‘Yet somehow you managed to without trying.’
‘Aye, well, clearly I’m a rogue of the worst kind.’
‘Are you, my lord? I wonder.’
‘Don’t, but you do make me wish myself otherwise,’ he said, so perhaps she’d made a small dent in his mighty defences.
His hand shook when he cupped the back of her head and drew her closer so gently she felt breakable. She looked up to meet his brilliant blue gaze defiantly and saw so many questions in it tears stung her eyes instead. No, she had her pride and made herself gaze back at him with desire bold and brazen and bare for him to see what she might have been with him, and what he could be with her, if he wasn’t denying all that made them right together in defiance of all the wrongs the world would whisper.
‘You’re not the man you think you are,’ she told him firmly.
‘And you’re not quite who you believe either, have you thought of that?’
‘No, but Partridge might be back any moment and the rain is stopping, so it’s clearly time for us to consider other things besides there not being a you and me for anyone to worry about, my lord.’
‘I will, if you will,’ he murmured and kissed her so gently it hurt.
‘Go away,’ she said unsteadily, the thought of a day spent dancing round each other as if nothing untoward had happened tearing at her like a battle wound.
‘Will you be all right?’
‘I’m always all right,’ she said, ‘it’s what I do best.’
‘There I have to argue, even with a lady,’ he told her with the ghost of his wicked smile.
‘Go and find your plans, my lord—even Partridge doesn’t deserve to search through some endless piles of documents alone for much longer.’
She thought she heard him mutter something uncomplimentary about the family archives, but went back to her window until he stamped out of the room in a show of masculine bad temper, as if she was the one who had put a stop to what could have been a glorious lovemaking and not him.
The great blundering idiot would probably ride himself and his unfortunate horse to a stand-still in the rain now and all because he wouldn’t admit he was subject to the same needs and emotions as the rest of humanity. Never mind what he felt or didn’t feel for her, he was grieving deeply for his beloved godmother and wouldn’t even admit it to himself.
Would a man who felt nothing for his own kind spend so much of his time finding out all he had omitted to do in the past two decades and do his best to put it right? Would he put himself out to find work for her mixed bag of fellow squatters if he was the care-for-nobody he did his best to pretend he was? No, and he wouldn’t try to find a place for Lady Wakebourne and herself to go to when they left either.
Sure enough, there he was, racing his beautiful bay gelding through the park as if the devil was on their heels. So much of her wanted to be out there with him, full of life and strength and risk, that she turned away from the last glimpse of them tearing into the rain-soaked landscape she had come to love so much with tears blinding her to anything closer by until she blinked them away and reminded herself she wasn’t the sort of female who sat indoors and cried for no reason on rainy days when the whole of nature seemed ready to weep with her.
‘Has it ever struck you that the intruders we thought were prowling round the Stuart wing of the castle could be choosing moonlit nights to avoid the free-traders, Lady W.?’ Polly asked Lady Wakebourne over the luncheon Prue insisted they took in the ‘Drawing Room’ while the rest of the self-appointed staff had theirs in the kitchen.
For a while Polly had tried to insist nothing had changed with the marquis’s homecoming, but the air of restraint and discomfort in the otherwise cosy kitchen had soon defeated her. Now she reluctantly bowed to the divisions that seemed to have grown up between gentry and working folk once more. It was tempting to blame his lordship, but fairness made her admit he’d done nothing to put those barriers up, he had given in to the fact they existed much as she had herself.
‘I do my best not to think about the smugglers who infest this coast, or anyone else who might be wandering about in the night when I’m in bed. And don’t call me Lady W. in that vulgar fashion.’
‘If you really mean to adopt me as well as your mixed quantity of urchins so Lord Mantaigne can get us out of his castle, then you’ll have to let me to call you something other than “your ladyship”.’
‘As if you ever did treat me with much respect,’ Lady Wakebourne scoffed.
‘Yet I still respect you and might even have admitted to loving you now and again, if you recall?’
‘You know it’s mutual,’ Lady Wakebourne said. Polly felt her own smile wobble as it occurred to her it wasn’t only Lord Mantaigne who had held back his feelings these past few years.
‘I also know you stood with me when the rest of the world turned its back and without you I would have been so lonely I can’t even bring myself to think about it. Besides that, who else can understand the things that concern me most? I love my brothers far more than they like me to admit now they’re so grown up and manly, but they aren’t interested in where their next pair of breeches is coming from or how to keep them well and happy on nothing a week.’
‘You’re far too young for that to be the beginning and end of your ambitions now, my dear, so at seventeen you were unforgivably youthful to be left to bring them up without a penny to bless yourself with. I would be a very hard-hearted female if I’d turned my back on you and those three little boys then.’
‘And you’re certainly not one of those, are you? Do you ever intend to tell Lord Mantaigne how your great-aunt somehow contrived to interfere in his young life, my lady? No, don’t try pretending she had nothing to do with his timely rescue from his awful guardian because I know you as well as anyone can by now. Hearing how it was done might help him live here and not see that monster around every corner when the rest of us must leave.’
‘And you take a humane interest in the man’s welfare, I suppose? Do you really take me for such a fool, Paulina?’
‘No, but you know as well as I do it’s all I will ever share with him.’
Lady Wakebourne gave Polly a steady look as if she would like to argue, then sighed and shrugged her agreement that there was no future for a lady of no means at all and a rich and powerful marquis. ‘Nevertheless, I am always here if you need to talk to someone about it. Carrying your burdens alone as you have had to all these years has made you both older than your years and at the same time as inexperienced as a débutante at her first ball. Promise me you’ll come to me if you need a woman’s advice or even a sympathetic ear?’
‘If I ever come up against a problem Lord Mantaigne doesn’t resolve before I have a chance to make my own decisions, I will,’ Polly said bitterly and knew how much she had betrayed when she saw the look in her acute friend’s dark eyes.
‘How very ham-fisted of him,’ the lady said with a glint of unholy satisfaction in her gaze that left Polly torn between agreeing and feeling even more hurt.
‘We are better having as little to do with each other as possible when we must live under the same roof.’
‘If you say so, my dear,’ Lady Wakebourne said so equably Polly gave her a suspicious glare.
‘Anyway we were not talking about me and the lord and master of this poor old place, we were discussing how your relative came to intervene in his childhood.’
‘Well, no, we were not if we intend to be strictly accurate. You made an unsubstantiated observation and I didn’t deny it.’