The Black Sheep's Return (10 page)

‘Hold on, lover, and trust me,’ he managed to grate before he seized her striving face with cupped hands, even as his body drove even more frantically into hers, and their eyes met and meshed as he plunged into her as if his very survival depended on it and suddenly they had both got there at once. Together; blissfully, infinitely together.

Wild convulsions of the most unimaginable pleasure rocked through her as his body convulsed and raced into hers and took her with him into an uncharted glory. She heard herself gasp a triumphant moan that went on and on as joy surged through her in long waves of unimaginable delight. He ended his own long groan of satisfaction on a husky chuckle at the sound of it, then he kissed her what felt like endlessly as they swam together through an endless drift of passion and absolute pleasure locked into each other’s rapture.

Her body still soaring with ecstasy, she felt as if she was being deluged with sensual satisfaction, truly joined with her lover in a private
paradise where nobody else could ever reach or touch them again. She held his gaze as his kiss went on and on and hung on to his striving shoulders when the rigid, pleasured joy finally went out of them and he collapsed for a long lovely moment on top of her. Revelling in the ultimate luxury of her spent lover’s body resting on and in hers, she let her senses satiate themselves in him before he had his way and separated from her before rolling over on to his back with her sprawled like the wanton she felt now at his side and loving every inch of bare skin on bared skin.

‘Was that enough?’ he asked at last and she adored the husky timbre of his voice as he seemed as lost in the moment as she was.

‘Enough of what?’ she managed and heard the same hoarseness in her own softer voice and wondered if this was the true intimacy of lovers, this mutual and joyous experience of each other that made them somehow bonded for ever, however far apart they might be fated to become if he had his way.

‘Everything,’ he pointed out helpfully.

‘It will do for now,’ she told him with a secretive smile he chose to trace with a calloused finger as moonlight drifted over their skin. His touch made her shiver with heat she
had thought faded, until next time he wanted an amateur houri like her in his bed.

The thought this might be the only night they would ever have to lie satiated and content in each other’s arms occurred to her, but she thrust it aside and refused to dwell on the lonely future when she was royally satisfied in the powerful arms of her lover.

‘It will have to, for you will be sore,’ he told her gently, as if he now knew her body better than she did. She flexed her newly discovered internal muscles and considered whether he might be right and whether she cared even if he was.

‘Will there be another time?’ she let herself ask and there seemed no point pretending she didn’t want it when he had every reason to know it would be untrue. Her enthusiasm for him
and
his lithe and sleekly muscled body and magnificently rampant manhood was so obvious there seemed no point trying to pretend otherwise when their time together would be so short.

‘Aye,’ he breathed on a long sigh, as if he had almost hoped this conflagration of the senses would cure him of her, but the cure had turned into a new and virulent disease.

Wishing it could be different between them,
she muffled her own sigh and nestled her face into his still-fast-breathing chest to nuzzle the fire and gold curls that she knew shadowed a fine haze over the mightiest muscles of his powerful torso by daylight. She breathed in sweat and salt and arousal with that edge of mossy wood-smoke she now associated with him and would for ever have to avoid if she wasn’t going to turn into a watering pot every time she smelt it in future and he was nowhere near. Shifting restlessly at the very thought of the parting to come, she felt an unexpected ruck of scar tissue under her sensitive cheek and raised her head to peer up at him with a question in her wide eyes that he seemed tempted to ignore for a moment, before he grimaced and decided to let her in that far.

‘I was stabbed one night many years ago, when I wasn’t quite as wary of stealthy villains and dark corners as I am now,’ he told her.

‘Because?’ she insisted, despite the attempt he was making to shut down the intimacy of his glittering eyes holding hers in the silvery moonlight. Now their heat was fading, he seemed to be already locking his essential self away from her again.

‘Because I was a fool and let an enemy creep up on us.’

‘Us?’

‘I was with my wife at the time,’ he said tersely and turned his head aside as if he couldn’t talk about his lost love without cutting himself off from the woman he’d carelessly taken to his bed in her absence.

‘She must have been terrified,’ she made herself say, as if they were talking of strangers, not a man who wouldn’t be here to take her to ecstasy if his enemy had had his way back then.

‘Not she—my Anna laid about the rogue with her parasol and made such a commotion it shamed the fashionable throng who would have passed by into coming to our rescue. She saved my life and I fell completely in love with her, as she always swore she did with me.’

‘How romantic for you both,’ she said as generously as she could and was suddenly glad he’d turned away.

If not, he might see the death of the unlikely hopes and dreams she’d clung to, despite the voice of common sense telling her he only wanted her and didn’t intend to love anyone but his lost wife. Now they shattered like ice on a winter puddle under a child’s gleeful heel. He sighed as if it was agony to love so deeply, then lose his Anna, and Freya wondered how
a mistress should behave when she became an embarrassment in her lover’s bed.

‘I can’t be the man I was when I met my wife for you, Perdita, any more than you can ever be a virgin again.’

‘Do you regret I am not, Orlando?’ she asked coolly, considering the desolation that urged her to run outside and rage uselessly at the moon.

‘Do you?’

She pretended to think about his question when the negative sprang straight into her head and whispered
liar
.

‘No,’ she admitted at last.

‘Then neither do I,’ he told her, eyes full on her again and as honest as he could make them. He levered himself upright and draped a shawl Keziah had lent her about his waist to try to protect her from what she now knew so intimately about him.

‘Clearly not,’ she said, refusing to let the fact he wanted her again pass politely by.

‘Be wary of me, Perdita,’ he warned halfseriously. ‘I’m a wolf in wolves’ clothing, so don’t mistake me for an honourable gentleman. We only have a brief spell out of our lives to give each other before we part.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’

‘I think all women hope for more from their lover than I can offer you.’

‘You’re unwilling to take more than that brief spell of you and me. I accepted that you don’t have enough for me as well as your family when I took you as my lover, Mr Craven. Don’t paint me other than as I am to make yourself feel better.’

‘My children must always come first for me, Miss Rowan: before my selfish wants and needs, even before you.’

‘I envy them that love, Orlando,’ she said truthfully, for her own father had never felt even an iota of that emotion for his unworthy daughter. ‘I’m sure you love them enough to do whatever is needed to keep them safe and help them grow up strong and true,’ she said as sincerely as she could. How deeply she wanted to love his tempestuous little girl and endearingly manly little boy for the rest of her life would have to remain her secret.

They had accepted her so matter of factly that it tugged at her heart strings for the lack of a mother in their lives. She recalled her own mother’s love for her as a spoilt yet uncertain little girl and hoped Orlando wouldn’t make the mistake of putting his own hopes and dreams on to his children like that.

He didn’t seem likely to, but something held him back from fulfilling his true role as piratical protector of anyone who needed him. Love was the only thing she could imagine stopping him seizing the day and everything that went with it and, if only he loved her, she would have eagerly joined his bargain with fate and joyously forgotten Lady Freya Buckle in Mrs Perdita Craven, but Perdita didn’t really exist and now she never would.

‘I do—I have to,’ he said softly in reply to her implication he always had to think very hard about what his children needed most and it wasn’t her.

She finally shook off the ghost of the cherished lover she might have been and believed him. ‘Then we’ll seize the day and please each other for a time, Orlando. You can’t love me and I refuse to love a man who won’t love me back,’ she lied without a blush, ‘so we can enjoy each other and part friends.’

‘I might get you with child,’ he warned and, given the driven passion they roused in each other, he could be right.

‘That will be my problem and not yours.’

‘I won’t have any babe of mine put out for the wolves to bring up,’ he made a half-hearted
try at joking, although she could see he found it as poor an attempt as she did.

‘Neither will I,’ she said quietly and he nodded as if acknowledging that with her as a mother, a child would never need a fiercer protector.

‘I will endeavour to control myself,’ he promised shortly and she knew he was embarrassed by the fact he had wanted her so badly he hadn’t done so this time.

‘And I shall make sure you don’t,’ she vowed and meant it, for she longed for that child more fiercely than she could have believed possible, considering it would come into the world a nameless bastard in the eyes of the world, if it came at all.

D
espite the unspoken competition between them to exert control on one side and overbear it with headlong passion on the other, as Orlando and Perdita they managed to fit a lot of loving into the bare week they agreed to take from real life for wanting, and having, each other. Freya discovered the heady power of a touch or a look to tease her lover into such a stew of frustrated need that, by the end of a long day’s work, he was incoherent with passion for her by the time the children were safely abed and asleep.

She learnt how it felt to be so urgently wanted there was no question of refined couplings in the chastely curtained box-bed when he dragged her outside into his workshop, after
a long and particularly fretful evening, to be hastily kissed and urgently taken on the workbench he padded with his discarded jacket with only slightly muffled enjoyment out here for the sake of not waking his children. Even that had hardly taken the edge off his appetite for her, she decided with the assurance of satisfaction to come when he tugged her back inside and met her eyes with a heavy-lidded gaze that promised her there was no need to look outside for the moon and stars tonight.

‘Trust me?’ he whispered when she had already done so with everything she was and had and might be.

Nodding her head silently and wondering what was to come, she would have gasped her astonishment all the same when he deftly gagged her with his clean neckerchief and lured her back to the bed. He confounded her by lying full length on it and beckoning her to do as she pleased with his prone body, so she did, with sensuous thoroughness and rode them both to a climax that would have made her one long scream of satisfaction, if she had been able to utter more than a muffled moan to tell him what she’d learnt about loving that night to add to the precious others they’d enjoyed to the hilt.

‘This is our last night, isn’t it?’ she said as soon as she had breath enough to spare and could keep the sadness out of her whisper when he removed that now-mangled binding.

‘Aye, it has to be,’ he told her with plenty of it in his own voice and knowing he would miss her warmed the ache of letting go inside her a little as she knelt over him, still braced across his narrow hips and naked in the faint light of the dying fire.

Impossible not to feel bitter and forsaken at such a moment, she decided, and set out to make him pay dear for his rejection of all Perdita Rowan could be to him in her own special way. Let him forget her when she was gone after this, she raged to herself as she found undreamt-of depths of sensual witchery in her until-now untapped imagination. Using his kerchief to draw him along with her, she led him to the fire and stoked it, despite the June heat, so they could love naked by the golden light of it. If he could let the image of her bathed in firelight and staring open eyed with every inch of her aware of every inch of him, inside her, around her and for ever in her head as she bucked and bowed on the rug beneath him slip out of his head when she was
gone, he was beyond cold and well on the way to heartless.

She might not have his love, but she had his passion and it stirred for her again and again as they wore out the night with each other, driven by the ever-present goad that this was all they would ever have of each other, the only pleasure she would ever have with a man because there couldn’t be another after him. He had the experience of a loving marriage behind him and, she suspected, a good few years of untrammelled bachelor freedom before that. He would find another woman to slake his passions on and maybe that woman would take her pleasure of such a mighty and driven lover then move on as easily as he could.

Astonished by her own lack of inhibition as he had shown her ways of coupling she would never have dreamt there even were, as if he was trying to pack a lifetime of loving into one night as well, she greeted the dawn with dread and revulsion that it was becoming ever harder to conceal.

‘Keziah will be here soon and I must light the copper ready,’ he told her at last, his eyes as weary and flat as hers felt at the idea of what was to come, as well as the sudden fatigue
their lack of even a moment’s sleep made out of their last night together.

‘Why?’

‘So you can have a bath. It’s high time you had that wild and witchy hair tamed and dressed as befits a lady again,’ he informed her, as if she had been slacking from the high standards of a fine lady for the last few days out of sheer laziness and needed goading to reclaim even some of her former perfection.

‘Considering my gown is in shreds and my cloak not a lot better, I don’t quite know how I’m to pretend I walked out of the forest as fresh as if I was dressed out of a bandbox,’ she said grumpily.

‘You underestimate us,’ he told her with a tolerant smile for her bad temper that made her want to hit him.

‘Do I?’ she said disagreeably.

She saw him flinch at her implied criticism of a lover so determined not to give his heart to a woman twice in his life. Good, he was making her leave him in the face of every desire she had to stay with the man who had stolen her heart and taken her love as if it was a candy twist, to be consumed for its sweetness, then forgotten when the next treat presented itself to him to be enjoyed. She might
go, because Perdita had her own pride and it wouldn’t let her stay unless he needed her as unendingly as she did him, but she wouldn’t let him dismiss her as if she was a pretty little nothing.

‘Keziah, then,’ he qualified shortly and went to do as he had promised the older woman he would and get the makings of a bath ready while Freya sat on the stool by the now-cold fireside to comb out her tousled locks with the wide-toothed wooden comb he’d made for her so she could tease the tangles from it more easily.

It had been too easy to part with Perdita and yet so hard he wondered his teeth weren’t ground to a powder he’d had to clench them so many times in order to beg her not to go, Rich decided, as he drove the hired horse and cart back to Reuben Summer’s taciturn friend and walked off in the opposite direction to the one he needed to take for home. Far too easy to leave her at the nearest inn where the accommodation coaches halted and far too hard to force himself to drive away and not go back before she was gone for good.

Keziah would care for the children while he made his long and aimless wandering way
through country lanes and heathland tracks before finally turning for home, so nobody could follow him back. Not even Reuben’s people would take time or trouble to stay on the trail of a person who seemed without wealth or purpose. Just as well, considering his head was far too full of stubborn, gallant Perdita Rowan and the tearing fear possessing him that he’d let half his life drive away on the swaying accommodation coach and would never be whole again without her.

Not inclined to allow her to be so important, he tried to fill his thoughts with Annabelle and their children instead. love for his vital and courageous wife hadn’t fallen away, but the awful suspicion a man might love deeply and abidingly twice in one lifetime was beginning to creep up and make him feel an abject fool. Not a fool to perhaps find love again, but one to let all the hope and glory of it go without the trace of a fight.

Too late
, echoed about his head like the knell of doom as he let himself realise what he’d known in his heart every step of their wretched journey this morning. Once Perdita got into that coach and he watched it move off from his hiding place nearby, she had vanished out of his life as if he’d imagined her. How he
could imagine such a wondrous conundrum as his lost princess he had no idea, but Miss Rowan was no more real than Mr Orlando Craven and it would be hell’s own job to track her down under her real identity.

Impossible to trace a shadow and how many brown-eyed, brown-haired ladies of quality were there on this racing island of theirs? Far too many to track this special one, even if he dared, he told himself as he halted his march to nowhere in particular and almost turned back. A fast horse might catch up with the ponderous stage even now, but what would he say to her once he’d attracted more attention than Rich Seaborne had dared draw to himself in six long years of hiding in Longborough Forest?

Come live with me and be my love and slave in the forest with me, isolated from your kind and limited to the narrow little life that is all I can offer you?
He forced himself onwards with the harsh thought his lost lady was better off without him echoing round his head like knife blades clanking in the wind. The sneaky suspicion he must change to deserve her still ate away at his certainty he was doing the right thing, but a cowardly impulse to ignore it made him walk on. Hal was the rightful
heir to a grand title—no, he was the rightful Marquis of Lundy right now and had been ever since he was born. How could Rich bring up a Marquis to care for his lands and people as he should while Annabelle’s son continued to run wild about Longborough Forest like a wild cottager’s boy, with no more to take on one day than a narrow patch of land and his father’s trade to live by?

Then there was his mischievous little daughter, uniquely herself from the instant she was placed in his arms when she was born. Even though her coming took Annabelle from him, he could never have resented their perfect little daughter or wished her dead instead. Sally bore the stamp of the Seabornes on every feature and had fire and determination running through her from both sides of the family. Rich wondered if he was selfish to hide his children from the world, then remembered what the so-called Marquis of Lundy had to lose by Hal’s very existence and knew he’d been right to conceal the true Martagon heir for so long. Small and vulnerable to a corrupt nurse or a physician paid to treat the boy so direly he would no longer be an obstacle in Francis Martagon’s path, Hal had been too easy a mark when he was a baby and then a toddler.

Now his son was five years old and the first to declare himself independent, Rich was beginning to realise his days as an isolated forest dweller could be almost over. Or they definitely would be if he managed to expose Hal’s venal cousin as the murderous rogue he was. Then Richard Seaborne could openly search for his amber-eyed lady with her nut-brown hair and wood-nymph’s body and offer her all he was too much of a coward to risk laying before her today. Yet after he let her leave without confessing he’d miss her for ever and a day, he’d made it all too unlikely Perdita would accept him if he grovelled for her hand in marriage on bended knee for a month.

Damnation take it, but he was the biggest fool this side of poor mad King George, who at least had bouts of painfully aware sanity among his humiliating interludes of lunacy. Rich slashed moodily at a clump of nettles with the stout stick he carried. It would be a risk the most protective side of him would fight furiously, but somehow he must move against the usurper of the Lundy marquisate and secure his son and daughter’s future, then hope it wasn’t too late to find one of his own with his lady of the woods.

Rich frowned fiercely as he strode heedlessly
on his way and brooded about the dangers ahead. He wasn’t the boy’s real father; he couldn’t claim guardianship of Annabelle’s son unless he managed to prove Francis Martagon the villain Rich knew him to be. To take the risk of establishing Hal’s identity in front of the law and his peers, Rich would have to be sure there was no chance he would ever leave his precious son vulnerable to the very cousin who wanted him dead.

Revulsion at the idea almost made him change his mind and revert to his intention of hiding away until Hal was of age. By then his Sally should be plenty old enough to make her come out in polite society, if she hadn’t already run off with one of Reuben Summer’s handsome cousins, or decided to launch herself on an unsuspecting world in a wild Seaborne fashion it made him shudder to even contemplate. Both his children needed family and feminine influence and they would need civilising if they were to shoulder the responsibilities of their true place in the world one day and not make the same sort of mistakes both Hal’s fathers made in their wild youth.

So, if he could hunt Francis Martagon down and neutralise the threat to Hal’s very existence, if he could render himself a gentleman
once more and a suitable mate for a proud and finicky lady, then he might somehow find Perdita and convince her he wanted to marry her. So many ifs and not a guarantee among them he could find her again and beg her to accept him in every way a woman could accept a man this time around when he’d made it insultingly clear to her up to now that there could be no future for them, no second marriage for Orlando Craven.

Yet what a life it would be if only he could persuade her to forgive him. She would make him a queenly yet hospitable lady and who better to grace the lovely home his parents had made of Seaborne House and the position of Lady of the Manor Perdita could have been born for? If she would take a man with wide business interests and a very adventurous past, he knew she was equal to anything his past and present lives would throw up. The courage and truth of her reflected exact opposite qualities in him, but Rich longed for a chance to prove worthy of a good woman’s love for the second time in his life now he’d finally let himself see past that ridiculous promise he’d made Anna that he would never love or wed another woman.

Miss Carolina Bradstock tapped a thoughtful finger on the breakfast table and stared at her guest of six weeks with a directness her family had always found disconcerting. So much about the girl across the table was still a mystery, but she was now certain that Lady Freya Buckle was in even more trouble than she had admitted to her great-aunt when she turned up at her quiet house in the country with only the clothes she stood up in and a battered purse with a few pennies left in it.

If the girl hadn’t borne the stamp of her parentage as clearly as if the Earl and his Countess had branded her, Miss Bradstock might have doubted this pale, quiet and perfectly polite girl was the notoriously proud Lady Freya Buckle of legend. From the letters and rumours that reached her from old friends and one or two acquaintances who couldn’t resist gloating at how her niece had made herself a laughing stock by regarding the Duke of Dettingham as her personal property, this Freya was very different from the one her fellow aristocrats now regarded as something of a joke. Apparently the girl had carelessly lost her Duke to a lame spinster, but apparently it was rumoured she was such a cold piece
no red-blooded male wanted to marry her for anything but her grandfather’s plump fortune.