The Bargain (30 page)

For a moment he stood like the personification of vengeful justice. Duty was making its undeniable demands on him, Ariel thought, recognizing the expression and the stance. His fists clenched at his sides, he looked wild and dangerous, driven and inexorable. Duty would draw him away from her again, Ariel thought.

Then he said, “Devil take it,” and made a gesture as if throwing something away. He knelt on the stone floor, reaching for her bonds. His breath rasped as if he had run a long way. It was loud in the small space. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“When I heard they had attacked you, I wanted to kill with my bare hands,” he said.

Even his voice sounded different, Ariel thought. It vibrated with emotion.

“I was ready to tear the place apart bit by bit to find you,” he said.

His knuckles were white, she noticed. The muscles in his neck were rigid.

“I would have done anything—anything.”

He gazed at her. His eyes still burned, Ariel saw, but with something other than rage. He finished untying the ropes that bound her. They fell from her arms. “They didn't hurt you?” he asked again, touching her wrists and shoulders as if afraid.

She stretched her aching muscles. “Not really.”

“Damn them to hell,” he said.

She gazed at him. Alan's eyes were full of tears. She couldn't quite believe it, but then one spilled over and fell onto the lapel of his coat. She was afraid to speak.

He bent to tear the ropes from her ankles, throwing them aside so hard that they thumped against the wall in the corner.

Sitting up stiffly, Ariel put her hands on his broad shoulders.

Alan pulled her close, lifting her from the floor and then rising with her in his arms, carrying her out of the tiny chamber where she had been imprisoned and into the cellars. He was silent as he walked across the stone floor. There were sounds in the house about them, as if it were being cleared. Ariel heard a thump and a distant flurry of voices.

She stole another glance at Alan's face. It was hard and impassive as stone. But that one tear had been followed by another. They made two astonishing trails over his cheekbones and into the hollows under them.

Upstairs, they passed a few people in the corridors, but Alan paid no attention to any of them. He carried her to the bedchamber where they had spent the previous night—so long ago it seemed now, Ariel thought—and placed her on the small sofa in the corner, falling to his knees beside her. “Are you sure you're all right?” he said then.

She nodded.

He gazed at her, his burning blue eyes seeming to devour her face. “Is this love?” he said in a choked voice. “This chaos, this terror?”

Ariel blinked.

“This is what they meant?” he went on. “All those friends I thought were idiots. This… dependence? When I thought I might have lost you, I didn't see how I could…”

Ariel saw his muscles tighten to an almost unbearable pitch. Then he bent and put his head in her lap.

She stroked his russet hair. “Love?” she whispered, hardly daring to believe he had used the word.

After another moment, he straightened and looked at her again. His handsome face was taut and strained. “Poets are fools,” he said gratingly. “Flowers, vows—none of them write of feeling as if your heart were being torn out of you.”

Ariel was not going to argue with him about literature.

“You said you loved me,” he added. It was almost an accusation. “This is what you feel?”

She swallowed, remembering certain moments when she thought her heart was breaking. “I've felt it,” she acknowledged.

He looked wild.

“But that's not all of it. Not even the main part.”

“What is the main part?” he demanded.

Ariel let out her breath. He was asking the impossible. How could he expect her to define love? Did he think she could list its properties, categorize and analyze, and then understand? “The… the joys of being together,” she tried. “The knowledge that someone cares for you.”

His gaze was steady. He looked far from satisfied.

Ariel grimaced. “Love is wild and safe and frightening and comforting and… rapturous.”

She glanced toward the bed opposite them, and he followed her gaze. When he looked back at her, there was a bit less confusion in his expression. “It seems very disorganized,” he complained.

“Yes. Irrational, too,” she couldn't resist adding.

He gave her a look. “I'm not used to this kind of”—he made a gesture—“turmoil.”

He really meant it, Ariel saw. As she had hoped and dreamed, she had broken through to the passionate, unfettered man at the core of this man of science. “I know,” she replied. She felt a tremulous smile spreading over her face.

“Do you get used to it?”

“Not exactly.”

He gave her a pained look.

“If you got used to it, it would be… habit, routine—even boring. That is one of the best things about love; it makes life thrilling.”

“Thrilling,” he repeated, as if he had an idea of what she meant but wasn't sure he approved of it. “You have never bored me,” he allowed.

A tremor went through Ariel. Partly, she wanted to laugh; partly, she was touched by the admission, an immense compliment, from him.

“This is all very… unsettling.” His breathing had returned to normal, but his expression hadn't. “It ought to be studied, systematized. There ought to be some warning.”

“That would be like trying to put light in a box to dissect it,” Ariel responded.

He stared.

“Love is not an exact science,” she said, slipping her arms around his neck.

“Obviously!”

“It is always surprising.”

“I have never cared particularly for surprises,” he protested, but his arms had encircled her waist.

“Perhaps you could learn,” Ariel murmured and kissed him softly.

His arms closed hard and demanding around her. “I have always had a passion for learning,” he acknowledged and took her lips for his own.

“You did not rescue me,” said Flora Jennings in a tone that suggested she was repeating herself.

“I deuced well did,” responded Lord Robert's equally determined voice. “Why you cannot simply admit that—”

“I had nearly gotten free of the ropes,” she interrupted.

“Nearly? Only if you were counting on having a month or so to work on them.”

“They were distinctly looser.”

“You could scarcely wiggle a finger,” Robert uncharitably pointed out. “What is the matter with you?”

There was a brief silence.

“Is it so intolerable to think that I might have done you a service?” he added in quite a different tone.

The silence was longer this time, and Flora's reply did not carry through the tall boxwood hedge that concealed Ariel from her houseguests.

That was just as well, Ariel thought as she moved away along the garden path. She hadn't meant to eavesdrop. She hadn't even known that Robert and Flora had come outdoors until she stopped to look at a rosebush and their conversation had come floating over the hedge.

What would become of that unconventional couple? she wondered. Were they even a couple at all? It hardly seemed so. And yet when she had asked Flora to come and stay in Oxford for a few days, Robert had immediately invited himself along. Perhaps he had no one to quarrel with in London, she thought with a smile. He seemed to have developed quite a taste for it.

Ariel stopped before a bed of tulips and daffodils, blossomless now in late summer and looking rather bedraggled. She wondered whether to have them cut down. The old gardener who had more or less come with their house here in Oxford would tell her. Indeed, he would be delighted to tell her; he had made it his special task to educate her about all things horticultural.

Ariel took a deep breath and let her eyes wander from the flowerbed to the high redbrick garden wall to the mellow Georgian facade of the house that was now hers. Really hers. It had been quite empty when they took possession, and she had been slowly making it her own, room by room. It was such a pleasure. She had never had a place that was completely her own. Just as she had never had any family but her mother, and now she had a father and a whole network of kin by marriage.

“Ariel?” called a deep voice from the small terrace that lay between the house and the garden.

And a husband, Ariel added to her list. Most important of all, a husband. “Yes?” she answered, moving along the gravel path toward him.

“Ah. There you are.”

Alan stood on the flagstones, his auburn hair gleaming in the morning sun, his tall figure very handsome in a blue coat and riding breeches. He held out a hand and Ariel took it, feeling a familiar tremor of love and amazement.

“I am going to the laboratory,” he said. “But I'll be back early.”

She nodded. “Nathaniel is bringing Violet to dinner,” she reminded him, just in case he had forgotten.

“Dinner? All the way from London?”

“They're going to stay the night.” Ariel refrained from adding that she had told him this twice already. There were certain things that men simply could not keep in their brains, she had found. They might be awesomely intelligent and conduct brilliant experiments on the nature of light, but they were utterly incapable of remembering where they had put their keys or the name of the new housemaid. It was rather endearing.

“Are they?” Alan's smile was slightly rueful. “I wonder what's come over Sebastian, then? I'm surprised he's missing such an occasion.”

“He's on duty tonight,” answered Ariel absently. Was that shouting from the back of the garden? she wondered. Lately, Robert and Flora had begun to rouse each other to shouting.

“Ah. And I suppose my mother has some social engagement that prevents her from attending.”

“She's coming in October with Lord Randolph.”

“Of course. Another brother.”

“I'm looking forward to meeting him,” she said. Flora and Robert
were
shouting, she decided. They would have to settle it between them, whatever it was.

“Perhaps I'd better write a letter of warning,” replied Alan dryly.

Ariel looked up at him, her guests forgotten. “What?”

“Let him know what he's in for. Do you have someone in mind?”

“Someone?”

“For Randolph. There's our neighbor across the way, though she's a bit mature.”

“Sixty at least,” acknowledged Ariel.

“True. What about Wrenshaw's daughter? She seems a nice enough chit.”

“And barely fifteen,” answered Ariel, letting him enjoy his teasing.

“Really? That's rather young.”

“Isn't it?” She smiled at him. “I have no intention of looking for a wife for Lord Randolph.”

“No? I understand he wants one. Very isolated, that parish of his up north. What he needs is the daughter of a bishop or some such thing, to help him rise in the church.”

“I'm sure he will find a proper—”

“Ah, but will he know what's proper?” Alan shook his head, his blue eyes twinkling. “No, I'm sure you'll be able to set him right, just as you have the rest of us.”

“All I did was—”

“All you did was create a revolution. The Greshams will never be the same.”

“Nathaniel and Sebastian chose their own wives,” she protested. “And Robert…”

Alan raised one auburn brow.

Ariel spread her hands in helpless incomprehension.

“Robert, who never spent a single night in Oxford before you came. Sebastian, whose visits were even rarer. Nathaniel, who was always too busy to bother. Even my mother, who might have summoned me to London if Randolph was in town, but never would have brought him here. I haven't seen so much of my family since I was in short coats.”

Suddenly anxious, Ariel examined his face for clues to what he really felt. “Have I invited them too often? It is just that I never had any family, and it is so pleasant to be able to…”

Alan took a step forward and put his hands on her shoulders. “I'm not sure I ever had a family either,” he said, no longer teasing. “You showed me that.”

Ariel wasn't entirely convinced. “You know you have only to say if you don't want them to come.”

“Really?” His eyes glinted again. “You don't think Sebastian would ride up on his charger and storm the doors?”

“I mean it.”

“And Nathaniel would come the older brother and send me a stiff note,” he added as if the picture amused him. “Robert would—” He stopped suddenly, and his eyes lit with a positively unholy glee.

“What?” said Ariel.

“James,” he replied.

“James?”

“The last of my brothers. He commands a navy ship in the South Seas.”

“I remember who he is,” she answered. “But what has he to do with…?”

“We must get him home,” said Alan, his expression still full of mischief. “He would offer you a real challenge.” He grinned. “A wife for James—now there is a concept.”

“I really have no intention—”

“Did my mother tell you about the gift he sent her from the islands?”

Ariel shook her head.

“Ah.” He laughed. “You would have to see that first.”

“Alan!” She raised her hands to his chest as he looked down at her. “Be serious.”

One corner of his mouth curved upward. “I have spent most of my life being serious. I believe I'll give it up.”

“But your family…”

His arms slid down to encircle her waist, and the merriment faded from his eyes. “You've given me the gift of my family, and for that, as for so many other things, I am deeply grateful.”

Ariel held his gaze. She found she was holding her breath as well.

“A man never made a better bargain,” he added, pulling her closer.

Ariel relaxed in his embrace. “I got the best of it,” she replied.

“Do you think so?”

She nodded.

His smile broadened. “I intend to make sure you never change your mind about that,” he said and bent to kiss her.