Almost a Gentleman (48 page)

Lincolnshire, 1824

Admiral and Mrs. Wolfe had had glorious weather for their drive up from London. They weren't expected at Linseley Manor until tomorrow, but Phoebe had said that it wouldn't matter exactly when they arrived. "We're so occupied with the haying that the days are rather a blur," she'd written in her last letter, "but we shall adore seeing you whenever you turn up."

"And she also said that when she and the earl were busy, little Kathy would have to entertain her godparents," Kate added. "Which will be both useful and agreeable, since we need practice with children anyway."

Complacently, she surveyed the slope of her own rounded belly. "Kathy will be a year old soon. Just about when this one arrives, John. Fancy that."

He smiled. "And I always pooh-poohed the healing powers of David's Plough play."

"We're almost there now," he added. "Shall I drive up the wold? We can get a good view of David's lands from there."

"Do, the sunset is delicious."

The wide sky above the wolds was most beautiful, perhaps, during the gold and purple evenings of harvest time. The admiral stopped the horses on the top of a gentle rise. From their barouche, he and Kate could see miles of countryside framing the harvest scene spread below them.

Haycocks, their shadows growing long, dotted the golden field. Workers were making their way home, waving their good-nights to the tall gentleman who stood holding a wide straw hat in his hand. As the last of them disappeared over a rise, he turned now, toward the hay wagon, atop which a slender figure in overalls stood leaning on a rake.

The person in overalls pulled a scarf from her hair, letting the breeze blow pale chestnut curls around her shoulders. Laying down her rake, she seemed to be calling something to the gentleman in the field.

From their barouche atop the hill, of course, Kate hadn't been able to hear what Phoebe had said. Nor what David had replied, when he's strode to the wagon and lightly swung her down. He still held her now, but lightly, gazing into her upturned face and taking her right hand in his left.

But Kate didn't need to hear the words. For both she and John could easily discern the language of trust and love and ever-renewed desire engraved in the long curve of Phoebe's torso. How elegant she is, Kate thought, even in those clothes—and how eloquently she leans into the strong hand at the small of her back.

A stronger breeze had started up now, bending the high grasses in its long wake. Moving into the curve of her husband's arm, Kate smiled up at him, both of them stirred by the wind's rippling caress of the hills sprawling around them.

And both of them watched silently as Lord and Lady Linseley, alone in the field now, began to dance: a slow waltz, under a darkening purple sky, to a tune that only the pair of them could hear.

Please turn the page for an exciting preview of

THE FOREVER KISS

by Thea Devine.

A summer 2003 paperback release from Brava.

It was blood. The gypsy blood pounding through her body that would never let anything go. And it was the house, Ducas's house, a magnet, with the gas and candlelit windows that beckoned deep in the night, especially when the Sangbournes were entertaining.

They were always entertaining. Lady Sangbourne had an insatiable need to surround herself with people all the time, fascinating people. People about whom you could find out things if you were clever enough and if you followed the lure of your gypsy blood.

Oh, there was something about the way it thrummed deep within her, blotting out her mother's every attempt to turn her into the lady her father wanted her to be.

But then, her father didn't know that her mother was a frequent visitor to Sangbourne Manor, because he himself was such an infrequent visitor to the house in Cheshamshire.

And this he didn't need to know—that his exotic, alluring Gaetana was frequently the paid entertainment. They feasted on her, the wild gypsy dancer, as they gossiped about her, she who had enticed the earl and held him still in her thrall. They paid her to come to the Manor and dance for them, and she went, following the call of her nature, and in spite of the fact the earl kept her like a queen.

It was the blood. It could not be denied. Not in her mother, not in her. And so Gaetana danced, giving herself to whatever voluptuous pleasures were on the menu on any given evening at Sangbourne Manor, and giving herself to the earl at his command.

Gaetana on the inside and Angene, her changeling daughter, on the outside, looking in, squirreling away secrets.

So many secrets. Her gypsy blood reveled in the secrets. Secrets were knowledge, secrets were power, and Angene knew it with every fiber of her gypsy soul.

And besides, what else had she to do until Ducas came back from the war? Dear God, Ducas, throwing himself in harm's way in a godforsaken country thousands of miles away for no reason she could ever understand.

Ducas, with his persistent tongue and honeyed promises.

Her body twinged just thinking of it. It was the blood; no decent woman would even conceive of doing what she intended to do when Ducas returned.

And he would return. There was not a doubt in her mind. And then… and then—she would become his mistress and enslave him forever, the way her mother had captivated the earl.

The thought made her breathless.

How stupid of him to go to war. It wasn't his war. And it was so far away that it could take him years to return. The idea of it yawned like an abyss, dark as the night that enfolded her. Perhaps that was why she so loved the night: there was always the promise of a new day, and with it, Ducas's return.

But until that day, it was the house that drew her, and the sense that at night she could be close to him by just touching the cold stone walls, and by learning everything she could about those who peopled his life.

By lurking in the shadows…

It was the blood: there was a turbulence in her that could not be tempered by all the good breeding of the man who had sired her, nor by a hundred lessons with the best tutors in deportment and manners her mother had employed.

She was what she was: daughter of a gypsy dancer and an aristocratic earl, and the fact she was creeping along the outer walls of Sangbourne Manor was proof enough which part of her held sway.

And then there were the secrets, the delicious sensual secrets about the games that adults played.

Games that quickened her blood, because she and Ducas had played at playing those games, had skirted the ultimate conquest and surrender, with the full understanding that someday, somehow, it would happen.

But for now, she moved noiselessly through the trees and into the bushes that fronted the windows of the grand parlor where the games would begin.

The dining first, hours of it, with five or six courses of elegantly prepared food and the best china and silver; they began early in the country, on the evenings when they played their games. After dinner, the men would retreat for port and polite conversation as the tension and anticipation escalated to an unbearable degree. And finally, the men would join the ladies for the evening's entertainment—this night, Gaetana, the gypsy, well-paid for her sensual dances, for her time, for her body.

A never-ending fascination, watching the aristocracy as they ate, drank, eyed each other, flirted, paired off, disappeared; sometimes they imported girls from the village to service the gentlemen while the ladies went off with the goat-boys and shepherds into the fields.

Or they would hire high-priced courtesans for a more elegant and willful seduction.

Or they took each other up and off in private rooms in a variety of interesting combinations.

And the the queen of all this rampant lasciviousness was Ducas's mother.

Gaetana would not talk about herself, nor anything that went on at Sangbourne Manor. Secrets were safe at the Manor, kept beyond the grave in a devil's bargain. No one would tell, ever, about the things that went on there, weekend-long things, forbidden things.

Things, perhaps, Ducas had been a part of. Things, because of that, Angene had to know, since she was certain they were things that would give her the power she needed to convince him to become her lover, forever. She was a bastard child; she wanted nothing more.

As she peered into the tall, multi-paned windows of the dimly lit grand parlor, she saw her mother dancing to a wildly strumming guitar, her skirts held high, her feet and legs bared to all. And the look on her face—the transcending look of joy that she could finally be herself, even among these heathens who had no idea of her life, her lore, her heritage.

It didn't matter. She did not need to pretend in these wild hours. She could follow the dictates of her heart, her blood, and no one would tell.

In that curious honor among like-minded hedonists, her mother's secret was safe.

Angene was the only one who knew—and she harbored a tumultuous desire to be among these libertine people, her hair, her skirts, her desire flowing free.

If only Ducas would return; Ducas understood her. Handsome, reckless Ducas with that irresistible combination of haughty aristocrat and primitive stable boy—and that tongue, that insatiable, demanding tongue…

But wait—her mother's voluptuous dance was finished, and the guests—four couples in all, excluding Lord and Lady Sangbourne—were clapping loudly and appreciatively.

She knew what came next in the sexual quadrille: these country weekends almost seemed to be a set piece, depending on the guests. In tonight's little play, the lights would dim, a gentleman would rise and select the lady of his choice, who was not his wife, and away they would go into the shadows to explore the unfettered nature of men and the naked response of women.

Lady Sangbourne directed the scene, standing tall and slender in the center of the room, dressed in her habitual green, with her long thick hair that deliberately grazed her waist bound away from her narrow face; did she not know how much men loved long hair to curtain their sins? Yet she was always the last to go into the shadows.

She knew everything, Lady Sangbourne, and didn't blink an eye as her husband chose his companion for the night…

Gaetana?

Angene's heart sank. This she had never witnessed before, this wholesale taking of her mother, in spite of her allegiance and her love for the earl. But none of that ever counted here. And certainly not tonight, if her mother's expression were any indication.

The air was thick with expendable lust, and every last guest only wanted that evanescent moment of surrender. Instinctively Angene understood that the crux of the evening was the pleasure point, nothing more, nothing less, and not even her mother was immune to the call of her blood.

She sank against the wall, her heart pounding painfully. This reality was not pretty, not even romantic. But then, wasn't it what she wanted for herself? To give herself wholly and completely to Ducas, and to live, outside constraints, as the love of his life forever?

Was there a forever when it came to the nature of men?

Would
she
entertain Ducas's friends and companions, and would he just as cavalierly hand her over to whoever wanted her for a night? Was this the life she wanted to commit to, in her overwhelming desire to possess Ducas?

It did not bear thinking about… she couldn't. He might be dead for all she knew, on some foreign battlefield, dead with no remains to be buried and mourned over… and this was worse than anything that might come of their life together.

Oh, dear Lord—Ducas…

Silence descended, the curious silence of the deep dark night, where the merest rustle of a leaf could set the blood thrumming. Not a star burned; the moon drifted behind a tail of clouds; every detail of the landscape merged into another so that there was only the flat black of nothingness around her.

There was nowhere to move, no landmark to guide her back home. She was a prisoner of the dark, caught in that abyss of emptiness, that cold black hole she so dreaded, and there was nothing she could do but curl up against the cold stone walls of Sangbourne Manor until daylight.

The howling of a dog awakened her.

Dawn. Cold. Wet. Dank.

Jingling. A rasping, rolling sound. Horses. A carriage emerging out of the fog that hovered just beyond the drive in front of Sangbourne Manor.

Dreaming. Too early in the morning for visitors… and besides, they were all still tumbled in their ruttish rest.

If she moved quickly, she could get back to the house before her mother returned.

Only, limbs stiff from the cold. Can't move. Not yet. Slowly, slowly… no sound—if anyone caught her here, her mother would abandon her to the wolves… the carriage door opening—who… ?

A stranger. Wait—someone leaning on him…

Slowly easing out of the carriage—was it? The stranger, giving him a cane. A familiar stance, a bend of the body, the rumble of a word, a familiar voice…