The Rake of Hollowhurst Castle (10 page)

His hands tightened on her, cupping her, testing her where the straining of her stretched-up legs met her neat buttocks and Roxanne was sure she'd melted. Her cheekbones flushed with a hot bar of colour and she changed her stance so her hands could explore his tightly clenched stomach muscles under his shirt, as that was as close as she could currently get to his skin, unless she explored his absorbed face with her tensed, tactile fingers. Puzzling over such a dilemma, she almost got distracted from what he was doing to her while she was caught between one sensual banquet for her senses and another.

Those firm, strong and yet so gentle fingers of his hand left off stroking sensuous circles on her bottom to ease a little back, as if he was afraid of crushing her between the tree's ancient bark and his own rigid desire. She was a country woman who'd spent so long helping run her uncle's estates that she knew what went on between a man and a woman in bed must be similar to the mating of the rest of nature, or at least she did in theory. Suddenly theory united with practice and the hot need inside her demanded more than this wickedly torturous spiral of urgency and wanting from him. She shifted against the familiar old tree and Charles's completely aroused body, the evidence of his passion for her as blatant as she knew her own would be if he felt the wet heat at the heart of her beckon him to something she understood on one level and now longed to feel and feel and feel for herself.

‘No, hush, love,' he whispered into one pink-tipped ear as she keened her wanting impatience.

Feeling him fighting both of them, she squirmed her slender curves against his rigidly aroused body, all the temptations Eve was capable of knowing by pure instinct riding her headlong urgency to complete what they'd started here and now, and to the devil with his scruples.

‘I ache,' she told him reproachfully, ‘I ache so much that I don't know if I'll ever be right again if you don't do whatever it is you're hesitating over.'

‘I like that you ache for me, my wild lover, but we can't go any further than this here and now. I might get you with child for one thing, as I'm in no state to restrain myself sufficiently to avert one once I'm inside you.'

‘It took even Joanna and Tom two years to beget their first one, and I can't think the delay was from lack of application on their part, can you?' she amazed herself by asking, with a look that should tell him just what she thought of such a timid lover, when his reputation argued the contrary.

‘And the Besfords not even a week, if what he told me when he was reproaching himself for putting his wife in such danger while Sophia was busy getting herself born was true, and I doubt he was in a state to lie just then.'

Did that make them lucky or unlucky? Roxanne wondered as she surprised herself by indulging in that exploration of his handsome features with her fingers, after all. It made her think about them properly, without the overlay of cynicism with which he usually faced her and the world. His mouth was too sensitive to belong to a jaded rake, she concluded hazily as he shot her straight back into searing desire again by opening it and nibbling her finger, as if it was so delightful to have
her in this state that he couldn't help himself. Heavy-eyed, she looked back at him hopefully, but could tell he was exerting his mighty will over his aroused body and trying to force a little space between them, so his manhood might stop demanding he listen to her with quite so much enthusiasm. She should be blushing and refusing to meet his fathomless blue eyes instead of boldly challenging him to ruin her as fast and as furiously as humanly possible.

‘I thought you were supposed to be a rake,' she reproached him crossly, even as her wilful fingers explored his lean cheek and firm jaw, then ran over the surprisingly vulnerable line of his neck and round to enjoy the spot where his curling golden locks were cropped at his nape. She felt his response in a long slow shudder that racked his mighty body and raised those fine hairs under her fingers in an instinctive response to her touch that was echoed by her own at touching him so very intimately.

‘Anyone who saw us thus would surely agree, as I very much doubt you make a habit of sporting so dangerously with riff-raff like myself, or I'd surely have heard of it by now and been forced to call someone out for even suggesting the possibility,' he joked, but Roxanne felt a deep, primitive shudder of fear—this time at the very thought of him risking this intriguing, magnificent body of his to a duellist's bullet.

‘Don't even think of such a thing,' she reproached him, and she felt like shaking him for being such a damnably honourable rake, after all.

‘Ah, there you are, boy!' a loud female voice boomed cheerfully from not much less than ten feet away.

Even as Roxanne wished she could disappear into
the friendly bark of the huge tree behind her back rather than be seen by anyone else while thus occupied, she marvelled at their complete absorption in each other. Both of them were too guarded to drop headlong into such oblivion to the wider world that they completely forgot about it in their fascination with each other, or so she'd thought until today. Today, she decided fervently, had taught her a great deal more about herself and Sir Charles Afforde than she was altogether sure she'd wanted to know.

‘Grandmama,' he muttered with a sigh that might be a warning or even a welcome and, newly awake to his vulnerability to emotions she'd never credited him with until today, Roxanne detected love in his exasperated gaze, even as it iced to a warning the elderly lady deflected with a look of bland innocence none of them believed for a moment.

‘Charles,' she acknowledged him with a brusque nod, then looked questioningly at Roxanne, who was furtively trying to right her appearance as best she could in the hope they were fully occupied with greeting each other. Which was far too sanguine as it happened, Roxanne, she chided herself, and flushed like a schoolgirl when caught tying her hair into that ridiculous pony's tail for the second time today.

‘Miss Roxanne Courland,' he introduced her stiffly once she looked passably respectable at last, thanks to her furtive efforts, and he stepped far enough away from her side to allow Roxanne to make a shaky curtsy. ‘And this is my grandmother, the Dowager Countess of Samphire, Roxanne.'

‘Your ladyship,' Roxanne managed huskily, and if the old lady had any doubt what they'd been up to, that
hoarse-voiced acknowledgement must have given the game away.

‘I knew your great-uncle,' the lady responded, as breezily as if they'd met in Hyde Park. ‘He was a fine man, even if he did have some totty-headed notions about bringing up his nieces.'

‘He was the finest guardian any girl could wish for,' Roxanne defended him hotly and almost allowed herself to groan at her impulsive tongue, but that would only have made it worse.

Lady Samphire looked as if she'd like nothing better than a good sparring match with a worthy opponent, but Roxanne knew very well she wasn't up to it just now, might never be up to it again if Sir Charles didn't step a little further away from her and let her wits settle into some sort of order.

‘He'd not be pleased with you today, then,' the lady replied, looking remarkably cheerful at the notion, ‘unless there's something you wish to tell me, my boy?'

‘Didn't I say?' Charles drawled carelessly, recovering his usual guarded persona again, much to Roxanne's bitter disappointment. ‘Miss Courland has just agreed to become my wife.' He took her hand and squeezed it, as if frightened she'd brusquely deny every syllable and flounce away.

‘Doubt it, m'boy,' Lady Samphire argued.

‘Why?' he challenged sharply, apparently still too finely strung with tension to recall just who he was talking to, which might even persuade Roxanne the man she'd begun to want beyond all reason was buried under all that outraged ice and his usual armour of indifference, after all.

‘Doubt if you got round to asking her anything that rational, if what I just saw of how you are together is aught to go by. I've waited a long time to see you thrown so far off your rake's podium by a girl that you'd fall flat on your handsome face at her feet, my lad, so I'd be lying if I pretended I was looking the other way while you did it.'

‘Such rare honesty, Grandmama,' he said tightly, but didn't argue with that fanciful summary of his ardour, much to Roxanne's surprise.

Did he feel this tender novelty, then—this sense of barely comprehended possibilities opening up in front of him as uneasily and incredibly as she did? Could he possibly be as wound up with hope and fear and this raging need she was still trying to extinguish, despite such a sobering intrusion? He certainly seemed to be struggling to put his usual cynical composure in place, but what a heady idea, what a dangerously seductive hope.

‘With the honour of Miss Courland's hand openly in mine, how could I do anything but renounce any other?' he said with a gallant bow she liked less than his former shaken honesty.

‘You haven't really asked me to marry you and I certainly haven't said yes,' she informed him implacably.

‘That's it, girl, you tell him,' his unnatural grandmother urged.

‘And however much I love you, I'll ask you to keep your long nose out of business that doesn't concern you.' Charles rounded on his grandmother as if rapidly approaching the end of his tether.

‘And I certainly won't wed a man who addresses his grandmama so rudely,' Roxanne stated, with what
she thought magnificent scorn, considering she'd very recently been more or less begging him to complete her seduction—wouldn't that have made this scene utterly impossible to endure, rather than just excruciatingly embarrassing?

‘It'd be better if you enquire into a man's relationship with his family before rather than after you let him seduce you next time then, m'girl,' her ladyship informed her blandly, and Roxanne gave an involuntary chuckle.

She heard Charles groan and recalled what he'd said about that just before she was swept into uncharted waters and for a moment let her fingers tighten on his as it all became possible again. No, she reminded herself sternly, under the chilly sunlight of a November day, it was impossible to marry just because her reputation was tarnished by her lack of self-control around a certain handsome rake. She loosed her hand from his and brazenly faced the surprisingly unworried Dowager Countess of Samphire, even as she felt surprisingly cold and lonely without the warm haven of his gentle, masculine fingers on hers to secretly revel in.

‘I
can assure you that matters didn't progress that far between us, your ladyship,' Roxanne reassured the Dowager Countess with as much dignity as she could summon in the circumstances, ‘and therefore I feel no obligation to wed your grandson, even if you did just witness something happen between us that I'd rather you hadn't seen.'

‘I'd deem it a favour if you'd have him all the same, though, for you seem to have a lot more about you than the usual wet gooses he saddles himself with, mainly because he's too tender hearted to make them go back to their husbands and actually work at something for once in their silly lives.'

Roxanne couldn't help herself, she snorted sceptically and wondered if the old lady really thought she was daft enough to swallow such a farrago of nonsense, but Lady Samphire's surprisingly clear blue eyes were steady, and instead Roxanne let herself wonder if Charles was
such an easy touch for a bored lady, restive within the arranged marriage she'd probably fought so hard to attain and now found hollow and unsatisfying. She couldn't acquit him of all his sins, for hadn't she witnessed him flirting shamelessly, then leaving a ball with a married woman the one time she actually laid eyes on him during her miserable London Season?

He certainly hadn't looked in the least reluctant to be leaving with the loveliest female present that night and had had no attention to spare then for the gawky débutante who had been watching him so intensely she was surprised it hadn't bored a hole in his immaculately cut evening coat at the time. Then she'd felt as if his perfidy had blown the very foundations of her world apart. By living up, or down, to his reputation, he'd shattered the silly bubble of dreams she'd cocooned herself in for the three years since she had first laid eyes on him so terribly painfully that her seventeen-year-old self had been unable to cope with such bitter disillusionment and had had to be taken home, crying inconsolably, much to her newly-wed sister Maria's open disgust. She'd do well to remember that appalling feeling of betrayal and utter desolation and make sure she never gave him a chance to do it again.

‘I feel like a bone caught between two very polite dogs,' he said now, trying to deflate the whole wretched business with his usual easy humour, but even Roxanne could see the attempt was off-key and wasn't surprised when Lady Samphire virtually ignored him.

‘You could do a lot worse for yourself, Miss Courland,' she coaxed like a farmer's wife at market, trying to sell off a last dubious-looking cheese so that she could
go home and put her feet up with a well-deserved cup of tea.

‘No, thank you. If I were foolish enough to agree to such a proposal, I should never know if it was made out of concern for the reputation I've just risked of my own free will or for my own fair sake,' she ended, trying for that wry humour Charles so often hit more perfectly and sounding rather pedantic and silly instead.

It was true, though; she wouldn't wed him under such circumstances, even if half-a-dozen dowagers watched her being even more thoroughly seduced than Sir Charles Afforde had allowed her to be today.

‘Your wine, Sir Charles,' Mereson chipped in, as he finally stepped forwards and offered a tray rejoicing in three glasses of glowing burgundy.

‘Is anyone else joining us?' Roxanne queried almost hysterically, looking about her as if to discover who else had witnessed her being ridiculously careless of her good name in public with an acknowledged rake.

‘Miss Roxanne?' Mereson said blankly with a look of reproach that would do justice to an offended duke.

‘I take it nobody else will be joining this slightly odd bacchanal?'

‘No, miss,' he replied repressively.

‘Good, then pray direct them out here if any more of Sir Charles's friends or relatives decide to visit him unexpectedly,' she ordered a little too brightly. ‘Oh, no, I'm not mistress here any more, am I? Then Sir Charles may do as he pleases with any further callers he intends entertaining today, because I'm going home.'

‘Very good, Miss Roxanne, I will inform the stables you need your horse brought round,' Mereson said with superb composure and returned to the castle to do so.

‘As far as I'm concerned, you
are
home, Roxanne,' Charles gently interrupted, stopping any more brittle words she could come up with, and Roxanne felt tears gather at the very idea, the first she'd allowed since the day of her uncle's funeral. It was as close to a declaration as she was going to get today, and even that limited invitation to share his life made her feel ridiculously off balance, especially when it was so far from announcing his undying devotion.

‘Not any more,' she managed with a wobbly attempt at rationality, before he gave an exasperated sigh and pulled her back into the haven of his strong embrace. Self-restraint broke down at last, and she let herself cry out her bewilderment and grief against his broad chest.

‘Bring her over here,' his grandmother ordered with a rather satisfied smile, for which he frowned at her, as if not quite knowing what to do with the welter of emotions he'd finally unleashed in Roxanne now she was crying out so many pent-up woes in his arms.

Lifting a gentle hand to stroke the ebony curls nestled so recklessly against his torso, Charles did his best to pretend the warm, contrary, sobbing female in his arms meant no more to him than any other. Meeting Lady Samphire's sceptical gaze with a mixture of defiance and sheepishness, he knew very well she saw far too much of his true feelings, as she always did, and concentrated on finding his large and manly handkerchief before Roxanne reduced his shirt to a sopping wet rag instead. ‘Here you are, love,' he murmured into the lovely mass of her ebony hair as the ribbon gave up its work and came undone yet again, cloaking them both in the vibrant, fascinating veil of curls.

How any man could look on her thus and
not
want to run the silken weight of them over his hands as she rested naked and confiding in his arms after being well and truly loved was beyond him. The hand not engaged in soothing her tightened into a fist; he doubted whether one single nuance of the wildly heightened emotions between himself and Roxanne had escaped his eagle-eyed grandmother.

‘Why were you proposing to take your wine with Miss Courland in the garden in November in the first place, Charles?' she asked curiously as she sat down on a nearby bench and sipped her glass with a connoisseur's appreciation.

‘Propriety,' he replied shortly and felt a hard burn of colour flash across his cheeks under her sceptical gaze. ‘A misplaced hope, as it happens,' he conceded.

‘Still rather a touching idea, so perhaps there's hope for you after all, m'boy. All you have to do now is persuade the girl you really do want to marry her, and we can get you both up the aisle as soon as possible, after all.'

‘I can get myself there, thank you very much, and you're only making my task harder,' he condemned rather harshly, for he'd felt Roxanne's resistance to the very idea and was surprised to find he didn't want her to leave his arms, even if she was only crying out all the tension and misery he'd caused her by buying the estate and then displacing her into a world far too little for her talents. Loving his wife would prove no hard task in one sense, but falling
in
love with her—now that would be another matter entirely.

‘I'm not going to marry anyone just to save my reputation,' she muttered gruffly into his damp shoulder.
Why did it cost him such a pang to turn his back on the notion of just gathering her up in his arms and carrying her off to his bedchamber to seduce her ruthlessly until she changed her mind?

‘I heard you the first time, Miss Propriety,' he assured her and felt almost godlike as she managed a feeble chuckle and finally pulled away from him to look up at him with reddened eyes that he somehow still found utterly irresistible.

‘Even I'm not brazen enough to claim such a title after today, Sir Charles,' she assured him and he wondered why the faint hiccup of a fading sob as she tried to laugh at herself touched him far more than all the tears and tragedies any of his former lovers had acted out.

‘Then drink your wine, my dear, and when you're feeling fully restored you can ride home and rest until you're your old self again and fit and eager to fight with me again another day.'

‘I'm not your dear,' she informed him with a watery and not even very convincing defiance, and Charles fought not to tell her how very wrong she might well be.

‘Whatever you say, ma'am,' he managed to say evenly, when all he really wanted was to carry out that very tempting scenario of whisking her off and slaking this merciless need of her that he should never have put into his own head when he was in such a painful state of rampantly unsated desire. ‘If Miss Courland will kindly consent to go home and reassemble her usual fearsome armour, I'll engage to try to rob her of it even more thoroughly tomorrow. Is that better?'

‘You know very well it isn't, you devil,' she accused, seeming to forget that she was doing her best to pretend
to be a pattern card of propriety, whilst still wrapped securely in his embrace and resting against his broad chest as if she belonged there while she absently shredded his fine lawn handkerchief.

Turning away from the temptation to stare down at her until her eyes were velvet dark and full of that heady, driven passion for him once again, he met his grandmother's shrewd, speculative gaze in the act of inspecting them both and wondered once again exactly why he loved her so much.

‘I have a very poor memory these days,' she assured them both virtuously and Charles felt Roxanne stiffen in his arms as she recalled exactly where, and with whom, she was.

‘Congratulations, ma'am,' he said ironically. ‘I never heard you voluntarily admit to feeling any of the trials of your age before today, so perhaps this will usher in a whole new phase to all our lives.'

‘And it could be the end of me behaving like an old fool towards you, you undutiful rogue,' she snapped back with undiminished fervour, and Charles watched her appreciatively down the rest of her glass of one of his finest burgundies with resigned fondness. ‘You have a fine palate, my boy,' she told him regally, ‘although you should have, I suppose, since I taught you to appreciate a good wine when you ought to have been sitting at your stepmother's knee, learning to be as boring as the rest of my tribe of grandchildren.'

‘Thank you for saving me from that fate at least,' he said ruefully and reluctantly let Roxanne go.

‘I'm sorry for behaving like a ninny,' his lady said with such a gallant attempt at dignity that he felt like snatching her back into his arms and carrying her off to
his highest tower room and locking them both in until the world went away, after all.

‘I never met anyone less likely to add to that breed than yourself, Miss Courland,' he assured her and for once hated his own smooth patter as she took his very real admiration for mockery and flamed a furious glare at him. ‘Truly you belong in a class of your own,' he went on, but saw he'd made bad worse as her ridiculous lack of self-confidence bumped up against his wretched reputation and made her certain he was taunting her.

‘As do you, Sir Charles,' she informed him icily and turned regally away to offer Lady Samphire a stately curtsy and a sincere-enough-sounding adieu, before marching away with a swish of her gathered skirts and a toss of those midnight curls that should have informed him, if he needed confirmation, that it was beneath her dignity to even bid him farewell.

‘Always told you that glib tongue of yours would lead you to disaster one day, m'boy,' his grandmother informed him gleefully.

‘And just whose side are you on?' he rasped back, preoccupied with the sight of Roxanne's neatly rounded rear view as she stormed off towards the stable-yard.

‘That of the angels,' she informed him piously, and even as half of his mind and most of his body was enjoying the view, the other half was not that credulous.

‘Yes? Which lot of angels would that be then, sooty or sweet?' he asked as Roxanne finally rounded the corner and ruined a fine landscape for him by no longer completing it in his eyes.

‘Know very well I can't abide sweetmeats, but that ain't to say I think heaven's anything like those fools
of parsons would have us think; nobody with any sense would want to go there if it was.'

‘You must be sure to let me know,' he said with a direct look that made her chuckle rather than take offence.

‘To be sure, I will, for if anyone deserves to be haunted by a curmudgeonly ghost it's you, Charles, and at least nowadays I can feel a bit more confident of getting there before you do.'

‘I thought I was bound for the nether regions,' he reminded her, nevertheless touched by the genuine emotion behind her flippant words and very conscious that he'd put her through years of constant anxiety during his naval service, for all she'd deny it with her last breath.

‘You are, of course, unless you manage to find redemption,' she told him—was there a hint of seriousness behind her determined banter?

Charles thought perhaps there was and recalled his own unease with his life before he finally made the decision to leave the sea and purchase the Hollowhurst estates, where he rapidly discovered life could be full of surprises after all. But to call Roxanne his redemption—surely that was going a little too far? Especially considering the very compromising position she'd found them in just now. Most grandparents would be marching them before a priest at this very moment and demanding grovelling apologies all the while. Lady Samphire was a remarkable woman, he conceded with a wry smile, and it paid to watch her even more closely than the proverbial cartload of monkeys.

‘The only thing I intend to find today is my land steward and the new housekeeper to inform her of your arrival, but not necessarily in that order,' he informed
her lightly and was relieved when she accepted he didn't relish discussing the state of his soul or his frustrated body right now.