Almost a Scandal (45 page)

“No, Sally.” His voice was soft but implacable. “You don’t need to cut and run. We’re safe with Colyear.”

Her brother could not possibly understand. She was
not
safe.

“Sally? What’s amiss?” Grace’s question was a whisper at her ear, as she took up Sally’s other arm. “Are you all right? You look faint.”

No, she should say.
No.
She was not all right. She
should
faint, and let herself be carried off to safety, but that was a coward’s way out, and she had come too far, and done too much, to let cowardice have its way with her now. And she had never in her life done anything so foolishly maidenly as succumb to a swoon.

Matthew was striding forward to greet Col. “Colyear. Good to see you, man.” They shook hands as old friends—Matthew reaching his left hand out to grip Col’s shoulder. “No longer a lieutenant of His Majesty’s Navy, I understand?”

The deck beneath her tipped back, tossing her the other way, as she grappled for equilibrium. Col leave the navy? How could he? He was brilliant at his career. Simply brilliant. No one else could hold a compass to him.

Why would he do such a thing. Why?

“Kent.” His large, browned hand, with his beautiful, articulate fingers, clasped Matthew’s.

The startling effect Col was having upon her sensibilities was even more pronounced close up. The sight and scent of his skin, the warmth and power radiating off his body drew her to him like a lodestone. His sheer size made her feel small and insignificant. But she wanted to feel small and insignificant. She wanted to be invisible.

“May I introduce you to my wife?”

No.

Anything but that. She could not face meeting his wife, some beautiful, accomplished, whole—

“I would be honored.”

Col’s voice, low and steady, was the one that answered.

Oh, God. God and the devil and Saint Elmo all at once. Of course, it was Owen who had spoken of his wife. But the clockwork of her heart was already irretrievably broken, smashed now into small bits that would never fit back together. Sally covered her confusion and fear and impotent rage by keeping her face turned resolutely to the floor, holding herself in tense readiness for the moment when Grace would have to let go of her arm to greet Col. Willing the shattered timepiece of her heart to somehow mend itself and resume beating correctly.

“Lady Kent. Your servant, ma’am. May I offer my congratulations?”

“You may.” Grace was everything charming and happy. “I have heard so much about you.”

Col sliced the sharp blade of his gaze toward Sally. She shrank back, away from him, away from the cutting pain of that nearly merciless look.

But Sally’s jerking movements reminded Grace of her presence. “Mr. Colyear, have you been introduced to my husband’s sister, Miss Sarah Kent?”

Grace meant to be helpful, but her voice held a soft warning, an instruction-to-be-kind tone, that made Sally pray for a hole to open up in the floor. A hole filled with a raging, spinning vortex of water, so she might jump into it, and drown the hideous rush of shame, and grief, and loss his mere presence occasioned. How did one dark look from him reduce her so effectively? How did all the inhibitions and worries she thought she had banished come flooding back to swamp her the moment he appeared?

“Miss Kent,” Col responded in his deep, quiet, solid voice, as he bowed over the hand she hadn’t thought to offer. “It is an honor.”

“Mr. Colyear.” Her own words came from somewhere at the bottom of her throat, thick and stupid, as if she had never spoken before, as if she had not yet even learned how to move her mouth to speak. She shut her mouth, and shut her eyes, clenching her eyelids tight, so she would not have to see him look at her.

Let them look and soon they will find there is nothing to see.

But she was no bloody, earthly good at waiting. And the silence—the awful, roaring silence of all the words she could not speak—defeated her, and she had to look. He could not be in her world, in her presence, and she not look at him. He had been water and air and sunlight. And he still was. He was everything. Everything she could not have.

Col was acknowledging her words with a slow nod of his head, as he continued to regard her in that grave, solemn manner. Three short, sharp, vertical lines pressed upward between his brows. Oh, God. Even his scowl was so dear it hurt.

Under the heavy weight of his gaze, she could find nothing placid or safe to say, nothing to fill the aching, growing void. She could only watch him look at her, in a silence so deep and so profound, they might have been anywhere else in the empty world, and not two feet away from each other in a too-crowded drawing room.

But she could not find any words.

“Miss Kent.” It was Col who broke the locked silence. “
That,
if I may say so, is an extraordinary scar.”

She did not even gasp, the way the others around her did. She did not raise her hand to hide her face, as Grace did in instinctive sympathy. She did not let heat gather in her eyes. She absorbed the blow in silence, without flinching, because numbing pain was leaking from her chest, filling the emptiness of her lungs until she was drowning.

Even as all around her protest erupted, hot and withering. Even as from the dim edges of her vision, Sally could see her brothers rise up together, like a dike before the ocean, to block any further inundation of grief. Even as they spoke.

“Damn your eyes, Col—” Matthew began, but he melted away into the periphery of her vision, his threat left unfinished.

Grace’s outrage, too, had been unmistakable. “Now you see here, sir, there’s no need for that sort of—”

But Owen said, “Grace. Come away.” And they faded to the fringes of her awareness as well.

Because Sally saw something the others had not. She saw how carefully Col was holding himself. How watchfully.

She could see that Col was poised on the very same knife’s edge as she.

It gave Sally, if not exactly hope or ease, then at least … curiosity. If he was not there to wound or expose her—and she was sure he was not—then why the devil was he there?

There was nothing and no one but Col as he stepped close, and closer still. Until he was too close, and she had to look up, up to see the hard lines etched into the corners of his face. He was scowling at her, fierce and insistent, but the effect was strangely blunted by the reassuring, homey scent of starch from his linen.

He raised his right hand, and gently traced the long pink outline across her temple with the tip of his finger. His touch along the angry length of the scar was electric, an uncomfortable rush of vibrating heat.

“It reminds me,” he said, his voice gentled into roughness, “of a saber cut, taken in hand-to-hand action by a courageous colleague, someone who saved my life. Someone who is very, very dear to me.” His expression did not change. He did not smile to reassure her, but only looked, and looked at her unflinchingly. Willing her to do the same.

“I wonder, Miss Kent,” he continued, oblivious to the scene he was creating, “if I might persuade you to do me the honor of taking a turn about the room, so you can tell me just how you acquired such an injury.”

And he was already turning, tucking her arm over his, and leading her away.

Sally wasn’t sure how she moved, how she put one shaky leg in front of the other without falling down. She hardly knew what to think, or do, or where to look. All she could do was feel—the solid strength of the arm beneath her hand, the heat radiating off his person, the reassuring shelter of his tall form as he steered them through the assembly.

People were staring, not least her own family. A glance revealed Grace white-faced with concern, though Owen was whispering into her ear. Near the door her father stood with a look as still as coming thunder, pent-up and watchful.

And she did not know how to reassure him. She did not know how to reassure herself. Yet she let herself be towed along in Col’s wake, promenaded across the room while Falmouth society wondered what on earth such a handsome man was doing with coltish Sally Kent.

Sally willed words into her mouth. “I think, sir, that we are making a scandal.”

“I think, Miss Kent,” he answered quietly, “that you did that months ago. In fact, I’ve come all this way to make sure of it.”

Was that humor, or censure in his voice?

Sally turned sharply for the arched entry to the drawing room, and from there hurried them down the central corridor toward the relative quiet at the very back of the house, where the old part of the building spilled into the gardens.

But having already vented his cryptic lure, Col chose to keep both his unhurried pace, and his hold upon her arm. “Handsomely now, Kent. What I have to say will keep, at least for a few minutes more.”

“Stop it,” she whispered out of the side of her mouth. “Stop all this calm assurance. You don’t know what you’re doing any better than I.”

“Don’t I?” One dark eyebrow taunted her. “Perhaps I’ve learned.”

Something that had to have been a spurt of jealousy speared its poison through her heart and she nearly stumbled, but his hand was there, at her wrist, and his arm had found its way around her waist, buoying
her
up this time.

She tried to hurry out of his embrace, not yet ready to so easily forgive the hurt his absence, and now his presence, brought her. Sally led them into the dimness of the garden room. Two small lamps had been lit on the tables, well away from the windows, so visitors could admire the view of the lantern-lit garden beyond. When she stepped through the doorway, the moist, pungent fragrance of the indoor garden of potted plants filled her lungs. It wasn’t the oak and tar of a tall ship, but it was real and familiar enough to steady her.

She was on her home ground. And no longer his subordinate. She could treat him as an equal. She had a right to protect herself. “You can let me go now, Mr. Colyear. I’m not going to run away.”

“I never thought you would, Kent. Running away isn’t your style at all, is it?”

“No. So you can let me go.”

“I think not,” he said carefully. “I think I mean never to let you go again.”

The broken pounding of her heart was hammering away, pulsing heat into her veins. Eroding the carefully cultivated veneer of numbness. “Co— Mr. Colyear. Don’t say things you don’t mean, or will regret.”

“Kent. You ought to know me well enough to know I never say things I don’t mean.”

“Well, you needn’t. I could see by your ferocious scowl when you entered that you came to salve your conscience. They don’t know.” She gestured back at the drawing room as a stand-in for her family. “I never told them. I mean, they know that I served under you, and of course Captain McAlden, in
Audacious,
but they don’t know that I was … that we…” She stumbled over the words, because with the memory of
exactly
what she had done in his arms came the icy heat of remembrance and awareness prickling across her skin. “No one knows. No one will ever know.”

“
I
know.” He stepped in front of her, the seemingly solid wall of his chest fencing her in, keeping her from evading him. “And what about you? Do you know? Do you remember? I sure as hell do. I remember every detail. Every night. Over and over again. I can’t get you out of my mind. I can’t think of anything, or anyone else, but you.”

“Of course I remember. Of course, but … It’s not the same. I’m not the same.” The fear she had tried so hard to keep at bay was escaping, making her voice ragged around the edges, coming out of her mouth in shreds. But she had to do it. She moved closer to the table and its lamp. “Look at me. Really look at me.”

Let them look and soon they will find there is nothing to see.

But Col was different. He saw what others did not. He saw everything.

His gaze was as dark, solemn, and level as ever, cataloguing every nuance of her ruined face. Reading her the way he used to read the sea, like a book open before him, all its secrets manifest to him.

She was the one to turn away—she was no good at waiting—but his hand came up to stop her, and retrace the uneven line that knitted across her temple and down the side of her cheek. This time, the touch of his bare finger over her skin was a mixture of pleasure and pain so heady, she felt upended, as if she were being churned up by a wave upon the shore.

“Do you know what I see when I look at this scar?”

She wouldn’t answer him. She couldn’t. All she could see in her own mind’s eye was the bristle of stitches as black as hedgehog spines in the mirror at Gibraltar and the ugliness of the now pink, uneven lines cobwebbing her skin.

But not Col. “I see loyalty. And devotion. I see what someone, what
you,
were willing to sacrifice for me. I see love. Only love could leave such a lasting mark. How could I not be moved by that?”

“I don’t want your pity.” She broke away and gave him her back, too ashamed of the hot tears stinging the back of her eyes. She didn’t want him to see how hard this was for her. She wanted to be strong. She wanted to be Kent. But in the time she had been away from him, she had grown too used to being Sally. And even his profession of love hurt so bad she could not draw breath.

“It’s only a scar, Kent. And I see it. It’s like a map of my failures. But it’s not all I see.” His hands were on her shoulders, turning her to face him. “Stand still and let me see.”

She closed her eyes against the sheer intensity of his voice. “Please, Col. Don’t.”

“I can’t seem to help it. Are you … Are you wearing face powder?”

He sounded as incredulous as if he’d found her wearing a knife. Which, of course, she was, in her garter. Why should she not? And why should she not wear face powder if she so chose? “It’s not as if it’s a sign of the apocalypse.”

His smile was quiet and slow. Not exactly begrudging, but perhaps rusty from lack of use. “I’ve already seen the apocalypse, Kent. And so have you. But I never thought to see you like this.”

“Devil take you, Col. I might say I don’t want your pity, but for God’s sake, don’t think that gives you leave to level me so completely, like—”