Slightly Scandalous (25 page)

The wilderness walk began with a series of wide, earthen steps with wooden borders leading up between rhododendron bushes to larger trees farther up the hill. Then a well-worn, shaded path turned sharply to the right to weave among the trees and give the walker an impression of total seclusion, of being miles from any habitation. It was fragrant with vegetation even though the height of summer was past, and loud with birdsong.

So had he-faced reality this morning, that was-or last night, to be more accurate. He was Hallmere now, whether he wanted to be or not. The wars were over with Napoléon Bonaparte imprisoned on the island of Elba. His job was done. He was twenty-eight years old. It was true that he had no intention of returning to Penhallow-ever. But he was a peer of the realm. He was going to have to take his seat in the House of Lords one of these days. He was going to have to acquire a permanent home somewhere-probably in London. He was going to have to settle down-those dreaded words.

Though why he should think them with dread he did not know. He had settled down once before, years ago, when he had learned and practiced the trade of carpenter. He had expected to live his life out there in the village of Lydmere. He had even been starting to look about him at some of the village girls.

Perhaps it was time he married. And if he must marry, why not Freyja? Socially he could not do better. He would never be bored with her. He found her attractive. He had discovered last evening that she was quite as explosively passionate in bed as he had expected. He would certainly enjoy the opportunity of bedding her under less frantic circumstances in order to discover if her nature was as sensual as it was passionate-he would wager it was.

Why not Freyja?

Perhaps because he had never set out to woo her. Perhaps because she had never shown any inclination to be wooed. Perhaps because his nature was still too restless or because her feelings were still too tied up with a thwarted passion for Ravensberg.

But perhaps now they had no more choice in the matter, he thought, striding along the path and peering into the occasional grove or folly set aside for rests along the way. There was no sign of Freyja. It was possible, of course, that she had not come this way at all. Or, if she had, she might have returned to the house another way by now.

The path had been climbing steadily upward from the beginning, though not with any steep gradient. He was about to move over the crest of the hill, Joshua realized, and begin the gradual, curving descent to the end of the walk. A stone tower, artfully built to look romantically ruined, had been built on the crest. If there was a winding stairway inside the narrow doorway with its Gothic arch-and he rather believed there must be-the energetic walker could get up to the crenellated battlements and have a magnificent view out over the treetops to the surrounding countryside.

He looked up-and grinned.

Her hands were resting on the battlements. Her face was raised to the sun and more than half turned from the path on which he stood. If she had been wearing a hat for her ride earlier, there was no sign of it now. Or of any hairpins. Her hair was billowing out loose behind her in the breeze.

Once more he was reminded of Viking maidens or Saxon warrior women. Or perhaps this morning she looked more like the medieval lady of the castle, holding it against all assailants while her lord was away in battle.

She had told him once that she sometimes felt she had been born in the wrong era.

"If I come closer," he called, cupping his hands on either side of his mouth, "will I be greeted with boiling oil and poisoned arrows raining down on my head?"

She turned and looked down at him, raising her hands to hold her hair back from her face.

"No," she called back. "I thought I would give myself the more personal pleasure of pitching you over the battlements. Come on up."

She favored him with one of her feline smiles.

CHAPTER XIV

Look," she said after he had come up the spiral stairs inside the tower and joined her at the top. She gestured about her with a wide sweep of her arm. "Is there a view more lovely anywhere, do you suppose?"

There was a view for miles in all directions. The house was back behind her, but she preferred to look into the wind the other way, over the trees, over the back part of the park, and on out over farmland and farm buildings and hedgerows and winding lanes. The tower was one of her favorite places in the world-wild and secluded, dwarfing her little problems and heartaches, blowing them away in the wind.

She did not like sharing it with anyone, but it would have been petty to send Josh away. She wished she could have done so, though. Hearing his voice calling unexpectedly from below and then looking down and seeing him had turned her knees to jelly and sent her stomach somersaulting and taken her breath away for an unguarded moment. She was terribly aware of him physically, more so now that he had come up beside her, tall and virile in his riding clothes-and hatless.

She did not like the feeling one little bit. Passion had been all very well four years ago when she had also fancied herself in love and headed toward a happily-ever-after-how young she had been in those days. But now it suggested only a loss of control, a fear that she could somehow lose her hard-won sense of strong independence. She was not in love with Josh, but she was certainly and ignominiously in lust with him. She did not like it. She did not choose to be either in love or in lust-especially not with a man who found everything in life amusing and rarely seemed to entertain a serious thought.

Joshua Moore, Marquess of Hallmere, was not worthy of her love, even if she was prepared to offer it. She was not.

"Not that I have seen in any of my travels," he said in answer to her question, looking about appreciatively at the view. "The fields have all been harvested and some of the trees are beginning to turn color. In another few weeks they are going to look more glorious yet. Ah, pardon me." He turned his head to look down at her. "You do not like autumn, do you?"

"Only because winter comes so close behind it," she said. "Winter always reminds me of-" She shivered.

"Your mortality?" he suggested. "Have you read Gulliver's Travels?"

"Of course I have," she said.

"Do you remember those characters who were doomed to live forever?" he asked her. "I cannot remember which part of the book they were in, but they were born with a mark on their foreheads that meant they could never ever die. Instead of being envied, they were the most pitied members of their race. It was a terrible fate to be born with such a mark. Jonathan Swift was wiser than most of us, it seems, and understood how undesirable it would be to live forever. And if we live always in constant dread, Free, how can we enjoy the time that is allotted to us?"

"I do not live in constant dread," she told him.

"Only in winter?" he said, smiling at her. "And in autumn because winter comes next? Half of every year?"

She shook her head. "This is foolish talk," she said. "Who told you that you would find me here?"

"Were you hiding from me?" he asked her.

"I never hide from anyone," she said crossly-she had, of course, been doing just that, or at least postponing seeing him as long as she could this morning. "I think it is time we quarreled, Josh. It is time I set you free and sent you on your way. It is time to end this farce."

"It cannot be done, sweetheart," he said, leaning one elbow on the battlements and turning to look fully at her. "Not yet. Not until we know if you are with child or not."

She had lain awake most of the night worrying about just that. About having to marry Josh. About his having to marry her. About being forever trapped in a marriage that neither of them had freely chosen and both of them would forever resent. About having a soft, warm, living baby of her own.

"I am not," she said firmly. "And there is always something or another. When we started this, we were going to end it the next day. Every day since then we seem to have dug ourselves a deeper hole."

"Am I to understand, my charmer," he asked her, "that you do not want to marry me?"

"You know I do not," she said irritably, "any more than you want to marry me. Do be serious for once in your life, Josh. I begin to think that your laughter and your carefree manner are masks that you wear. What I have not yet decided is whether they mask nothing at all or whether there is a person behind them that I would not recognize if I were to meet him without the disguise."

He gazed at her with squinted eyes, the smile still playing about his lips. "It would be nothing at all, sweetheart," he said. "Are you sorry last night happened?"

"Of course I am sorry it happened," she said. "And it was all my fault. I ought not to have suggested the gamekeeper's hut in the first place. With a little imagination I might have guessed the danger I was leading us both into. But I did not. I had not armed myself for resisting what proved irresistible. You had. You would have stopped me. But I would not be stopped. It is all quite, quite lowering."

"You did not enjoy it, then?" he asked her.

"Of course-" She turned her head and glared at him. "Of course I enjoyed it. I am a woman and you are a man-a handsome, attractive man."

"No!" He grinned at her. "Am I?"

"Of course I enjoyed it," she said again. "But that has nothing to do with anything. Do you not see that? I wish it had not happened. Not only are we not betrothed, but we are not even thinking of becoming betrothed. We have never cultivated any deeper relationship than a light flirtation, and we engaged in that only because we were both stuck in Bath and were horridly bored. We have never taken our feigned betrothal seriously, though we have both enjoyed it, I believe, as a sort of lark that will soon be over and will leave us quite unscarred. Last night spoiled all that. Of course I wish it had not happened. If we are forced to marry, that one mistake on my part will have ruined both our lives."

"We had better hope that we are not forced to marry, then," he said, the laughter gone from his eyes. "But did last evening have at least one positive result? Have you now abandoned your hatred of Viscountess Ravensberg?"

"It was high time," she said with a sigh, turning away to look back toward the house, which, with its long mullioned windows looked very Elizabethan from this angle. "My feelings had become an embarrassment to me-and to her and Kit. She is a perfect lady and kind and warm-hearted too-all qualities I have hated in her because I do not possess them myself. But, yes, we came to an understanding last evening. Perhaps we will even become friends. Who knows? Stranger things have happened."

"And Ravensberg?" he asked her. "Have you forgiven him?"

She sighed again and held her hair back from her face with one arm. "I could not help thinking all last night," she said, "that if he had come home last summer without Lauren, he would perhaps not have been able to resist the pressure of expectation from his family and mine. He might have married me simply because he could find no way not to marry me. And I would have known, if not immediately, then long before now. I would have been trapped in a living hell. There is nothing to forgive. He would have married me four years ago, but I would not marry him. He owed me nothing last year. And perhaps I have been clinging to something that never really existed. I was in love-desperately so, but I am not sure being in love is any closer to real loving than being in lust is."

"Are you in lust with me?" he asked.

She turned to look at him again and laughed when she saw the laughter back in his eyes.

"Oh, now that," she said, "I will not deny. You must know it anyway as I know it of you. It certainly would not be enough to carry us into any future, though. And so it is dangerous and must be resisted at all costs."

She was standing too close to him. His hands reached out to catch her on either side of her waist and draw her against him. He lowered his head and kissed her softly, almost lazily, with slightly parted lips. She rested her hands on his shoulders and realized with a terrible sinking of the heart that there was going to be a yawning emptiness in her life where he had been after this farce had finally come to its end.

"Though why you lust after me," she said when he lifted his head, "I will never know. I am so ugly."

"What?" His eyes were alight with merriment. "In any other woman that would be a far from subtle fishing expedition for a compliment. But you mean it. Let me see. Let me have a good look at you."

His eyes proceeded to roam her face while she wondered what on earth could have possessed her to utter such stupid words aloud. She had long ago given up lamenting her looks and envying Morgan hers. She was as she was. Anyone who did not like looking at her might simply look elsewhere.

"You are not pretty, Free, or beautiful," he said-at least he was not going to resort to lying flattery. "You are something else, though, over and above both. You, my sweetheart, are plain gorgeous. I think I may forever afterward find all the pretty girls somewhat insipid."

"How foolish!" She laughed. "Any more of such blatant flattery and I may toss you over the battlements in dead earnest."

"I am in fear and trembling," he said, and bent down to scoop her up into his arms.

"Put me down," she demanded indignantly.