Susan Johnson (21 page)

“I’ve never served in England’s Army,” Johnnie said, not mentioning he’d served in the French Army under his uncle’s command.

“How fascinating it must have been to be an actual
hostage
,” Jane precipitously declared, her mind on its own strategic track, her forwardness not a surprise to Munro, who’d been parrying her questions about his cousin for some time. And while her statement was directed at Elizabeth, her inviting gaze still dwelt on Johnnie.

“Not an unusual pattern on the Borders, Miss Gerard,” Johnnie replied to save Elizabeth embarrassment, although even his normally unruffled poise had been briefly shocked by Jane’s bluntness. “It’s all quite routine.”

“How long were you
there
?” Jane went on, her voice breathy with excitement, her glance unwaveringly
not
on the object of her query.

“Really, Jane,” Anne Baldwin interrupted, coming to Elizabeth’s support. “I’m sure Elizabeth has grown tired of repeating the story of her exchange for Lord Graden’s brother.”

The story was well known in the area of Three
Kings; only the presence of the disreputable, comely Border Lord had produced renewed, titillating interest in the minds of the inquisitive Gerard sisters.

“Why don’t you show us the current progress on your home, Elizabeth,” George Baldwin suggested into the uncomfortable pause. “I understand you’ve actually begun the foundations.”

“Would you mind, Munro?” Elizabeth queried, grateful to the Baldwins for their kindness. “He knows so much more than I,” she added as she smiled at her neighbors.

And the party proceeded out the glass-paned doors facing the gardens. The estate Elizabeth had purchased with her inheritance included a redbrick Tudor structure with a superb formal garden. The well-maintained grounds rose in terraced parterres to the top of the hill that had once held a small Romanesque folly—now much in ruins. On that picturesque elevation with a magnificent view of the countryside, Elizabeth had chosen to situate her new home.

“It’s going to be a long afternoon,” Johnnie sardonically murmured, his hand intimately at the small of her back as he and Elizabeth took up the rear of the procession through the neat, trimmed gardens, his gaze intent on the group ahead should he have to distant himself discreetly from his hostess. “No doubt the Gerard sisters will wish to know what he did last night in detail?”

“I’m sure they’d love to know anything at all about
you
, darling,” Elizabeth teasingly replied, turning toward him in a swinging half-step, her full-skirted apple-green gown swirling around her ankles, her expression playful. “And if it were proper to pant in public, they surely would.”

“Spare me,” he grumbled, female busybodies decidedly outside his purview.

“Don’t you find Lucy pretty?” she sweetly inquired, touching his fingertips lightly.

“No, I do not.”

“Perhaps Jane is more your style.” Her grin was cheerful.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he said with a
sudden smile. “And no, Jane is not my style; I dislike simpering blondes.”

“She hasn’t simpered yet.”

“She will, trust me.”

“So sure, Ravensby,” she teased. “Does it come from vast experience?”

“Damned right it does, Bitsy, my sweet, and if you don’t stop aggravating me with talk of those simpleton gossips, I’ll embarrass you right now before every one of your neighbors.”

“Are you threatening me?” She didn’t look alarmed.

“Absolutely.”

She cast him a sportive sidelong glance. “Well, maybe I’ll just embarrass you back.”

“Impossible, darling.” He gazed over at her from under the dark drift of his lashes. “Belive me, you’re years too late.”

“Arrogant man.”

“No, just honest. I’ve been out in the world more than you. And I’ve also met more Gerard sisters than you could imagine.”

He was right; he was also right about the Gerard sisters’ avid curiosity. “How
do
I respond to Lucy and Jane?” Elizabeth said with a small sigh, her teasing smile fading, genuine concern motivating her as they approached the party at the crest of the hill.

“You don’t,” Johnnie succinctly declared. “They have no right to inquire into your personal life.”

“We in the country are less blasé. Personal lives are the subject of much comment.”

He shrugged. “As they are everywhere, darling. But if you allow people to go beyond certain boundaries, they’ll eat you alive.”

“Should I fall suddenly ill?” Elizabeth facetiously suggested, each step drawing them nearer to the group at the construction site. The possibility of restraining the Gerard sisters for an entire afternoon was suddenly daunting.

“Perhaps later.” A faint smile curved his mouth. “If I can’t think of something more plausible.”

“I wish now I’d sent a messenger last night to cancel the invitation—even if it was midnight.”

“Amen to that,” he murmured, an effortless social smile appearing on his face as they came within speaking distance of the party. “Well, Munro, have you sufficiently explained the need for such sizable masonry in the foundations?” His smile held an open, natural charm. “I find it particularly fascinating how Munro can calculate the exact weight-bearing load of the walls and roof beforehand. Tell them how you learned that in Rome.”

And with consummate skill he quite literally controlled the conversation throughout the tour of the building site, on the walk back to the house, with cultivated ease over luncheon. He entertained them with stories of the Court in London—a world removed from the environs of Northumbria; he talked of the China seas and the trading depots in the Orient; he described the Sun King’s magnificent Versailles, not currently accessible to English subjects. He promised to send the ladies some distinguished French wines, very dear and difficult to obtain in England since the war; to the men he offered some aged brandies impossible to buy for love or money.

And they talked some more of the war on the Continent, and later, more pertinently, of possible war between Scotland and England.

“Hope it don’t come to that, by God,” Lord Ayton muttered. “London don’t always know what’s best.” Coming from an ancient Roman Catholic family, Lord Ayton had reservations about the Succession. “Don’t care for the Hanovers,” he bluntly said. What was left unsaid was his strongly Jacobite preference.

“Everyone knows the Scottish Parliament has concerns about the Succession too,” Johnnie said.

“Are the Scots going to march?” Ayton demanded. Like so many of the country barons, he was a plain-speaking man without artifice.

“It’s a moot question at the moment,” Johnnie neutrally replied, disinclined to offer details to any Englishman, no matter his Border affiliation.

“My Scottish cousin tells me the counties are raising levies,” Ayton said. “Damned if that don’t smell of
war. And a regiment of horse came up from Doncaster last week. We’re going to be caught in the damned middle again.” The boundary between England and Scotland was an arbitrary line on the map; extended families living on both sides of that artificial border often overlooked national interests in favor of familial ones.

“There’s some talk of union,” George Baldwin said. “Would that allay these overtures to war?”

“The union commission was disbanded in February,” Johnnie replied. “Through lack of interest. Have you heard of renewed purpose in Westminster?” It was a polite question only. No one in Scotland wanted union except those magnates who owned property in England and seats on the board of the East India Company and might lose them if war broke out. And the business interests in London and Bristol that controlled Parliament were adamantly opposed to Scotland entering their trade territories. As for the Court, if the English could secure Scottish approval for the Succession, they could continue to control Scotland completely. A union was of no interest to either country, for the moment.

“Thurlow, who represents our riding, tells me the Tories bring up the subject on occasion as though to test the waters.”

“Or to gauge their enemies,” Johnnie said.

“You go back to the sessions soon then?” George asked.

“Almost immediately,” Johnnie answered with deliberate vagueness, having decided on a means of escape for himself and Elizabeth. “It was a short adjournment. You must all call on me,” he cordially went on, “if you’re ever in Edinburgh or Ravensby.”

All in all, he managed to ingratiate himself nicely with the local gentry. He also effectively restrained the Gerard sisters from asking any impertinent questions. And when he said after dessert, “I promised Lady Graham to survey her wine cellar before I leave with regards to setting in a new supply. I’m sorry time is so limited. Would you excuse us, please?” everyone obligingly waved them off.

After a generous measure of wine for lunch, even
Munro didn’t mind being left behind to see the neighbors off. After an hour or two of Johnnie’s best wines, he found even simpering blondes had taken on an added allure.

Johnnie and Elizabeth retired to their private hermitage, relieved to have gotten away so easily.

“Thank you enormously,” Elizabeth whispered, throwing herself into his arms before he’d completely entered her bedroom.

“It was a purely selfish impulse, darling,” he murmured, his arms closing around her as he kicked the door shut behind him. “I was literally counting hours,” he said, “and I didn’t want to waste any more with strangers.”

“Umm … I love the feel of you.” Her hands ran up the back of his beige linen coat. “I kept wanting to touch you this afternoon, but I couldn’t.”

“I almost dragged you out of the dining room a dozen times, thinking to hell with them all.”

“The Gerard sisters could have dined on that for a lifetime.”

“My principal deterrent.” His grin was beautiful again, personal, for her alone.

“We’ve a whole day and a half left,” she murmured, her answering smile redolent with happiness.

“Two-and-a-half days.”

She leaned back in his arms to gain a better view of him. “You said you had to leave by six Friday morning.”

He squeezed her, a delicate nuance of movement, as delicate as the slow upcurving of his smile. “I decided to make it Saturday morning.”

Her green eyes shone with delight. “Because you adore me so,” she cheerfully supplied.

“Because I adore you so.…” he repeated.

Their days together were the stuff of dreams, lazy, indolent hours in bed, late breakfasts, leisurely walks in the shady forest or along the slow-moving stream, the water sluggish in the heat of summer; they rode once, although Elizabeth murmured no the next morning when he suggested it as they leaned against the cool stone of the pasture fence—“My bottom’s too tender.…” And sweeping her into his arms, he carried her into the house from the pasture beyond the stables: “To save you … for later.…” he said with a lush smile. They ate private dinners with Munro, and he marveled at the attachment shown by his cousin, a man not prone to public displays of affection. Johnnie called Elizabeth “my darling” and “sweetheart” and sat close beside her and fed her. Or she him. It was a side of Johnnie Carre Munro had never seen. And he’d known Johnnie a lifetime.

Their last night together was more tender than rapacious, as if the end of their time together tempered the greedy compulsions of the days past.

It was as if both understood the final limit of their passionate holiday was mere hours away.

Their kisses were sweet and slow and languid, so the memory of them was etched more powerfully in their minds. Their lovemaking grew measured and gentle; the flash and violence and flagrant fever was replaced by a sensitivity, an intensity of emotion.

Elizabeth didn’t dare call it love, the word incongruous with the Laird of Ravensby’s dissolute life, but she felt a kind of indelible passion that would suffer the precious loss of him.

Johnnie experienced a sense of latent deprivation, obscure and perplexing. He wouldn’t recognize love if it knocked at his door dressed in cloth of gold, carrying a placard. But he knew already he’d miss her.

And to that feeling his new tenderness spoke.

Into this blissful night of sweet desire, Elizabeth found herself thinking how wonderful it would be to
have a child by this wild, beautiful man. An absurdity she immediately understood as completely irrational.

But the thought lingered with all the buried feelings from her past. She’d always wanted a child in the loneliness of her life with Hotchane. And each of her monthly courses that appeared like clockwork in the years of her marriage had brought with it a feeling of hopelessness and sorrow. It had been easier to blame her aged husband than face the dread possibility her own womb might be barren, but she couldn’t know. And as the years went by, her yearning for a child increased; she found herself watching babies and young children with a keen, aching hunger, coveting their soft plumpness and happy smiles, wanting to wipe away their tears, wondering if she would ever be called—lovingly—Mother.

She’d forgotten that dream in the months since Hotchane had died, too concerned with her struggle for survival as an independent widow. She’d not had time between fighting off her father’s scheme for her remarriage, selecting and purchasing her land, drawing up the necessary plans, and arranging for a construction crew. But the thought of babies surfaced instinctively as she lay against the heated strength of the quintessentially male Johnnie Carre.

“Do you have children?” she asked into the dimness of the candlelit room.

Shocked from a brief daydreaming doze, he murmured, “Ummm?” hoping he’d misunderstood her question.

“I was wondering if you had children?”

“Why?” he said, automatically evasive.

“I just wanted to know.” Ungenerous envy stole into her mind at his cautious response; some fortunate women must have his children.

“I’m not sure.” Masculine equivocation.

“Tell me,” she said.

He sighed, realizing from her tone it wasn’t going to be possible to avoid this conversation. “A few,” he reluctantly disclosed.

“That’s suitably vague.”

“I’m not being vague. There are simply no absolutes,
since I never sleep with virgins. A certain difficulty blurs the results. And acknowledging possible children isn’t always feasible, even if I were certain.”