The Countess Confessions (4 page)

In the wavering shadows she watched Camden throw her an apologetic glance before he hurried outside to his friends. The wind carried dramatic shrieks of dismay into the night. She heard footsteps running across the bridge toward the manor house.

“Ladies,” Camden shouted to the gathered crowd, “one at a time, and give a gentleman your hand! We don’t wish for this rickety bridge to deposit us in the brook.”

She waited another moment and then slipped through the back of the tent, her head bowed.

She wouldn’t be missed at the party by anyone except Lucy. No respectable gentleman wanted to dance with a bookish girl whose father drank to excess. Certainly no eligible man desired a wife who challenged the five centuries of solid tradition that made Hatherwood the predictable and uneventful parish that it was.

No one would be overly surprised if Emily found herself in trouble tonight. Her downfall was long overdue. She’d been a person of controversy since she was six, the year before her mother died. The fact that Lady Rowland had encouraged her daughter’s love of reading and forays into the woods with her brother to study nature only made Emily appear more unconventional.

“My girl is full of life,” the baroness would respond whenever anyone criticized Emily.

“As if her excessive activity were a desirable trait,” the village matrons murmured. “Is that why you’ve never kept a governess longer than four months?”

“They were dismissed for boring her” was her mother’s usual answer. “And some of them were, frankly, stupid.”

After her mother’s death, the villagers stopped pretending to discuss Emily in well-meaning terms and gossiped about her in the market square.

Emily Rowland and her brother have been sighted together in the woods after dark.

Young Mr. Rowland is teaching her to ride—bareback.

Why does the baron allow Emily into his billiards room? Why does he act as if he doesn’t know she is hiding inside his carriage when he goes to the tavern? Why doesn’t he remarry, for the girl’s sake?

All Emily could think was,
Thank goodness Hatherwood never learned who Michael’s true father is.

She felt the start of a reluctant smile.

Sir Angus had paid her more attention tonight than any other man in Hatherwood. Yes, she did realize that scoundrels didn’t make reliable husbands. She decided that they gave lovely kisses, though, and should be forgiven a few sins on that account.

D
amien Joshua David Boscastle, Viscount Norwood, the first Earl of Shalcross, resisted looking back at the hollow where he and the gypsy wench had crossed words. Fortune-teller, his arse. She hadn’t even been able to keep her hands steady as she’d laid out the deck for a reading. She also hadn’t been able to hide the intelligence in her eyes or the fact that she was a literate fraud. Perhaps she
was
an actress hired to amuse the guests. And even though other men must find her as appealing as he did, she’d kissed like an innocent.

Only one thing was certain: Damien’s kiss had not only disconcerted her, but had also proven that he wasn’t as immune to temptation as he liked to think. He hadn’t emerged as unscathed from their flirtation as he should have.

He tended to regard all forms of divination as utter rubbish. Perhaps tonight he had thumbed his nose at fate. It wouldn’t be the first time, but unless he was careful, it might be the last.

He’d lost twenty minutes in that tent before he realized he’d overspent his stay. And now, only steps away from the shallow crossing at the brook, his skin prickled in warning.

He turned his head, glancing once at the wind-battered tent. As he’d suspected, there wasn’t a pony in sight, but there
was
a tall man leaning against a willow tree with a casual demeanor that did not deceive Damien for a moment.

The man was measuring every step Damien made, and while Damien did not acknowledge him, he reached inside his jacket for his gun and walked calmly on until the man began to follow him. Damien had been prepared for possible violence tonight, but not this early on. Had his ruse been uncovered?

“By damn,” an incredulous voice said at Damien’s shoulder. “That red beard threw me for a moment, ugly beacon that it is. But I’ve known only one man in my life who had the bollocks not to turn around when he’s being followed. I consider myself lucky to have made it this far alive.”

Damien did turn then, matching the sardonic voice to a face from his distant past. It was a long-ago friend and trustworthy soldier who had served under him in Spain. He drew his hand from his pocket. “Michael Rowland,” he said with a rueful laugh. “Still sneaking up on men and surviving to brag of it. Please don’t tell me that you are you are Urania’s pony?”

“Urania?”

“She’s very pretty,” Damien said, grateful again that he had not followed his baser instincts when he’d had the chance. “And unintentionally entertaining. I assume that’s the purpose of her presence here. To entertain.”

Michael ran his hand through his unruly hair. “It’s a long story. I’m only a party to this embarrassment. What are
you
doing here? And in that odd disguise? I didn’t recognize you at first.”

“It’s a longer story. Dear God,” Damien said with a laugh, taking in Michael’s mop of black curls and garish scarlet cloak that came halfway to his gold-striped trousers. “Why are
you
dressed up like a gypsy vagabond? No one mentioned to me that this was to be a masquerade party.”

Michael crossed his arms, looking Damien up and down. The curved silver knife he had pulled from his boot rested against the crook of his elbow. “I’m dressed for a private affair. And you? I hope the red fungus growing from your chin and that girth are not the genuine Boscastle. Is this what wealth has done to the man who slipped unnoticed through a crack in the family door?”

Damien grinned. “I don’t have time to explain, but let’s just say that I’m on a mission that called for a disguise tonight.”

“A mission?” Michael stared across the brook at the candlelit manor house. “At Lord Fletcher’s ball? It must be personal.”

Damien shook his head, turning in distraction as another gust of wind threatened to tear the tent from its poles. “It isn’t.”

Michael stepped out from the shadows of the willow. “I’d offer to help,” he said with a glance of resignation at the muffled thud that arose from the tent, “but I’ve got my hands full for the moment.”

Damien looked back at Michael and laughed. “So the fortune-teller is really your—”

“Sister.”

“Thank God.”

“Excuse me?”

“She mentioned her brother in a threatening manner, that’s all. Of course, I never guessed she meant you. Do me a favor?”

“Name it.”

“If you run into me later in the evening or during the next few days, we do not know each other. Obviously my disguise isn’t as foolproof as I intended, or you would not have recognized me.”

Michael flashed him a grin and slipped his knife back into his boot. “Then again, you and I spent weeks on battle trails together. I saw you unshaven and covered with dust and blood more than once.”

“If I play my cards right, no one else will recognize me tonight. And there will be no blood.”

A splatter of rain hit Michael’s cheek. “Your life is at risk?”

“More than mine, I’m afraid.”

A panicked female voice drew the men apart. “Michael! The tent is falling down on my head, and
he’s
abandoned me! Hurry! The cards are escaping all over the place, and I can’t chase after them and hold off this pole at the same time.”

Damien placed his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “A sibling in distress. Go. I’m glad to have seen you.” And gladder still that he’d found the control to stop at robbing an old friend’s sister of a tantalizing kiss.

For an instant Damien envied their game. Surely it involved promises of passion and not political motives that would end in wholesale death if Damien did not remember that he had a previous engagement for the evening.

Soldiers kept one another’s secrets. He assumed he wouldn’t be blamed for ruining her plans when the wind was really to blame.

He’d been away from England for more than a decade. He had spent years fighting a foreign war for the regular army, and a longer stint in the East India Company, plundering and amassing wealth. He had been contacted by one of his Boscastle cousins and asked if he could locate a missing relative, one whom the family refused to believe was dead.

Why not? He was rich, and the woman he’d intended to marry had betrayed him. He had money in London banks, investments that had prospered him beyond his dreams.

What would it cost him to hunt down young Brandon Boscastle and his friend? Damien had never done a damn thing to help anyone except himself.

So he’d set out for Nepal, and within a month of travel was imprisoned under false charges and cut off from the rest of the world. His only good deed had landed him in hell, where he might well belong. But he’d been determined he wasn’t going to stay, especially since he’d found evidence that Brandon and his partner were still alive.

He lifted his face to the wind. Freedom. How good it felt.

Perhaps, in a month or two, after he’d foiled another plot that had nothing to do with sweet liaisons but everything to do with deadly conspiracies, he would cross the fortune-teller’s path again and have a chance to take more pleasure in the acquaintance.

E
mily listened to Camden’s voice fade away, to the feminine giggles and male guffaws that accompanied his escape. Her shoulder ached where the pole had hit her. And yet that was the least of her immediate injuries. Sighing, she resisted the urge to run outside to follow her friends, who would
not
welcome her for a minute if they realized what she had done. Her heart wasn’t in attending the party, anyway. She knew she would recover. But not tonight. After all, she had just learned Camden loved another woman. Emily wasn’t sure why she didn’t feel worse.

Where had Michael disappeared to? She couldn’t drag the tent off by herself, but he wasn’t anywhere to be seen when she heard Lucy calling her from the bridge.

Cross, her shawl scant protection against the wind, she emerged from the collapsed tent to ask whether Lucy had seen where Michael had gone when the look on her friend’s face stopped her. “The reading was a disaster. Please spare me the humiliation of explaining how it went. Camden and I are a lost cause. I hope it rains basins of freezing water on his head. Or on mine. Obviously I need something to awaken me from my dreams.”

“Whatever happened here?” Lucy whispered with the wide-eyed shock of a person who had stumbled into a battlefield and not merely across a bridge.

“The wind blew everything over while I was inside. My brother was here one moment; in the next he abandoned me. Have you seen the rogue? Is he flirting with a lady in the garden?”

Lucy glanced over her shoulder. “He was talking to a gentleman I’d never met before. I didn’t want to interrupt and get us all in trouble, but I’m afraid it’s too late. Your father is at the party, Emily. He was looking for you and Michael everywhere. He’s swilling champagne like water, and even asking the footmen if you’d been seen.”

“You didn’t tell him anything?”

“I raced off across the ballroom before he could spot me. I heard him questioning my father, and he’s disappeared, too. There’s something unusual about this evening, Emily, and I am not referring to our innocent deception.”

“The stars are misaligned tonight.”

Lucy’s voice lowered to a quaver. “My father’s new political allies are beginning frighten me.”

“All political men are frightening.” Emily shrugged, distracted as the wind whisked a tarot card through the grass and into the brook. “But why are they here tonight?” Dragging Lucy by the hand, she slipped down the embankment to catch the fleeting card. It sailed past her reach, the taunting image suspended in a cold moonbeam.

Passion

She would recover that card if it took an hour. It
meant
something, although exactly what was no longer clear. It could turn out to be a memento of the only kiss she would ever know. She released Lucy’s hand and snagged the corner of the card. Oh—and there, in an updraft, went Virtue.

She chased that one until she lost sight of it. Whether it was worth the price of her wet skirt and stockings, only Michael could decree.

She stood, at least twenty cards collected in her basket, but double that number escaping like prisoners determined to inflict the acts of fate to which they had been assigned. “I promised my brother I would return every single one of these cards intact.”

Lucy stared as one soared over her head. “Some of them are already sailing downstream. There are a few flying like butterflies toward the house. They look ever so enchanting. The guests are going to think we had trained cards unleashed for their entertainment. They’re like party favors. Besides, Michael
will
forgive you. Your father won’t.”

The Past flew beyond her grasp. She watched it go with no regrets; she had the most unexciting life in the annals of English history. But along with it went its reverse, the Future. And that indicated that Emily might be trapped in the tumultuous present she had created, a fate she was not about to settle for.

Another card tangled in her hair. Lucy plucked it free, her expression amused as she lifted it into the moonlight. “What is it?” Emily asked impatiently.

“‘Secrets.’”

Emily shrugged, snagged the card, and tucked it securely in her basket.

“You were looking at it upside down.”

“It still reads ‘Secrets,’ even in French.”

“For all the good it does.”

“I can’t argue that.” Emily sighed in surrender. “Is Iris still waiting for me at the tower?”

“I assume so. Emily, listen to me. I’ll walk you there in case anyone approaches you, and then I’m rushing back to the party. What shall I tell your father if he confronts me? I can’t hide from him all night. I thought you said he had passed out before you left your house.”

“I thought he had. Tell him the truth—that I was here and meant to attend the ball but felt unwell. Tell him Michael took me home.”

“But what if he encounters Michael first?”

“Michael will—”

“Who is it I have to encounter now?” Michael said, materializing from the other side of the bridge.

Emily wheeled around, her basket knocking her brother on the hand. “I’ve gathered up half of the cards, but the others escaped. Please don’t hate me. It was out of my control. Lucky seven turned out to be a rogue.”

“Don’t go on like a goose,” he said, backing away to dismantle what remained of the tent in quick, confident motions, as if he could do so in his sleep. Perhaps he had at war. “Why are you in the water?”

“I’m gathering up all the cards.”

“Never mind the cards.” He took a long look at her. “Are you all right?”

She bit her lip. “Honestly? My heart is shattered. Please don’t make me talk about it, or I’ll cry, and then the dye will wash off my skin if the rain doesn’t do it. I spilled the potion on the wrong man. Thank goodness it was only a few drops. It felt peculiar. The flush still hasn’t gone away—”

He was staring at her with a bewildered expression that touched a place inside her that felt as tender as a fresh wound. “I’m asking about the tent, actually. Did any of the poles hit you on the head when it collapsed?”

“No.”

“Go with Lucy, then. I’ll hide the tent in the bog in the woods.”

“The chairs and tables need to be returned to the house.”

“Never mind the furniture,” Lucy said, shivering in her thin green silk gown. “Nobody will ever miss it.”

“I’ll meet you and Iris in the woods behind the tower with the horses, as we planned,” Michael said, rolling the canvas onto the poles.

“If you see Father first—”

“I’ll deal with him, Emily. You stood up for me often enough in the past.”

She nodded uncertainly, letting Lucy drag her to the bridge.

“Camden is a horse’s bum,” he said under his breath. “And that’s an insult to the horse.”