Sin and Sensibility (25 page)

“For what?”

Sin and Sensibility / 215

She made a frustrated sound. “For Stephen’s papers.

To take over his debt. How much did it cost you?”

How could he tell her that the amount of Cobb-Harding’s debt appalled him? And not merely the amount, but the carelessness of it? The bastard’s idea of a solution to his monetary troubles had infuriated him, but he didn’t want to let her know that, either. The Marquis of Deverill didn’t get angry or upset over other people and their dilemmas—not unless they directly affected him. “Why the interest?” he said instead. “Unless you wish to find a way to repay me and take them over yourself. I wouldn’t recomm—”

“It’s a simple question,” she interrupted, folding her arms across her lovely bosom.

“Yes, I suppose it is. And I’m ‘simply’ not going to answer it.”

“I think I have a right to know.”

Valentine shook his head. “I said I would take care of a problem, and I did. The details are my affair. Suffice it to say that Stephen Cobb-Harding is a reckless man who wouldn’t have deserved you under the best of circumstances.”

That seemed to stop her for a moment, but just as he began to relax a little, she leaned forward and touched his knee. “You are a very nice man,” she whispered, her voice shaking a little.

The emotion in her voice bothered him. “Good God, don’t go about saying that. I’m taking more pleasure from torturing Cobb-Harding than from helping you. That’s not nice.”

“Tell yourself anything you like, but you’re wasting your breath if you’re trying to convince me. You’re forcing a man to leave the country because he attacked me.”

216 / Suzanne Enoch

He lifted an eyebrow. “Your faith in me is somewhat dismaying. I’ll have to do something nefarious to convince you of my poor character.”

She laughed, a sound he’d recently become surprisingly attuned to, and absurdly pleased to hear. “Just not tonight, if you please.”

“Very well. Another time, then.”

Eleanor settled into silence, and for the moment he let her be. A declaration of a wish to go swimming might sound innocent enough, but he knew her well enough to realize that she had to be supremely nervous about it.

Ladies might take the waters in Bath, but that was considered medicinal. The shore at Brighton also attracted bathers of the female persuasion, but in addition to the god-awful attire they wore, that setting obviously lacked the solitude and the propriety-flaunting dimension that interested Eleanor Griffin.

As for himself, he could only admire the great restraint he’d been showing in her presence. Mentally he’d been undressing her and making love to her for days, but that didn’t count. He was being good. “Nice,” as she’d called him. Probably the oddest label he’d ever had applied to him, but on occasion he almost enjoyed it.

The coach turned onto a bumpier stretch of road, and he leaned over to brush aside the window’s curtain.

“We’re nearly there,” he noted, surprised at the low tremor of excitement that ran through him. For Lucifer’s sake,
she
was the one going swimming; he wasn’t even going to watch.

“Good. I’ll try not to be long.”

“Take as much time as you like, Eleanor. This is your moment of freedom.”

He heard her quiet sigh. “Yes, I’m being so terribly bold, aren’t I?”

Sin and Sensibility / 217

Valentine sat forward. “You are. I’m beginning to understand that this isn’t about making a statement to the world, but to yourself.” He conjured a smile. “And besides, if this doesn’t satisfy your cravings, I can still arrange a balloon ride or a voyage to the Congo for you.”

With a chuckle Eleanor glanced out her own window.

“I shall keep that in mind.” The line of her mouth straightened. “It’s very dark out there, isn’t it?”

“I’ll set a torch at the edge of the pond. And I’ll be close by, standing guard. But if you don’t want to do this, I—”

The coach bumped to a halt, and she stood. “I want to do this,” she returned, turning the handle and pushing the door open herself.

The driver flipped down the steps, and Eleanor emerged before Valentine. He would have preferred it otherwise, just in case someone might be in the area, but he hadn’t chosen this pond by accident. It was neighbored by an old church, and was used for the occasional baptismal on Sundays and otherwise abandoned.

“This way,” he said, removing the lantern from one of the coach posterns and offering her his free hand. She took it, her bare fingers warm in his and shaking just a little.

They walked across the narrow stretch of meadow between the pond and the road, then entered the small, dark stand of oak trees that circled the water. Eleanor stopped at the sloping edge of the pond to gaze about at the lantern-lit darkness. “This is what I imagined,” she said, her voice quiet.

That pleased him to an absurd degree. “It’s used as a baptismal, so the bottom should be fairly firm.” He set the lantern down on a rock, then straightened again. “I’ll be just outside the trees. Call me when you’re ready to return.”

“Thank you, Valentine.”

218 / Suzanne Enoch

He shrugged, watching as she set down the blanket and then went to work pulling pins from her hair. Brunette waves cascaded over her shoulders, caressing her smooth cheeks and stirring in the slight breeze. With a swallow he turned his back. “Have fun.”

Jesus. After he’d seen a hundred women letting down their hair, this one doing so innocently shouldn’t have the ability to make him hard, but it did. She did. And with an obligation both to her and to her brother, he needed to put some distance between them immediately.

After striding away so quickly that he nearly brained himself on a low-hanging branch, he stopped at a convenient tree stump and sat down. “Stop it, Deverill,” he mumbled at himself, rubbing his hands over his face. So he’d told her to have fun; it was far from the wittiest thing he’d ever said, but at least it had gotten him away from her before she could see his groin straining at his trousers.

Behind him he could make out the dim, broken light from the lantern, but he refused to look more closely than that. And he wasn’t certain whether he could hear the swish of her gown as it softly fell from her shoulders or whether that was just the sound of the breeze, but he definitely knew which sound he wanted it to be.

He did hear the splash of water as she entered the pond.

Keeping his gaze resolutely on the new moon, he refused to imagine her thin shift rendered transparent and clinging to the soft, wet curves of her body. This was about her freedom, damn it, not about how attractive he happened to find her. He’d already stepped too far by kissing her, and he wouldn’t make that mistake again. Not even if it killed him.

Chapter 14

E
leanor held her breath as cold water rose up to her thighs. A warm afternoon would have been more ideal for this excursion, but that would played into the ruination clause Melbourne had put into their agreement.

She took another step forward, gasping a little as the water rose to her hips. Her shift clung to her legs, making her feel clumsy and weighted, and the slap of the cold, wet material against her still-dry parts made her gasp again. With a glance over her shoulder in the direction Valentine had vanished, she yanked it over her head and tossed it onto the shore.

She shivered. “Oh, stop it,” she muttered, and deliberately sank to her knees, letting the water flow up past her bosom to her neck.

The shock of the cold froze her there for a moment. As her body grew more accustomed to the temperature, she acknowledged that it wasn’t that bad. She drew in her breath and submerged completely, stroking toward the 219

220 / Suzanne Enoch

center of the pond. The fingers of cold water sank in through her thick mane of hair, pricking and electric as they touched her scalp.

Swimming through darkness was an eerie sensation, as was the realization that her body felt different moving through the water than it had when she’d been a young girl. As she surfaced she smiled and flung hair from her face.

Tomorrow when she went down to breakfast she would know that she’d gone swimming naked in the middle of London, and that she’d done it simply because she’d wanted to do so. Her brothers had said they would serve as her escorts anywhere she wanted to go, but she seriously doubted they would have agreed to this. Certainly if Melbourne knew what she was doing, and who was standing guard, he’d drop dead on the spot.

Out here in the dark she could admit to herself that at least half of her excitement was from knowing that the Marquis of Deverill stood close by. Valentine Corbett, the notorious rake—and her surprisingly loyal friend.

While she appreciated the friendship part, she’d be a fool to deny that she spent more time thinking of his kisses and wondering what would happen if she dared to bait him again.

She swam until her arms and legs began to tire. Even then she was reluctant to leave the pond, but she couldn’t very well stay until daylight. Still, she would never do this again, and it was difficult to name the last moment of her freedom. Finally, though, she waded back to the point where she’d first gone into the water. And froze.

A pair of beady eyes, red in the reflected lamplight, gazed at her from beneath the skirt of her gown. It was probably a squirrel, she told herself, taking another step toward shore and waving her arm. A squirrel, or a hedgehog. “Shoo.”

Sin and Sensibility / 221

A low growl answered her. Eleanor yelped, backing into the water again. Hedgehogs didn’t growl, as far as she knew. And naked, she didn’t feel nearly as brave as she might have otherwise.

Something crashed through the shrubbery toward her.

“Eleanor?”

With another shriek she sank down in the water just as Valentine emerged from the trees. He skidded, nearly sliding down the muddy bank into the water before he came to a halt.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, his unabashedly curious gaze fixed just below the waterline in the direction of her chest.

“There’s a…a thing under my dress.”

His lips twisted. “I’ve actually had a chit tell me that very thing before.”

“I’m serious, Valentine! It growled at me.”

He gave her pile of clothes a dubious look. “Are you certain?”

“I’ve never had muslin growl at me before. Get rid of it so I can come out of the water.”

Valentine looked around for a moment, then set aside his nice walking cane and instead bent down and picked up a hefty stick. Rather than shooing away the growling hedgehog, he hooked a strap of her shift and lifted the damp material into the air. “You’re naked,” he announced.

Warmth crept down her spine. “And feeling extremely vulnerable. Make it go away, Deverill.”

With a sigh he lowered the shift and turned his attention to the larger pile of material. “Shoo,” he said experi-mentally, poking at her gown.

A long dark form shot out from beneath the skirt and swarmed at him, growling. With a curse Valentine shifted 222 / Suzanne Enoch

backward, brandishing the stick like a sword. The weasel grabbed the end of the wood with its teeth and shook it.

The marquis flung the weasel and the stick into the bushes, skidding to keep his footing on the damp ground.

A rock went out from under his boot, and with a curse he fell into the water.

He lurched to his feet, splashing water into the air and over Eleanor. He was soaked to the chest, water dripping from his fine coat tails and his sleeves. After a stunned moment Eleanor burst into laughter.

“Well, thank you very much,” he muttered, turning around to glare at her.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped, trying to control her laughter.

“The notorious Marquis of Deverill falling into a baptismal pool. It’s a wonder the waters don’t boil!”

Deverill started to respond, but the weasel trotted back out of the shrubbery. It stopped a few feet from the shore, and marquis and weasel glared at each other. Then with a sniff, the animal headed back into the trees, low tail twitching.

“I showed him,” Valentine stated, slapping at the pond with the flat surface of his hand.

“You know, you might have told me you wanted to go swimming. I would have invited you.”

“You sing prettily enough now, my bird, but I heard you squawking a moment ago.”

Eleanor chortled. “There was a weasel under my skirt!”

“Yes, and who can blame him?” Swinging around, the marquis shed his coat and flung it beside her shift.

Abruptly she remembered that she was stark naked, only the dark and a few inches of water concealing her body from the world as she crouched in the shallows.

“What are you doing?”

Sin and Sensibility / 223

He stopped, tilting his head as he looked at her. “Going swimming. You did say you would have asked me to join you.”

Her heart skipped a beat. “But I…I don’t have any clothes on.”

Deverill pulled his shirt from his trousers and yanked it over his head, sending it over to join his coat. “I’m attempting to catch up.”

She meant to reply that it wasn’t necessary for him to join her, but her gaze and her mind couldn’t seem to move beyond the sight of his bare, well-muscled chest and abdomen.
Oh, my
. “But I was…getting out,” she stammered, forcing her gaze up to his face again.

“Then do so. Do you require assistance?”

“Valentine, I—”

He faced her. “Do you want me to leave?” he asked quietly.

Her breath stilled. “No.”

Deverill submerged completely in the water. A moment later a Hessian boot came soaring out of the pond and onto the shore. The second one followed it and Valentine surfaced, snorting. “Damnation. Wet boots. I nearly drowned.”

“Then you should have gone back on shore to remove them,” she pointed out, surreptitiously backing into deeper water so she could straighten from her crouch.

She was insane to allow this to continue—but at the same time the naughty voice in the back of her mind told her she’d be insane to let the moment pass.

“Yes, I suppose so,” he replied, and the wad of his wet trousers slapped onto a rock beside his shirt, “but then I would have gotten my backside muddy.”