Almost Heaven (12 page)

It was all the encouragement Elizabeth needed.

The first hard drops of rain fell when she’d ridden a mile down the main road. “Wonderful,” she said aloud, reining her horse to a halt and scanning the sky. Then she dug her heel into the mare’s side and sent her bolting onward toward the village. A few minutes later Elizabeth realized that the wind, which had been sighing through the trees, suddenly seemed to be whipping the branches about, and the temperature was dropping alarmingly. Rain began to fall in large, fat drops that soon became a steady downpour. By the time she saw the path leading off the main road into the woods, Elizabeth was half-drenched. Seeking some form of shelter among the trees, she reined her mare off the road and onto the path. Here at least the leaves acted like an umbrella, albeit a very leaky one.

Lightning streaked and forked above, followed by the ominous boom of thunder, and despite the stablekeep’s prediction Elizabeth realized a full-fledged storm was brewing and about to break. The little mare sensed it, too, but though she flinched with the thunder, she remained docile and obedient. “What a little treasure you are,” Elizabeth said softly, patting her satiny flank, but her mind was on the cottage she knew would be at the end of the path. She bit her lip with indecision, trying to judge the time. It was surely after one o’clock, so Ian Thornton would be long gone.

In the few additional moments Elizabeth sat there contemplating her alternatives she reached the obvious conclusion that she was vainly putting far too much emphasis on her importance to Ian. Last night she’d seen how easily he had been able to flirt with Charise only an hour after he’d kissed her in the arbor. No doubt she’d been nothing but a momentary diversion to him. How melodramatic and stupid she’d been to imagine him pacing the cottage floor, watching the door. He was a gambler, after all a gambler and probably a skilled flirt. No doubt he’d left at noon and gone back to the house in search of more willing company, which he’d be able to find without the slightest problem. On the other hand, if by some outlandish chance he was still there, she would be able to see his horse, and then she would simply turn around and ride back to the manor house.

The cottage came into view several minutes later. Set deep in the steamy woods, it was a welcome sight, and Elizabeth strained her eyes to see through the dense trees and rising fog, looking for signs of Ian’s horse. Her heart began to pound in expectation and alarm as she scanned the front of the little thatched cottage; but as she soon realized, she had no reason for excitement or alarm. The place was deserted. So much for the depth of his sudden attachment to her, she thought, refusing to acknowledge the funny little ache she felt.

She dismounted and walked her horse around the back, where she found a lean-to under which she could tie the little mare. “Did you ever notice how very fickle males are?” she asked the horse. “And how very foolish females are about them?” she added, aware of how inexplicably deflated she felt. She realized as well that she was being completely irrational – she had not intended to come here, had not wanted him to be waiting, and now she felt almost like crying because he wasn’t!

Giving the ribbons of her bonnet an impatient jerk, she untied them. Pulling the bonnet off, she pushed the back door of the cottage open, stepped inside and froze in shock!

Standing at the opposite side of the small room, his back to her, was Ian Thornton. His dark head was slightly bent as he gazed at the cheery little fire crackling in the fireplace, his hands shoved into the back waistband of his gray riding breeches, his booted foot upon the grate. He’d taken off his jacket, and beneath his soft lawn shirt his muscles flexed as he withdrew his right hand and shoved it through the side of his hair. Elizabeth’s gaze took in the sheer male beauty of his wide, masculine shoulders, his broad back and narrow waist.

Something in the somber way he was standing – added to the fact that he’d waited more than two hours for her made her doubt her earlier conviction that he hadn’t truly cared whether she came or not. And that was before she glanced sideways and saw the table. Her heart turned over when she saw the trouble he’d taken. A cream linen tablecloth covered the crude boards, and two places had been set with blue and gold china, obviously borrowed from Charise’s house. In the center of the table a candle was lit, and a half-empty bottle of wine stood beside a platter of cold meat and cheese.

In all her life Elizabeth had never known that a man could actually arrange a luncheon and set a table. Women did that. Women and servants. Not men who were so handsome they made one’s pulse race. It seemed she’d been standing there for several minutes, not mere seconds, when he stiffened suddenly, as if sensing her presence. He turned, and his harsh face softened with a wry smile: “You aren’t very punctual.”

“I didn’t intend to come,” Elizabeth admitted, fighting to recover her balance and ignore the tug of his eyes and voice. “I got caught in the rain on my way to the village.”

“You’re wet.”

“I know.”

“Come over by the fire.” When she continued to watch him warily, he took his foot off the grate and walked over to her. Elizabeth stood rooted to the floor, while all of Lucinda’s dark warnings about men sped through her mind. “What do you want?” she asked him breathlessly, feeling dwarfed by his towering height.

“Your jacket.”

“No-I think I’d like to keep it on.”

“Off,” he insisted quietly. “It’s wet.”

“Now see here!” she burst out backing toward the open door, clutching the edges of her jacket.

“Elizabeth,” he said with reassuring calm, “I gave you my word you’d be safe if you came today.”

Elizabeth briefly closed her eyes and nodded. “I know. I also know I shouldn’t be here. I really ought to leave. I should, shouldn’t I?” Opening her eyes again, she looked beseechingly into his – the seduced asking the seducer for advice.

“Under the circumstances, I don’t think I’m the one you ought to ask.”

“I’ll stay,” she said after a moment and saw the tension in his shoulders relax. Unbuttoning her jacket, she gave it to him, along with her bonnet, and he took them over to the fireplace, hanging them on the pegs in the wall. “Stand by the fire,” he ordered, walking over to the table and filling two glasses with wine, watching as she obeyed.

The front of her hair that had not been covered by her bonnet was damp, and Elizabeth reached up automatically pulling out the combs that held it off her face on the sides and giving the mass a hard shake. Unconscious of the seductiveness of her gesture, she raised her hands, combing her fingers through the sides of it and lifting it.

She glanced toward Ian and saw him standing perfectly still beside the table, watching her. Something in his expression made her hastily drop her hands, and the spell was broken, but the effect of that warmly intimate look in his eyes was vibrantly, alarmingly alive, and the full import of the risk she was taking by being here made Elizabeth begin to quake inside. She did not
know
this man at all; she’d only met him hours ago; and yet even now he was watching her with a look that was much too . . . personal. And possessive.

He handed her the glass, then he nodded toward the threadbare sofa that nearly filled the tiny room. “If you’re warm enough, the sofa is clean.” Upholstered in what might have been green and white stripes at one time, it had faded to shades of gray and was obviously a castoff from the main house.

Elizabeth sat down as far from him as the sofa permitted and curled her legs beneath the skirt of her riding habit to warm them. He’d promised she would be “safe,” which she now realized left a great deal of room for personal interpretation. “If I’m going to remain,” she said uneasily, “I think we ought to agree to observe all the proprieties and conventions.”

“Such as?’’

“Well, for a beginning, you really shouldn’t be calling me by my given name.”

“Considering the kiss we exchanged in the arbor last night, it seems a little absurd to call you Miss Cameron.”

It was the time to tell him she was Lady Cameron, but Elizabeth was too unstrung by his reference to those unforgettable – and wholly forbidden – moments in his arms to bother with that. “That isn’t the point,” she said firmly. “The point is that although last night did happen, it must not influence our behavior today. Today we ought to be
twice
as correct in our behavior,” she continued, a little desperately and illogically, “to atone for what happened last night!”

“Is
that
how it’s done?” he asked, his eyes beginning to glint with amusement. “Somehow I didn’t quite imagine you allowed convention to dictate your every move.”

To a gambler without ties or responsibility, the rules of social etiquette and convention must be tiresome in the extreme, and Elizabeth realized it was imperative to convince him he
must
yield to her viewpoint. “Oh, but I am,” she prevaricated. “The Camerons are the most conventional people in the world! As you know from last night, I believe in death before dishonor. We also believe in God and country, motherhood and the king, and . . . and all the proprieties. We’re quite intolerably boring on the subject, actually.”

“I see,” he said, his lips twitching. “Tell me something.” he asked mildly, “why would such a conventional person as yourself have crossed swords with a roomful of men last night in order to protect a stranger’s reputation?”

“Oh, that,” Elizabeth said. “That was just well, my
conventional
notion of justice. Besides,” she said, her ire coming to the fore as she recalled the scene in the card room last night, “it made me excessively angry when I realized that the only reason none of them would try to dissuade Lord Everly from shooting you was because
you
were not their social equal, while Everly is.”

“Social equality?” he teased with a lazy, devastating smile. “What an unusual notion to spring from such a conventional person as yourself.”

Elizabeth was trapped, and she knew it. “The truth is,” she said shakily, “that I am scared to death of being here.”

“I know you are,” he said, sobering, “but I am the last person in the world you’ll ever have to fear.”

His words and his tone made the quaking in her limbs, the hammering of her heart, begin again, and Elizabeth hastily drank a liberal amount of her wine, praying it would calm her rioting nerves. As if he saw her distress, he smoothly changed the topic. “Have you given any more thought to the injustice done Galileo?”

She shook her head. “I must have sounded very silly last night, going on about how wrong it was to bring him up before the Inquisition. It was an absurd thing to discuss with anyone, especially a gentleman.”

“I thought it was a refreshing alternative to the usual insipid trivialities.”

“Did you
really?”
Elizabeth asked, her eyes searching his with a mixture of disbelief and hope, unaware that she was being neatly distracted from her woes and drawn into a discussion she’d find easier.

“I did.”

“I
wish
society felt that way.”

He grinned sympathetically. “How long have you been required to hide the fact that you have a mind?”

“Four weeks,” she admitted, chuckling at his phrasing. “You cannot imagine how awful it is to mouth platitudes to people when you’re
longing
to ask them about things they’ve seen and things they know. If they’re male, they wouldn’t tell you, of course, even if you did ask.”

“What would they say?” he teased.

“They would say,” she said wryly, “that the answer would be beyond a female’s comprehension – or that they fear offending my tender sensibilities.”

“What sorts of questions have you been asking?”

Her eyes lit up with a mixture of laughter and frustration. “I asked Sir Elston Greeley, who had just returned from extensive travels, if he had happened to journey to the colonies, and he said that he had. But when I asked him to describe to me how the natives looked and how they lived, he coughed and sputtered and told me it wasn’t at all ‘the thing’ to discuss ‘savages’ with a female, and that I’d swoon if he did.”

“Their appearance and living habits depend upon their tribe,” Ian told her, beginning to answer her questions. “Some of the tribes are ‘savage’ by our standards, not theirs, and some of the tribes are peaceful by any standards . . .”

Two hours flew by as Elizabeth asked him questions and listened in fascination to stories of places he had seen, and not once in all that time did he refuse to answer or treat her comments lightly. He spoke to her like an equal and seemed to enjoy it whenever she debated an opinion with him. They’d eaten lunch and returned to the sofa; she knew it was past time for her to leave, and yet she was loath to end their stolen afternoon.

“I can’t help thinking,” she confided when he finished answering a question about women in India who covered their faces and hair in public, “that it is grossly unfair that I was born a female and so must never know such adventures, or see but a few of those places. Even if I were to journey there, I’d only be allowed to go where everything was as civilized as-as London!”

“There does seem to be a case of extreme disparity between the privileges accorded the sexes,” Ian agreed.

“Still, we each have our duty to perform,” she informed him with sham solemnity. “And there’s said to be great satisfaction in that.”