The Black Sheep's Return (17 page)

‘I shall be two and twenty in a month, if you’re trying to discover my age.’

‘A mere babe, then,’ he joked and Freya felt her heart ice over at the thought of him discovering
her real one, rather than his unlucky figure of speech.

‘And how many years do you have in your dish, Mr Seaborne? A reputation like yours cannot have been earned in a day.’

‘Nine and twenty,’ he said as if they were wasting time he didn’t have to spare.

‘You were but three and twenty when you met Miss DeMorbaraye and married her?’

‘And despite my rakish reputation it took me a whole month to persuade her without her in my life I would be nothing. I wanted her to myself from the moment I set eyes on her, battling like a tigress to save herself and Hal from the devils Martagon sent to kill them. By the time I woke up from the fever she nursed me through after the wound I got helping her beat them off became infected, I was so deep in love with her I could never recover. I can’t lie to you and pretend I didn’t love Annabelle deeply, Lady Freya. I wouldn’t have missed her for the world, cherish her memory and dote on our children.’

‘I know,’ she said and turned away to resume her interrupted
toilette
. She carefully combed her hair into two halves, then threes and set her fingers the task of plaiting it that was now so close to second nature she didn’t
need to look in the mirror, which was as well considering the sadness she would see looking back at her if she did.

‘It took only moments after you’d gone to realise loving Annabelle only trained me better for loving you, Perdita. Fool that I am to let you leave in the first place,’ he said softly.

She couldn’t doubt his sincerity when she risked a glance at him and saw he meant it, for now. ‘Perdita is dead,’ she told him bleakly.

‘I hope she’s only asleep and dreaming of me.’

‘If she was, you killed her this afternoon.’

‘I don’t have words to say how sorry I am for what I said then, Freya,’ he said so seriously she fought the urge to childishly stick her fingers in her ears and pretend to be deaf.

‘No man could love a woman and call her the names you did me,’ she replied flatly.

‘This one can.’

‘Don’t,’ she demanded fiercely, ‘don’t dress up what you feel for me in pretty words. All you ever felt for me was lust and, strong and heady as that was at the time, that isn’t love. You feel you dishonoured a single lady and I understand you must propose marriage to Lady Freya Buckle, when Perdita only warranted your purse and a ride to the nearest
town. Save yourself the trouble, Mr Seaborne, because I won’t have you,’ she said regally, waving aside any argument about her summary of the differences between Perdita and the high-born lady she truly was. ‘I wanted what happened. I enjoyed our nights and days together immoderately and cannot regret them even now. I also watched your cousin woo his bride, so I will never be unguarded with a Seaborne so set on his quarry, whatever she might say to the contrary, as the Duchess was. You had your chance to wed me three months ago and didn’t take it.’

‘I was waiting for Fred Peters to find a way to free me from the forest when I got the news Cleo had kidnapped Sally and Hal. I brooded endlessly on the day I could do as most men can without thinking and find the woman I loved to beg her to marry me. Ask The children if you don’t believe me, because I was like a bear with a sore head after I let you leave. The reason Cleo was able to take them was because they spent so much time at Keziah’s to avoid me. Cleo was long gone by the time Keziah realised what the wretched female had done and came running to find me.’

‘Then why did you so instantly believe I
was in league with Cleo? How could you think such a thing of me?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted and shook his head at his own stupidity.

Freya kept her face coolly blank and let silence prod him into saying more.

‘I spent so many days futilely plotting and planning ways of finding you that I was half-mad even before the children were stolen away.’

‘I could never profit from the misery of two children I love.’

‘I know, but how can I explain what I said then when I don’t understand it myself?’ he asked with a defeated shrug and turned to go as he’d promised he would if he couldn’t convince her. ‘I’m sorry, Lady Freya.’

‘So am I, Richard Seaborne,’ she said sadly, desolation eating away at her certainty she must live without him, when the emptiness inside her warned that, despite their child and her aunt’s wonderfully irreverent company, she would miss him the rest of her life.

‘He and Orlando Craven adore every stubborn inch of you, Freya, especially the streak of wildness in you that made every day we spent together a mystery and a wondrous journey all rolled into one,’ he told her as he turned
back and watched her with all of it open in his deeply green eyes.

She remembered them full of shadows and mysteries as they loved—every move, every touch on sweat-slicked and fascinatingly other skin reflected in her lover’s eyes.

‘For three months I burned with the loss of you, tore myself to pieces for letting you go, then had to sit and wait on others until I could find you and beg you to let me love you again with everything I am and every breath I take.’

‘Yet you loved your wife the instant you met, did you not?’

‘All the more reason to resist loving you, Perdita. I knew the agony of loving so much, then having to exist without Anna as if I was only half-alive.’

‘I can see how her loss might make you wary, but you didn’t trust me, Richard. Once upon a time, I came to this house a proud and selfish lady with no thought in my head but marrying your cousin for his title. Even when I was that arrogant, vain and silly I would never have harmed a child or stolen one from a loving father.’

‘I didn’t know Jack had run his eyes over you while he was finding Jessica,’ he said with
a fiery possessiveness that almost warmed Freya’s icy heart.

‘I don’t think he did so very seriously, but I thought a fine marriage would make me count in my father’s eyes and, even when he died, I couldn’t let go of the idea I must make one to matter.’

‘He had a daughter any sane man would be proud of.’

‘I was born a girl,’ she said flatly, ‘a drawback he never forgave me.’

‘Can you imagine any Seaborne being considered lesser for that?’

Freya thought of Lady Henry’s lovely and lively daughters and the Duke and Duchess’s adored first child, Lady Nerissa Seaborne, and knew Sally would never feel a failure or a burden on her family because she was a mere female. ‘No,’ she agreed.

‘Then risk bearing me some leggy and precious girls in your own image, Freya? Give me a chance and I swear I’ll cherish our girls, along with any boys and the son and daughter we already have, for the rest of our days.’

‘My aunt claims Seabornes always breed true. That’s probably why she insisted we came here with the children, since she already suspected Sally was one. I can’t imagine
why I didn’t see it as soon as I laid eyes on her myself.’

‘Breed me some little Seabornes, then, and we’ll find out if Buckle blood is stronger after all, although I don’t think it can be, since Bowland has a Friday face and gooseberry eyes and very little resemblance to you.’

Torn between knowing she was already well embarked on that particular experiment and the temptation of succumbing to the heat and wanting in his eyes at the very idea of her carrying his child, she hesitated.

‘No, I can’t trust you,’ she said sadly and clenched her hands into fists at her sides as she fought the memories of how wondrous it felt to love and live with him, to lie in his arms and feel the world spin away as if nothing mattered but him and her and the children safe and asleep upstairs.

‘O
r is it yourself you don’t trust, my lady?’ Richard said huskily, as if he sensed defeat and the very idea of it was tearing his heart out and making him fight all the harder for what he wanted. ‘You think yourself unlovable and nothing could be further from the truth, Freya. You tell me you were once a selfish snob, hell-bent on making a marriage of convenience, yet I never meet a more open and democratic female in my life than the one you became in Longborough Forest before my very eyes. How could I
not
love you when every hour that passed seemed such a huge revelation to you? You paint yourself as charmless and self-absorbed, but even when you scold me it’s charming. You played and cooked and
mended and strove for my children, despite the fact another woman bore them and their father was your lover.’

‘That was then—now I know how you really see me, Mr Seaborne. I can’t live with you while that knowledge eats away at any trust we managed to build in each other, back when I thought you were Orlando and you thought me Perdita.’

‘Then come back there with me, if that’s the only way to get you to love me again. We’ll live that way and Hal and Sally will just have to learn to be lady and gentleman from observation and theory. Now and again we’ll have to come here and be Mr Seaborne and my lady, but I’d live for ever a woodsman and a carpenter if it would persuade you to marry me, Lady Freya.’

‘You would do that, for me?’ She tried to resist the picture of this man humbling himself to life such a life again, not because Hal would be in acute danger if he didn’t hide away in the forest now, but because it was the only way to win back her trust. Probably just as well if he didn’t know he already had her love and had almost from the beginning.

‘Anything rather than lose you,’ he promised so simply and fervently she felt a flutter of hope leap in her heart after all.

‘Such a little life for a great gentleman and landowner to live for the sake of my Lady Freya,’ she said, her voice a little wobbly at the thought of any man making such a huge sacrifice to prove how much he loved her, let alone this one.

‘For her every bit as much as for Perdita,’ he promised huskily. ‘Marry me,’ he begged her. ‘I’m proud and stubborn and wrong-headed as a mule when I’m in a temper. I say hasty things to those I love the most when life catches me on the raw and this won’t be the last time you have to forgive me for it, but I will always love you, even when I don’t tell you about it or rage at you as if I’ve a right to be right so you have to be wrong. I could promise to guard my wretched tongue and tame my temper for you, but I’d only make myself a liar next time you decide your way is better than mine and stick that proud chin in the air and defy me with every bone in your body. I can only say I’m sorry, Freya. I can’t unsay those terrible words I said in pique and temper and exhaustion when I saw you calmly standing there as if I’d been dashing about the country day and night for days for no reason at all. I can’t tell you how much I wish I could snap my fingers
and make it not so, but not even a Seaborne can do that.’

The realness of what he said and offered broke through her hurt as charm and magic and moonlight might not have done and made her hesitate. She had convinced herself she had to live without this man long before he said what he had today, but what if she’d been wrong?

Her hesitation went on long enough for him to sense she was weakening. Wolf as he was by nature and breeding, that was enough for him to seize the advantage and kiss her. At first his mouth moved on hers in a plea, then with increasing firmness and confidence as she held still and then responded. She couldn’t bring herself to flinch away and manufacture a ‘no’, when she had yearned for his kisses since the day they parted and now they were warm and real on her lips.

‘Neither of us can resist the other and I really do love you, Freya,’ he assured her very seriously indeed, once he’d managed to raise his mouth from hers long enough to say anything that made sense. ‘I never felt such pain in my life as I did while I railed and raged at you like the madman I felt when I saw you this afternoon.’

‘Really?’ she asked, the terrible loss of his
first wife in her mind even as she ordered herself not to make the comparison.

‘I raged at the devil the day Annabelle died, of course, but misjudging you made me totter on the edge of lunacy, love. I wanted to tear at myself and smash down the walls, then sit in the rubble and weep because I’d lost you through my own efforts. I’d held the hope of you in my heart all these weeks and months and as soon as I saw you again all I could do was shout at you for rescuing my children for me and being you.’

‘Hmm, it does sound as if you’ve suffered a little, Mr Seaborne,’ she mused, as if she could be cool and detached about him when she was warm in his arms as she hadn’t truly felt since the day she left him, feeling as if every step dragged with leaden reluctance.

‘A little? Can you really love me if you believe it was only a little when I thought I’d truly lost you this time, Perdita?’

‘I can, but will you love me once I tell you all my secrets, Orlando?’

‘Aye,’ he promised as if he’d opened himself to the essential rightness of them now, so all he could do was love her. She hoped he was right and made herself tell the biggest one of
all before he got any further with seducing her again and found out for himself.

‘I’m carrying your child, Richard Seaborne,’ she made herself say as she met his gaze while holding her breath against the anticipated storm.

‘Good God, are you?’ he asked and confounded her by chuckling, then grinning at her as if he was a tom cat with an awful lot of cream on his whiskers.

‘Stop pretending you’re solely responsible for my shameful state. It was very much a joint effort.’

‘I remember every single shot we made at the project in vivid detail,’ he said and leered another stray-cat grin. ‘Would you like a demonstration to remind you?’

‘I’m not sure—how much will it cost me?’

‘A wedding ring, lover,’ he said, the grin and rakish poise quite gone as his green eyes were suddenly completely sincere and very serious indeed.

‘And what will the children say?’ she asked the question she had dreaded facing if her wildest dreams ever came true, for it was one thing to be their friend, quite another to become their stepmama.

‘It’s about time, I should think, if they were
old enough to have a firm opinion on the subject when at the moment they only love you. So what’s your answer, Freya-Perdita?’

‘Yes, all right then,’ she breathed on a long and contented sigh.

‘Your aunt assures me a special licence could settle the whole business inside a week, if only I find a bishop ready to grant me a second chance at loving you abidingly, Lady Freya,’ he said, his eyes brilliant with triumph and joy, as if he was only holding in a wild whoop of joy because it was now very close to midnight.

‘Does she now? She is a very devious old lady and I shall tell her so in the morning.’

‘Since Bowland doesn’t deserve the honour of being asked for your hand in marriage, I thought I might as well request it from the only other member of your family who matters to either of us,’ he told her with a sly Seaborne smile she didn’t trust an inch.

‘Considering I came to bed convinced I would never marry anyone and least of all you, she’s obviously a very crafty aunt indeed, then.’

‘Don’t expect me to argue. I had to swear I loved you as passionately as Romeo ever loved his Juliet, or any of my assorted sisters, brother
or cousins love their chosen mates, before she agreed I might make you a tolerable husband, in spite of everything I’d done today and in the past to make myself the last man on earth you would ever agree to wed.’

‘And do you?’ she asked dreamily.

‘Do I what?’

‘Love me that much?’

‘If you doubt it, why not let me show you?’ he whispered and kissed her so deeply and passionately she forgot what the question was and launched herself into this familiar, but, oh, so deeply missed and mourned, loving without any edges to it.

So this was real love, she decided hazily as she felt his questing mouth and wicked fingers undoing her in so many more ways than one. Until now, she hadn’t let herself dream it would ever come back at her even more generously than she gave it out. He found the new fullness of her breasts and she felt his breath stutter with all sorts of complex emotions as he reined himself in like a trembling thoroughbred and just let the tip of his tongue delicately whisper over her sometimes too-sensitive nipples. Burning with need, tender with loving and revelling in his heady exploration of her changing body, she was on fire and more desperate
than she had ever been to take him into her and love in every sense of the word.

He shucked her gown off her shoulders and unlaced her not very tightly laced corset, even as her busy hands dealt disrespectfully with the ducal finery he’d borrowed and couldn’t return now they’d done their worst with it. At last they were both in the same state of nature and he could explore her changing body with tender reverence. She splayed her hand over his as he tested the slight changes in her waistline where their child was growing and realised how special the bond between a man and woman could be. He would never be revolted or less than fascinated by her changing body and his child and she felt all the dreams she’d never let herself dream in her cold days as Lady Freya come true anyway.

‘When do babies quicken, Orlando?’ she murmured as she felt him try to hold himself a little away, so she wouldn’t feel intimidated by the hugeness of his need of her, and frustrated such ridiculous ideas by pushing her neat
derrière
back into his braced body.

‘Another few weeks yet,’ he said distractedly and she luxuriated in the shaken restraint he had managed to clamp on his eager sex for her sake.

‘Can we love without harming our babe in the meantime?’ She asked the question she needed answered right now.

‘With me like this and you more or less as you are we can,’ he said thickly, as if words were becoming too demanding to say easily, ‘or the way we did that last night when I was ungallant enough to gag you lest you woke the children,’ he managed in a rush of interesting information that undid his most gallant desires to protect her from his rampant needs, so he demonstrated in as wild a race as he dared gallop with her already three months along with his child and she enjoyed every wanton inch of the race and the joyously hasty rush to completion as they shot to ecstasy their painful wait for each other had only made more inevitable and boundlessly wonderful.

‘Well, that all seemed to work very well, don’t you think?’ she asked when he had pandered to his gentlemanly instincts and carried her almost-boneless body to the spacious and comfortable bed the Duchess had allotted her so considerately.

‘My practical Perdita,’ he muttered on an unsteady laugh she shushed, as if their gasps in the extremity of their satisfaction wouldn’t already have alerted anyone close enough to
hear that Lady Freya was behaving in a most unmaidenly fashion with prodigal Richard Seaborne once again, and enjoying it mightily.

Luckily Miss Bradstock and the other guests were a wing and a floor away and the Duke and Duchess occupied the ground floor room in the most splendid part of the original Tudor mansion and the only ones disturbed by their lovemaking were any ghosts haunting Ashburton and the last traces of Lady Freya’s chilly dignity.

‘Who are we to be from now on then, my love?’ she murmured as she snuggled into her lover’s shoulder and sighed like a contented cat as he played with her hair.

‘Husband and wife,’ he informed her lazily.

‘Not that, idiot. What shall we call each other, as we have two names to choose from?’

‘Well, I intend to be Rich Seaborne most of the time we live at Seaborne House and I farm my acres and you ever so gently bully my staff and discuss our children, our estates and our hopes and dreams with me. When we’re in Longborough Forest, I shall abandon him and be Orlando again. I’ll have to build another wing on the cottage to accommodate our growing family and give Hal a room of his own now he’s a young gentleman.’

‘We shall have to spend time at Martagon Court as well,’ she reminded him with a grimace, finding the rest of his programme very much to her taste and wishing they didn’t.

‘Of course, we owe Hal and his parents that much at least. Chance is a very odd beast, don’t you think?’ he asked as he stroked her long silky hair down over her slender back, then even lower and made her think she might not have it cut after all.

‘In what way?’ she managed despite the long shiver of awareness prickling delightfully down the length of her spine.

‘If Colton Martagon hadn’t been killed in a reckless ride to try to win enough money to set his wife and child up in comfort without his guardian knowing he had either, I would never have met Annabelle and Hal and loved them so deeply I was still hiding in Longborough Forest the night you needed me to find you there.’

‘So all my terror and confusion was worthwhile after all?’ she mused.

‘Never, I wouldn’t have you run a step in such fear if only I’d been able to prevent it, but I wonder if Lady Freya would ever have fallen for Rich Seaborne half as freely and honestly as Perdita did for Orlando.’

‘Probably not. Is Lady Freya going to get in the way of you loving the rest of me?’

‘No, how can I
not
love all of you, Freya Buckle? You’re my lover and you’ll soon be my wife and the mother of my child. Anyone who cares to argue with the woman at the very heart of my life will have to fight me first.’

‘I can win my own battles,’ she reminded him.

‘I know, but why do so alone when we can fend off our enemies together, my love?’

‘Why indeed?’ she said with a luxurious shiver and lost interest in battle altogether.

Now her fifth and sixth grandchildren had been safely baptised in Ashburton Church, Lady Henry Seaborne gave a contented sigh and watched Rich proudly show off his very different twins to the assembled guests. Meanwhile Freya was doing her best to distract Sally from loving her little brother and sister so heartily they would begin to scream again. At three months Miss Miranda Carolina Seaborne’s eyes were already lioness amber and Master Matthew Frederick Seaborne watched the company with fascinated green eyes the exact shade of his father and big sister’s.