The Desperate Love of a Lord (5 page)

At the next three inns the answer was the same. No one had heard the name.

He did not ask in the shops. It was common place to ask questions at an inn, but not in a shop. He was not here to destroy her character. He did not wish to draw attention to her if she was hiding from something here.
If it was her?
But what reason did she have to hide?

As he walked about Lacock, he alternated his gaze between the houses and the people passing. Where the hell was she? There were at least a dozen houses of a size Violet might rent. Which?

He looked through windows, trying to see who was in the rooms, but the sunlight reflected back and made that virtually impossible.

His eyes scanned the faces of the women walking past him, and those across the street – Violet’s was not among them.

He looked at the women with their backs to him, judging their height and figure. But none of them resembled Violet.

As he completed his fifth circuit of the village he stopped in the market place and slid his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat.
Come on, Vi, where are you?
In the privacy of his pockets his fists clenched and unclenched. He took a deep breath.
Damn.
A few people were here, but it was now nearly four. They’d all be gone soon.

Was Violet here, or was she not? What to do? He could stay at an inn and look again tomorrow, and then the next day and the next. Yet what if Mrs Mayer was not Violet? Then he’d just waste time – and possibly lose her.

His heart thumped in a steady rhythm and his gaze ran across the houses about him. Nothing.

He turned and faced a narrow street, one he’d not walked down yet. Perhaps?

Arms swinging at his sides, his fists still clenched and legs slashing at the skirt of his greatcoat he walked on; his jaw taut.

It was as if his fingertips clung to the cliff of sanity and he was about slip off.

“Damn, Violet?” Where had she gone?

At the end of the street he faced a little ford through a stream which ran about the edge of the village. There were three small cottages on the far side. He couldn’t imagine Violet in any of them.

He turned away from the possibility of the stepping stones to the left and continued up a short hill.

The cottages grew sparser about him.

He didn’t stop walking. He’d given up hope of finding her today. He reached the brow of a hill and looked down.

There, before him, as the road dropped again, was a woman, clothed in unrelieved black.

She stood with her elbows resting on a wooden gate, looking out across a field. She wore a bonnet so he could not see her face, and her black cloak hid her figure entirely, yet there was a certain curve to her neck.

He’d stopped still, and it was as though his heart was stilled too.

He began moving. His steps urgent as pain and love whirled through him in a sudden storm. “Violet!”

She turned.

“Violet! My God. Violet!” He kept moving as she merely looked at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

“What the hell is going on, Vi?” His voice became bitter when he drew near. “Why did you leave?” Despite his anger and the pain ripping threw his middle, he lifted his hand. He wanted to hold her, but she backed away. The rejection cut into him. His heart belonged to this woman.

“Violet?” Geoff’s voice shifted into a tone of confusion.

Yet she couldn’t let him hold her, she would crumble and the child would be lost.

His hand reached out further but she stepped back again.

“Violet. What is going on? Tell me. Why are you wearing black, and calling yourself Mrs Mayer? For God’s sake, what or who are you hiding from?”

You

“I don’t understand Violet. You just disappeared. Why did you run? Why did you not come to me?” There was anguish and anger in his pitch. It reached inside her and played on the aching strings in her heart. But she daren’t concede and let him know.

Hardening her heart and taking up the mantle of the merry widow again, she smiled and made to walk past him. “Well you know me Geoff, I like to have fun, nothing holds my attention overlong –”

He caught her upper arm. “Violet. Damn you. You have caused me untold agony. Do not act as though you do not care. We have had far more than
fun
.”

His eyes blazed as he looked down, as if he was trying to look into her soul.

She bit her lip and turned her head away, but he caught her chin and turned it back.

“Violet.” It was a question, a declaration and an accusation as his head descended and then his lips pressed against hers tipping her head back.

She longed to cling to him and she wanted to weep as all they’d been to each other flooded in. It had always felt good with Geoff, but this summer it had become much more. She’d fallen so deeply in love with this young, elemental man. She was the sea to his moon. The feelings he could quicken inside her were terrifying.

Her palm pressed against his chest and pushed him back as she urged herself to remember sense. “Go away, Geoff.” She would have to go too, and find somewhere else to hide.

“Go away?” His voice lifted in pitch and anger. “Go away? Vi? Have you been playing with me all summer? Was this some bloody game of yours? God! Have you been making a fool of me?”

Worse obscenities slipped from his lips. “We are standing in the road, Geoff!” – and on the edge of the village – anyone might hear him, and see him manhandling her like she was a common slut. They were making a fine exhibit.

His hands let her go, falling away at the same moment she stepped back. But his gaze became threatening and his voice dropped in pitch but not in intensity. “You are not casting me off, Violet. I’ll not go. Do you understand? I don’t believe you do not care for me. I am not leaving you here. I love you.”

Violet’s heart leapt and then beat at an aggressive pace.

Part Three

Violet watched Geoff take off his hat and put it on a table in the hall. Then he took off his gloves too and dropped them on top of it.

She’d told Janet to leave the house for an hour or two. The maid had looked at Violet and then glanced at Geoff with a question in her eyes before disappearing. Violet’s reputation in this village would be shredded. This was not London. People would not turn a blind eye to such things. The gossip would spread within hours. She was entertaining a man alone – and when it was a man of Geoff’s quality, well.

She did not offer him tea, she did not wish him to stay, she had only proposed they come here to take their argument off the street so others might not hear him rail and swear at her.

Her heart lurched as he began unbuttoning his greatcoat. He had such long-fingered, masculine hands.

When she had seen him standing there with the sun behind him, placing him in silhouette, her heart had burst with joy and love, and an overwhelming sensation of recognition. Her heart knew and wanted him. She’d never felt like this before. And now, as he started stripping off his outdoor coat, she was intensely aware of the body she knew beneath his clothes too.

He’d said, I love you?
“You are not staying,” she whispered as he slipped the third button free. Her body and her heart might want him, but her head had more common sense. There was the child.

“I am not going,” he answered with a brutal depth. “You are not throwing me out, Vi. You’ll have to find someone to do it physically if you wish to. I am not moving.”

Oh Lord
. “Geoffrey…” Her heart raced.
What did I love you mean anyway?
Did it change anything between them? How could it though?

“Geoffrey, what, Violet? What is going on?”

She turned and walked into the parlour leaving him in the stone-flagged hallway. She had no way to make him go. When she turned back she saw him slip off his coat and turn to hang it on a peg near the door, as though he belonged here. He did not. But he had become a constant presence back in London and her body ached to step into his arms.

Her chin tilted up, when he turned again and entered the parlour.

“Why the blacks, Vi? Has someone died? I didn’t think you had any family left…” His words ran dry and he looked at her blankly for a moment then his gaze flashed hard and sharp. “Mayer was you maiden name wasn’t it? Your father’s name?”

He clearly knew more about her than she’d told him. She’d never spoken of her childhood to him. He was aristocracy and she had come from a family who had made their money from sugar plantations in the colonies. It was another reason he would not wish to marry her and not something she cared to discuss publicly, but there were those who remembered. Those who he had obviously been talking to behind her back. But had he been talking because he cared, or because he was prying…

“Did someone die?”

She didn’t know how to answer and so she did not, just stared at him.

“Let me take your cloak?”

He moved forwards. She stepped back, struggling to find the persona of the merry widow and some way to put Geoff off.

“Violet? What is going on?”

She turned away from him, her fingers trembling as they lifted to untie the ribbons of her bonnet. She did not answer because she could not think of anything to say – except the truth. Yet the truth would not do. She dared not tell. Her child. Their child. Was too precious to risk. It was so unlike her to feel confused. It had been a rule of hers to never let a man close enough to hurt her – but Geoff.
I love you
.

“Violet, speak to me for God’s sake.” His hand gripped her shoulder and turned her back. “I have been through hell. You vanished from London without a word. I visited every damned entertainment searching for you, for three nights, like an idiot. You were not there. Then when I finally call on you because I realised you were not looking for me, I discovered you gone. I have threatened your solicitor and throttled poor Selford. Then you lead me on this damned trail! I have stopped at every toll to find you, and stalked inns and agents in Bath.” He took a breath. “Violet, I don’t understand.
Is this a game?
Was I amusement? Because it was far more than that to me, and I thought, well… I thought it was bloody mutual.”

She opened her mouth but no words came. His beautiful hazel eyes shone like gold in the autumn sunlight pouring through the window.

“Let me take your bonnet.”

“No.” She stepped back as his hand lifted, her head tilting sideward, then slipped the bonnet off herself. It dangled by its ribbons from her hand for a moment as she took a breath, before letting her bonnet fall into an empty chair.

“Damn it, Violet!”

She found her voice at last and her words erupted with the confidence she’d oozed in London. “Must you keep swearing, Geoff.” But she did not feel confident here.

“Swearing? If you wish for swearing…” The next expletive was obscene, and certainly one a man should not use before a lady.

A blush burned her cheeks. Why must he be so obtuse?

“Is there someone else? Is that it? Have you moved on from me, Vi? You didn’t have to flee London and hide here under a false name, in blacks, to do that. You have been doing it for years. I am no monster for you to be scared of. Yet I don’t understand what I have done? One minute you say goodbye to me at your bedchamber door and the next moment the house is empty. Tell me! What did I do?”

“Geoffrey…” The pain in his eyes was pricking at her soul, like he was stabbing at her conscience with hairpins, and it tore at her heart. She felt his loss too. Dare she speak? Was there a possibility for them? He had said,
I love you
.

He stepped closer and his fingers lifted to her face. “Violet?” They were cool and his touch feather-light. She’d never have any physical contact with him again if she did not speak.

If she did speak…?

“What did I do wrong, Vi?” His pitch softened as his anger seemed to blow out. “Tell me and I swear I’ll never do it again. I love you, I can’t let you go.”

“You did nothing wrong.” The words came out on a breathless sob as tears burned at the back of her throat, gathering in a lump.

A look of confusion creased his brow. “Is there someone else? Do you not feel the same? Is that it?”

She shook her head as his palm pressed against her cheek, offering comfort and expressing need.

“Then what, Vi?”

“Nothing,” she whispered the moment before his lips touched hers.

There had been this connection between them for weeks, this hunger and craving. They could not be together in a room and not touch.

His hand slid down her back and sought to draw her closer. But she held rigid aware of what was between them. Yet she opened her mouth to him and his tongue swept in. Longing flooded her. He was all she had missed from London, just him. But her fingers gripped his arms and set him away. She had to tell him…

His eyes blazed as they looked down into hers, shining like gold again. “Violet.” It was another plea for explanation.

She took a breath to speak but as she did his fingers lifted and tugged loose the tape tying her cloak. It slipped from her shoulders as her mouth opened to say the words. To tell him the truth. But he looked down, his gaze sweeping over her body, as it he’d developed a habit of doing all summer, and he saw the truth for himself. Her stomach was too round now for him not to see the convex rise beneath her dress.

“My God!”

“I was going to tell you.”

“You were clearly not, Vi.”

It was her turn to grasp his arm in plea. “Geoffrey.”

His hand lifted and swept across his face. He did not look happy… He looked shocked – and angry again.

“A child!” That was what this was all about. “A child… Good God. Violet?” Geoff knew from his sister’s pregnancies how far gone she must be. She was surely past mid-term. How had he not noticed it in London? He must have been blind. “I suppose it is mine.” The words slipped from his mouth in accusation. He was angry. Why had she kept this from him? Run from him? Hidden from him?

Horror filled her eyes. “Of course it is yours…” Then her words drifted and her eyes suggested she regretted her admission…What on earth was going on?