The Desperate Love of a Lord (3 page)

It felt like snuffing out a candle.

The child tumbled within her stomach, it was barely a movement, more like a sensation. But she knew it was the child. Her palm settled there, cradling the infant.

The first time the baby had moved was during the journey here; she hadn’t understood the odd shifting sensation then and it had concerned her, but the physician here had said it was the child moving. In the few days since, her bump had become too pronounced to hide.

Her fingers parted and stroked across it. It was a sign. The child knew it was wanted. She did not care that she’d given everything up, or that she must smother herself.
I would do it a dozen times more for you
.

When anyone had asked, she’d said, “I was regrettably recently widowed.” It was a bare-faced lie. “I have come here to make a new life for myself and the child.” But not one of her new neighbours had questioned her further on her past.

Her hand stroked across her stomach again. It did nearly all day while she sat here, alone. The time she loved most though, was night, when she lay down and the child tumbled over and over, as if it had been waiting all day to stretch out. It was a strange beautiful feeling.

Her gaze lifted and met her own in the mirror. She would be happy here.
I will make myself be happy.
She turned away and crossed the room, then rang a little bell by the door.

The maid arrived in moments. “Yes Ma’am.”

“May I have tea please, Janet?” The maid turned away to fetch it.

Watching the maid sent another spasm of home-sickness tumbling through Violet’s nerves – she missed her familiar servants even more than her home. But she needed anonymity. If they’d come with her, they would have wished to write home, and she could not have asked them not to. No, her old life, that of the merry widow, was cast aside, and soon it would be auctioned off, or given away. She could not live it anymore.

Jane came to mind as all the people Violet lacked crept into her head; a picture of Jane laughing in London. They’d met in Bath. It was the place Violet had run to first, she’d not been able to think of anywhere else to go. But she couldn’t have stayed there. Too many people knew her there. An agent had told her about this property, well away from the city, in Lacock. A place where she could run and hide.

She hadn’t out run her memories though.

Geoff
.

The child shifted in her stomach, the movement was barely recognisable through the thin muslin of her dress, but even so she stroked her stomach.

She missed Geoff most.

Part Two

Geoff pulled on his morning coat and then his greatcoat.

His heart was hammering a rhythm in his chest. It had been for three days now.

Thank God for his lucky guess. It might have taken days to stop at every toll booth about London, but the first direction he’d gone in had hit success. He’d tried the Bath road because Violet had gone there last year. Jubilance had ripped through his middle. It had crashed into him – relief and hope – as the man at the toll gate remembered a lady travelling alone in a carriage with the Rimes coat of arms emblazoned on the door.

Thank God she had taken her deceased husband’s coach.

The man at the next toll gate had remembered her too, and the next. It had been like following a trail she’d left deliberately, as nervous energy kept his heart beating constantly. He’d tracked her for a day until he’d reached the inn where she’d deserted her carriage. He’d spent a night there. Then in the morning paid the staff to tell him where she’d hired a post-chaise, and with more bribery and a little added coercion, he’d persuaded the livery to tell him where they’d taken her to.

Bath.

He’d arrived yesterday, and spent the night in the Fox Inn, though it had not been comfortable. His clothing was now crumpled because he’d slept in it - restlessly.

His stomach growled.
Damn
, he’d forgotten to eat again last night. His fingers ran through his hair. He needed to gather his thoughts. He’d eat and drink some coffee, clear his head, then start searching the inns here.

~

Violet sifted through the ribbons and lace of a pedlar’s stall in the market, although she had no intent to buy anything. She must keep her blacks for a good long time to continue her ruse. People must think her husband had only recently passed.

As her fingers turned over the pretty coloured silks and delicate lace, her mind searched for sad feelings. Did she mourn the loss of all her pretty things? She could not find any regret. She was a new person now. What was important was the child, not frippery. She was glad she’d left it all behind.

Her fingers pressed over her stomach. It had become a habit in the last week. She moved to the next stall and looked at the gloves.

This was a welcome novelty. She’d never had opportunity to look about a market. Such a trivial thing would not have drawn her attention in London. She was enjoying it, and all the noise and bustle and chatter about her. The problem was though that if she had ever gone to a market in London, it would have been with Geoff, and so, yet again, his absence felt like an empty space. He’d be beside her, touching her arm as she sifted through items. Smiling at her when she looked up, and making some merry comment. He was so very capable of making her laugh.

Surely the longing inside her should be subsiding, not growing. It felt like a physical pain today. She missed him terribly. But she could never have him and the child, and she wanted his child,
their child
, most.

A decision spun through her head. She would buy fruit from another stall and go home, then sit and read. Perhaps fiction would fill her mind with something else. Perhaps she would take up painting. Perhaps that would free her from this emptiness. Sewing would never do, that had been her friend Jane’s skill, not her own.

When she selected some apples, her maid placed them in the skirt of her pinafore to take them home.

What was Geoff doing now? How had he taken the news that she’d gone? He would be unhappy. That she knew.

She paid the man and turned to go back to what was now her home. But it did not feel like home. Sadness swept over her, in a wave of regret and guilt. But how could she feel guilty for saving her child?

Geoff
.

She’d thought she’d loved her first husband. They had been friends and he’d been very dear to her… It had not been love. Not as this was.

She loved Geoffrey.

The love for her husband had only been a warm feeling of attachment or endearment.

This love
was overwhelming.

She sighed. It mattered not. What mattered was the child.

Once more she touched her stomach.

~

None of the inns remembered a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman staying on her own or even passing through. How could anyone forget the vibrancy Violet carried with her?

Perhaps she had not stayed here.

Perhaps she had not come this far at all and left the post-chaise further back.

Geoff was sitting at the table in the private parlour he’d hired to dine. He rested one elbow on the table and his hand gripped his forehead. He needed to think. If she was not staying in an inn, perhaps she’d rented a property here. Perhaps she’d been planning this for ages and their affair had only ever been a finite thing. Maybe she had just forgotten to mention that fact to him.

Tomorrow he would check with rental agents.

Leaning back in his seat again, he lifted his ale and then sipped from it. Damn the woman.

“Your meal my Lord.”

He’d not heard the maid enter. A sign of how distracted his thoughts were, no doubt. The inn’s staff probably thought him mad.

He ate the meal, but the food tasted like ashes. He felt as though his body was frozen in time. He was only waiting out the hours until his search could start again.

When he went to his room, he undressed to sleep, but sleep only came in fitful patches. His eyes were open at sunrise, and he got up and dressed, then walked the quiet, empty streets of Bath until it was a suitable hour to start calling on the property agents.

He crossed the Pulteney Bridge and walked back into the city at nine, heading for the Pump Room first. Yesterday he’d checked for Violet’s name in the register, today he was here to ask the master of ceremonies for a list of all the letting agents in the city.

He left the Pump Room with the list gripped in his fisted hand. Today was a new day. He was going to find her. If he could not believe that, then what the hell was he doing here?

It was just like yesterday, though, when he’d walked about the inns, every agent he went to denied knowledge of a lone blonde woman.

When the bells of the Abbey chimed at four past midday, he still had no lead. No one remembered a vibrant blonde, with blue eyes.

Geoff remembered her. Her company was all-consuming. How the hell could she have simply vanished? But what if she had come here to meet a man and she was not alone at all. Had she simply moved on from him?

Damn!

The pain of that thought bit at his heart.

He’d had a conversation with Robert in a coffee-house in London a couple of weeks ago, when Robert had been searching for the woman he was now married to. Robert’s agitation then had been palpable, and Geoff remembered watching his friend with no understanding… now…
God
… now he knew how Robert had felt then.

If Geoff had just opened his mouth a month ago and spoken the words he should have said,
I love you
, then he would not have had to bear this anguish. He should have offered for her. But she’d always made it clear to her men that her interest was only in a bed and nothing more. He hadn’t found the courage to try her, to see if that had changed. Fear had gripped his chest with a cold hard sense of steel each time he’d thought of speaking. If she’d wanted nothing more, then she’d have withdrawn from him and left him with nothing at all.

Yet when he’d taken her to bed her gaze had held his, her eyes glowing with something far more than a physical connection. No other woman had looked at him like that. Surely her views had changed.

Her words on the very first night he’d slept with her almost two years ago came into his mind. “You understand, Sparks, this is just what it is, I shan’t expect commitment or any such nonsense, I do not want you falling at my feet one day.” He could hear her laugh as she’d said it, as she’d stripped off his shirt.

Her hooks had slipped into him that night, he’d felt the barbs even then. They’d kept pulling him back to her bed. He’d just been one of her hoard of casual lovers then. But he’d enjoyed her company, and admittedly her sex. Then this summer he had tired of that role, and he’d stopped playing the game her way. Instead he’d asked her to dance and invited her out. It had won him the sole occupancy of her bed. The pleasure of that knowledge warmed his blood even now. He’d liked having her lean on his shoulder, and grip his hand possessively. He’d liked
her
.

Then his likes had turned to more, his deeper feelings gathering as a storm. He should have spoken. That was his error.

He would now… When he found her…
If I find her
… He’d tell her what he felt. He’d offer her marriage and pray she’d accept.

But if he found her with another man, what then? Then he’d walk away with a crushed heart, that was what. Even now he could feel it waiting to break in his chest. Like it was porcelain, and any jolt would shatter it.

She’d rip it out of his bloody chest if she took another man now. He was in love with Violet Rimes, the bloody Merry Widow, of all the people to fall for.

The last agent on his list was in Queen Street. He walked beneath the arch from Trim St, into the narrow cobbled back street which ran parallel to Milsom Street.

The agent’s was the fifth door up. His name was engraved on the front door.

“Mr Harrison?” Geoff spoke as he entered.

A short, thin man rose from his position behind a desk. Another man sat at a smaller desk in the corner.

“May I help you…?”

“Lord Sparks… I am seeking –”

“Property, my Lord.” The man immediately turned to gather some papers.

“No, no, not property, I am looking for a lady who may have rented a place locally in the last couple of days. Lad…” He nearly said her name, but instinct suddenly warned him not to. If she was running from him, would she use her name? “A lady with striking blue eyes, the colour of a summer sky, and blonde hair like gold. I believe she was alone.” He hoped she was alone.

The man looked at Geoff with wide eyes which then turned sly and suggestive. The man had seen her.
Thank God!
“Did she rent from you?”

“And who is it who asks? I should not divulge –”

“I am her brother…” An utter lie, but he’d do anything to find her. “She is in need of protection and I am worried for her?”

“And she is running from you, so she cannot wish for yours, my Lord,” The man’s voice rang with condescension and disbelief, but as he spoke he held out a hand.

Geoff understood and reached for money, withdrawing a note from the roll clipped in his pocket.

The man took it, looking down with a grin. Then he looked back up at Geoff. “Mrs Mayer took a property in a village a little out of Bath, in Lacock.”

Mayer? Geoff’s heart pounded. Was it her? It was the only lead he’d had, he had to follow it.

“Which street, what number?”

The man just smiled. “It was organised by another agent. His office isn’t open for two days, he’s gone away.”

Tiredness washed over Geoff, he was sick of facing dead ends. This was like navigating a bloody maze. It was a game of chance.

When he left, he walked out into a white mist. Fog. The cooler air of night had fallen and it felt cold and bleak. Autumn had turned to winter. He couldn’t even go tonight now, not in this. He’d have to leave in the morning.

It meant another restless night in the inn. Yet his heart suddenly flared with warmth as hope surged in – he’d see her tomorrow. Tomorrow.
If this woman was her?