Dark Angel / Lord Carew's Bride (37 page)

“Thank you,” she said. “Tea would be nice.”

H
E WAS GLAD HE HAD THOUGHT OF OFFERING her tea in his office rather than in the drawing room. He found the drawing room cold and impersonal unless he was entertaining a large gathering. His office, on the other hand, was where he spent most of his time indoors when he was out of his own apartments. It was a cozy room, not small really, but filled with his own personal treasures and never quite tidy since the maids had learned not to move books—especially ones that lay open.

He seated her in an ancient, comfortable chair to one side of the fire, which his servants always made up as soon as he stepped inside the house, and sat in its twin at the opposite side. His father had been going to have the chairs thrown out years ago, calling them a disgrace to so grand a place as Highmoor Abbey, but he had appropriated them for his study and he did not believe he would ever let them go.

Now he knew that he would not. And he knew that his study would become even more precious to him in the future, because the greatest treasure of his life had been there for tea one afternoon. She looked small and dainty in the chair. She looked comfortable.

He was glad she had made a joke of marrying the Marquess of Carew after some demon in him had made him suggest it as a possibility. But he was sorry that someone had broken her heart. She made light of it now and she always seemed cheerful enough, but he did not believe he had exaggerated in saying that it had blighted her life. Most ladies of her age would have been married long ago and have had children in the nursery by now. Especially ladies as lovely as she was. But there was no other lady as lovely as she. …

They talked about books after she had seen some of the titles of those lying on the small table beside her. And about music and opera and the theater. Their tastes were similar, though she had never studied Latin or Greek, as he had, and she had never read the plays she had seen performed. And she preferred a tenor voice to a soprano, unlike him, and a cello to a violin. Both of them preferred the pianoforte to either.

He had never known a woman easier to talk to. But then he had never known a lady who was unaware of his identity. He wondered if it made a difference. She had said in the ballroom that she would not set her cap at the Marquess of Carew even if she had the opportunity to do so. But if she did know that he was the marquess instead of just a gentleman so far down on his luck that he was forced to hire out his services as a landscape gardener—if she did know, would it make a difference? Would she be less comfortable with him? Would she feel the impropriety of their behavior more acutely? She seemed quite unaware of it now. And yet it was even more dreadfully
improper for them to be indoors alone together thus than it had been for them to roam the park together.

“What happened?” she asked him quietly. He realized that they had been sitting through one of their silences, which never seemed awkward, and that he had absently fallen into one of his habits. He was massaging his right palm with his left thumb and straightening his fingers one by one. Her eyes were on his hands. “Was it an accident? Or were you born—” Her eyes flew to his face and she blushed. “I am so sorry. It is none of my business. Please forgive me.”

It was a measure of the friendship that had grown between them, perhaps, that he could tell her, a virtual stranger, that an unhappy love affair the details of which he did not know had blighted her life, and that she could ask him what had happened to leave his right hand and foot deformed. Good manners would have kept both of them silent on such personal matters had they been merely acquaintances.

“It was an accident.” He smiled at her as he told her the lie he had been telling for most of his life. He had never told the truth, even to his parents right after it had happened. There was no point in telling the truth now. “I was six years old. I was out riding my new pony with my cousin.” His cousin had been ten. “We had left the groom far behind. I was showing off, showing how I could gallop to match the pace of a cousin four years older than I, and showing how I could jump a fence. But I did not clear it. I crashed very heavily right down onto the fence, breaking bones and tearing ligaments. By
some miracle my pony escaped serious harm. The physician told my father that both my leg and my arm would have to be amputated, but fortunately for me my mother had a totally genuine fit of the vapors.”

He smiled at her grimace of horror.

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “The physician did his best to set the broken bones, but of course there was permanent damage. Both my father and I were told that I would never be able to use either my right leg or my right arm again. But I can be stubborn about some things.”

“Courageous,” she said. “Determined.”

“Stubborn.” He laughed. “My mother shrieked when she first saw me limping about and swore that I would do myself dreadful harm. My father merely commented that I would make myself the laughingstock.”

“Poor little boy,” she said, head to one side, blue eyes large with sympathy. “Children should not have to suffer so.”

“Suffering can make all the difference in a person’s life,” he said. “It can be a definite force for good. At the risk of sounding conceited, I would have to say that I am reasonably happy with the person I have become. Perhaps I would not have liked the person I would have been without the accident.” Perhaps he would have always been the sniveling, cringing, self-pitying coward he had been as a young child.

“I am sorry for my unmannerly curiosity,” she said. “Please forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” he said. “Friends talk
from the heart, do they not? I believe we have become friends. Have we?”

“Yes.” She smiled slowly and warmly. “Yes, we have, Mr. Wade.”

There was not even the glimmering of a sign in her eyes that they were anything more than that. Of course. How foolish of him even to have dreamed of such a thing, let alone to have hoped. But how unbelievably wonderful it was to see Miss Samantha Newman smiling so kindly at him and agreeing with him that they were friends.

“And this friend,” he said, getting reluctantly to his feet, “had better see you on your way back to Chalcote before every constable in the county is called out to search for you. You did not tell Thornhill or his lady where you were going?”

“No.” She flushed rather guiltily as she got up herself without his assistance. “They might have thought it improper. My aunt—Lady Brill—might have felt obliged to accompany me as chaperone. I suppose it
is
improper. I suppose I should have a chaperone. But it does not feel wrong, and I do not feel the need of a female protector. And if one cannot exercise a little personal judgment and enjoy a little freedom at such an advanced age as mine, one might as well be shut up inside a cage.” She laughed lightly.

“I will ride with you as far as the gatehouse,” he said, opening the door of the study for her to precede him from the room. “There is a folly overlooking the lake that I have not shown you yet. And farther back behind the
house there is a stretch of rapids where the stream flows downhill. I have ideas for creating a more spectacular series of waterfalls there, but I do not want to spoil the natural beauty. I would like to hear your opinion. Will you walk there with me, perhaps three afternoons from today?”

She turned her head to smile at him as they left the house, her jacket back on and her hat at an even jauntier angle than before. “I would love to,” she said, “and will studiously resist all attempts to organize any other entertainment for that afternoon. I shall pray piously for good weather.”

“The usual time at the top of the hill?” he asked.

“Yes.” She laughed. “By the time I return to London for the Season, I shall be the fittest dancer in any ballroom. I shall smile in sympathy at the ladies and gentlemen wheezing all around me after the first set of country dances.”

He wished he could dance. He had always wished it, perhaps because he knew that he never could. He avoided ballrooms. Although he spent almost as much time in London during the year as most other gentlemen, he rarely accepted any of his invitations to the round of social activities that accompanied the Season. He was not very well known, especially by the ladies of the
ton
, despite his rank and fortune and eligible marital status.

“I wish I could be there to see it,” he said. They had ridden their horses out of the stable yard and turned in the direction of the gatehouse, a mile or so distant. “This
lawn stretches all the way to the gatehouse. It is temptingly long and level, is it not? Do you enjoy taking your horse to a gallop?”

She looked at him and down to his right leg. She opened her mouth to ask if he was sure he ought to—he was certain that was what she was about to say. But she bit her lip instead, and when her eyes came back up to his, there was mischief dancing in them.

“I will race you,” she said, and she was off before he could recover from his surprise, her laughter almost a shriek.

He stayed half a length behind her, enjoying her excitement and her exuberance—and also her careful and excellent horsemanship. Another episode to commit to memory, he thought as he surged past her when they were only yards from the gatehouse. He turned his head to laugh at her chagrin.

“Unfair,” she said, her voice breathless. “Oh, unfair. Gabriel has given me a horse lame in all four legs.”

“That is an insulting fib for which you can expect to fry,” he said, looking over the splendid chestnut she rode. “The Earl of Thornhill keeps the best stables in these parts—or so I have heard. We did not agree on a wager.”

“Oh,” she said, pretending to the sullenness of defeat. “What do you suppose I owe you?”

“That is a delightful feather in your cap,” he said. “Literally, I mean.”

“My—” Her laughter was more of a giggle as she removed her hat. “I am not at all sure that it is detachable,
and I would hate to have to give you the whole hat, sir. If there is anything more scandalous than riding about the countryside alone, it is doing so hatless. I would never live down the ignominy if someone were to see me. Ah, here it comes.”

And she handed him the curled green feather that had been circling her head and nestling against her ear and beneath her chin.

“Thank you.” He inclined his head and chuckled as she pinned the absurd hat back on her hair. “If anyone asks, you will have to say it blew away in the wind.”

He raised a hand in farewell as she rode off. He then placed the feather carefully in his right hand before taking up the reins with his left once more and turning back in the direction of home.

He wondered what she would think if she knew that the prize she had just awarded him would be treasured more than any of the costliest of his possessions for the rest of his life.

It was a good thing that one person could not see into another’s mind or heart, he thought. What a fool he would appear to her if she could see into his. And how horrified she would be.

Three days. How would he fill them? How would he stop himself from descending to the horribly immature measure of counting the hours?

T
HE DAY FINALLY CAME
and the sun was shining. Still. It had not stopped shining all through every day since the
afternoon of her visit to Highmoor Abbey. The law of averages said that it must rain soon, but she had hoped—foolishly, she had even prayed—that it would not be today.

She did not know why she valued Mr. Wade’s friendship so dearly. He was a man of very ordinary appearance, and she would guess that though he was a gentleman, he was poor. But then she was not looking at him as a possible suitor, so his appearance and his financial status were of no concern to her at all. That was why she valued him so much, she decided. She had always felt some physical attraction to all the gentlemen who made up her court—she was beginning to describe them to herself by that term, after hearing it from Gabriel so often. She could not have encouraged them and flirted with them and held them always at arm’s length if she had not.

She felt no attraction whatsoever to Mr. Wade. No revulsion, either, of course, despite the physical handicaps. Just—oh, just the warmth of friendship. She could not remember the person, man or woman, whose company she had more enjoyed and more yearned for when she was not with him. Even Jenny, she thought disloyally, had never been such a dear friend.

She hoped he would not have to go away soon. He had spoken of planning waterfalls north of the house. He had spoken of seeing the work at the lake started this year. Surely he stayed to oversee his plans brought to fruition when he was designing something new. Would he stay all summer?

But she would not be staying that long, she remembered with a jolt. She would be going to London for the Season. She always went to London for the Season. This would be her seventh—she would wince at the number, perhaps, if she were in search of a husband. Many young ladies considered it an unutterable humiliation to have to go back for a second Season unattached. Jenny and Gabriel were not planning to go this year. They did not always go, being far happier in the country romping with their children. And Jenny had told her in an unguarded moment—and been mortally embarrassed afterward—that they were trying for another.

Perhaps, Samantha thought, she would stay at Chalcote this year, too. But she dismissed the thought immediately. Kind and hospitable as they both were, Jenny and Gabriel needed to have their home to themselves for at least a part of the year. And she and Aunt Aggy had already been here for three months. Too long. Soon—as soon as she had control of her fortune—Samantha was going to set up for herself somewhere so that she would have a home of her own in which to spend those slack months when there was nothing much happening anywhere but in country homes.

No, she could not stay at Chalcote. Soon she and Aunt Aggy must return to London. But she tried to put the thought from her mind. There would be another few weeks first. Another few chances to explore Highmoor land with Mr. Wade. If he wanted to explore them with her, of course. If he did not tire of their friendship.