Slightly Scandalous (42 page)

"It would," he said. "But my approval is supremely unimportant, is it not? Constance is of age and not my ward. And, like Prue, she has a mind of her own and is quite capable of deciding what will give her greatest happiness in life. I cannot think dynastically, Freyja. I was not raised that way."

"You will stay for that wedding too, then?" They were approaching the end of the valley, and the steep hillside no longer protected them from the fresh west wind, which sent their cloaks billowing out to the side.

"Yes," he said. "I would like to settle them in the dower house, but I will need to work out a few details first."

"And so poor Chastity will be left at Penhallow alone with her mother," Freyja said. "But at least she will have her sisters close."

"My aunt can no longer live at Penhallow," he said, turning his head and looking down at her. "Penhallow is going to be my home."

"Oh." She looked at him in some surprise. But she could think of nothing else to say. She was feeling a little hurt for some reason she could not yet quite fathom.

"She will have to live at the dower house herself if no other solution presents itself," he said. "But I am going to do all in my power to find her somewhere else to live. And I daresay she will not want to be in such close proximity to me."

"Chastity?" she said.

He sighed. "My ward," he said. "But not my prisoner. I cannot decide what she will do, can I? Perhaps she will choose to go wherever my aunt goes. Perhaps she will go to live with Constance-or remain here. I shall give her the chance of a Season in London if she wants it, though I am not sure how I would go about it. I am the Marquess of Hallmere, though, am I not? A man of importance and influence." He grinned at her.

They rounded the headland, and the wide flat sands of the beach stretched before them, the towering cliffs to one side, the sea to the other. It was half out or half in-Freyja did not know which. She could hear the rush of the water and see the moonlight sparkling across its surface. It was chillier here, the air damper and saltier. She lifted her face and drew in great lungfuls of it.

He was going to stay, then. He was going to take on his responsibilities as head of his family. He was going to settle down. Without her.

"Perhaps I will see you in London next spring, then," she said. "Morgan will be making her come-out."

"I want the first waltz at the first ball," he said. "We have waltzed together only once, Free, and even that was interrupted by the necessity of chasing after the master of ceremonies to announce our betrothal."

They set off across the beach, the wind in their faces.

"The first waltz is reserved, then," she said.

They walked in silence for a while. They were not touching. She had her hands inside her cloak. He had his clasped behind him.

"The tide is on the way in," he said. "But we have plenty of time before we get cut off from the valley."

"Did he commit suicide, do you think?" she asked.

"Albert?" He was silent for a few moments. "He must have realized he was in deep trouble. He also knew that his mother could see no wrong in him and that his father was weak. He did not seem like the sort of man who would take his own life anyway. But who knows? Chass had given him an ultimatum. So had I. I had told him that if he was still within ten miles of Penhallow by nightfall of the next day I would kill him with my bare hands. I don't suppose I would have done it, but I would have pounded him within an inch of his life. He knew it too. My guess is that he was overcome by the cold or by cramps. He was a nasty, villainous creature, Freyja-I always suspected that he was in on that attempted smuggling ring too. But enough on that topic. It is over and done with."

He stopped walking and stood looking out to sea. Freyja stood beside him, feeling all the vast wonder of the universe and the exhilaration of the fact that she was part of it.

"Freyja," he said, "what are you doing for the rest of your life?"

Oh, no! She was alerted by his tone and by the fact that he had called her Freyja rather than Free or sweetheart.

"Whatever it is," she said, lifting her chin, "it will be done without you, Josh. I am not one of your loose ends that must be tied up neatly before you can settle peacefully here. It was never a part of our bargain that you feel obligated to offer for me in earnest."

"What if it is not obligation that I feel?" he asked.

But her throat suddenly felt raw and painful and she realized in some horror that if she allowed him to speak one more word she might make an utter idiot of herself by starting to bawl. How dared he! She did not need this. She turned sharply about and eyed the cliffs. The moonlight was full upon them. They did not look quite so sheer from below.

"I am going up," she said.

He sighed. "Very well, then," he said. "It is probably wise to start back anyway. The tide is coming in fast."

"I am going up there." She pointed to the top of the cliffs, and she felt the familiar weakness of the knees and shortness of breath that had assailed her throughout a life of forcing herself to do dangerous things, preferably those that most terrified her. She had climbed trees when she was a girl only because she had been afraid of heights.

Joshua chuckled. "I will come back in the morning, sweetheart," he said, "and sweep up your remains. No, I won't be able to do that, will I? They will have been washed away by the tide. What the devil are you doing?"

She was striding straight toward the cliffs.

"I am going up the cliffs," she said.

"Why?" He caught up to her. "We are not even close to being cut off by the tide."

"Why?" she said haughtily. "What a stupid question, Josh. Because they are there, of course."

She pushed her cloak behind her back, found her first foothold and handhold, and raised herself clear of the beach. She looked back over her shoulder.

"I'll race you to the top," she said.

CHAPTER XXIII

What he ought to have done, Joshua thought, was to have plucked her off the cliff face and borne her back to the house by the valley route, by force if necessary. It would have been necessary, of course. He would have had to tuck her under one arm or toss her over one shoulder and parry her blows as best he could without retaliating in kind and close his ears to her curses. But at least she would still have been a live body by the time he had set her down safely inside Penhallow.

It would have been the responsible thing to do, and he had drawn responsibility about him like a mantle during the past week or so. He had become a new person, a mature adult, a sober marquess with duty as his guiding light. He had been preparing to fade into stodgy respectability and premature middle age.

But what was he doing instead of hauling Freyja safely back home?

He was climbing the cliffs with her, that was what.

In the middle of the night, with a stiff wind blowing.

And with her hampered by a woman's garments.

He was also doing a good deal of laughing. The utter absurdity of it all! And the undeniable rush of exhilaration at the danger of it all!

Not that it was quite as dangerous as it looked-especially from above. Steep as the cliffs were, they provided any number of perfectly steady holds for feet and hands. Of course, there was no going back down once they had started. For one thing, going down a cliff face was infinitely more difficult than going up. For another, the tide was already in at the river mouth, and there would be no way of reaching the valley except by swimming.

He was not engaging in a race. He was keeping as close to her as he could, and slightly below her, almost as if he believed he could catch her if she should happen to slip and hurtle past him. But perhaps he could offer some assistance if she got stuck. Not that he offered out loud. He did not want anger to distract her. When she stopped, sometimes for a whole minute at a time, he stayed quietly where he was.

He knew that as soon as they reached the top they were going to collapse, their legs turned to jelly and quite useless for many minutes. They were also going to lie flat on the blessedly flat land, clinging to it as if expecting to slide off into space at any moment. And they were going to vow, as he had vowed every time he had done this as a boy, that never again would they be so foolhardy.

The last few yards were the most difficult, where solid stone became intermingled with earth and grass and loose pebbles and the dangers of finding a false foothold and sliding uncontrollably became very real. He remembered clinging motionless for maybe half an hour a body length from the top the first time he made the climb, unable for all that time to persuade himself to move a muscle while telling himself that he must before he disgraced himself by losing control of his bladder.

Freyja did not make the mistake of clinging too long and so becoming paralyzed. He had been trying to decide what to do if she did. He climbed after her over the lip of the very hollow where they had sat a few days ago and lay facedown on the grass, panting, beside her.

She was the first-after perhaps five minutes-to start laughing.

He joined her.

They lay side by side, clinging to the world as if they expected the force of gravity to expend itself at any moment, and shook and snorted with laughter.

"I believe I won," she said-a pronouncement of enormous wit that sent them off into renewed convulsions.

"I suppose," he said, "you are afraid of heights?"

"Always have been," she admitted.

They laughed so hard they wheezed for breath.

He turned onto his side to look at her, and she turned onto hers to look at him.

"You are not finding the night cold, are you?" he asked.

"Cold?" She raised her eyebrows. "Cold?"

They met in the middle of the space between them and were soon having tolerable success at trying to occupy the exact same space. Their arms were about each other, their mouths wide on each other's, kissing with the urgency of two madcaps who knew very well that they had just challenged death itself and won.

They came together soon afterward in a tangle of clothes and arms and legs, heat and wetness and enticing urgency at their shared core. They made love with vigor and passion and joy.

"My sweetest heart," he murmured, and other inanities of a like kind, whenever his mouth was free for speech.

"My love. Oh, my dearest love," she murmured back to him.

They exploded into completion together-perhaps all of three minutes after they had begun. As if now, their climb over, they were running a race. Which, appropriately enough, they finished in a dead heat.

They were panting again then, and she was laughing again into his shoulder as he wrapped one arm about her from beneath and both their cloaks about them from above.

"What was this?" he asked, his mouth against her ear. "Has my hearing turned suddenly defective? My love? My dearest love? Passion and lust run wild, sweetheart?"

Her laughter subsided, but she said nothing.

"Speechless?" he suggested.

"Don't spoil it, Josh," she said.

"What will spoil things for me," he said, "is to see you leave here in a few days' time, Free, and to smile cheerfully as if I were happy to see you go off to plan our wedding. And then to wait for your letter officially ending our betrothal. And then to waltz with you next spring, having lived all winter for just that one half hour. And then to spend the rest of my life without you."

He heard her drawing a slow, deep breath.

"There is no need-" she began.

"Dammit!" He cut her off before she could launch into the expected speech. "Let there be some truth between us at least, Freyja. I have had enough of lies and evasions and secrets to last me a lifetime. If all this has been nothing but a lark to you, then so be it. Say so honestly and I will let you go without another word-unless, that is, you have been got with child. But if you are letting me go because you think you ought to honor the temporary clause in our bargain and because you think I am being annoyingly noble in my offer to make our betrothal real, then stuff it, sweetheart. Just stuff it! Give me honesty now. Do you love me?"

Her voice sounded reassuringly normal-it was cold and haughty.

"Well, of course I love you," she said.

"Of course." He was back to laughter then. He held her tightly and could not seem to stop laughing for a while. "Are we going to allow a little bargain to ruin the rest of our lives, then?"

"Whenever we would quarrel," she said, "and we would quarrel, Josh, each of us would wonder if the other had felt coerced into marrying."

"What poppycock!" he said. "Do you not trust me to say the truth to you, Freyja? I say that I love you, that I adore you, that I can imagine no greater happiness than to spend the rest of my life loving you and laughing and quarreling and even fighting with you. I trust you to say what is true to me. You have said that you love me-that of course you love me. Does that include the wish to marry me, to live here with me all your life, to have babies with me and fun with me? To share the sorrows of life with me? And all its joys?"