Almost a Lady (15 page)

“She wouldn’t have subjected Arabella to this agony,” Jack stated.

Sir Mark nodded. “No, she wouldn’t.”

“Or her parents either,” Jack said.

“Probably not.” Sir Mark sighed heavily. “I don’t know what to think.”

The sound of the great knocker rumbled through the silence and then they heard Arabella’s voice. She sounded puzzled, then surprised. She came into the drawing room, looking at a letter in her hand. “This is very odd. Some man just delivered this for me.”

“A postman, a courier?”

“He wasn’t dressed like either,” she said. “He was very elegant in green silk and he was riding a handsome bay. He didn’t speak like a postman either.” She took up a slim paper knife from the dainty French secretaire and slit the wafer, unfolding the sheet. Her mouth opened. Slowly she looked up.

“It’s from Meg.”

“What?” Sir Mark bounded forward. “Let me see.” He almost snatched the sheet from her. He stared down at it in some degree of incomprehension. “What does this mean? It’s not Meg’s handwriting.”

“May I, sir?” Jack held out his hand. He too stared at the rather masculine script, then looked across at his wife. Her face was radiant with relief, but there was something else in the tawny eyes. A mischievous amusement that he knew well. He looked again at the letter. It read:
An accident befell me but I’m safe and well.
In the top corner was inscribed the single word
Gondolier
.

“Why is it so short?” Sir Mark demanded. “And why did she not write it herself? Can we believe this?”

“Oh, yes, we can believe it,” Arabella said flatly. “Meg may not have penned it but she had a hand in its wording, I can promise you.”

“I suspect by its brevity and the unknown handwriting that the note came via a rather unorthodox carrier,” Jack mused, turning the paper over to examine the back. “It reads as if it was originally written in code . . . to be carried by a pigeon for instance.”

“Good God, man, what’s my daughter doing with a pigeon?” Sir Mark shook his head in disbelief.

“I suspect only Meg can tell us that,” Jack said. “Or maybe Arabella can?” He raised an eyebrow at his wife, convinced now that she knew something the rest of them didn’t.

“I have no idea,” Arabella said, trying to keep a note of slightly hysterical laughter out of her voice. “But at least we know she’s all right, and I’m sure that whatever the accident was, it’s prevented her from coming home immediately. So we must deal quickly with any possible gossip. But first I’ll go and tell Lady Barratt the good news.” She whisked herself out of the room before her inconveniently perspicacious husband could ask any more awkward questions.

It was over an hour before she was able to leave a somewhat reassured but still very bewildered Lady Barratt. She closed the door to the Chinese Bedchamber softly behind her and then turned around slowly. Jack was lounging in a window embrasure next to the chamber door, his arms folded, and there was an uncomfortable gleam in his gray eyes.

“So, madam wife, what is the significance of a gondolier?”

“Oh, hush,” she said, looking around. “Sir Mark could appear at any moment. It’s a miracle he didn’t notice himself, I’m sure Meg meant it for my eyes only.”

“Maybe so, but you’ll share it with me.” It was an uncompromising statement.

Arabella covered her mouth to stifle a laugh. “Come away then,” she said. “I’ll tell you in my boudoir.”

He followed her into a pretty sitting room at the rear of the house. The windows were open onto the small town garden below and the faint sounds of waves breaking on the stones of the beach drifted in. Arabella fussed with a bowl of heavy-headed peonies on the round Chippendale table in front of the window while Jack waited with every appearance of patience.

“Do you have the note?” she asked.

“No, I didn’t feel I could take it from her father,” he said. “But it matters little. You know what it said. I know what it said. Explain
gondolier
.”

Arabella brushed a wavy lock of dark hair from her forehead. “It means that Meg is in the middle of some kind of romantic adventure,” she said.

Jack stared at her, anger flaring in his eyes, a muscle twitching in his cheek. “So she left on purpose . . . put us through this hell for some—”

“No,”
Arabella interrupted quickly. “Of course not. Meg would never do that. Something happened.” She shrugged. “I have no idea what, but it was nothing she could help. However, she’s saying that its consequences are proving not . . . not unpleasant,” she finished with another shrug.

The anger died out of his eyes. Jack knew enough of Meg now to believe that his wife was right. She would never have caused such pain to her friends and family deliberately. But the mystery was nowhere near solution.

“What are we supposed to do now?” he asked.

“Stop worrying,” Arabella said. Her eyes gleamed with mischief again. “I expect she’s been abducted by an Arab sheik and is having a wonderful time in his harem in the desert.” She could see from her husband’s expression that he didn’t appreciate her flight of fancy. “More to the point, why would she send a message by pigeon . . . if you’re right, that is?”

Jack frowned. He was beginning to think abduction was not such a far-fetched explanation after all. Pigeons were used when land transport couldn’t be. “I have a feeling Meg is no longer on English shores,” he said slowly. “She’s either on a ship somewhere, or on the French coast. There’s no other reason to use a pigeon.”

“And you’re certain it was brought by a pigeon . . . oh, not the messenger who came here. He was far too elegant to be mistaken for a pigeon, but the original?”

“Sometimes, Arabella, you have a very misplaced sense of levity,” he said severely. “Get your pelisse, we’re going to walk the dogs down to the harbor.”

“Why the harbor?” She fetched the required garment with alacrity.

“Naval stations rely on courier services. Meg’s been gone less than three days, so this message has to have arrived somewhere close to Folkestone. I have it in mind to make some inquiries.”

“You think Meg’s with the navy?” She couldn’t hide her incredulity.

“I don’t think anything, my dear. I’m merely following a hunch.”

“Oh, well, I’m happy to follow it with you.” She fastened the top button of her pelisse and arranged a very fetching straw hat on her dusky curls. “Wherever she is, at least I know she’s amusing herself.”

Chapter   10

C
osimo?”

“Meg?” He looked up from his charts with a quick smile as she hovered in the cabin door. “What can I do for you?” He infused the question with such languorous sensuality that her knees turned to butter.

“Don’t look at me like that for a start,” she said. “I want to talk about something serious.”

“Oh.” He put down his pen.

She came across the cabin and looked down at the charts and the unreadable notations he’d been making. “Are you plotting a course?”

“Mmm.” He ran a finger in the groove of her bent neck, up beneath her hair, enjoying the shape of her small skull against his palm.

“For when you leave tomorrow?”

“Mmm.” He bent to kiss her nape. “Your skin smells of the sun.”

Meg moved her head aside. Every time she’d prepared herself to open this depressing yet increasingly urgent subject, he’d worked some of his magic to banish the issue from her mind, or at least to persuade her temporarily that it was too soon to cast a shadow over the idyll. But the discussion couldn’t be put off any longer.

“No, Cosimo, we
have
to talk. Have you given any thought as to how I’m going to get off this island and go home? You can’t just put me ashore when you leave and forget all about me.”

“Oh, I don’t think I could ever manage to forget all about you,” he said with a lascivious grin, catching her chin between finger and thumb and turning her face towards him.

“Cosimo, do listen to me,” she exclaimed, jerking her chin free and moving rapidly out of range. “I’m serious.”

He had done his best to prevent her broaching this subject until it couldn’t be avoided. Every minute he had to draw her deeper into their liaison was to his advantage, and he had intended to use their lovemaking that night as a natural introduction to the idea that she stay with him for a while longer. However, it seemed he’d have to deal with it without the benefit of lust’s softening.

He perched on the edge of the table, swinging one foot, his arms folded as he regarded her with a quizzical smile. “As a matter of fact I have given it some considerable thought.”

“And your conclusion?” she prompted when he didn’t continue.

“Well, now . . .” He tapped his mouth with his fingers. “We
could
decide not to bring this delightful . . . uh . . . association . . . to an abrupt end.”

A quiver of anticipation, a little prickle of excitement, lifted the fine hairs along her spine. She said carefully, “How so? You said you
had
to leave.”

“Your friends’ immediate fears are by now put to rest. Is there a pressing need for you to return at once to the family fold?”

Her green eyes took on a lustrous sheen. “Go on,” she invited.

He’d hooked her, he knew it. That luster in her eyes, the sudden glow of her skin told him all he needed to know. He smiled a slow smile. “We’re sailing to Bordeaux with some secret dispatches for our friends there. I shall exchange them for others to be delivered to England. You could come with me for the round trip.”

Her blood sang but she forced herself to go slowly. “You’re returning to England immediately afterwards?”

He nodded, preferring the deceptive gesture to an outright verbal lie.

“How long will this journey take?”

He shrugged. “That I can’t answer, Meg. You’ve seen for yourself how we’re always at the mercy of the weather.”

“But weeks . . . months . . . ?”

“I’d hope weeks, although in the circumstances I’d prefer months.” His eyes narrowed and his mouth curved in pure seductive invitation.

It was not an invitation she could refuse. In fact, although she had not allowed herself until now to acknowledge it, it was one she had been hoping for. But the risks . . . the risks were enormous.

Reality was a bucket of cold water. Meg suddenly couldn’t see how she
could
agree to such a plan. An absence of weeks, maybe even a month or two, would be impossible to conceal.

“I have to think,” she said suddenly, feeling his gaze on her, uncomfortably penetrating as if he would read her mind. She couldn’t reach a considered decision under that kind of pressure. She hurried out of the cabin, leaving Cosimo still perched on the edge of the table.

A frown chased the seductive softness from his countenance and his mouth hardened. Had he misplayed his hand? Had he misinterpreted Meg’s expression, her desire? He would have sworn not, but if he’d jumped the gun, he’d lost the only opportunity he would have. He started to go after her, then stopped. Pressing her wouldn’t help. She was far from the most persuadable lover he’d taken.

He turned back to the charts. With or without her, he was leaving for Bordeaux at dawn. His visit to Murray had confirmed the suspicion that the pigeon had been tampered with and he had to assume that the French would be waiting for him at Brest. So he would take the longer route by sea to Bordeaux and from there the shorter overland route to Toulon. It was a more frequented cross-country route and therefore more dangerous, but Ana’s capture had left him no other choice. And if he failed in recruiting Meg, he was going to have to complete his mission alone.

He paused, his quill suspended. His chances of successfully completing his mission alone and coming out alive were very slim. He knew he could manage the first part, he had never yet failed at such an enterprise. But living to tell the tale in this instance was much more of a challenge. He needed a partner. And it had to be Meg. The stakes were far too high to consider failure. She was a free spirit, impatient of convention, and with a very healthy appetite for the joys of lust. In the week or so it would take to sail to Bordeaux he would have ample opportunity to feed that appetite, an appetite, if the Bard of Avon was to be believed, that grew whereon it fed.

It certainly did with him, he reflected, with candid self-knowledge. Indeed he could imagine that making love with Meg could become an addiction. He adored the way she moved in sex, the feel of her body, its angles and points, and the surprising softness of curves and indentations. He couldn’t get enough of her scent, of the wild fires in her eyes as she approached orgasm, the way she threw her head back, exposing her white throat at the moment of convulsion. And most of all he loved the way he could make her reach a climax over and over again, her cries of ecstasy filling the cabin, her body writhing beneath his hands, his tongue, around the throb of his sex buried deep within her.

He inhaled sharply as his body stirred at the images. Oh, yes, he could imagine sex with Meg could become an addiction; he just had to ensure that it was a mutual one.

Lovemaking didn’t figure in Meg’s cogitations as she stood in the stern apparently watching lobstermen at work checking their pots in the harbor. In fact, the busy scene made no impression at all. She needed a plan . . . a plausible story she could concoct to cover an extended absence. One that would satisfy the gossips. Obviously her parents wouldn’t be deceived and of course not Jack or Bella, but she had to believe that at some point she would return to her ordinary world and she couldn’t do something that would slam the door of social acceptance in her face.

She would write to Bella . . . enlist her support. That would be easy. She could suggest that her parents fabricate the story that she had gone to distant . . . very distant . . . relatives for her health. But where, though? Not Europe, no one in their right minds would visit the war-torn Continent for their health or their pleasure. But her mother had relatives in the Scottish highlands. Not that she’d ever met any of them, but it was far enough off the beaten track for no one to question an extended absence.

Or she could go home tomorrow.

And miss the adventure of a lifetime? The best lovemaking ever?
Absurd. Besides, she liked the idea of contributing her mite to the war against France. Sailing on a sloop-of-war, taking part in the transfer of dispatches, however passive her part, could still be seen as participation in a patriotic act. In fact, she decided, it was her duty to her country to extend her sensual idyll with the privateer.

The hypocritical sophistry made her laugh aloud and the two lieutenants looked at her curiously. Their uncle had just emerged from the companionway and at the sound of that laughter a satisfied smile crept over his countenance. He came over to her.

“What’s amusing?”

She looked over at him. “My faultless self-serving reasoning.”

“Care to share it?”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. If I write a letter of explanation to my friend, is there any way it can be transported?”

He nodded. “The fishing fleet will go out on the morning tide tomorrow. They sell a lot of their lobster catch to fishermen working off the English shore, where they’re not plentiful, and they can pass on a letter. It’s a relatively efficient postal service.”

“Then I’d better start composing.”

He put a hand on her back, warm and somehow possessive. “So, is that my answer?”

She smiled at him. “I find I’m in the mood for adventure, sir.” Her little attempt at rational consideration of the proposal had been a waste of time, she knew. She’d always intended to accept the invitation and the consequences be hanged. She laughed at herself again. So much for mature reflection.

“Then write your letter quickly,” he said. “We’ll sail on this evening’s tide instead of tomorrow morning.”

She looked startled. “Why such a sudden change of plan?”

“Because, my dear, if you’re coming with me, there’s no need to waste any more time.”

“I thought you were waiting for dispatches.”

“I got them from Murray this morning.”

“Oh, I see.” Except that she didn’t. Despite the urgency of his time-sensitive mission, an urgency he’d stressed to her more than once, an urgency that had prevented him taking her back to Folkestone as soon as he’d discovered the mistaken identity, he’d been willing to wait unnecessarily just for the sake of one final night of passion. Something was wrong there, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

“I’ll write my letter,” she said, going below, still thinking about the puzzle. He had left the narrow bed before she’d awoken that morning, as he had done the previous day, so presumably that’s when he’d picked up the dispatches. But where had they come from? The only ships she had seen near the island were the naval men-of-war, and it didn’t make sense that their commanders had given Cosimo dispatches when they all seemed to be sailing in the same direction and they’d left Folkestone together.

Oh, well, she knew nothing about the mechanics of all this covert activity. At least not yet. There was probably an explanation that hadn’t occurred to her. She dismissed the puzzle for the moment with the reflection that she might find this voyage a useful education in more than the joys of the privateer’s body.

For the moment blissfully unaware of the questions his glib response had raised in Meg’s inquiring mind, Cosimo glanced around his ship from his position in the stern. It was an orderly, leisurely scene. The tide would be full at six o’clock and they would have time to negotiate the reef and be in the open sea before dark. He detested inaction and while he’d accepted the need to stay put while he worked on his as yet unwitting partner, now that that was accomplished his spirit strained to be on the move. He beckoned to the ever watchful Miles, who sprang eagerly across the deck to his side.

Below, Meg heard the abrupt bustle, felt the change in the atmosphere. Voices called, feet ran on the deck above her head, and Gus started to pace his perch, muttering. A knock at the door brought David Porter with his little bag of tricks.

Meg looked up from her composition as she bade him enter. “Good afternoon, David. It seems we’re leaving ahead of schedule.”

“Nothing unusual about that,” he observed, setting his bag on the table. “I’m guessing you’re staying with us.”

“You guess correctly,” she said, aware of a slight heat in her cheeks. It was one thing to behave with blatant indiscretion, quite another to be forced to acknowledge it. But David merely nodded. “It’ll be good to have another face around. Sailing can be tedious when you don’t make landfall for a long time.”

“It can’t take that long to reach Bordeaux,” she said.

He looked interested. “Oh, is that where we’re heading?”

“You didn’t know?” She looked stricken, remembering the secrecy that seemed to exist on Cosimo’s ship. “Should I have told you?”

“If Cosimo told you, he has no problem with its being general knowledge,” David said, lifting her arm to unwrap the bandage.

Meg wasn’t sure she liked being lumped together with the entire crew of the
Mary Rose
. It would have been pleasant to cherish the illusion that she was in the privateer’s confidence. But it was early days yet, she reminded herself, turning her attention to the rapidly healing wound.

“Does it still need a bandage?”

“I’d prefer it,” he said. “Just for another couple of days. If you knock it accidentally, it could open up again. It doesn’t take much for that to happen in such close confines.” His eyes flickered to the captain’s bed and Meg bit her lip hard, unsure whether she should laugh conspiratorially or maintain a haughty indifference to the implication.