The Black Sheep's Return (6 page)

‘How hard it can be at times to have such fine offspring as ours, Hal,’ Melissa murmured
and caught herself in her habit of talking to her husband as if he was still here that she knew others would find deeply eccentric or plain mad. ‘If I could see our dear Rich again maybe the world would fit together a little better without you, my love,’ she added wistfully and caught herself looking out of the window at a fine view of her rose garden and the distant Welsh hills beyond.

Her eldest son could be out there, among those green and lovely hills, or maybe even adrift on the other side of the world and she would never know, she decided gloomily. Little wonder she felt so dismal on this shiningly beautiful morning. As long as he was safe, that was all that mattered, and she knew he must have the best of reasons for staying away. When she had learnt Richard had disappeared at the same time as Lord Calvercombe’s young cousin Annabelle, it was a relief to know he’d done it for love, not perversity. If they were happy, she told herself, she would be glad and bide her time until it was safe for them to reappear. Meanwhile, their disappearance brought dear Alex Forthin, Earl of Calvercombe, to look for a clue where his cousin had gone and found a countess in her darling Persephone instead.

Three years ago her nephew Jack had wed his Duchess and her goddaughter, Jessica Pendle. Shortly afterwards Persephone married her love, followed up the aisle three weeks later by Telemachus, her younger son, and his vivid and lovely Antigone. Lady Henry smiled at nothing in particular; Antigone was an endearing mix of fire and resolution and had kept Marcus on his toes and passionately absorbed since the day they’d first met as no freshly pretty débutante could ever have done. Their own son, Thomas Henry Seaborne, was a bright and headstrong Seaborne barely two years old, and he had a plain pair of names that argued she should have insisted on similar ones for her own children.

Lord Henry had loved his Homer and she’d done well to limit him to the more hopeful
Odyssey
and not descend into tragedy with names from the
Iliad
. After she got her own way and managed to name their first child for her beloved grandfather, she hadn’t the heart to fight for a more conventional first name for their next one and after Telemachus, Henry came up with such charming suggestions for their daughters she could only agree. Poor Antigone hadn’t been so lucky and her mama Electra had suffered an even more unlikely
christening, the only time Melissa could feel sorrier for the woman than she did for herself, she concluded wryly. Her exasperation at Telemachus’s totally self-absorbed mother-in-law often made her feel guilty. However many blessings life poured on Electra Warrender, they would never be enough and the greatest of them were the ones she valued least—her family.

Melissa hated the idea of growing bitter and demanding like Electra, yet without Rich in his rightful home with his family around him, she always had a stubborn worry at the back of her mind at excited family gatherings. Ordering herself to count the blessings showered on her, she still eyed those distant hills and wondered what Rich was doing as she did every morning and always would until she knew.

Despite her resolution not to sleep, Freya woke from dreams she didn’t care to remember and glanced at the solemnly ticking clock. It was nearly two, if the clock was to be relied on and something told her it would be, since Orlando would see no point in a timepiece that lied. He might be able to tell the hour by the passage of the sun, or the flight of the moon or some such nonsense, but he probably liked
his genius confirmed by the mechanisms of lesser men as well.

Unfair, she rebuked herself, he struck her as a practical man with a touch of wayward poetry in his soul and the new Freya, who tried to look deeper into her fellow beings’ hearts and minds than the old one ever dreamt of doing, would not make shallow judgements or shrug off the rest of the world as unimportant. The constant battle to get her own way among a family determined to go theirs was over, she assured herself and, whatever happened next, she wasn’t going back to it. Which was all very well, but it left her sitting in this oddly comfortable bed in a poor man’s home in the midst of a forest, with not even a penny-piece to her name and hardly a stitch of clothing on her back. Not much of a start to her wonderful new life, she concluded with a gusty sigh. It was a huge task to remake Lady Freya, now there was going to be more to her life than marrying well.

If one failed Season, a year in mourning and another sitting at Bowland twiddling her thumbs and fending off repellent suitors hadn’t ruined her chances of a brilliant match, going missing and taking up with a penniless cottager for the time it took her ankle to heal
would certainly do the trick. Even if Bowland’s supposedly tame Member of Parliament was still willing to take her, she would rather walk barefoot all the way to her aunt’s house than endure such a husband. So, when she was finally whole, she had no money to hire a carriage or buy a ticket for the accommodation coach and if her great-aunt refused to take her in, nowhere to go even if she could get there.

There was nothing to do but wait patiently for her ankle to heal and decide what to do when she could manage more than a slow hop on one leg. Having settled her immediate future, she lay back against the pillows and sighed again. When a flash of the horror at all she could have suffered yesterday shot through her head like some terrifying play she shuddered and thanked God for such a safe and comfortable resting place. She had a healthy and vigorous body, apart from her constantly aching ankle and some sore spots and twinges of stiffness that would soon pass, and a sane mind. Everything could be so much worse that it was silly to bemoan her current lot in life.

It had been wickedly wanton to strip off her bedcover and under-clothing and sleep naked though, she decided, stretching that body sensually against the sheets. Freya yawned neatly
as a cat, then let herself think the unthinkable. What would it feel like to wake up beside Orlando and know they had enjoyed each other’s vigorously youthful bodies to the full and would shortly do so all over again? The idea should never have entered her head, but somehow her total embarrassment this morning had mutated into a curiosity that seemed to eat at once cherished views and values. When she had come out in society, without any of the diffidence run-of-the-mill débutantes were expected to show, she’d been so sure she would catch a nobleman. Three years on it didn’t seem important she hadn’t married a title and would go through life with the one bestowed on her by her chilly sire.

If her brother thought the only use for a girl was to acquire more influence or wealth by marrying her off, she pitied his coming child if it dared be female. Perhaps her mother made the misalliance by wedding into the Buckle family, rather than the other way about as Freya had been told all her life and suddenly a revolution came tumbling through her head in the wake of that unthinkable notion.

If every tenet she was supposed to revere was false, what did that make Lady Freya Buckle? A fool, she concluded bleakly, and
let the delicious tension of rested limbs stretching on a Freya-warmed bed fade as she lay still and considered twenty-one wasted years trying to be a model aristocrat. She grimaced at the wide boards above her head and wondered how she’d been that fool quite so long. Being a Buckle, she’d taken her own sweet time to see herself as she was, she supposed, and wished she’d realised she might be wrong about what mattered in the world sooner.

Having friends would have been pleasant, she concluded, but so few girls had come up to her family’s rigid standards of fit breeding or behaviour that their neighbours’ children were declared unsuitable companions and the notion she should go to school unthinkable. To her father the Royal House of Hanover was an upstart race. Freya had a picture of him asking at the gates of Heaven if the inmates were suitable company for the head of his noble house.

Looking at the world from a very different place, Freya could see why even breeding, a substantial dowry and a passably pretty face hadn’t caught a noble husband at last. She pictured herself at eighteen years old, convinced she was the finest catch ever to grace the marriage mart, let alone the crop of young ladies called to Ashburton New Place in Herefordshire
one summer for the dashing Duke of Dettingham to make his choice of a Duchess, and flinched. Even then instinct had warned Freya that something she didn’t understand was growing between Jack Seaborne and the Honourable Jessica Pendle. Something deadly to the shining future she herself deserved as his Duchess. With that unease at the back of her mind she’d grown more fretful and disagreeable as the month went on, until her hopes and dreams finally vanished like mirages.

The prospect of outshining her sister-in-law as Duchess to her mere Countess had probably appealed as strongly as the Duke himself, Freya saw now. Such a masculine and brilliant man as a husband would have been a bonus, of course, but she wouldn’t love him. Love, Mama informed her before Lady Freya was presented at Court, was for those who knew no better. Perhaps her mother’s disappointed hopes and dreams had been talking, she decided, and pitied her parent for slamming up against stony Buckle pride herself. Becoming the second wife of an Earl when her father was born the son of an impoverished vicar probably blinded her to the fact she would only
ever be an upstart nabob’s daughter to him, never an equal.

Away from Bowland Castle and all the outmoded stuffiness and formality of an age gone by, Freya could see what a house of cards it truly was. Without Mama’s substantial dowry the castle would have fallen into ruin long ago. The reduced staff and family retreat to Bowland every summer instead of Brighton—her sister-in-law Winfreda’s cheeseparing suddenly looked a necessity, not the refusal to indulge in vulgar show Winfreda insisted it was.

How furious the family must have been when her maternal grandfather had left his fortune to his only grandchild instead of his noble son-in-law. Freya vaguely recalled slammed doors and a new tension in the house after Grandfather died, an ever-widening coldness between the late Earl and Mama. Lady Bowland did her best to conceal it from her one precious chick, Freya decided with a tenderness the lady rarely encouraged when alive. At least Mama had loved her. If her efforts to marry Freya off seemed misguided in hindsight, they were prompted by love.

S
eeing a little too deeply into her former life for comfort, Freya pushed back the bedcovers and reached for her improvised walking cane. At least this time the door was stoutly barred against the world so she could resume her coverings in private. Feeling ashamed of herself for her fascination with how she looked naked to Orlando, she ran a speculative hand down the curve of her slender waist and along the neat symmetry of her feminine hips. She was well enough formed, if a man didn’t demand all females be buxom and plump to be desirable.

Perhaps Orlando preferred pocket Venuses to leggy Amazons, though. The woman who originally owned her shift slipped into her
mind and rendered her inadequate. His wife had been inches shorter than her, yet her chemise fitted Freya apart from that, which argued she was full-breasted and probably Orlando’s ideal woman in every way.

Which was exactly how it should be, Freya assured herself, then was in danger of falling over her own feet as she scrabbled the bedclothes back together in her first effort at bedmaking. He’d married a woman who suited him and his chosen life as neatly as if she’d been made for him. Lady Freya Buckle was clearly not for the likes of Mr Orlando Craven, whoever he might really be, so what did it matter if she was less than his late wife? Perdita Rowan wasn’t a noblewoman and, weighed by worldly goods, more of a pauper than her rescuer—the man she depended on for a roof over her head and food in her belly. Never had she felt more dependent and at the same time more free.

Since she wasn’t going to make that brilliant marriage, what
was
she going to do with her life, then? It would take years before she could think of going about the world alone and not be considered scandalous. The first thing she needed was a chaperon she could tolerate while she wrested control of her fortune from
her half-brother and sister-in-law. The lawyers were sure to make that as difficult as possible for an unwed female, but generations of arrogant aristocrats at her back had to be useful for something, so perhaps she could intimidate them into it.

Which still left the huge question—what was she going to do with the rest of her life? Maybe she could find a husband even now—if he overlooked this adventure and her icy reputation. A man who didn’t know or care what society with a capital S thought. A man who suddenly looked very much like Orlando in her fantasy of an ideal life with the perfect husband for Freya, the woman, not Lady Freya, aristocrat.

Ridiculous, she mocked herself—he was a man who chose to hide himself as far as he could get from any society at all. Why on earth would he saddle himself with a wife who would bring attention down on him in cartloads? Particularly when he had already had a wife he’d loved very dearly and mourned to this day. And why would he need her when he was doing such a fine job of raising his children alone? Anything more between them than enforced guest and reluctant host was clearly impossible for Lady Freya and Mr Craven. But
must it be so between Orlando and Perdita? The question echoed in her mind and refused to go away, despite the voice of common sense telling her such an unequal relationship was doomed to end in tears, even if he could forget his dead wife long enough to notice Perdita as anything other than a nuisance to be sent on her way as soon as possible.

Trouble had stumped into his life along with Perdita so-called Rowan and trodden all over it with muddy boots, Rich decided crossly. He’d been perfectly content until she came—well, perhaps not
perfectly
so. He missed Anna too much to be that, but he’d done well enough. Striding along in the lead, he heard Sally and Hal chattering like starlings to Keziah and wondered why he was allowing himself to be herded back to the cottage by his friend and mentor because Keziah was eager to judge for herself if the lady he’d stumbled on last night was a fit companion for Sally and Hal and perhaps even for him when the boot ought to be on the other foot.

Why had he prided himself in having his little world under control last night when he ought to know better than that by now? It had been tempting fate, he decided gloomily, wishing
he’d put Perdita in his cart and driven to the nearest inn with her as soon as it got light this morning. He frowned at the feeling he’d had as if he’d just run headlong into a wall when he came on his lost princess naked as the day she came into the world.

It was the sweetest disaster to see her in the shadowy light reflected off the forest at this time of year and lending the scullery a watery enchantment. She had looked like every warning legend he ever heard of, with her own enchantment added to remind him sirens were a story and she was real. He’d never seen such a thickly waving hank of hair spilling down a woman’s naked back before, the diffuse brightness catching lights and depths in that wild mass of soft nut-brown hair so it was revealed as so much more than merely brown.

Her long, long legs only added to his open-mouthed awe, but he’d already seen and felt the blisters and grazes yesterday’s rough journey left on the soft-skinned soles and heels of her misused feet. Then he’d wished he could kiss them better like Sally’s smaller hurts, but knew if he even tried it she would be horrified. Now he knew he might not be able to stop at comfort and would long to trail hot kisses upwards until…
Until nothing
, he barked at his inner
rake and strode on so fiercely even Keziah protested, so he slowed down and tried to recall he was a civilised man these days and not an idle aristocrat.

For a while he managed to keep his attention on the here and now and off Perdita. He even managed to smile and nod when Hal pointed out the darting turquoise flash of a kingfisher as they passed a summer-tamed stream. Then Sally marvelled so hard at a brilliantly yellow Brimstone butterfly that it took fright and flew away, so she had to be comforted and reassured it was probably nothing personal.

Keziah’s thoughtful gaze on him only made him uneasy and reminded him he wasn’t living the lovely promise of a June day in the forest as he should do, because he was so busy thinking of a lady who should bring out his protective instincts, not these rough desires. Yet there had also been something touching as well as hotly arousing about the sight of Perdita balanced on one leg, intent on washing dust and grime from every inch of her silky skin.

It would be good to think he’d averted his gaze and left her to her privacy. Except he hadn’t, and perhaps it was his punishment that he now couldn’t seem to evade memory of those endless legs leading to the lithe curve
of her
derrière
and up to an impossibly slender waist and breasts so high and perfect he wanted them in his hands or mouth, whichever could first wrap about the cold and shock-tightened amber nipples. No doubt she only remembered the untamed wolf she’d seen in his eyes and shivered at the very memory he was slavering over like a wild beast.

He had subjected her to a lecherous, eager survey no gently bred female should expect to endure outside marriage. When he finally raised his eyes from her creamy-skinned and lovely form her averted cheek was flushed with shame and her full bottom lip caught by pearly teeth as she bit back a gasp of shocked dismay. Knowing she was controlling an urge to scream or rage at him because his children were a hair’s breadth away from discovering what a satyr they had for a father, he had muttered a brusque apology and left her standing frozen in that haunting sylvan light like an artist’s wildest fantasy.

How his Anna would have raged at him for being such a boor, he reflected, as he felt the thunder and lightning of wanting Perdita released in him threaten to turn him rigid and painfully aroused all over again, if he didn’t get back to his workshop and work himself
into the ground to tame it. Had his wife been here he wouldn’t be without a woman and three years of denying his basic nature to honour Anna’s memory began to look like a sad mistake. His driven urge for a lady he shouldn’t want would never have sprung into infernal life the second he held Perdita in his arms if Anna was here.

His love had welcomed her husband’s amorous attentions and revelled in their passion for each other. Annabelle would be the first to condemn him for subjecting a lone female to his lecherous stare if she could see him now. Yet the idea of slaking his animal lusts on a woman paid to endure them had about as much appeal as a rotten egg. Once he might have seen it as merely sating a need healthy males felt with varying degrees of urgency. After he met Annabelle and discovered how to love as well as need a woman, anything less seemed insulting.

Only a romantic would fall in love with a woman at first sight, he accused himself, particularly when she was little more than a schoolgirl and obviously with child by another man. He remembered the shock and awe of that unlikely moment in the hope it would push the memory of a naked Perdita out of his head.
Annoyed when it didn’t, he strode on until he outstripped his children and Keziah and stormed along the forest track as if he’d a kingdom to defend at the other end of it.

Impossible to love again with every impulse and instinct he had, he assured himself. Not even a fool like Richard Seaborne loved headlong and without boundaries twice in a lifetime, certainly not with Perdita Rowan, lady of the woods. This was lust, brought on by a misguided belief he could never want another woman as he wanted Anna, urgently and completely and, he recalled with an un-Seaborne-like blush, somewhat insatiably for a sober married man with another man’s widow in his bed, big with his posthumous child.

When Keziah delivered Annabelle’s precious son he fell completely in love for the second time in his life. Hal was his as if he’d been at the heart and source of his conception, instead of the boy who hadn’t even lived long enough to know his young wife was carrying his child. Jealousy that Annabelle met and loved the lad before she was struck by the same thunderbolt that felled him threatened. He made himself remember Annabelle saying her first marriage came out of their mutual
desperation to get away from home, not a passionate love at first glance like theirs.

He smiled at the memory of her bold and brazen admission that she wanted him as urgently as he did her. If she’d come to him as pure and virginal as she had to her marriage bed with Colton Martagon, they might never have wanted each other so hotly. He’d loved her lustily and deeply and promised to try to live well without her. His mouth twisted as he recalled her extracting that promise out of him once they knew she couldn’t survive the struggle to push Sally into the world. These last three years he’d found grief had no boundaries and men did cry, but now he wondered what his Annabelle would make of Miss Perdita Rowan. Would she see his hot need of another woman as him beginning to keep that promise, or a shameful abuse of his duty as a host?

Now he was back where he started, hankering after a female he couldn’t have with any trace of honour. So why had he rushed ahead as if he needed to get to her all the quicker? Even now he’d realised what he was doing, he couldn’t seem to wait for Sally and Hal and Keziah’s presence to remind him that Perdita was as unattainable to Orlando Craven as a royal princess.

A heavy knock on what she could call
her
door if she wasn’t careful made Freya jump and threaten to drop the kettle she had so laboriously filled and tried to set on the fire she had finally managed to light after only an hour of strenuous effort.

‘Who is it?’ she shouted through the heavy oak planks, although she knew perfectly well it was Orlando.

‘Me,’ he bellowed back and she could almost feel his impatience as she put down her sooty burden to turn the key with both hands and draw back the bolts she’d shot home.

The instant the door was open they froze as if examining each other for changes. It was odd, but yesterday his face seemed a stronger, more defined version of features she’d seen on young men all her life. Today they were his alone. Was that because he’d seen her as no man had since the doctor announced the bad news she was a girl? Or because Orlando was a man and he’d wanted her hotly for a fleeting moment this morning, before he turned away from her as if the idea poisoned the air between them?

‘I was worried about you,’ he said gruffly and disarmed her completely.

‘It might be better if you worry about your house next time,’ she told him ruefully, standing aside and waving a grubby hand at the dying fire.

‘That’s easy enough to mend. People need more care and attention,’ he said, sounding almost cheerful as he bent to see to her sulky bird’s nest of a fire. ‘Next time add to it little by little until it’s well alight, then you can put on the larger pieces. You overwhelmed it.’

She tried to listen and learn, but seeing his large hands so deft and skilful set her senses reeling all over again. He was pretending he wouldn’t dream of seeing her naked, so she only had herself to blame for wishing those broad-palmed hands were busy about her body and not building a fire. It wouldn’t even matter they were sooty and smelt faintly of wood-smoke and dry lichen. It might even add to the wonderment as she watched the shadow of his exploration form on her body; a map that said Orlando was here, and here, and here…

‘I thought I should like tea, if you don’t mind?’ she said hastily.

‘Of course not, but I doubt our version will match your usual one,’ he said to the fire, as if he might get more sense out of it.

‘So long as it’s wet and warm. I sometimes
share the gardeners’ tea when nobody is likely to catch us hobnobbing,’ she heard herself say. He didn’t need to know her family employed gardeners in the plural. Although it was her money that paid for such luxuries as pleasure gardens and Freya hoped her friends wouldn’t lose their jobs now she’d escaped Bowland Castle for good or ill. ‘I like gardening,’ she said, admitting the secret vice her brother found so deplorable that he called her a peasant brat when he caught her sneaking in through the garden door to wash dirt off her hands or change her muddy shoes.

‘Good,’ he said with a wry grin. ‘Once you’re well enough you can help with mine and let me worry about keeping house.’