Slightly Sinful (40 page)

And then her hand dropped to her side, she felt a great welling of emotion that escaped from her lips in a wordless cry, and she caught up the sides of her skirts and broke into a run.

"Alleyne!" she cried, her heart so bursting with joy that it did not even occur to her to wonder why he was here.

He met her halfway and caught her up in his arms and swung her twice about before setting her back on her feet and putting enough distance between them that she could see he was grinning, his eyes alight with laughter.

"Dare I hope you are glad to see me?" he asked her. "You are a sight for sore eyes, Rachel, though there ought to be a better way of saying it than with that sad old cliché. I have missed you."

Somehow she found that she was looking beyond his shoulder to the window of her uncle's room. He was sitting there, looking down at them. She took a step back, and Alleyne looked over his shoulder and then back again.

"You were not here when I arrived," he said. "I have had a word with your uncle."

"But what are you doing here?" she asked him. And now that her mindless joy was past, she was sorry he had come. All that she had suffered during the past five days would have to be repeated when he went away again. "How could your family have been willing to let you go again so soon? Was it a happy return, Alleyne? Did you recognize them all? And remember everything?"

With every word she drank in the sight of him as if she had forgotten and would commit every detail to memory for future reference. He was hatless. The slight breeze was ruffling his hair and lifting that errant lock from his forehead.

"I have not been there," he said.

"What?" She raised her eyebrows.

"I am the world's worst coward, Rache," he said. "I stayed in Bath, making excuses every day to wait one more hour or one more day. I could not face them until I had remembered everything or at least enough that I would not just stand there like a mindless dolt after knocking on the doors of Lindsey Hall and asking if anyone there knew me."

She tipped her head to one side and reached for his hands, without thinking.

"And have you remembered?" she asked him.

"A reassuring amount," he said. "More and more each day, in fact. I have no more excuse not to go to Lindsey Hall. And I want to go almost more than I want to do anything else in this life."

"But you came here instead?" She looked inquiringly at him.

"I turn weak at the knees," he said, flashing her a grin again, "at the thought of going there, of presenting myself to Bewcastle and any other member of my family who happens to be there, and of announcing to them that their brother has come back from the dead. I think one of the worst experiences of the past week was discovering from you that they had held a memorial service for me-a funeral, except that there was no body. To be treated as dead when one is still alive-no, I cannot begin to explain how it feels."

She squeezed his hands more tightly.

"I cannot go there unless you come with me," he said. "Now, is that not a totally unmanly thing to say? The old Alleyne Bedwyn would not have said it or felt it. He was an arrogant, devil-may-care, independent, rather hard-edged man. I have changed since his days. I cannot do this without you, Rachel. Come with me?"

"To Lindsey Hall?" Her eyes widened.

"If for no other reason," he said, "then because you are the one who saved my life, Rache. Bewcastle will want to thank you. If you do not go there, he will come here, I daresay, and that would be a daunting experience for you. He is as high in the instep as it is possible for any aristocrat to be."

His grin, she realized when he flashed it again, did not denote amusement. He needed her. He desperately needed her.

"I will come," she said, "if Uncle Richard says I may."

"He has already said it," he told her, "and Bridget has agreed to accompany us-but only if you agree of your own will. I can do this alone if I must, Rachel. Of course I can. But I would rather do it with you."

He raised one of their clasped hands to his lips, and she smiled at him.

"One thing you ought to know," he said, "is that I am not married, Rachel. There is no wife, and there are no children. There is no betrothed, no romantic attachment at all."

Her gaze slipped from his, and for the first time a painful hope was born in her. Why had he come back? Why was it so important to him that she accompany him to Lindsey Hall? Was it just because she had saved his life?

"I want to hear about everything you have done during the last five days," he said. "Is it possible that it has been only five days? It seems like an eternity. And I want to tell you everything I have remembered in that time. I want to tell you who I am. Will you walk with me?"

She nodded and took the arm he offered and wondered if the sun had somehow affected her mind. Could this possibly be happening? But his arm was solid beneath her hand and she could feel his body heat all down one side. If she chose, she could close her eyes and rest her cheek against his shoulder.

He was real, and he was here. And he was not married.

They did not take any conscious direction. They went around the house and strolled along the back lawn, which had been cut since that first morning when she had ridden across it with him, though daisies and buttercups and clover bloomed gaily again.

She told him about the journey home and about the past few days because he seemed genuinely interested. He looked down into her face as she talked, and laughed when she told him about riding alone and taking the boat out.

"I hope," he said, "you are as proud of yourself as I am of you, Rache. You have turned yourself into an intrepid country lady."

She was rather proud of her accomplishments.

"But I have still not perfected the art of standing on a horse's back on one foot twirling hoops," she said.

"It has to be a galloping horse," he told her, and they both laughed.

But he did most of the talking, because there was so much she wanted to know, and so much he was eager to tell her.

The Duke of Bewcastle was a powerful man, aristocratic hauteur bred into his very bones. He ruled his world like a despot, and yet he never had to raise anything more violent than his eyebrows and his quizzing glass in order to enforce his will. His name was Wulfric. The second brother was Aidan, a former cavalry colonel who had married last year and settled on the land with his wife and their two foster children. Then there was Rannulf, usually called Ralf, who looked like a Viking warrior and was married to a gorgeous redhead-Alleyne's own words. Freyja-the name he had overheard in Bath-was his elder sister, a formidable spitfire married to the Marquess of Hallmere, who somehow seemed able to handle her without having to throttle her every day of their lives. Then there was Morgan, the youngest of them all, only eighteen years old.

"She is the lady who was waiting for me at the Namur Gates," he explained. "The lady of my recurring dream. Her chaperon had not taken her away from Brussels when the battle loomed, and they had allowed her out to tend the wounded on the day Waterloo was fought. I had promised Bewcastle to keep an eye on her even though she had not gone to Brussels under my care. I was desperate to get back to her."

"What was your regiment?" Rachel asked.

"Ah," he said, "I ought to have started with that. I am not a military man. I was going to be a diplomat. I was attached to the embassy at the Hague, under Sir Charles Stuart. I was sent to the front with a letter for the Duke of Wellington and was carrying a reply back with me-the infamous letter of my dreams. I have changed so much, Rachel. I could not go back to that life now even if I were to be offered the whole embassy."

It had taken him five days to remember, and even now there were gaps and blanks in his memory that puzzled him and kept him struggling for total recall.

"But what I am missing the most," he told her, "is feelings, if that is the right word. I know all these things about myself and my family and my life dispassionately, rather as if they are things I have learned about someone else. I have a feeling of disconnection, as if I do not quite belong to it all. I feel almost embarrassed about going back, as if I will need to apologize for not having died after all."

He took her hand from his arm and clasped it instead, lacing their fingers as he did so.

"And look," he said, "we have walked all the way out to the trees and I have hardly allowed you to squeeze a word in. What sort of gentleman am I not to observe the niceties of polite conversation?"

"This is not a polite conversation," she said. "I am your friend, Alleyne. I care about you."

"Do you?" He smiled at her. "Do you really, Rache? I have been pretty self-centered lately, though, haven't I?"

"With good reason," she said. "But it only seems that way to you because you have been alone with your own thoughts and returning memories for five days. Before that you concentrated upon helping me even if we did go about it in a thoroughly misguided way. And then you were my champion when we found Nigel Crawley. I sometimes think I should be ashamed to feel a thrill at the memory of you knocking him down and drawing blood from his nose, but I am not."

"Shall we walk through to the cascades?" he suggested.

It was very warm among the trees. But the sun was in such a position that the rock on which they had sat before was in shade. They sat on it again, Alleyne lounging on his side, Rachel with her knees drawn up and her arms clasped about them.

"I was born to wealth and power, you know," he said. "It is not necessarily a good thing, though I suppose it is infinitely preferable to being born to debilitating poverty. I am independently wealthy even now. I would not have to do a hard day's work in my life if I chose not to. I was a restless, aimless, careless, cynical man with no deep feelings for anyone or anything. I do remember that about myself. And yet I knew there was an emptiness in my life. I thought of going into politics but went into the diplomatic service instead. I suppose it seemed more adventurous."

"But you will not go back," she said.

"No." He shook his head. "I belong on the land. I know that now. Strange-I can remember now that Ralf discovered that too last year when he went to stay and then to live at our grandmother's. Good Lord, I have just remembered her-my mother's mother. She lives in Leicestershire-a little bird of a woman. And Aidan discovered it too when he decided to retire from the cavalry and live with Eve in the country. Maybe once we learn to strip away the trappings of wealth and power, that is what we Bedwyns are at heart-a family devoted to the land, to the basics of life and contentment. And love."

He was staring into the water, Rachel could see, his eyes half closed. She wondered if the time would come when she would be alone again and would sit here remembering today. Or if . . .

His eyes were on her.

"That is it, of course," he said, but he did not say it as if he had just made the discovery. He spoke as if he had thought this through before but had only now worked it into his full understanding of himself. "It is love that makes all the difference. One might say that losing my memory was the best thing that ever happened to me, since it totally disconnected me from my past and gave me the chance to start again, to make the same sort of mistakes again, and to learn the proper lessons from them this time. But they are lessons I have been able to learn because there has been a new dimension to this new life of mine, one I have never experienced before, and one that has made all the difference to me."

Rachel rested her cheek on her knees and kept her eyes on him.

"It has always been a tradition with our family," he said, "that we tend to marry late but that when we do so we marry for keeps and for love. Fidelity within marriage is expected of even the most rakish of us. I watched it happen last year to Aidan and Ralf and Freyja, and I was somewhat incredulous and somewhat skeptical. I really did not understand. Now I do."

Rachel hugged her legs a little more tightly while he smiled directly into her eyes.

"I know you are enjoying the first real freedom of your life, Rachel," he said. "And for the first time you are in the milieu that is yours by right of birth. You owe me nothing-quite the contrary. And though love centers upon one person when it also qualifies as being in love, it is not a possessive or a dependent thing. I do not want you to feel trapped or pity-bound. If I must live without you, I will. Even if I must go to Lindsey Hall alone I will. Ah, there is that dimple again. Have I said something funny?"

"No," she said, "but you really do talk too much, Alleyne. You must have caught it from Sergeant Strickland."

He laughed and she gazed at him, amazed that a man who was so very handsome and charming, who had lived a life of privilege and power, his every whim catered to, women doubtless falling all over their feet for one of his smiles-it amazed her that such a man could be so unsure of himself with her that he was babbling.

"Yes," she said.

"Yes?" He raised his eyebrows and immediately looked arrogant.

"Yes, I will marry you," she said. "And if you now tell me that that was not what you were leading up to at all, then I will jump in the river and allow it to carry me out into the lake and oblivion. Was it what you were about to say?"