A Reckless Desire (15 page)

“That is true,” he said quickly, wishing with both his heart and his cock that she hadn't mentioned ravishing. “I gave you my word, and I will not break it. We shall put aside that last little, ah, transgression, and continue to abide by our agreement.”

“Yes, my lord, your word, and our agreement,” she said, and sighed again. “You truly are a gentleman. Please forgive me for doubting you.”

He grunted. He didn't like her apologizing to him any more than she liked it when he did it, and it didn't help that while she wasn't doubting him, he was noticing how the breeze was teasing at the kerchief tucked into her bodice and over those maddening breasts, threatening to pull it free.

“There's nothing to forgive,” he said gruffly. “Now come, let us walk through the gardens.”

He stalked off ahead of her, determined to leave this conversation behind. She followed, but brought the conversation with her.

“Thank you, my lord, for understanding,” she said, a little breathless from keeping pace with him. “You've always been so kind to me, and so generous, even when I didn't deserve it. It's only because this wager has been so…so difficult. I don't wish to be quarrelsome, especially not to you, but
santo cielo,
these weeks have been a trial to me. A regular trial.”

“I can imagine.” They'd been a trial for him as well, though likely not in the same way she was intending. “I have not always been an easy tutor to you. But you have been so apt a pupil, and have made such spectacular progress in your studies, that surely you must believe the trials have been worth their trouble.”

She nodded, leaving him to decide whether she agreed, or was simply being distracted by the flowers. Either was possible, especially once they entered the rose garden.

She gasped with wonder as soon as he opened the gate. “Oh, my lord!” she exclaimed. “Look at the roses!
Look
at them!”

Nodding obediently, Rivers tried to do as she asked. The first red roses were already in bloom, and the air was heady with their scent. He'd always taken them for granted. The precisely tended bushes, each in their perfectly squared beds, had been designed to make a pretty show for guests taking breakfast in the back parlor, and he'd always found their beauty a bit too lush, a bit too predictable, to be genuine.

Lucia, however, had no such reservations. She stopped directly in the middle of the raked gravel path and flung out her arms as if to embrace the entire garden. She tipped back her head so the sun washed over her face beneath the curving brim of her flat straw hat, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply.

“
Such
a beautiful smell, my lord,” she exclaimed without opening her eyes. “I know poets write of lying in a bed of roses, but I should rather have this, to be surrounded by this smell, without any of the prickly thorns.”

“It's not just any old poet who wrote that,” he said. “It was Christopher Marlowe.”

With her eyes closed, he could unabashedly study her face. She'd blossomed like a flower herself here in the country, with enough to eat and no more of the unappreciated physical toil for others that destroyed the soul. The circles beneath her eyes were gone and the sickly pallor replaced by a charmingly plump rosiness. No one would overlook her now, not when she looked like this.

“Christopher Marlowe, my lord?” she asked without opening her eyes. “Should I know of him? Has he written plays, too, or only poems?”

“A few,” he said.
Hamlet
was enough for her to consider at present without tossing Marlowe into the mix as well. “His plays are not the fashion now.”

She opened her eyes and lowered her chin. “Then why speak of him at all, my lord?”

“Because he wrote quite splendid verse,” Rivers said, reciting for her.

And I will make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,

Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

Lucia smiled, her joy in the words and images lighting her face as surely as the sun had, and sending a little lurch to his chest.

“Oh, my lord, that is splendid,” she declared. “Is there more to it?”

Of course there was more. There was an entire poem. But he'd be damned, doubly damned, if he recited all of
The Passionate Shepherd
to her now.
Come live with me and be my love
indeed. What kind of infernal mischief in his brain had made him think, after all that had happened earlier, standing in the middle of a rose garden and quoting Marlowe to her would be a wise idea.

“There is more, but it's mostly about sheep,” he said quickly, hoping to distract her. “Come, there's another garden here you haven't seen. This way, through this gate.”

“Oh,” she said, clearly disappointed, even as she followed him. “But will you answer me one question about Mr. Marlowe's poem, my lord?”

“Mr. Mar-
loh,
” he corrected almost without thinking. “Mar-
loh.
”

She sighed with dutiful frustration. “Will you answer me one question about Mr. Mar-
loh's
poem, my lord?”

“If I can,” he said, albeit reluctantly. The last thing he wished to do was discuss all the swoony, erotic overtones of the poem.

“It's the kirtle, my lord,” she said. “What exactly might that be?”

He wanted to laugh with relief. “It's only a gown of some sort,” he said. “An old-fashioned garment, much enhanced by the flowers. Here's the other garden I wish you to see.”

He held the old oak door open for her to step inside, and she laughed as Spot ungallantly pushed ahead of her. He was glad that she'd laughed, and glad, too, that he'd decided to lead her here.

Later he'd think back to this decision, and wonder why and how he'd made it, and consider all that had occurred because of it.

But not yet. Now all he did was follow her inside the garden, and let the heavy oak door fall shut after them.

This garden was small and square, with unruly beds filled with every color of wildflower and herbs mixed in for fragrance's sake, and as far from the neatly groomed garden of French roses as could be. The walls enclosing this garden were the same gray stone as the Lodge itself, but rough-hewn and haphazard, and settled into place by time. Twisting, gnarled crabapple trees grew in each corner, their boughs bright with new green leaves and filled with the chirps of the songbirds who'd wisely chosen this haven in which to build their nests. In the center of the garden stood a small bronze sundial, and sitting beneath it on a stone was a flat pan of water for birds to bathe in. No matter whether Rivers was here or in London, his orders were that that pan be filled freshly each day, as it had been for all his life and more.

“No roses here, I fear,” he said, wanting to defend this humble garden, and hoping she wouldn't find it lacking by comparison. “But I much prefer the exuberance of these wildflowers.”

“I do, too, my lord,” she said, sunlight filtering through the straw brim of her hat to dapple her face with tiny freckles of brightness. “I'm more a wildflower than a rose myself.”

“That was what my mother said, too.” The long stems and spreading leaves brushed against the hems of her skirts, reaching out to her as he himself longed to do. “She loved the roses too, of course, but this garden was hers. She'd little interest in the hunting, and this was her private retreat while Father rode off with their friends and guests. Father kept this garden in her honor, and I do the same now that the Lodge is mine.”

She tipped her head to one side. “Your mother is dead?”

“She is,” he said, the sorrow in his voice more for what he'd never had rather than for what he'd remembered and lost. “So long ago that my father has had time to grieve her and remarry, to a lovely, gracious lady who is a joy to have in our family. But she will never replace my mother. She can't. I was so young when she died that I have only the vaguest of memories of her.”

“I am sorry, my lord,” she said softly, reaching out to touch the tall daisies nodding on their stems beside her. “It's much the same with me. I can only just recall my mother's face, but it's the other things—her laughter, her gentleness, the way she brushed my hair and sang silly songs to me in French—that's what I remember most. That's why I wear her necklace, too, to help with my remembering.”

He watched how she touched the little cameo pendant that rested in the hollow of her throat, a pendant she always wore and that, before now, he'd dismissed in his head as some little bit of poor rubbish. Now he understood how the humble necklace must be more valuable to her than any diamonds, because of who had worn it before.

He understood, and her words rang true to him as well. He'd always tried to remember his mother as the beautiful lady in the portrait in Father's library, dressed in jewels and ermine and red velvet for Court, and not the frighteningly fragile woman, wasted by her final illness, that he'd been forced to kiss on her deathbed.

He looked up at the trees, striving to clear away that last melancholy thought.

“I fear that most of the memories I have of my own mother are based upon what others have told me rather than what I recall for myself,” he said carefully. “She was especially close to my brother Geoffrey.”

“Yet you were her son, too, my lord,” she said. The breeze was toying with the ribbons on her hat, blowing them up into her face, and impatiently she brushed them away. “You
are
her son.”

“Of course,” he said, agreeing to the obvious. He envied those ribbons, dancing across the curve of her cheek.

“That is why you've kept this garden as she left it, my lord,” she said, a statement rather than a question. “Even if you can't remember her, you can still be with her in a way when you're here.”

He frowned, taken aback by the notion that the Duchess of Breconridge would be laid to rest beneath an informal garden of wildflowers.

“My mother isn't buried here,” he said brusquely. “She's with the rest of my ancestors, in our family's crypt in St. Andrew's.”

“But if she loved this place and these flowers so much, my lord, then part of her is still here,” she reasoned. She bent and plucked a deep purple pansy, one of the last of the spring, and traced her fingertips across the velvety black-and-purple petals.
“ ‘There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember. And there is pansies; that's for—' ”

“For thought.” He smiled with relief, glad she'd turned their conversation back to
Hamlet
and away from his family. “Knowing the actual flowers in that scene will add richness to your interpretation. They won't have real ones in any playhouse, of course—they'll doubtless be some sort of imitation trumpery—but if you can recall the flowers here, you'll be able to convince your audience that the false ones are every bit as real.”

“That's my last scene in the play, my lord,” she said softly, twirling the flower's stem gently in her fingers. “If audiences do not believe in my Ophelia by then, and if they cannot feel for her plight and be ready to weep for her, then it will not matter a whit whether my flowers are real or false.”

“But they will care for you, Lucia, I am sure of it,” he said. He was sure of it because
he
cared about her—though he hadn't realized until this moment exactly how much. “In a way it's a shame that your death is offstage, and only related to the audience. Of course not even the most clever of stage wizards could contrive a drowning death on the stage, but even if there were some way you could be seen on the farthest branch of the willow, over the deep currents, so that the audience could share the trepidation of Ophelia's danger.”

“No, my lord,” she said firmly. “To do that would be to meddle too much with Master Shakespeare's play. You've said yourself his words are sacred.”

“Yes, yes,” he said hurriedly, chagrined that she'd recall that, and chagrined, too, because she was right to remind him. “It's a shame that it cannot be done. But you must admit how poignant such a scene would be, and how affecting to every sensibility.”

“I will be carried out on my bier,” she said. “That will be sorrowful, or it shall be if I can manage to lie still as death.”

“I trust you will,” he said. “The crowds on the benches like nothing better than to shed a tear for a doomed lady, not a restless corpse. As I have explained before, my studies have discovered that every expert in theatrics declares that it's the task of the entire playhouse, from the lowest stage-sweeper to the highest actor, to indulge the crowd's pleasure.”

He'd expected her to smile and nod and agree with him, the way she usually did. But today she wasn't smiling, and he suspected she wasn't going to agree with him, either, and he wasn't sure which was more unsettling. Instead she continued to study the pansy's fierce little face as if it were the most fascinating thing in nature, and certainly more fascinating than him.

“Surely you agree with what those experts have written,” he said doggedly. He'd grown so accustomed to her usual attentiveness and conversation that now, when they were absent, he missed them more than he'd like to admit. “Surely you must think similarly, that the desires and entertainment of the audience must always come first. Surely you can't think otherwise, after all we've discussed.”

She turned to stand directly before him and reached up to tuck the pansy into the top buttonhole of his coat.

“ ‘Pansies for thoughts,' ”
she said, quoting the play again as she snugged the little blossom into place. “That's what matters most to you, my lord, isn't it? Banish that idle, sentimental rosemary! Thinking this, thinking that, and what's been written in a book is always better than everything else.”

“That's not true,” he said defensively, looking down at the purple flower and with it her little hand still lingering on his chest. “Not of me anyway.”

“Forgive me for speaking plain, my lord,” she said, taking back her hand, “but it is true. As true as can be, and being in this place only makes it truer.”

He was sorry she'd taken her hand away, and somehow he felt as if the imprint of her palm remained on his chest like a subtle brand. She'd said much the same thing earlier, when she'd accused him of relying too much on reason. Books had always been his comfort, their knowledge the one sure thing in an often uncertain world. He'd always believed he could learn anything he desired from the right book, and prove whatever he wanted as well. He'd been proud of it, too.

But what if Lucia was right? What if he'd been using his library not as a sanctuary, but to keep the rest of the world at bay? Perhaps he had relied too much on the words and thoughts of others, and hadn't dared to trust his own.

And ever since that night when they'd kissed, perhaps he'd been trying so hard not to say too much that instead he'd said too little.

“I'm most grateful for what you've taught me, my lord,” she continued, “and I'd never wish not to know all I've learned from you, about acting and history and life among grand folk like yours. But there's still so many things in life that cannot be learned from books and scholars, things that must be enjoyed and remembered for their own sakes.”

“I know that,” he said, unsettled by how close she'd come to reading his thoughts. Damnation, how could she? Spot dropped a stick on the toes of his boots, and Rivers snatched it up and hurled it so hard it struck the garden's far wall. “I
know
that.”

She gazed up at him, her face solemn but clearly not believing him.

“Very well, my lord,” she said with maddening evenness. “It is as you say. You know it. You know everything.”

She turned away to follow the dog, but Rivers grabbed her arm to pull her back toward him.

“My lord!” she gasped, startled and struggling to pull her arm free. “My lord, please, let me go!”

“How can you call me unfeeling, Lucia?” he demanded, emotion turning his voice rougher than he'd intended. “How can you say I care for nothing in life beyond what I've learned in books? That's not a fair judgment, and you of all others must be aware of it.”

She stopped struggling, her eyes wide. “What are you saying, my lord?”

“I'm saying what you must know for yourself,” he said. “That these last weeks here with you have been among the best and most enjoyable of my life. That I regret how swiftly the days have passed, and dread the time when the last of them will be done. That I have enjoyed your company more than I would ever have imagined. So do
not
tell me that I care for nothing beyond books, Lucia, because damnation, it is not true.”

He hadn't intended to say so much or to say it so freely, and he could tell from the expression on Lucia's face that she clearly thought him to be a madman for it. He couldn't blame her if she did. He was raving like a lunatic, and he could not help himself.

And then, like a lunatic, he drew her closer, and into his arms, and kissed her.

She didn't fight, but melted against him as warm as the sun, her hands sliding over his shoulders and along his arms. The tiny part of his brain that was still capable of thought was vaguely aware of the songbirds in the trees around them and the breeze still blowing the ribbons on her hat, and of how there really couldn't be anything he'd rather be doing than kissing Lucia here among his mother's wildflowers.

The brim of his hat knocked hers back off her head and to the path and she didn't seem to notice and neither did he, and when he deepened the kiss, she instantly parted her own lips and drew him deeper into her warmth. She'd accused him of not feeling, yet he'd never felt anything more certainly than the desire he was feeling for her now. He kissed her with feverish intensity, and with a certain desperation, too.