Fair Border Bride (17 page)

At last, his lashes lifted and his blue eyes spoke of matters that warmed her blood and caused a quiver of unease deep in her belly.
“Meanwhile?”

“We are here, together, and alone.”

There was no mistaking what he meant. Oh, yes, Harry! She wanted him, but her stomach knotted on the thought. “I want to know more about you. Tell me about your family. I want to be sure you are Harry Wharton, and not Harry Scott or Harry Jones.”

Harry groaned. “Now who doesn’t trust whom?”

“I haven’t been traipsing around the countryside under a false name. You have.”

“But—”

“You know exactly who I am and where I come from. You’ve met my parents, my brothers and our servants. I suspect that I am not what you wanted in a bride, but—”

“Where shall I start?” He cut in before she could voice her doubts.

“At the beginning,” she said pertly, pleased with his capitulation. “How old are you?”

“I was born in ’21.” From kneeling beside her he slid back into the chair on the other side of the hearth without actually rising to his feet. His agility was a constant surprise to her.

So he was older by little more than two years. “Do you have brothers?
Sisters?”

He had realised what she wanted, for he took her next question out of her mouth. “Look, let me give you the potted family history and save time, shall I? Edward knighted Gilbert de
Querton
in 1292 and seven generations brings us to my father. My mother was Eleanor Stapleton. She comes from Yorkshire. Wharton Hall is the family home on the banks of the river Eden in Cumbria. I have one older brother, George, and two younger sisters, Joan and
Feorina
. One son died in infancy. Yes, Father has been promised a barony for his work at Solway Moss last November, but who knows? Our king is an unpredictable man. Speaking of which, have you heard that he has another wife?”

“What?
A sixth wife?”
It took a moment to adjust to the new subject. “How do you know?”

Harry grinned. “Hearing things early is one of the better aspects of being the son of the Deputy Lord Warden of the West March. Messengers scurry about the countryside on a daily basis so my father is one of the most knowledgeable men in the country. She married him a week ago tomorrow.”

Alina sank back in her chair. “It is not yet two years since he beheaded Queen Katherine.” She shuddered, and crossed herself. “Marriage is such a shaky business these days. She must be a brave lady, whoever she is.”

“Her name is Catherine, too. Catherine
Parr,
recently widowed last March by Lord Latimer. I doubt she dared refuse and I am sure her family will have urged her to take him. Already her thirty-year-old brother is Lord Warden, much to my father’s chagrin.”

She knew she stared, but couldn’t help it, for he moved in circles she did not know. He must surely have hoped to marry a fine lady somewhere and take charge of her lands, whereas she could offer very little. This house, perhaps, if she was lucky.

Alina shook her head. “Women do not do well out of marriage on the whole. Look at me, sold to the Erringtons by my own father, the man who should care most for me…”

Tears pricked behind her eyes, and her throat tightened and made speech difficult. “I have been so foolish…I see now that I bring you nothing, Harry. You should aim so much higher than me. You should have a wife who can bring you property, and a title.” Her throat ached and tears threatened. “You deserve that, I think. I must go back and make amends, beg to be accepted. I cannot do anything else.”

For the second time that night Harry slid off his chair and went to his knees before Alina. He did not speak, for he could think of nothing to say in the face of her distress. He pulled her down and into his arms and rocked her back and forth before the fire, crooning wordlessly against her cheek.

Her sudden changes of mood confused him. What had made her decide so suddenly that she should not marry him?

Her face was hot and wet against his throat. Laying his cheek against the top of her head, his gaze sightless on the bare stones of the kitchen floor, he held her until she calmed.

“What is it?” He asked when the sobs died away. “I know it is a stupid question, but why are you giving me up? And what makes you think I want to go jaunting off around the countryside looking for a rich and titled woman to wed?”

She hid her face against the already damp surface of his doublet. “You said that was what you wanted. Men always seek wives who bring lands and estates. Why should you be different?”

Her hair smelled of smoke, not the roses he remembered from the first day they met in Corbridge market. She hadn’t been tending her own fires then, as she was now. “But I don’t want some rich heiress. I want you.”

She stilled in his arms. A moment later he heard and felt the huge breath she took as if steadying herself to reject him again. He pulled a piece of linen from his doublet sleeve. “Here. I can hardly understand you.”

Alina took the fabric, blew her nose, tossed her hair back and regarded him with pink eyes.

“Ah,” he said, “you’ve made your eyes sore.” He leaned forward and dropped a kiss on her lips. She lurched away from him and scrambled back into the chair behind her.

“The day you escaped the Leap and disappeared,” she said, with heavy emphasis on the last word, “was the very day Father told me John Errington would be my husband. John rode over to Aydon the next day, and came courting every day after that.”

Harry remained on the flagstones at her knees. Had she grown fond of the man? Was she regretting running away from the marriage? “Do you like him?”

She shrugged. “He is a nice man. Our families have known each other a long time.”

Harry ground his teeth together as she spoke. “But did you want to marry him?” His question sounded sharp in his own ears. A dark feeling he did not recognise twisted his innards in its grip.

“John is kind, considerate and I think he would have grown fond of me in time. What more could I have expected? Every woman expects to marry to her family’s advantage.” She flicked a wary glance in his direction.

“I expect a lot more than that from any wife I take.”

Her head lifted slowly. “I know. You want land, castles and riches before you’ll accept her.”

It occurred to him that he could give her nothing better than Old
Lammerside
. Perhaps she wanted a man richer than himself. “Errington would give you those, Alina. Can’t you answer a simple question?”

Her eyes widened. “What answer? You haven’t asked a question.”

“Perhaps you should have married him.” The words came without warning. He stared at her. Why had he said that? The words were exactly the opposite of what he intended. “Christ!”

“You want me to marry him? You really don’t care about me?” She ground her hands together in her lap.

Harry shook his head. “No—”

“John won’t want me now, so—”

Harry grasped her shoulders and shook her to silence. “Of course I don’t want you to marry Errington. I want you to marry me.”

Her reaction was slow. Her eyes widened, chestnut and gold in the firelight, and her lips parted. Gazing at him, searching his face, she raised her brows.

Harry nodded.

“Do you mean it?”

“Of course I mean it. I love you.” There it was. He’d said it, and he meant it. It hadn’t been so hard after all.

Alina slid out of her chair, landed on her knees before him and grasped his arms. “Oh, Harry! What have we been arguing about?”

“Unhand me, woman.” He growled at her, but could not repress the smile that wanted to burst through. “I didn’t invite you to throw yourself all over me. Think of the scandal if someone walked in.”

By the time he got the last word out, he was grinning like a boy and wrapped his arms around her.

“No one knows we’re here, Harry.”

Her soft lips tantalised him. He breathed deep, wondered if he breathed air that had been inside her body. Firelight flushed her pale skin to the colour of honey. Above the tight bodice, the drawstring neck of her linen drooped low enough to reveal the slender lines of her collar bones and the soft shadows where the bones met her throat. She breathed in fast, shallow gasps that made the shadows move and change.

Her lips met his, tentatively, a mere whisper of flesh against flesh. Harry’s heart lurched as her lips touched him again, moved to the corner of his mouth. She laid her cheek against his and rolled her head against him, over and over, as she murmured his name.

He grasped her arms, and held her off. “Alina—”

She looked at him with such adoration his heart leapt up, knocked against his breastbone and he forgot what he had been about to say. A pulse jumped and fluttered in her throat. She leaned slowly towards him and pressed her lips to his.

He groaned. “Alina, should we…?”

He really ought to stop her. If he was wise, he would. If he didn’t, there was no going back. What was he thinking? Already there was no going back. His old cynical reflexes kept getting in the way of this astonishing new direction in his life.

She went on kissing him, smothered his words with her mouth. Briefly, laughing, he pulled back. “If we must, then we must.” On a surge of breathless laughter he added, “I’ll say you forced me.”

“We must.” She ignored his attempt at humour. “But I don’t know where.”

He ran a line of kisses from her temple to her jaw. Slowly, as her words sank in, he paused. His brain didn’t seem to be working properly. Even his words blurred together when he finally spoke.
“
Whaddyamean
, where?”

She sat back. “There’s little furniture here. It’s all at Aydon.”

“All we need is a bed. The house full of furniture can wait,” he murmured, his mind concentrating on the information streaming through his fingertips. The sense of what she said coalesced all at once in his mind. He stopped caressing her and jerked back. “Are you telling me there’s no bed upstairs?”

“No bed, no bolster, no blankets. My mother is a good housewife and she took everything we needed to Aydon. The house is nearly empty.”

Harry stared at the stone flags of the kitchen floor.
Impossible to make love there.
The narrow wooden settle offered no safe refuge. Had they been practiced lovers, the chair or the table might have sufficed, but Alina was far from practiced. He groaned, ran a hand through his hair and met her amused glance.

“There’s always the stable.” Her smile was innocent. “They didn’t take all the straw.”

Their eyes met in mutual delight. “You have a wicked mind, Alina.”

She grinned as if at a compliment, shuffled off his lap, and waited.

He did not move. “It will be cold, you know.” Was she really suggesting they should go and make love in the stable?

“I have my cloak. We can make a nest in the straw. Did you never do that when you were a child? Or are you so old you cannot recall your childhood?”

She teased him, he knew. He wanted her so badly he ached for her but he tried not to appear too eager.
“In daylight, yes.
But never in the cold of night.”

“It is summer, Harry.
Jesu
, what ails you that your blood runs so thin?”

He rose and grasped her before she could back away. “You have a bright, brave adventurous spirit, Alina Carnaby and I salute you. But you have changed your mind several times this night already. Remember, when you turn to an icicle in the straw, that this was your idea, not mine.”

She laughed, and made for the door.

Harry threw a glance at the fire, decided it would burn for an hour unattended, and grinned as he strode after her. He got to the door, hurried back and pulled his cloak from his saddle bag.

His mare snuffled a welcome as they clattered into the stable.

“We should have brought a lantern,” he muttered.

Alina guided him to the narrow set of rickety steps against the side wall and followed him up. Together they groped through the darkness. Harry used his knife to slit the twine binding a couple of straw bales and spread the fresh straw out on the loft floor.

“Imagine it makes a soft, golden bed.” Alina’s subdued whisper came out of the shadows and made his skin twitch.

“I suppose we’ll be able to see something when our eyes adjust to the darkness. Where are you?”

“Here.” She was a substantial form, warm between his two hands. Her wandering hand found his face, and the other joined it. “Let me spread my cloak and then—oh, Harry!”

The straw rustled and released the scent of summer fields about them.

“This is hardly what I imagined.” Guilt, an emotion he rarely felt, flickered through him. “You should have a featherbed, Alina, and silks and jewels on your wedding day.”

Her palm drew his face towards her. “But I shall remember this more than any featherbed.” Their mouths met, joined and explored. Her hand clamped over his and held it still. “You do love me, Harry? We will be together always?”

The age old plea.
The one he had always avoided before. But this time, he must answer it, or she would be gone. And he must sound convincing. “I love you. I want to marry you.”

“You could sound as if you meant it,” she muttered and sank her teeth into his shoulder.

Heat pulsed through him. The darkness concealed his body’s reaction to her touch. As a signal of his good intentions, he put his hands behind his back.

“I don’t have a lot of practice at this declaration lark,” he said. “I shall not touch you if you are not sure.” He waited. An inner voice told him that he’d made a silly move. He should have kept hold of her. “Are you sure?”

“Aye, of myself.”
Her sharp voice came out of the shadows.
“But what of you?”

He sighed. She was going to freeze him out again. “What can I say? I speak flippantly. Always have done. How can I convince you that I love you, that my heart is yours forever?”

He let himself fall full length in the straw. The rest was up to her.

After several long moments she came to rest beside him. In some ways it was a pity they had no light, for he would like to have seen her face and judge her expression. He wanted to see her unclothed but there were no guarantees and he must move very carefully. He risked losing her if he moved too fast.

“Let me tell you something,” he said comfortably. “I told my father about you before I left, and he—”

The straw rustled as she sat up again.

“Be still.” He pulled her down and resisted the urge to fondle anything more intimate than the curve of her shoulder. “Yes, I told him about you. He asked me much the same question you did, though not quite in the same terms, perhaps. I assured him that I wanted to marry the girl who had the misfortune to be Cuthbert Carnaby’s daughter, and
we
—”

“Misfortune?”

He found he did not need light for she stiffened in outrage beneath his palms. “We hatched a plan whereby I should bring the Deputy Lord Warden’s orders to Cuthbert Carnaby since his brother is ailing.”

“He’s dead,” she said flatly.

“What?” He still could not see her. Not even a stray moonbeam found a way through the sturdy roof.

“Sir Reynold died yesterday morn. He’s been ill since May, poor man.”

He pulled her closer. She was slender, but her breasts were rounded mounds pressed against him and he longed to touch them. Later, he told himself sternly.
Later.
The innkeeper in Corbridge had told him Carnaby was dead. He ought to have remembered.

“I’m sorry. Were you close to him?”

“No, not really.
He was always travelling from here to Halton, to Hexham, to Langley. Sometimes to
Bearl
, even
Fallodon
.” She sounded subdued. “His wife is already dead, so his daughters will continue to live at Shortflatt with their maternal grandmother.”

No wonder she’d shed a few tears earlier. Death was never easy and she’d had a lot of other things to contend with in the last few days. “Your lady mother will not accept the children?”

Alina sighed. “There’s no room for them. Once the repairs are done, and extra chambers built, then perhaps they will come to us. But I interrupted. My mind is in such a whirl. Please go on with your plan.”

“I’ve forgotten what I was saying…”

“Your father’s orders for Aydon.”

He settled more comfortably into the nest of straw and pulled the second cloak over them both. “Well, let’s see. I’ve brought written orders from the Lord Warden to your father. That means he cannot attack me now. Or if he does, he’ll have to face the Lord Warden, with three thousand soldiers at his back. Not a likely prospect, I think.”