Games of Pleasure (18 page)

“A cold pond is bracing, not luxurious.”

“And so it will cool your fevered humors? Very well. By all means, bathe in your mystic pond, if you must.”

She halted her pony. A stream tumbled over the edge of the limestone escarpment into a small pool, its dark surface partly obscured by rocky outcrops. Ancient trees stood in picturesque groups in a deer park that stretched several furlongs to the facade of a great stone house. Carved chimneys smoked silently.

“It's in the grounds of someone's country home,” she said.

“So it is.”

“There are fires in the kitchens, which means that the owner is very probably in residence.”

“Almost certainly.”

“Furthermore, he's not likely to encourage trespassers. There may even be mantraps in the undergrowth.”

The breeze tossed his hair as he corrected his sidling mount. “So there may. If you're afraid, we'd better resist temptation and ride on, though at the moment I'd probably give half my inheritance for a bath.”

“Even if there aren't steel teeth in the long grass ready to take off a man's leg, there may be fences with spikes to disembowel the intruder.”

“I doubt there are any barriers in the way too great for someone bold enough to attempt them.”

“Then never let it be said that we weren't bold enough!”

Miracle cantered her pony down off the ridge. Ryder followed, holding Beauty back just enough so that the mare would not overtake. They pulled up only when the way was blocked by a tall iron railing, topped with spear-shaped spikes.

“As I suspected,” she said, spinning the pony back to face him. “His Lordship—whoever he is—has fences to keep out hoi polloi like us.”

“Then damn His Lordship's beady eyes!” Ryder glanced about. “Yet he's forgotten to trim his own trees.”

One large oak grew close to the other side of the fence. Several stout branches had spread over the top, though the lower spurs had been sawn off, leaving their stumps protruding between the railings.

Ryder halted his mare beneath the oak and threw the reins forward over her head to catch over a cut stub. Too well trained to pull back, Beauty nevertheless rolled her eyes. Yet as Ryder kicked his feet free to stand up on the saddle, the mare swung her haunches sideways, forcing him to balance on one foot with outstretched arms. At this grotesque new shadow, Beauty ducked and shied, but her rider had already leaped up to catch the spikes on the top of the fence. Moments later he sat comfortably on an overhanging branch. Freed of her mad burden, the mare dropped her head and relaxed.

“Come!” Ryder reached down with one hand, grinning like a schoolboy. “Let's invade!”

“You want me to stand on Beauty's saddle? She'll dump me.”

“So she will, but Jim won't.” He locked his feet around the branch and reached down with his hands. “Like any other lovesick male, the pony won't leave the mare. Come, ma'am, a grotto awaits its nymph!”

She secured the reins, tugged her skirts out of the way, and scrambled up to stand on the pony's back. Jim flicked an ear, but stood quietly next to the mare as Miracle stretched. Ryder caught her hands and lifted her to sit on the branch beside him. The climb down into the deer park on the other side was simple.

He led her across a short stretch of grass. Against the base of the cliff, huge boulders formed moss-covered stacks, leaving a network of secluded fissures, which led the intruders to a waterfall splashing down into the pool, dark and cold in the shade of the trees.

Ryder crouched to splash water over his face with both hands.

Miracle perched on a limestone outcrop and wrapped both arms about her knees. She was determined not to let him see how afraid she was.

“This place was carefully enhanced, wasn't it, to be more picturesque?” she asked.

“Absolutely! Nature no doubt created the cliff and the waterfall, but she never designed these pretty stacks, nor planted them with all those exotic alpine flowers. I imagine the judicious use of explosives produced both the spare rocks and a pool with enough depth to evoke mystery.” He dashed more water over his hair. Drops sluiced down over his face. “It's a folly. My grandmother built some similarly charming fancies at Wrendale.”

“Wrendale?”

“One of the smaller of the duchy properties.”

“Ah, I see. If I weren't here, you wouldn't hesitate to strip off and bathe in that mysterious water, would you?”

“I'll content myself with a little splashing like a wagtail, instead. I don't fancy riding in wet undergarments.” He glanced up at her through his damp lashes. “And I can hardly bathe naked in front of a lady.”

“You keep forgetting,” she said. “I'm not a lady.”

Water dripped from his outstretched fingertips. “But what if a gardener, or a bevy of guests from the house, or a nursemaid with her charge, or His Lordship himself, should happen to take a stroll and discover my frolicking in his pool?”

“Then you would meet the intrusion with an arrogant stare, which would cow the gardener, terrify the guests, thrill the nursemaid, or reassure His Lordship. No one would ever mistake you for anything but a duke's son: even stark naked, even standing on your head, even when you've chosen to keep company with a murderous harlot.”

“I'm not planning,” he said dryly, “to stand on my head.”

She rose to her feet, her heart battered by his smile, by his carefree assurance, by the wicked curve of his ear. “Yet it must be very fine to know that you may make free with the whole world, even when it belongs to someone else.”

“It's not always that simple, Miracle.”

“Nevertheless, being of humbler stock and possessing fewer watery skills, I think I'll stroll away by myself and allow you the lonely delights of the pond.”

“You don't swim?”

“I don't swim.”

He stripped off his jacket. His back flexed as he set the garment on a flat rock, then glanced up at her. “I can teach you.”

She smiled down at him. “It's too dangerous.”

His eyes seemed very dark, almost black. “I wouldn't allow you to come to any harm.”

“No, but I think that my joining you in a state of nature in that pool might be a little perilous to our recently agreed equilibrium, my lord, even though that chivalrous abstinence is all your idea, not mine. So while you take the plunge, I'll paddle about discreetly downstream. It will be just as refreshing, but much safer.”

She marched away, leaving him staring after her. A labyrinth of shaded paths wound between the rocks. Tiny flowers nodded on slender stems in every crevice. Mosses and ferns hung dripping from the cliff, the sun firing every droplet.

Miracle trailed one hand over the rocks, alarmed by her unsteady pulse and mad longings, then stopped to laugh at herself. She had always tried to live in the moment. Life had never offered her a past that she much wanted to remember, nor a future that she much wanted to contemplate. Guilt and fear were her daily companions now, but Lord Hanley could never find her here, and what could be more magical than this strangely bright morning?

She leaned her back against a dry slab of limestone and stared up at the sky. She longed to grasp this beauty and hold it in her heart. If she were alone, that was all that the grotto would be, of course: a lovely, magical place, discovered unexpectedly.

Instead, the presence of this duke's son charged it with hidden meaning, as if Oberon cast his enchantments of power on every last living thing, including Miracle Heather: courtesan to the less respectable scions of the nobility, a fallen woman who had tumbled so far from grace that there was little choice left now, except to keep sliding.

In which case, she might as well do it with as much mirth and defiance as she could muster. A harlot's final fate might be inevitable, but that didn't mean that she couldn't still meet it with audacity.

Just ahead of her, a fork in the path led up a set of rough steps. Miracle climbed them and found herself on a small ledge. A rustic bench, green with moss and overhung with imported aspens and red maples, framed a view of the pool. She sat down, just as—in a flash of white—Ryder dived naked into the water.

He swam strongly, his hair slicked to his head, his shoulders and buttocks glimmering like marble as his arms cleaved the surface. Entirely unaware that anyone could see him, he turned a somersault and emerged to float on his back, his arms thrown wide, his ribs arched, his genitals bobbing in the water.

Miracle felt pinned in place as if pierced by an arrow—
Ah, but he was beautiful!
—then she buried her face in both palms in a vain attempt to destroy the vision that was already burned into her brain.

He looked so strangely innocent and pure—the cold green water flowing over his white skin, the smooth bones and muscles and tendons carved with unearthly perfection—as if he were a creature from the far side of the moon, or from heaven, tumbled unexpectedly to earth.

Yet she could so easily recall the scent and feel of that male loveliness in her arms, in her body, and remember that he was ashamed and—in some deeply buried place—probably still angry at how she had used him.

Miracle turned her back, clambered down the steps, and followed the other fork, away from the sound of a man playing like an otter in a grotto, away from his communing with the water as if he had been conceived in the curve of a dark ocean wave.

The path soon looped back to the stream. She crouched and splashed water over her face, drowning out all awareness except that of her own thundering heart.

Ryder really wouldn't care, of course, if he were discovered by a gardener or a nursemaid, and certainly not if he were discovered by the owner of this place: probably a peer who was related to the St. Georges in some way. All the great families married each other. Whatever he did, he was invulnerable. No one could ever touch him. It was unfortunate that such immunity would not extend to any less noble females with whom His Lordship might choose to keep company, especially when those females had committed a capital crime.

Miracle made a wry grimace at the sky and laughed at herself. Some things, perhaps, couldn't be prevented, but all things could be faced with optimism.

She unlaced her boots and paddled her bare feet before she slipped off her clothes and washed herself all over. Then—as if drawn by the vision of Ryder's silent cleave through the water, of the silvered droplets sluicing over his powerful shoulders—she dressed and walked back to the pool.

He was floating with his eyes closed. His clothes formed a tidy little pile on a rock, his boots standing next to it. Without making a sound, Miracle sat down next to his discarded garments. She smoothed her hand over his jacket and stroked absently at the collar of his shirt. When she looked up again, he had already turned to swim toward her.

Silver streamed over his shoulders as he stood up, the water lapping around his waist.

“You were watching me?” He wrung one hand over his wet head. Dark runnels traced the hair on his chest. “What about your maidenly modesty?”

Miracle grinned at him. “I told you that I wasn't a lady.”

He grinned back. “Obviously not! But how am I supposed to maintain my modesty and retrieve my clothes, when you're sitting on them?”

“I'm not sitting on them. I'm sitting beside them. And whatever chivalrous nonsense you've chosen to believe, you're not completely chaste yet.”

“Yet I'm balanced like the Lorelei on this submerged rock, contemplating the demands of circumspection.”

“I don't believe for one moment that you're so bashful, but I promise not to look, if you like. Tiny rainbows are dancing in the high spray from the waterfall behind you. I'll happily study them, instead.”

“Not bashful,” he said. “Just wondering if perhaps I ought—in my present state—to be considering a little rectitude, at least.”

Miracle laughed as she seized his shirt and held it out. “So nature asserts herself once again, in spite of all that cold water? Here, my lord, come fetch your shirt to cover your shame.”

He plunged back into the pool to swim the few strokes to the shore. Sunlight glittered over his shoulders as he vaulted up onto the bank, water slicking the sprinkling of dark hair on his skin, sparkling on his arms and buttocks and the proud length of his erection.

Without hesitation he strode up to her. Miracle glanced up into his eyes as he bent down to take the shirt.

As if arrested, he froze, unmoving, unblinking, meeting her gaze. His eyes darkened as he studied her face. Her heart began to thump.

“We've talked of debts and ransoms,” she said. “But no more are owed.”

Water fell in fat droplets from his hair to burn, blissfully cold against her fevered skin. He brushed the moisture away from her cheek with a thumb. “Not even for a shirt?”

“No,” she said. “Along with everything else, this shirt's already yours.”

He crouched beside her, still erect, and slipped one hand into her hair, cradling her head as he tipped it back. A dark green fire burned, precariously banked, in the depths of his eyes.

“I think this is a very bad idea,” he said. “I should have stayed in the pool.”

His shirt fell from her fingers as Miracle reached up to take his shoulders in both hands.

“No,” she said, smoothing her palms over his firm, chill flesh, feeling the flame that scorched just beneath the surface. “Not if it's just a celebration of a bright swim in a magical place.”

He exhaled as if punched, and closed his eyes. “Then I'm defeated. God help me!”