April Moon (19 page)

“So you wish to be the fair lady’s champion?” he asked the driver. “You would defend her?”

“Nay,
I
won’t do that,” answered the driver quickly, and without a hint of gallantry—not that Sophie had expected any. “She be plain, an’ poor and sharp-tongued, too. If it weren’t for what her master’d say if I lost his new gov’ness, I’d give her t’ you outright, an’ save th’ horse instead.”

“A plain, poor governess.” The disappointment in the man’s voice was so palpable that Sophie wrinkled her nose. He was a fine one to show such scorn for her position, considering how dishonorably he earned his living! “Ah, well, better I should judge for myself, yes?”

Sophie could hear him coming closer, the puffing of the horse’s breathing and the jingle of its harness. The man might be disappointed in the prospect of
her,
but he still would have an interest in her purse—the purse filled with her hard-earned coins that she’d no intention of surrendering to a lazy rascal like him.

Think, Sophie, think! Don’t just sit here cowering like a helpless head of cabbage, waiting for the stewpot. Show a bit of backbone. Think of how to save yourself, then do it!

He was on one side of the carriage, and she on the other, and swiftly, before that changed, she reached up to unlatch the door, shoved it open, and scrambled out to the ground. With so much moonlight, she’d need to use the carriage as a screen between her and the man as long as she could. She bunched her skirts to one side, freeing her legs to run, and began clambering up the embankment, her shoes sliding in the soft, damp soil. If she could just get to the bushes, she could hide there in the shadows, until the thief lost interest and rode away. She’d already disappointed him by being poor; how much more time would he be willing waste on her, anyway?

But she’d forgotten her ungallant driver. He’d turned to look when he’d heard her open the carriage door, and as soon as he realized she was fleeing, he lashed his whip over the horses’ backs, making them jump forward in their traces.

“Stop, you miserable coward!” she shouted furiously after him as the carriage rattled away. It wasn’t only that he’d abandoned her; he’d absconded with the two trunks with her clothes and books and other belongings, as well. “Stop at once, you—you—
ohh!
”

Suddenly the man on the horse loomed up in the road before her, a menacing black silhouette made sharp in the moonlight. He was a large, powerfully built man, made larger by the horse dancing lightly
beneath him and the dark cape billowing around his broad shoulders.

What a great blustering bully, observed an unimpressed Sophie, trying to intimidate a lone woman on an empty road. She’d known five-year-olds with better manners—at least after they’d had her as their governess.

“Stand and deliver,” he ordered through the dark scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face, giving his voice an extra growl for effect. “Now, miss. Be quick about it.”

“No, I will not,” she answered irritably, folding her arms across her chest to stand her ground on the sloping embankment. After all,
he
was the one who should be on his guard, not her. Because of him, she was going to be late to arrive at Sir William’s house, and she hated being late to anything. She was tired and hungry and cold and in a perfectly foul humor after watching most of her worldly goods go rumbling off into the night, likely never to be seen again. Oh, yes,
he
should be the one on his guard from her.

“First, I will not ‘stand and deliver,’ because I am already standing,” she continued, “and secondly, because I do not oblige great hulking bullies simply because they say I must.”

Without answering, he shifted slightly in the saddle, turning so she couldn’t miss the moonlight glancing off the long barrel of the pistol in his hand.

But she also didn’t miss how he’d left the lock on the gun uncocked. She’d grown up in the country, and thanks to Harry, she knew all about guns—far more, apparently, than did this sorry excuse for a highwayman. He was like an oversized watchdog without any teeth, all bark and bluster but no bite.

“Hand me your money,” he ordered gruffly. “That’s all I want. To give to the poor.”

“For the
poor?
” she repeated, incredulous. “You expect me to believe that?”

“You should, because it’s true,” he said, more than a little defensively. “Give me your pocketbook, and then you shall be free to go.”

“Oh, butter and beans,” she said crossly. “This being England, I’m free to go now, if I please, and with my pocketbook, too.”

“Wait,” he said softly. “Please.”

To her own surprise, she did. She wasn’t exactly sure what it was in his voice that made her pause, but she heard it just the same, and waited as he’d asked.

“Take off your hat,” he said in the same soft voice, strangely more potent to her than all his earlier menace. “Let me see your face.”

Instantly her wariness returned. “Why? So you might see for yourself if I’m as plain as that infernal driver deemed me to be?”

“Please,” he said again. “For the sake of beans and butter.”

“Butter and
beans.
” She narrowed her eyes, not understanding why he’d quoted her own nonsensical words back at her. But once again, she found herself obeying, untying the wide ribbons of her bonnet and sliding it back from her head. She wasn’t ashamed of her face, plain though it might have become, and she raised her chin to the moonlight to let him look his full.

“Sophie,” he said. “My God, Sophie, it’s you.”

F
ATE, THOUGHT
H
ARRY
with wondering amazement. It had to be fate that had brought them back together after so many years.

She’d changed, of course. Who wouldn’t, in that time? The angles in that lithe, coltish body he’d remembered so well had softened and grown more womanly, her movements less impulsive and more assured. She’d grown into her face, too: the passionate mouth that was too full for accepted beauty, the tiny crescent-shaped scar on one cheek left from a childhood fall from an apple tree, the quizzical dark brows that still didn’t match her fair hair. But even before he’d seen her face, he’d known it was her. He hadn’t believed it at first, his heart racing even as he’d denied the possibility to himself, but still somehow he’d
known.

But what had given fate such a damned peculiar sense of humor as to play this sort of trick on him? To deposit Sophie Potts back into his life here, on this deserted road, with him gotten up as a highwayman for the sake of some infernal wager and
her dressed as—well, he couldn’t put a decent word to the hideous, unflattering way she was dressed, could he?

But it
was
her, and that was really all that mattered.

“Sophie,” he said again, tucking the pistol back into his belt and swinging down from the saddle to join her. “Sophie, I—”

“Stop,” she said sharply. “Stop where you are, sir, and come no closer.”

Belatedly he pulled the scarf from his face and pushed back his hat so she’d recognize him. “Sophie, look,” he said. “Look at me. I’m not a ‘sir.’ I’m Harry.”

Her frown became more perplexed as she searched his face. Even in the moonlight her eyes were exactly as he’d remembered them, a deep, intense blue framed with thick golden lashes, beautiful eyes, but intelligent, too, and always filled with questions.

Including, it seemed, now. “Harry? It cannot possibly be you, can it? Can it?
Harry?
”

“The same.” He grinned, unable to help it, and scarcely able to wait for the moment she’d throw her arms around him like the old days. He almost—
almost
—expected next to see his brother George come bounding from the trees. Indeed, seeing Sophie again was making him feel as if the past ten years and all their sorrows had magically vanished,
a grim weight lifted from his back. “Tell me you’d know me still, lass. Tell me I’m not so vastly different as all that.”

“Actually, you are,” she said evenly, frowning a bit as she looked him up and down. “You’re a great deal larger than I recall.”

“I’m not the stripling I was at eighteen, no,” he admitted confidently. He was still lean, but now there was muscle and strength to his body and limbs, as well. “But that isn’t such a bad thing for a gentleman.”

For the first time she smiled, her face softening with amusement: another reminder of what he’d lost when she’d disappeared from his life. “You haven’t changed so very much after all, have you, Harry?”

“Seeing you again makes all that time feel like nothing.”

“Nothing?” she asked, the bittersweet regret in her voice unmistakable. “It’s been nearly ten years, Harry. So much has happened to us both since then, hasn’t it? I was only seventeen when you sailed, you know, and you’d just passed your nineteenth birthday.”

“The fifth of May.” He smiled crookedly, wondering exactly how much else she was remembering along with his birthday. God knows it was all coming back to
him:
her taste, her scent, the way she’d laugh with gleeful triumph when she’d outrun him
through the orchard, then sigh with contentment afterward when they’d lie in the tall grass and he’d hold her close. “You would remember the dates and such. You were always far better than I at ciphering and logic.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling still as she glanced down at the gun in his belt, “and I always knew enough to uncock the flintlock on a pistol if I intended to use it.”

He followed her glance down to the pistol, as if seeing it for the first time that evening. “But I didn’t intend to use it,” he said sheepishly, “not truly, and never against you.”

“Then what precisely
were
you doing, Harry?” she asked, her smile fading. The breeze was tugging at the tight knot of her hair, pulling tendrils free to dance across her temples and cheeks, and impatiently she brushed them aside with her gloved fingertips. “What manner of cruel masquerade would reduce you to stopping hired carriages to rob the women passengers?”

“I don’t know how to explain it, Sophie,” he said slowly. She’d scoff at his wager with Walter as foolish and idle, and though she’d be right, he didn’t want to spoil things by hearing her tell him so.

But how could he have guessed that when he’d stood at the window at White’s, watching the moon
rise, that it would somehow lead him back to Sophie Potts?

“It was the moon,
this
moon,” he continued, grasping for the right words. “Likely you won’t believe me, Sophie, but you have been in my thoughts ever since it came over the rooftops.”

Ever skeptical, she tipped her face to one side. “The
moon,
Harry?”

“Yes, the moon,” he said, his voice low, confidential, as if wooing her all over again. He took a step closer in the road, pulling off his glove before he reached out toward her. “It’s almost as if that infernal moon were haunting me, making me think of nothing but you and the past. Remember, lass, remember the last night before I left for Dover? That was April, too, with another moon exactly the twin to this one, and—”

“No, Harry, don’t,” she interrupted abruptly, shaking her head. “Please. Don’t.”

“Why not, Sophie?” he said, undeterred. He swept his hand up toward the sky, so grand a gesture that his horse whinnied uneasily behind him. “Can’t you see for yourself? It’s fate that’s brought us back together, lass, fate and this moon that—”

“But I don’t believe in fate, Harry,” she said, purposefully looking away from the sky and moon to the rutted road beneath them. “If you can remember that I had skill at ciphering, then you should likewise recall that I don’t believe in fate,
or destiny, or anything else that claims we cannot have will over the lives God gave us. I never have, Harry, and I’m not going to begin now, not even for the sake of your moon.”

“I’m not asking you to begin anything new.” Gently he touched her chilly cheek with his fingertips, not wishing to startle her as he coaxed her to trust him again. Yet still he could feel the little tremor that rippled through her, a shiver of—of what? Fear or excitement or uncertainty, anticipation or dread or the wildest joy, all the same things he was feeling himself?

“I’m only asking you to be the old Sophie from the manor,” he continued, “the one who seized whatever life tossed her way, and claimed it as her own. Remember who you are, lass, and what we had together. That’s all I’m asking.”

“That’s a great deal.” Though she didn’t pull away from his touch, her eyes were troubled as she searched his face. “We were scarce more than children then.”

“We were far more than that, Sophie,” he whispered, leaning closer to kiss her. “We were lovers.”

“No, Harry, don’t,” she cried softly, twisting away from him just before his lips found hers. “What we were then no longer matters.”

“Damnation, Sophie, it does,” he said, hoarse with frustration. He reached for her again, and once
again she pulled away, her heavy woolen skirts swinging out from her legs like a bell. “Why won’t you admit it?”

“For the same reasons I left you before,” she said, her words coming in such a painful rush it was almost a sob. “Because I’m good at calculations and logic and seeing which things can be combined with success and which cannot. Because we were never meant to last together, Harry, and all the moonlight in this sorry world cannot alter that truth.”

“What if I said I cared for you still?” he demanded. “That’s the truth, moon or not.”

But she only shook her head again. “You should have forgotten me, the way I forgot you.”

“But you didn’t, Sophie,” he insisted. “Damnation, I’ve only to look at your eyes now to know that. Why can’t you admit you still care for me, as well, the way I know you do? Why can’t we take this night that’s been given us, and leave the rest until tomorrow?”

“I won’t, Harry,” she whispered, her voice breaking with a long, heartbreaking sob. “I can’t. Not even you could make me do that. Because you will always be the Earl of Atherwall, and I will never be more than a mere country governess, and neither of us a match for the other.”

But before he could answer, to his shock, she
changed.

There on the moonlit road, she swallowed back the sob and visibly steeled herself, straightening her back and composing her features into severe propriety and blinking back any stray tears. Through sheer willpower alone, she put everything to rights. Briskly she tied the bonnet ribbons beneath her chin, using the broad brim like blinders to shutter and shadow her face, and the transformation was complete. In no more than a minute, she’d smothered both her beauty and emotions as surely as if she’d hidden them behind a mask. She became exactly what her driver had declared her to be: a poor, plain governess that no man would ever notice.

“Do you understand, my lord?” she said. Even her voice now seemed to carry a governess’s schoolroom authority, while the use of his title—damnation, he never thought he’d hear that from
her!
—served to accentuate the gulf between them even more. “Have I made myself clear, my lord?”

He nodded silently, too stunned to find words for his response—at least not words he’d want to use to her.

How in blazes could she possibly believe he gave a fig about his rank over hers? How could she do that, when she was the one who’d thrown up a wall of scratchy wool and propriety between them, as impenetrable as one of stone and mortar?

Yet here she was, wanting him to believe she’d no interest left in him at all, that she’d prefer her
life as a lowly governess to whatever he offered. Of course if she truly wanted to be free of him, then he’d let her go. He had never forced a woman to do anything she didn’t want, and he wasn’t going to begin now.

But the memory of the other Sophie, the laughing, bold, adventurous girl that he’d loved with such passion and delight—that Sophie wouldn’t let him leave. God knows he’d seen glimpses of her tonight, little bright flashes behind the severe facade that proved she still existed.

One more night with her was all he was asking. One more night together…

She claimed she placed no value in fate, and proudly made her own choices for how she ordered her life. Well, then, so be it. Let her be stubborn; let her be proud. He wouldn’t argue, because that, too, was part of what made her Sophie, and besides, she’d never give in.

But before this night was over, he’d play the ruthless highwayman again. He’d use every scrap of charm and persuasion and passion to steal away her heart for keeps. This time, when she made her final decision, he’d leave no doubt that she’d make the right choice: the one that would include him.

“You do understand, my lord?” said Sophie again, striving to keep the anxiety from her voice along with every other emotion. She wished he
would answer, instead of simply
standing
there. “I have made myself clear?”

The tall man before her was Harry, and yet he wasn’t. He’d changed, her Harry, and this elegant, self-possessed gentleman in black was a far cry from the boy she remembered. His smile was the same, and so was his laugh, but the well-muscled chest and arms beneath the tailored coat were new, as was the lordly imperious air that, she guessed, must have come with his title. There now was a darkness to him, too, that was harder to explain, a moody undercurrent that seemed as black as his clothes.

It worried her, this black streak, just as she was worried by whatever foolishness had inspired his masquerade as a highwayman. Over the years, she’d read enough newspapers with accounts of fashionable London to know how his boyish impulsiveness had grown dangerously into reckless dares and wagers. It had been one thing to see how high he could climb up a tree when they’d been children, and it was quite another for him to drive a phaeton blindfolded at breakneck speeds. If the driver on her own carriage tonight had been armed, he very well could have killed Harry outright. Then the fact that Harry’s pistol hadn’t been cocked would have been as meaningless as his intentions. It was almost as if he wished to die, a final, flam
boyant gesture to show the world he was beyond caring.

And he’d been right, painfully right, about one thing: God help them both,
she
did still care for him.

“Do you understand, my lord?” she said again, feeling like a desperate parrot with only one question learned by rote. “Do you—”

“Yes, lass, I do.” His voice was low, careful and now intentionally devoid of the emotion he’d shown before. “I do not care for your decision, but I shall abide by it.”

“Thank you.” She knew she was making the right choice. Along with Harry’s wagers and exploits, those newspapers had also linked him to scores of women, titled, wealthy beauties all, and each one of them proof that he’d never keep a lasting affection for a humble country spinster. A duchess might indulge in an dalliance with Harry, but a governess would only be ruined.

Of course she’d made the proper decision.

But suddenly Sophie felt the evening’s chill, making her hug her hands around her folded arms. At least the walk ahead would warm her, even if it could never be as satisfying as the kiss she’d rebuffed. She looked down the road where her carriage had vanished. “Do you know how far it is to the nearest inn? I was asleep when we stopped, and did not notice how far we’d come.”

“Not far,” said Harry, pointing in the opposite direction. “Perhaps a quarter mile at most.”

“But what about that way?” she asked. “That’s where that wretched driver went with all my belongings.”

“Oh, at least five miles,” said Harry. “That is, if that rattletrap of yours can travel so far without falling to bits.”

“It already very nearly has,” she said, her unhappiness growing by the second as she stared down the road, as if staring alone would somehow bring the carriage back. “A pox on that lazy coward of a driver! He has not only robbed me of my trunk, but now I’ll never make Winchester when I promised. Even if Sir William doesn’t dismiss me outright before I’ve properly begun, then he’ll still regard me as an unpunctual laggard, unfit to be trusted with his sons.”