The Uncatchable Miss Faversham (15 page)

    Despite himself, Nathaniel was forced to laugh. Sharp-tongued little vixen, he thought appreciatively.

    She had learnt wit in her years in London, and was not afraid to square up to him, gloves off. There was nothing of the lover about her. Quite the opposite, in fact.

    ‘
Touché
. A pretty speech. Now do as I say and put your clothes back on.’ He stooped to her crumpled chemise and stays, tossing them back to her. Red-faced, she stood and turned her back on him, dressing again with her head bent. ‘Before the moon is any higher in the heavens, if you please. After dark, I may not be held responsible for my actions.’

    To give her some privacy, he busied himself with lighting the lantern on the table. By the time its soft flickering light had been conjured to illuminate the circular room, the chemise was once more protecting her dignity and she had laced up her corset. It took all his resolve not to unlace the contraption again, seeing how her full breasts spilled over the top of its restraint, pale and inviting.

    ‘Are you a werewolf then, my lord?’

    He looked up at her face, surprised by her ready wit in such circumstances. ‘Part werewolf, part green boy. Else I should not have come within a mile of you again, Miss Faversham.’

    He laid aside the tinder-box and helped her on with her blue velvet riding habit, noting that his hands were trembling too.

    ‘I said earlier that I had caught you,’ he added more seriously. ‘But I was wrong. I grant you are “Uncatchable” indeed. You will not have me as a husband and I will not have you under less formal terms. So we must agree, surely, that this unfortunate liaison can bring neither of us joy?’

    She raised her face to his. ‘The length of rope. What was it for?’

    ‘I beg your pardon?’

    ‘One of the servants claimed you had taken a length of rope from the stables. Charlotte thought the worst.’

    ‘That I was planning to hang myself?’

    She nodded, watching him.

    ‘Of all the harebrained …’ He was angry, turning away so she could not see her face. ‘Now I understand why you came out here, looking for me. No doubt my sister is fretting herself to a shadow, imagining my corpse swinging from a tree somewhere?’

    Eleanor did not reply to that, merely asking again, ‘What was the rope for, then?’   

    ‘To tie my horse to a tree without expecting the poor creature to stand in the same spot for half the night,’ he exploded.

    Nathaniel was satisfied to see her blush and look confused at such a prosaic explanation of why a stout rope might have been necessary for his excursion. So Eleanor believed him that infatuated with her, did she?

    Instantly, he felt like jeering at her misplaced egotism, and tried not to consider that he had in fact glanced at that length of rope more than once with sinister intention.

    His voice grew silky. ‘So what, may I ask, could have driven me to such a desperate course of action, anyway?’

    Looking distinctly uncomfortable, Eleanor muttered something about having ‘made a mistake’.

    ‘Was it my unrequited love for a certain Miss Faversham, by any chance?’ he queried, nodding grimly at her reaction. ‘Ah, I see. The spurned lover must needs seek eternal damnation at the end of a rope. Whilst dreaming up this lurid fantasy, did it occur to either of you that I might simply have wanted to take myself off for a few days of solitary peace and quiet, away from my sister and her interfering friend?’

    ‘Then you should have left a note to that effect. Charlotte was very worried and upset,’ she replied in an accusatory tone. ‘And who can blame her?’

    ‘I can,’ he said bluntly.

    She bit her lip. Her flush had deepened, her over-bright eyes bluer and sharper than ever. ‘Well, I’m sorry for that. But if you will stride about in high dudgeon, acting like the tormented hero of some gothic romance –’

    ‘
What
?’

    ‘You see!’ She snatched up her riding bonnet and arranged it hurriedly on her head, her face turned away. ‘That is precisely what I mean. You jump at every chance to humiliate me. I have no idea why I ever thought that you and I ... that we ... But that is all finished. You said it yourself- this liaison can being neither of us any joy. From now on, I shall avoid you as assiduously as possible, and I trust you will do the same for me.’

    ‘Trust me, nothing could give me greater pleasure than to ignore you,’ he agreed, a savage bite in his voice. He must have been mad, touching her the way he had done, making love to her. She was about as inviting as a venomous snake bite.

    ‘Good, I am glad that is settled. Now I must return home, otherwise Foster will be arranging a some kind of search. I requested supper at seven, and it cannot be far off that now.’

    ‘In that case, allow me to escort you –’ he began, but she cut him off with an abrupt gesture.

    ‘I am perfectly capable of finding my own way home without a male escort, my lord. Indeed, I have been doing so these past five years without falling into difficulties.’

    ‘I daresay you have. But this is not London and we have no link-boys here,’ he pointed out drily. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, it is dark out there.’

    ‘There is no need to worry for my safety, I assure you. It is a bare two miles distance between here and Faversham Hall, and Desdemona does not go so fast as to stumble down a rabbit hole. Besides, there is a full moon tonight to guide us, as we have already established.’ She slid on her riding gloves and sketched him a brief curtsey before turning to the doorway. ‘I bid you good evening, my lord.’

    ‘Eleanor! Nell!’

    Exasperated by this ludicrous insistence on independence, Nathaniel seized the lantern and followed her down the narrow, winding staircase, limping heavily.

    The pain in his hip, brought on by a day’s riding in the woods, did nothing to improve his temper. Where did she think she was going? Did she not see how impossible it was for him to allow her to ride home in the dark unaccompanied?

    By the time he reached the bottom of the Folly she was already untying her horse, and Nathaniel realised it would be futile to argue with her much longer, for soon she would be gone.

    ‘Must you be quite so headstrong?’ he demanded.

    ‘I believe so, yes.’

    ‘Then at least allow me to ride behind you. My horse is amongst the trees there. It will only take a few moments to saddle him., if you would consent to wait.’

    Using an outcrop of rock as a makeshift mounting block, Eleanor swung herself into the saddle without making him any answer nor once asking for his help.

    Insufferable behaviour! Though Nathaniel could not fault the elegance of her seat, nor the decorous way her skirts fell in such lavish folds to her soft kid boots. Even flushed and partially concealed under the extravagant riding bonnet, he thought her face really quite handsome in the moonlight. Wild and damnably untameable, but handsome nonetheless.

    ‘Will you wait?’ he demanded.

    Gathering the reins in one gloved hand, she looked down at him with obvious disdain. It was hard to reconcile this proud creature with the woman whose pale, sensuous body he had admired not half an hour since. But her eyes in the light of his lantern held the same defiant spark, and her lips as they opened to speak were as soft and crushable.

    ‘Very well, sir,’ she agreed stiffly, inclining her head. ‘But only under the most severe protest, and purely because I do not want poor Desdemona to take a spill in the dark. She is quite elderly now and might not easily recover if she were to strain a fetlock.’

    Nathaniel bowed and limped back to the Folly momentarily to recover his saddle. When he came back outside, hurrying to the thicket where he had left Warlord, he tried not to let his triumph and relief show on his face. Eleanor might have said yes to his escort, but she could just as soon change her mind, devil take the woman.

Eleanor could not quite believe how very badly the evening had gone. If she had know what would happen, she would never,
ever
, have ridden out here alone in search of his hideout. She had promised Charlotte she would help, but no friendship was worth this onslaught of anguish and humiliation. Nor had she intended things to go so far between them.

    He swung in behind her on the track beside the glimmering river. ‘After you, Miss Faversham.’

    She was not sure which was worse – his previous hostility and frosty demeanour, or this sardonic flippancy.

    ‘Thank you,’ she responded tightly, and kicked Desdemona into a reluctant trot, glad of the moonlight.

    The sooner she returned to London the better. There, she was far less likely to find herself alone with a man and so could hardly compromise herself again. It would only take one colourful incident like this, observed and whispered about in polite society, for her reputation to be so damaged she would be forced either to retire disgraced into obscurity or get married.

    And marriage was something she refused to countenance.

    Give up her freedom to a man, to become his legal possession and his social inferior?

    Her father had said it often enough: no man would consent to marry under such disadvantageous terms were the boot on the other foot.

    The woods gradually closed in as they rode alongside the river. Desdemona began to sidle about, spooked by the menace of rushing water and shadowy trees, and Nathaniel made a grab for her bridle as the horse stumbled.

    Eleanor stared at him coldly. ‘Would you be so good as to unhand my reins, sir? I am considered a tolerable rider and can manage to control my own horse, thank you.’

    ‘So it seems. You were not, in fact, about to be thrown?’

    She blushed at the caustic bite in his reply. With him, some devil always drove her on to defy him. In London, she was well enough known for her high spirits and flirtatious ways, but never, she devoutly hoped, for any coldness or disdain towards the gentlemen. Yet here, in his company, she was fast in danger of becoming a complete fright, quite as stern as any governess.

    ‘Desdemona is a trifle skittish, I will concede – ’

    ‘Desdemona?’

    Her lips tightened and she glared back at him coldly. ‘Yes,
Desdemona
.’

    ‘I see,’ he said drily and drew alongside her, his knee bumping her own as he kept one guiding hand on her bridle. ‘It is safer this way.’

    ‘And highly uncomfortable!’

    His gaze shot to her face, and even in the darkness she could see the glimmer of unholy amusement in his eyes.

    ‘I am sorry you should think so, Miss Faversham. Yet you seemed not to mind my proximity just now.’

    ‘If you were a gentleman, you would not find it amusing to raise such a topic.’

    ‘Ah, but I am not a gentleman,’ he countered swiftly. ‘ Not when I am with you, at any rate. With you, I am ...’ He paused, frowning. ‘A madman, I sometimes think.’

    ‘Am I supposed to find comfort in that statement. Or is it offered by way of an excuse for your erratic behaviour?’

    ‘
My
erratic behaviour? It seems your memory is at fault, my dear. You are the one who would happily play at kissing games with a man until he is foolish enough to offer marriage, and then take to your heels as fast as though he had the pox.’

    The temptation to slap his face warred inside her with the desire to dig her heels into Desdemona’s side and break away from the insufferable man.

    ‘At last, no pointless attempt to dissemble. Is it too much to hope that progress has been made?’

    ‘Decidedly too much.’

    He sighed. ‘A pity.’

    ‘You would perhaps do better to reserve your efforts for more willing objects of your attention.’

    ‘Miaow.’ But he was frowning again, his head on one side as he studied the deep shadows lying across the path ahead. ‘Now who did you mean by that, I wonder?’

    ‘Oh bravo, my lord. My ability to dissemble is nothing to yours. You should be on the stage.’

    ‘A specific woman, clearly.’ He continued to muse, his knee bumping hers as the riverside path narrowed and their horses pushed together. ‘A lover? A mistress?’

    Eleanor clamped her mouth shut to avoid uttering the hated name
Rose Underwood
. But her fists had clenched, and she could feel her temper rising.

    The powerful nature of her response took her by surprise. Good god, could she be jealous of the woman? No, that was impossible. To be jealous could mean only one thing.

    She shook her head, sitting stiffly as she stared into the darkness. She did not love Lord Sallinger. Nathaniel was a man she desired, that was all. The memory of their one night together was almost an obsession. But it was not love. She indulged no fantasies of how their future life together might be nor wondered what their children would look like. Whatever she felt for him, it could not be love. Could it?

    More fervently than ever, Eleanor wished herself back home in London. There at least she could flirt harmlessly with all her beaux, out late at a different party every night, and yet not find herself longing so helplessly for the company of one particular gentleman over another.

    ‘Tell me her name,’ he insisted, still watching her. ‘Of whom are you so jealous? I will guess it eventually, you know.’

    Oh, the dangers of falling in love could not be overstated. She had seen too many young woman of fortune and good looks swallowed up by the institution of marriage to find anything admirable in the idea of losing her heart.

    The rituals of courtship might be exciting, and the honeymoon a time of revelation. But after that all a woman could look forward to was the curtailment of her personal freedom, unless the husband in question was more than usually liberated. Which, she thought, stealing a sideways glance at his scarred and forbidding countenance, Nathaniel was most definitely not.

    But was she prepared to die an old maid, cut off from physical pleasure and the comfort of children, rather than hand over her body and personal fortune to a man?