She numbly added up the time it would take her to whisk Jenny into hiding and let Joan know she had been forced to run away without even a toothbrush.
‘Ah, I see it is. Well met, Wife,’ said the Sixth Duke of Cherwell, with a harsh parody of his old smile that made her heart ache.
She had to peer up at him through the black spots dancing in front of her eyes and she could hardly hear his mocking words past the thunder of her frantically pounding heart. Maybe she was still leaning on the ancient stone inside its eerie circle, dreaming impossible things. Yes, that was it; she had fallen under a malevolent spell. Local legend promised terror to anyone silly enough to dally there and her Ash had been lean and self-conscious about his height, whereas this man sat his horse like a Roman emperor posing for a triumphal statue. She had taken great pains to hide her tracks when they came here as well and had never contacted anyone from her former life, except the Hartfield family solicitor by the most devious route she could think of, so nobody could have betrayed her to him, therefore he could not really be here.
‘Go back to hell,’ she ordered the spectre and crossed her fingers under her cloak to ward off evil.
‘Only if you come with me,’ it said coolly. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ he added in a darker version of the voice she remembered so well her hopes he was an illusion were beginning to waver.
‘I have nothing to say to you.’
‘Not even “Where have you been all these years?”’
‘No.’
‘Yet I am very curious about you, Mrs Meadows. My lawyer tells me you live alone except for a maid and teach music and dancing to aspiring young ladies. Is your latest lover a wanderer, too, then? Does he have a different lovebird in every parish as a reason for not keeping you in style?’
‘You never knew me at all,’ she said distantly, silently blessing her close-mouthed neighbours for not being at all helpful to any official-looking strangers asking questions along a coast where smuggling was rife.
‘I know everything there is to know.’
Ha! her inner rebel argued. ‘You know nothing,’ she said out loud.
‘I know enough,’ he said icily. ‘And as I need a duchess rather badly now you are damnably in the way.’
‘Have you come to kill me and bury my body up here where nobody will ever find it?’ her inner idiot challenged, but somehow she still trusted him not to physically hurt her. Disconcerting, she decided, as she met his eyes without a single shudder for her safety. He was shaking her world to its core yet again and she could not bring herself to hate him wholeheartedly even now. Still, if she irritated him enough, maybe he would ride away and never get any closer to Livesey and find out she had borne him a child.
‘And wait another seven years before I can have you declared dead?’ he said with a cynical smile. ‘Even I am not that stupid.’
‘Do you have your next Duchess picked out and waiting, then?’ she asked just as cynically back, in order to mask the fact it had hurt her that he seemed to think disposing of her merely stupid, instead of unthinkable after what they had been to one another, once upon a time.
‘No, but I should be able to find a gentle and biddable young lady with no illusions about love and a practical mind easily enough once I am free to wed her, what with me being a duke and under the age of thirty.’
Arrogant of him to think it would be that easy even if he was right. He was also formidably handsome and obviously rich and should have no trouble finding a suitable candidate among the debutantes, even if they were secretly terrified of such an awe-inspiring aristocrat. He meant his next wife to be her very opposite. Good again—a romantic fool like Rosalind Feldon would have her heart broken and no man should be able to do that to two wives in a lifetime.
‘I wish you joy of one another,’ she said coolly, thinking it sounded as empty and joyless a union as he deserved. When she considered how deeply they had meant to love one another the day they married over the anvil, his new version of marriage sounded as frozen as an Arctic waste. She shivered at the thought of all the dash and promise he had at one and twenty turning into this cold man with a cold heart, aiming for an even colder marriage. What a relief he meant to divorce her if that was what he wanted from a wife. He might look like Ash, but this man was very different under the skin. There were still glimpses of young Ash in his smoky gaze and tawny hair and she eyed him sideways and longed for things she didn’t understand. She recognised the Ash of eight years ago under the hard shell and she wanted him, not this hard cold man he had become. That was the only reason for this thrill of attraction still so annoyingly alive under her armour against him.
Ash would have been relieved to know Rosalind thought he was hard and emotionless. All it took was one look at her white, closed face and she had divided him in two again. One half was doing and saying cool and rational things while the other slid about on thin ice like the boy he was when they first met. And she was so lovely now she took his breath away. He felt his inner boy grieve for the light-hearted girl she had once been, but a beautiful face could never make up for a fickle heart and shallow nature. Yet there was something about her now that even made cynical, grown-up Ash wonder how best to describe her. She was pared down—that was as close as he could get.
Her old sidelong looks of girlish uncertainty and a puppy-like need for approval were gone. She was the woman she had not yet found room to be when he fell in love with her and he wanted her so urgently it hurt. He refused to brood over the lovers she had no doubt enjoyed, told himself he didn’t care who had enjoyed her richer curves and the privilege of exploring the sweeter, tighter hollows of her silky skin with the slavish attention of a lover. Except he did; he envied them like the devil. Temper at the thought of another man exploring her secrets would hand her victory in this battle of wills and that would never do. He had come here to do business with his wife, it was just a shame he could not remember what it was right now.
Remember, Ash, he cautioned himself and tried to see the little changes that would make him feel repelled by her shop-soiled charm.
There was a faint trail of freckles across her high cheekbones and she had the slightly gilded skin of a woman careless about wearing a hat on unladylike tramps around the countryside, but that was all.
You would have thought time would write ‘liar’ across her purely beautiful face, wouldn’t you?
No sign of it that he could see. Well, his mother could act the innocent so beautifully a saint might be taken in and he was no saint. He still eyed the high neck of Rosalind’s disreputable stuff gown and simple cotton collar and caught himself longing to trace the line of sun-exposed skin where it met whiter, even softer, Rosalind with passionate kisses. Devil take the woman; he had come here to make sure he could finally be rid of her, not to fall under her witchy spell again. His body wanted to lead him about by an organ far more wilful and troublesome than his nose and if he wasn’t careful his sex would betray him. He had come for his freedom and didn’t want his heart mangled by his confounded wife again.
‘Why are you dressed like a dowd?’ he heard himself ask even so.
‘Because I am one?’ she said cautiously, as if she didn’t understand why he was asking either.
And he had never been able to accuse her of vanity, had he? ‘Not if you wrapped yourself up in chainmail and put on a suit of armour to try and snuff out your sex altogether,’ he scoffed.
There, young Ash was even speaking for him now. He wanted to kick the immature fool where it hurt and ride away, but since that was impossible he watched her muffle her thoughts with a bland, blue stare and wondered what was going on in her head. Maybe he had put that curb on her passions when he left, but he could not afford a conscience