feet set neatly side by side, her hands cupped one on top of the other in her lap. Kit set his bundle down and seated himself on one of the side benches. She looked severe and somewhat brittle.

“Newbury Abbey is close to the sea, is it not?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “The beach is part of the park.”

“But you never swam there?”

She shook her head. “I have never liked the beach,” she said. “Sand gets in one’s shoes and clothes, and the salt wind off the water dries one’s complexion. And the sea itself is . . . wild.”

“Wild.” He looked curiously at her. “You do not like wild nature?” Did not everyone love the sea? Was there really, perhaps, nothing but primness to the very core of her?

“Not the sea.” She gazed out at the lake, which this early in the morning was like a smooth mirror reflecting the rays of the sun. “It is so vast, so unpredictable, so uncontrollable, so . . . cruel. Nothing comes back from the sea.”

What or who had not come back? Had someone she knew drowned? And then he had an inkling.

“When your mother and your stepfather went away on their wedding trip,” he asked her, “did they go overseas?”

She turned her head to look at him, rather startled, as if he had changed the subject.

“They went to France first,” she said, “during a lull in the wars, and then gradually south and east. They were in India the last time I ever heard from them.”

The sea had not brought her mother back.

“I am told that my uncle and aunt took me to see them on their way,” she said. “Apparently I waved my handkerchief until the ship had disappeared beyond the horizon. It must have taken a very long time. But I have no memory of the event. I was only three years old.”

No
memory? Or a memory pushed so deep that it could not surface into her conscious mind?

The sea had never brought her mother back.

But this was not the sea, and he had not brought her here to make her melancholy. He got to his feet and stood in the doorway, looking out.

“Did none of your childhood playmates swim either?” he asked her. “Even in that pool you told me about?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Neville and Gwen both did. It was forbidden, of course, but whenever they arrived back at the house with wet hair on a particularly hot and sunny day Aunt Clara would pretend not to notice and my uncle would purse his lips and ask if it was raining.”

“But you never broke the rules yourself?”

“It was different for me,” she said.

He looked back over his shoulder. “How so?”

“I was not their child,” she explained. “I was not even a blood relation. I was a stranger foisted upon them by circumstances.”

He felt angry on her behalf. “They treated you like an outsider, then?” he asked.

“No.” Her answer was very firm. “They showered me with love. They treated me no differently than the way they treated their own. I was as much Neville’s sister as Gwen was. And Gwen and I were bosom friends almost from the day of my arrival. You must have seen yesterday that Aunt Clara and Gwen both hold me in affection. They came
here
with me. But they . . . Well, I owed them so much, you see. How could I disobey my uncle and aunt? How could I not every day of my life do everything in my power to show my gratitude, to prove myself worthy of their affection?”

He believed that Lauren Edgeworth had just presented him with an answer to some of the questions he had about her.
This
was why she had shaped herself into being the woman she was—no, not woman.
Lady
was a far more appropriate word. In order to earn acceptance and love? This was why her whole life until a year and a half ago had been devoted to Kilbourne, who apparently had told her when he went off to the Peninsula that she was not to wait for him? Because her adopted parents had planned a match between them? Because in a marriage to Kilbourne she had foreseen final acceptance, final security?

But that security had been cruelly destroyed.

Was she in fact, despite all her control and dignity, the most insecure person he had ever known?

“Do you have much to do with your father’s family?” he asked her.

“No. None whatsoever,” she said. “After my mother had been gone for a year or so, my uncle wrote to ask if my own family wished me returned to them until she
did
come home. Viscount Whitleaf, my uncle, who succeeded to the title after my father’s death, said no. But I did not know this until after I wrote to him myself when I was eighteen and he wrote back to tell me that—that it was a practice of his never to encourage hangers-on or indigent relatives.”

Kit stared at her over his shoulder, but she was looking at the hands spread in her lap, as she had done at Vauxhall, he remembered.
What the devil?
He certainly wished he had known this two weeks ago.

“My grandfather would have taken me, I believe, if he had been asked,” she said, looking up at him again, a slightly defiant tilt to her chin, as if she expected him to argue the point. “But he would have thought, correctly, that I was better off with children of roughly my own age.”

Galton had never offered to take her, then?

Kit grinned at her suddenly. “We are wasting the best part of the morning,” he said, “when the water is at its calmest and freshest.”

“Go and enjoy it, then,” she said somewhat tartly. “I will sit here and watch you, though I would ask that you not remove your shirt. It would be most improper.”

He laughed outright. “For propriety’s sake,” he said, “I must bathe in my coat and boots, then, and you in your habit and feathered hat? We would ruin perfectly decent clothes and look like a couple of drowned rats at the end of it all.”

“I am not bathing at all,” she said. “You may get that notion out of your head, my lord. And you might have the decency to do that outside where I will not have to watch you.”

He had stripped off his coat and flung it onto the bench. He was tugging at one of his boots.

“What are you more afraid of?” he asked. “Getting your toes wet? Or allowing me to see them bare?”

Her cheeks turned slightly pinker. “I am not afraid of anything,” she said.

“Good.” He tossed his one boot under the bench and tackled the other. “You have five minutes to get down to your shift. After that you are going to be tossed in, ready or not.”

“What?”

“Four minutes and fifty seconds.”

“My sh-shift?” Her cheeks were flaming.

“I suppose,” he said, “you are wearing one. I perceive a slight problem if you are not. I may not be able to restrain my blushes.”

She stood up, all polar righteousness as his second boot disappeared beneath the bench. He was unbuttoning his waistcoat.