Simply Unforgettable (19 page)

He knew something at that moment with ghastly clarity.

He was not going to be able to let her go this time.

It was that simple.

“I came to see you,” he said.

“Why?” Two spots of color had appeared in her cheeks. Her eyes had turned hard.

“Because there is something still to be said between us,” he said, “and I do not like to leave things unsaid when they should be spoken.”

“There is nothing else to be said between us, Lord Sinclair,” she said. “Nothing whatsoever.”

“There you are wrong, Frances,” he said. “Come out with me. Come walking in Sydney Gardens.”

“I am in the middle of giving a music lesson,” she told him.

“Dismiss the girl early,”he said. “She will be ecstatic. Do you have other lessons to follow this one?”

She compressed her lips for a moment before answering. “No,” she admitted.

“Then come walking with me,” he said.

“Have you noticed the weather today?” she asked him. “It is going to rain.”

“But it is not raining yet,” he said. “It may not rain all day—just as it did not snow all over Christmas. Bring an umbrella. You cannot claim to be English, Frances, and yet fear stepping outdoors lest it rain. You would be housebound all your life.”

“I do not want anything more to do with you,” she told him.

“If I thought you truly meant that,” he said, “I would be gone in a flash. But I think you lie. Or if you do not do so quite consciously, then I believe you deceive yourself.”

“You are a betrothed man,” she said. “Miss Portia Hunt—”

“I am not betrothed
yet,
” he told her.

“But you soon will be.”

“The future,” he said, “is just a theory, Frances. It is not fact. How can any of us know what we will be doing
soon
? Now, at this precise moment, I am not a betrothed man. And you and I have unfinished business.”

“We do not—”

“You are such a coward, Frances.” He was beginning to feel frustrated, angry. Was she really going to refuse to come? And why the devil was he pressing her when she was so clearly reluctant to have any more dealings with him?

But he knew—he
knew
beyond any doubt—that her attraction to him was just as powerful as his to her.

“It is not cowardly,” she said, “to avoid inevitable and pointless pain.”

“I cause you pain, then?” His incipient anger disappeared in a moment. She had finally admitted to more than just a twinge.

But she would not answer him. She clasped her hands at her waist and looked composed and pale again. She gazed very steadily into his eyes.

“Give me one more hour of your life,” he said. “It is not a great deal to ask, is it?”

There was an almost imperceptible slumping of her shoulders and he knew that she would not deny him.

“One hour, then,” she said. “I will go and dismiss Rhiannon Jones and let Miss Martin know that I am going out for a while.”

He stared broodingly at the door after she had left the room. He ought, he supposed, to have stopped to think, to
consider,
before coming here. But, devil take it, it was his life, and there must be a way of living it to his own satisfaction and doing his duty by his family and position at the same time.

But how could he have thought or considered? When he had left the house on Brock Street, he had not known where he was going.

He had certainly not known why.

Or had he?

He gazed out the window with unseeing eyes, looking back wistfully on the time, not too long ago, when his life had been uncomplicated and perfectly satisfactory.

Well, it would be satisfactory again, dash it all.

It
would
.

He had promised to find the perfect bride.

But there was more than one kind of perfection.

15

He paid their way into Sydney Gardens, just on the other
side of the road at Sydney Place, and they walked along beside a bowling green until the path wound upward, twisting and turning as it did so between lawns and among trees whose branches swayed and tossed in the wind.

It was not by any means an ideal day for strolling in any park. There was not another soul in sight apart from the two of them.

Frances shivered even though she was dressed warmly—in the exact cloak and bonnet and half-boots she had been wearing the first time she met him, in fact, she realized suddenly. She felt chilled to the bone, but not so much from the buffeting of the weather as from the fact that she was actually walking here beside him again, one day after she thought he had returned to London, two days after they had said good-bye forever—again.

She had already lived through a day of pain so intense that it had seemed like stark despair. Was she to have to endure the same all over again later today and tomorrow?

Would he never go away and stay away?

Would she never have the resolve to send him away and mean it?

She had received a card with the morning post from Mrs. Lund, Mr. Blake's sister, inviting her to join Mr. Lund and herself at the theater next week. Mr. Blake was to be of the party too, she had added. Although Frances had hesitated, she had written back to accept. Life had to continue, she had reasoned. And perhaps now she would finally be able to put the past behind her and concentrate her attention upon the man who seemed eager to be her beau. It was not as if she had to make any final decision about him yet. She did not even have to tell him everything about herself yet. It was merely an evening at the theater to which she had been invited.

She had congratulated herself—again—upon her good sense. But here she was, just a few hours later, walking in Sydney Gardens with Lucius Marshall—who was soon to marry a Miss Portia Hunt.

“For someone who had something important to say,” she said, breaking a lengthy silence, “and who was granted merely one hour of my time, you are remarkably silent, Lord Sinclair.”

They walked onto a brightly painted and exquisitely carved Chinese bridge and paused for a few moments to gaze down into the slate-gray waters of the canal below. Under different circumstances, she was half aware, she would be feasting her senses on all the beauty that surrounded them, inclement weather notwithstanding.

“Do you believe in fate, Frances?” he asked her.

She considered her answer. Did she?

“I do believe in coincidence,” she said. “I believe that some unexpected things happen to catch our attention, and that what we do with those moments might affect or change the whole course of our life. But I do not believe we are blown about helplessly by a fate over which we have no control. There would be no point in free will if that were so. We all have the power to decide, to say yes or no, to do something or not to do it, to go in this direction or that.”

“Do you believe,” he asked her, “that the whole course of your life brought you to that snow-clogged road when it did, and that the whole course of my life brought me to the same place at the same time? And do you believe that coincidence as you call it willed it so? Or that in some quite unconscious way
we
did ourselves? Was it perhaps not simple, random accident that it was you who were there and not some other woman, or that it was me and not some other man?”

The strange, unlikely possibility made her feel breathless. Could life really be that . . . deliberate?

“You were warned that it would snow,” she said. “You might have chosen not to travel that day. I had seen all the signs of an approaching storm for days. I might have waited to see what would happen.”

“Precisely,” he said. “Either one of us or both could have heeded the warnings and warning signs, which appear to have deterred every other intended traveler in that area. But neither of us did. Has it struck you as curious that we met no one else on that road? That no one else stopped at that inn?”

No, it had not. She had never thought of it. But she thought of it now. She had wanted to set out earlier that morning, but her great-aunts had persuaded her to sit an extra hour with them over breakfast. If she had left when she had intended, she would very probably never have met him.

How she
wished
she had set out earlier!

Or did she?

What was he trying to say, anyway?

He set out along the path again, and she fell into step beside him. He did not offer his arm. He had not done so since they left the school, in fact. She was thankful for it. But she did not need to touch him in order to feel him with every fiber of her being.

Was it possible, she wondered, that it was not just the fact that she had lain with him that drew her so powerfully to him, that had made it impossible to forget him, that had made her life an agony during the past few days? She had loved before. Surely she had loved Charles. But she had never felt quite like this.

They walked onward in silence again. They still had not encountered anyone else since entering Sydney Gardens. Everyone else in Bath had more sense than they, it seemed.

When they reached the top of the hill, they paused again to look down on trees and lawns and winding paths. A roofed pavilion was in view to the left. So was the famed labyrinth a little lower down. Maps of the maze were available from the Sydney Hotel beside the entrance to the Gardens, Frances had heard, for use by those too afraid of getting lost for an indeterminate length of time before finding their way out again. Behind them was a row of swings, one of them creaking in the wind.

There were all the signs of the fact that these were
pleasure
gardens, not least among them the sheer beauty of nature. Yet she felt the very antithesis of joy as she looked on them all. Where was this hour leading them? It was leading absolutely nowhere at all.

His silence unnerved her, though she had sworn to herself that she would not break it again. But when she looked across at him, she found him looking back, an unfathomable expression in his eyes.

His words took her totally by surprise.

“Do those swings beckon you as strongly as they do me?” he asked her.

What?
For a moment her mind was catapulted back to the inn kitchen on the first morning they spent there, when they were eating breakfast and he had suddenly challenged her to a snowman-building contest. That, she realized then—yes, just
that
—had been the real start of everything between them. If she had refused . . .

She turned her head to look at the swings. The broad wooden seats were suspended from tree branches overhead on long, plaited ropes. Because they were set in a grove of trees, they looked as if they were sheltered from the wind. Only the one swing at the far end swayed and creaked.

“Even more strongly,” she said, and she turned, catching up the hems of her dress and cloak as she did so, and strode toward the nearest swing.

The need to break the terrible tension between them was overwhelming. What more sure way than to frolic on a child's swing?

“Do you need a push?” he asked as she seated herself.

“Of course not,” she said, pushing off with both feet and then stretching out her legs and bending them back under the seat to set her swing in motion and propel herself higher and higher. “And I bet I'll be first to kick the sky.”

“Ah, a challenge,” he said, taking the swing next to hers. “Did no one ever teach you that it is unladylike to make wagers?”

“That is a rule imposed by men because they are afraid of losing to women,” she said.

“Ha!”

They swung higher and higher until the ropes of their swings creaked in protest and the wind whipped at her skirts and the brim of her bonnet and fairly took her breath away on the forward descent and ascent. With every upward swing Frances could see more and more of the gardens below. With every downward swoop she was aware of tree branches rushing by only a few feet away.

“Wheeee!” she cried on one descent.

“The exact word I was searching for,” he called, passing her in the opposite direction.

They were both laughing then and swinging and whooping like a pair of exuberant children until by unspoken assent they gradually slowed and then sat side by side, their swings gently swaying.

“One problem,” he said. “There was no sky to kick.”

“What?” She turned to him, wide-eyed. “You did not
feel
it? That means you did not swing high enough to touch it. I did and I win.”

“You, Frances Allard,” he said, “are lying through your teeth.”

He had said those exact words before, and the occasion rushed to her mind with startling clarity. They had been lying in bed, and she had just told him she was not cold and he had replied that it was a pity as he might have offered to warm her up.

I am frozen,
she had said then.

You lie through your teeth, ma'am,
he had answered her,
but I like your spirit. Now, I suppose I need to think of some way of warming you . . .

What was she doing here? she wondered suddenly. Why was she doing this again—frolicking with him, wagering against him, laughing with him?

Just a few minutes ago, it seemed, she had been trying to get Rhiannon Jones to feel the melody with her right hand and allow the passion of it to rise above the accompaniment with the left.

“Frances—” he began.

But at that exact moment a large drop of moisture splattered against one of her cheeks and she saw a few more darken the fabric of her cloak. He held out a hand, palm up, and they both looked up.

“Damnation!” he exclaimed. “We are about to get rained upon, and you did not bring an umbrella even though I advised you to do so. We are going to have to make a dash for the pavilion.”

He took her by the hand without a by-your-leave, and a moment later they were running toward the pavilion a short distance away down the hill while the heavens gave every indication that they were about to open in earnest at any moment. By the time they reached shelter, they were both breathless and laughing again.

The pavilion had been built more as a sun shelter than as a refuge from the rain. It was walled on three sides, with a roof that jutted out in front a couple of feet beyond the side walls. Fortunately for them, the wind was blowing from behind and the inside of the shelter remained dry. They sat on the wide bench against the inside wall and watched as the expected deluge arrived. It came down in sheets, drumming against the thin roof, forming a curtain across the front opening, almost obliterating the view of lawns and trees beyond. It felt like sitting behind a massive waterfall.

“One can only hope,” she said, “that this is not about to set in for the day.”

But their laughter had faded, and their solitude seemed far more pronounced here than it had out in the deserted gardens.

He took one of her hands in his and held it in both his own while she looked away and tried not to react to the warmth of his touch.

“Frances,” he said, “I think you had better come to London with me.”

She tried to remove her hand then, but he held it in a firm clasp.

“That
was
fate,” he said. “And it was speaking loudly and clearly. It was so insistent a fate that it threw us together again this week when we had missed the chance it presented to us after Christmas. Forgive me for saying this, but I have known many women, Frances, and I have not mourned the departure of a single one of them from my life. Until you, that is. I have never before known one for only two days and still been obsessed with her three months later.”

“I suppose,” she said bitterly, “it is because I said no to you and you are not accustomed to women who deny you what you want.”

“I have considered that as a distinct possibility,” he admitted. “But injured pride, if that was all that was involved, would actually have sent me dashing off in the opposite direction to find another woman to bolster my sagging confidence in my own charms. I could never grovel before any woman simply because she had thwarted my will. I would be off in pursuit of more easy prey instead.”

“Of which there is doubtless plenty,” she said tartly.

“Quite so,” he said. “I am young, you see, Frances, and have all my hair and all my teeth, tolerably white. I am also wealthy and titled, with the prospect of vastly more in the future. It is an irresistible combination for many women. But all that is beside the point under present circumstances. I
am
groveling before you, you see.”

“Nonsense!” Her heart was hammering against her ribs. She would have been able to hear it, she was sure, if the sound of the rain against the roof had not been almost deafening. “You want to get me into bed, that is all.”

Her cheeks grew hot at the bold vulgarity of her own words.

“If that were all it was,” he said, “I would have been satisfied long ago, Frances. I have
had
you in bed. One bedding is often enough to satisfy simple lust. Yet I am not satisfied.”