Clandestine (18 page)

“Thank you, Mr. Pearse,” Guy said. “Very splendid!”

The gardener flushed, touched his forehead, and backed out of the room.

Sarah sat down on a marble bench.

“Good heavens!” she said. “What was all that about?”

Guy glanced up from the blossoms, their elegant shape defied by the passionate color of the lips.

“All what?” he asked.

“All that thunder! Poor Mr. Pearse must have thought you wanted to run him through with one of his own plant supports. Are you angry that he's proud of his cattleya?”

“Angry? God, no! They're magnificent.”

“Then, what?” Sarah Callaway stared up at him with her honest heart in her eyes. “This orchid's not an easy plant to grow.”

Guy negated his desires as if he crushed crystal into sand, and dropped onto the seat next to hers.

“It fills me with craving,” he said. “Yet I imagine we'll have very little time before we'll be interrupted. I intend to persuade you to leave, after all.”

“You found out something more in London?”

“I found out enough to regret having allowed you to come here.”

She began to weave a green ribbon between her fingers. He caught the ribbon and pulled it from her hand. Sarah Callaway looked up at him.

“The man Daedalus hired to oversee the attacks on your cousin comes from this part of Devon. Though he was free to travel to London, he also works with his hands. He knows roses, but he more intimately knows orchids. Thus, he's the head gardener on an estate such as this. No one else can afford them.”

A pulse beat in her throat. “You think Mr. Pearse could be this man?”

“Perhaps.”

“But surely Lord Overbridge cannot be Daedalus?”

“There are only five or six other great houses within reach. Our quarry must own one of them. That's all I know.”

“But if he lives in Devon, why did Rachel flee here to escape him?”

Guy glanced at the other orchids.
Cattleya intermedia
, showy and expensive, and pure white at the heart.
Angraecum sesquipedale,
the comet orchid, ghostly, deeply fragrant after dark. Mr. Pearse must possess a touch of genius.

“I don't know, but I believe that Rachel told you the truth. She's safely in hiding, but why so close to her tormentor, I've no idea.”

“Meanwhile, this gardener is the only lead that we have? What else did you discover about him?”

“Enough.” He looked back at her. “He was calling himself Falcorne, though that's no doubt a false name. I wish you would go back to Bath, or let me send you to Wyldshay.”

“You really believe that the danger is more acute than we feared? We're really dealing with a murderer?”

A lie would no doubt be more convenient. Instead, desperate to hold as close to honor as he could, Guy told her the truth.

“No,” he said. “The goal in London was most definitely only to frighten Rachel, not to kill her.”

“Yet you still think I'll become hysterical, after all?” Her eyes burned as if she stalked through a jungle. “We've been over this already, Mr. Devoran. I shan't leave. Either we cooperate, or I shall try to find Rachel alone. The choice is yours, sir.”

Guy sprang to his feet and paced away. Water dripped from the long spur of the comet orchid. He did not believe she was in peril from Daedalus. He wanted her to leave for his sake, not hers.

“I don't welcome danger heedlessly,” she added. “But surely I am safe here at Buckleigh?”

“Yes, of course. No one here has any reason to connect you to your cousin. Yet your situation here can only be uncomfortable.”

“Nonsense! I believe your situation may be a great deal more uncomfortable than mine, sir.”

Guy spun back to face her. “Really? In what way?”

The deep color began then, spreading up her neck and over her cheeks, yet her eyes sparkled.

“The governess and I were bringing the children in from the garden when you arrived. I'm afraid that we overheard every word.”

“Ah,” he said, choking down a sudden mad hilarity. “Did you?”

“It was impossible to avoid, sir. Of course, matchmaking is one of the purposes of a house party such as this.”

As if a jester had turned the wheel of fate and winked at him, Guy laughed aloud.

“Yet you didn't expect the married ladies to set their caps at me quite so openly, before I'd even removed my hat and gloves?”

The freckles scampered as she grinned. “If I didn't, I should have, though I'll admit to a certain discomposure when Lady Whitely dragged my name into the conversation.”

“It's absurd to you, I suppose, that anyone could believe that I might indeed be attracted to you?”

In a flow of white skirts, she stood up. The straw hat framed her face. A few red strands escaped from her plaits to caress her speckled cheeks.

The roar of his desire almost flattened him.

“It's obviously absurd that you'd arrange for us both to attend this house party merely to commence an affair,” she said.

Guy dropped onto another marble bench and leaned back to watch her. She wouldn't leave. She would stay here to torment him.

“Lottie Whitely's real fear is that I came here to pursue Lady Overbridge.”

Sarah crouched over the ruby-lipped cattleya to brush one fingertip over the deep purple–frilled edge. The soft smudges of snow at the sunshine-stained gullet shivered beneath her touch, as if the orchid surrendered to a pollinating moth.

Ardor raced hot and strong through his blood, spreading fire as if a naked woman ran through dry grass trailing a burning scarf at her heels.

“And did you?” she asked.

Guy stretched out his legs and breathed in a great draft of the scented air, trusting to self-mockery to shred his craving.

“Annabella Overbridge is certainly very pretty,” he said. “You don't think that she's already my mistress?”

“I don't know,” Sarah said. “She might be, I suppose. Yet she looks more hopeful than satisfied.”

In spite of his distress, he laughed. “You're very sure that I would satisfy, Mrs. Callaway!”

She kept her back to him, leaving him nothing but the green ribbons trailing over the curve of her back.

“Oh, every lady here is certain of it,” she said. “You must know that they're all fighting for your notice like dogs for a bone: the married ladies for your favors, the unmarried for your hand.”

“I'm considered a good catch,” he said. “It's bloody exhausting!”

The hat brim threw her face into deep shadow, but he knew that she grinned. “And thus your situation is more uncomfortable than mine. Though I'm sure you can cope, Mr. Devoran.”

Female voices chirruped from inside the house.

Guy leaped up to block the view of Sarah from anyone entering the orchid room. He seized her elbow to help her to her feet, though the touch of her soft flesh beneath his palm set fire to his blood.

“If you insist on staying here,” he said beneath his breath, “we must talk again. It'll be difficult to do so privately during the day. Can you escape your room unseen after dark?”

“Yes,” she said. “I believe so. I could use the servants' stair.”

“The governess won't wake?”

“Her room is closer to the nursery and farther from the stairs than mine.”

“Then meet me tomorrow just before dawn in the Deer Hut. You know it?”

“The little folly made of bark and antlers near the lake? Yes, of course.”

Guy gazed down into her tiger-bronze eyes and ruthlessly repressed the insistent pulse of desire.

“Be careful, Mrs. Callaway!”

“No one will notice anything I do,” she said. “Unlike you, sir, I'm invisible.”

The chatter of female voices intensified, as if someone herded a flock of pigeons. One voice, shriller and more insistent, dominated the others.

“God!” he said. “I fear Lottie Whitely comes to fetch me to show me her watercolors.”

Sarah Callaway glanced away through the glass. The hat brim hid her face. “If she does, sir, I believe she's bringing all of her competition with her.”

Guy opened his fingers and released her. Sarah spun about and left the hothouse by the garden door.

With the unmarried roses fluttering behind them, Lady Overbridge and Lady Whitely walked into the room arm-in-arm. The gentlemen trailed after them.

A walk to the lake was planned. But they couldn't go without Mr. Devoran! And where was Mrs. Callaway? She must come to teach the young ladies about the plants in the gardens—and thus give them an opportunity to linger where a young gentleman might get the chance to murmur privately into a shell-like ear.

Guy ignored the chattering voices and smiled boldly at Lottie Whitely.

She twirled her parasol and smiled back.

A
chill glow glimmered through the trees as Sarah walked rapidly down to the Deer Hut. She wore her green traveling dress and sensible boots. If anyone discovered her, she would say she had come out to see the sunrise over the gardens.

But as she had told Mr. Devoran, no one was likely to care.

Even if Lady Whitely truly believed that Sarah was Guy's lover, Her Ladyship would dismiss it as the equivalent of a quick tumble with a maid. Real affairs of the heart took place between equals. Guy Devoran was the son of an earl's daughter, and nephew to a duke.

Mrs. Sarah Callaway, captain's relict, was a schoolteacher in Bath. Though her father had been a gentleman, her family had been far from being aristocrats. She was determined not to forget it.

Dew glistened on white stone, ghostly as half-melted snow in the dawn light, as Sarah walked through an alley of classical statues. Blackbirds had begun a faint twittering. Ahead of her, the lake spread like a silver mirror, empty of life.

Yet a creature rustled somewhere in the undergrowth: a fox, perhaps, or a badger.

Sarah shivered and wrapped her cloak more tightly about her shoulders.

The Deer Hut nestled among a grove of birches on a small mound above the lake. The path was a little slippery beneath her boots. As she climbed uphill, her heart began to pound.

As if night refused to give way to the dawn, the door of the hut gaped open onto darkness. Sarah stopped and glanced back over her shoulder.

“Come,” his voice said softly. “It's all right.”

A hot wave raced through her blood. She knew what caused it. She knew how very dangerous it was. Yet perhaps it didn't matter, as long as he didn't guess how she felt.

Guy Devoran lounged casually in the doorway, tall and solid and secure. Laugh lines furrowed his cheeks. Ebony hair tumbled over his forehead. Yet a much darker fire burned in his eyes, as if he, too, belonged to the night.

Her soul singing like a heavenly chorus, Sarah met that hot midnight gaze and plummeted—like a stone into a lake—straight into love.

Giddy and intoxicating and mad, the air sparkled in her lungs like champagne.

Oh, God! Her improper desires were dangerous enough—to fall in love with him would be fatal!

Yet for that moment, as their eyes met, she didn't care. With every fiber of her being—however foolish, however destined for heartbreak—she wanted nothing else but the absolute, exclusive attention of this one man.

Like every other female here at Buckleigh.

The thought sobered her instantly.

“Mr. Devoran,” she said with a kind of desperate normalcy. “How extraordinary that we should run into each other like this!”

He laughed and stepped backward into the shadows as he gestured for her to join him.

“This is the strangest little building,” he said. “The roof is built mostly of antlers and deer hide. The floor is tiled entirely with little sections of antler, and the walls appear to be pieced together from bark.”

“Yes,” she said. “I came here on my first day, when I was able to explore by myself. From the window, one may enjoy a stunning view over the lake to the moor.”

“And so may two,” he replied with a grin. “I took the liberty of bringing a little breakfast and a jug of hot coffee. It's here on the table: a rather painfully rustic contraption, yet serviceable enough. Please, come in! We shan't be disturbed.”

Sarah walked through the door into his magic kingdom, where Oberon had commanded his sensual pleasures. The aroma of coffee and the yeasty scent of fresh baking spiraled into her nostrils.

Saliva flooded her mouth as if she might devour the world.

Her heart beating like a child's drum, she swallowed. “You took a detour through the kitchens, Mr. Devoran?”