Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress (12 page)

‘No, of course, you won’t be.’ The keeper’s face fell. ‘You will soon enough, won’t you? But we don’t have to wait—Sir John Vernon at Hall Place, he’ll have the old rogue behind bars, soon as look at him.’

It would kill Billy. And it was a miracle he’d escaped capture before now. But Ross wasn’t going to let him fall foul of Tregarne if he could help it. If he could only think of a way to keep the wily poacher on the right side of the law—but that was like looking for ways to stop cats chasing mice.

He could tell Tregarne to ignore whatever Billy was up to—but that would be openly condoning smuggling as well as undermining Tregarne’s authority with his underkeepers.

‘Leave him be for a few days,’ he temporised. ‘I’ll see about getting sworn—I don’t want to export my own troubles over to Sir John to deal with.’

‘Aye, I can see that.’ Tregarne nodded agreement. ‘You’ll call in tomorrow then, my lord? There’s a field of young beet with the tops being shredded by those darned pigeons. I could fancy a pie.’

Ross found the conversation had calmed both his anger, and his desire. There was Billy to worry about,
but he’d think of something. As Ross crossed the hall on his way to the library he met Meg, just emerging from the door to the back stairs.

‘Mrs Halgate.’ Ross felt an unfamiliar sensation in his cheek muscles. He wanted to smile at her, although he was not at all sure why, infuriating woman.

‘My lord.’ She sounded just a touch wary.

‘I have come to the conclusion that I have no use for two gowns, a pelisse and some female undergarments. I suggest you keep them.’ Meg opened her mouth as though to speak, then closed it, her eyes intent on him. ‘Because you are not going anywhere just yet, are you, Meg Halgate?’ And then he did smile as he turned and took the stairs two at a time.

‘Ow!’ He reached the turn of the stairs and the half-landing, out of Meg’s sight, before the stab of pain in his leg brought him up short. Ross hopped a couple of steps and sat down at the foot of the next flight to wince and stretch his leg. That had been a damn fool thing to do, but the sudden attack of high spirits had made him act like a twelve-year-old. Which was ridiculous. The estate and all its problems had not vanished; there was Billy, just as much of a rogue as he’d always been, and now adding smuggling to the tally of his offences, at least one household full of simpering blonde damsels in pursuit of his title—and Meg.

Meg, with whom he had erred so badly she was talking about leaving him. Meg, who he was aching for and who he had to have. Somehow, if he could just fathom what she wanted. Meg. Ross leaned back against the stairs, closed his eyes and contemplated the things that were so desirable about Meg Halgate.

There were her blue-grey eyes and those long dark
lashes. There were her curves. There was the way that one corner of her mouth dimpled slightly more than the other when she smiled and that tiny mole at the corner of her right eye. And the way she stood up to him and the wicked flashes of humour and the strange sensation that he was waking up from a long, nightmare-racked sleep and she had him by the hand and was teaching him to see and feel again.

‘My lord?’ said a voice from above him.

Ross tilted back his head, opened his eyes and saw Damaris, Meg’s red-headed maid, looking down at him.

‘Are you all right, my lord? I thought you must have fallen, but then I saw you were smiling. I can go round to the back stairs, only—’

‘No, that’s fine, Damaris.’ Ross got to his feet and stood aside to let her pass. I was just thinking.’ And dreaming.

‘M
rs Halgate, ma’am?’

Meg blinked and found she was standing in the hall with a foolish smile on her face.
He smiled! He smiled and he made a joke.
Damaris was standing in front of her, looking worried. As well she might with the housekeeper behaving in such a hen-witted way.

‘Yes, Damaris? What is wrong?’

‘It’s his lordship,’ the maid hissed with a glance over her shoulder. ‘I found him sitting on the stairs, just at the landing, with his eyes closed and a big grin on his face. And when I asked him if he was all right, he said he was thinking. Seems an odd place for a gentleman to be thinking. Don’t they have studies for that?’

‘I believe that thought can strike a gentleman anywhere. Unlike we poor females who must do our work first and then think, if we have the leisure. Come along, Damaris, I’ve sure we have a lot to be doing.’
Only just at this moment, I cannot for the life of me remember what it is.

Damaris was looking doubtful. ‘We’ve done everything
on the list for today, Mrs Halgate. Unless you was wishful to be making a start on the linen cupboard?’

The Housekeeper’s Guide
was most insistent about the importance of maintaining an up-to-date register of the contents of the linen cupboard, with every item and its condition noted, and Mrs Fogarty’s linen list had a date of almost twelve months ago.

‘No, we will save that treat for tomorrow.’ She needed to read the relevant sections in the
Guide
first. Linen cupboards sounded straightforward, but there was sure to be some vital detail she must not miss.

‘I am going for a walk, Damaris. You may have the rest of the afternoon off.’

There, that’s another smile,
she thought as she made her way to her rooms for a shawl and to change her shoes. At this rate the entire household would be beaming.

But what was making Ross smile? Meg walked round the side of the house and found a footpath leading in the direction of the sea. He had not enjoyed the visit from Lady Pennare and her daughters, so that could not be the cause. Then they had had that ridiculous row over her becoming his mistress. Men did not like being refused, especially about sex. James had never had any patience with her when she had let any reluctance show and he had positively sulked when she had her courses.

The path reached an old gate, just right for leaning on and thinking. Why refuse Ross when it made her feel this strange inside? She wanted him. It would be so good in his arms, she knew that. He might be big and fierce but he could be gentle. And he would know what he was doing. A smile tugged at her lips at the thought of Ross knowing what he was doing.

But it would be a financial transaction and that left her heart cold. What had Shakespeare said? ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action…’ and Ross meant more to her than that. Quite what, though, she was not certain. She had not felt like this with James and she had believed herself in love with him. But Ross, so much tougher and harder than James, made her shiver with both tenderness and desire, longing and lust. She would not surrender to him—but might she go to him, as an equal? Would that be worth the broken heart that would surely follow?

Too much thinking—she needed to walk. With a shake of her head Meg pushed the gate open and found herself in a lane, deep between grassy banks higher than her head, their slopes studded with wild flowers. She had noticed the flowers as they had driven here, but they had passed in a blur. Now she could stop and enjoy them individually. Bluebells in indigo profusion, primroses, the vivid magenta heads of ragged robin and sheets of wild garlic with nodding white heads.

Shuttlecock-heads of hart’s tongue fern were unfurling themselves and the soft leaves of foxgloves promised towering spikes still to come.

Enchanted, she strolled down the lane, stooping to examine trails of scarlet pimpernels and the blue bird’s-eye periwinkle and reaching up to pluck a spray of wild cherry blossom to tuck behind her ear.

When the lane petered out suddenly into sand she was right on a beach, a sandy half-moon between two arms of low brown cliff. The sea was breaking in tiny waves, smoothing the sand like well-ironed linen, and bisecting the half-moon was a tiny stream. It must be the stream that ran near Billy’s cottage.

There was no one in sight, no reason not to give in to temptation, take off her shoes, roll down her stockings and paddle in the frothy edge of the water. Under her bare feet the sand was cool and grainy; the water when she ventured in a few inches made her gasp—despite the sunshine the sea was icy. Once she had learned to swim in still, fresh water, the deep calm of the millpond with the sun on her back. A long time ago.

But this was curiously both soothing and stimulating at the same time. She lifted her skirts to her knees and ran a little, splashing, then retreated up the beach as a bigger wave came in.

How Bella and Lina would love this! The three of them, free, happy, running over the sand and laughing in the sunlight.
I’ll find you soon,
she promised silently.
We will be together.

Toes numb, she walked back to her rock and sat with her feet on a smooth boulder to dry so she could brush off the sand. Seabirds swooped and shrieked, a fishing boat sailed past, the sun shone and Meg sank into the puzzle of Ross’s smile.

It was not that she did not wish him to smile, it was wonderful that he had, but she felt uneasily that it was to do with her and that, in some mysterious, masculine way, he had not been discouraged by her refusal to be his mistress.

Which was worrying, because she so much wanted to say
yes
that she was shocking herself. The old, romantic, yearning, loving Meg, whom she thought had been buried in disappointment and the need for sheer common sense in order to survive, was still there.

Was the only thing that was stopping her yielding to him the fact that he was offering her money, the position
of a mistress? That he wanted to buy her, which would ensure for him that all the inconvenience of emotion and feeling could be set aside? Did that freeze the spontaneous impulse to follow her instincts and go to him? If he had set out simply to seduce her for one night of passion, she might have succumbed. Because, however much Ross looked like the Grim Reaper most of the time, there were those moments when every nerve in her body seemed quiveringly aware of him and the inevitable unhappy ending of all this no longer seemed to matter.

‘You be that new housekeeper up at the Court?’ The strong Cornish burr was right by her ear.

It was Ross’s old poacher. He must be able to move like a ghost. How long had he been there? And her with bare feet, bare head and a bunch of cherry blossom behind her ear. ‘Yes. I am Mrs Halgate. I’ve never been at the seaside before,’ she added, as though to excuse her eccentric behaviour. ‘It is beautiful.’

He watched her with unusual amber eyes that seemed startlingly youthful in his wrinkled face. She should get up and walk away, she knew, but something about him fascinated her. ‘You be as pretty as he told I.’

‘Who? Ross? I mean, Lord Brandon?’

‘Aah,’ he said, a complicated noise with more vowels in it than she could count. He sat down on a rock facing her. ‘You looking after that boy properly?’ A black-and-white dog, long haired with a plumy tail, crept up, belly to the sand, and curled round at his feet.

‘Boy? He is hardly that. You are Billy, are you not? I’m afraid I don’t know your last name.’ Dreadful old reprobate he might be, but this was the man Ross
seemed to regard almost as a grandfather. If she wanted to understand Ross, perhaps he could help her.

‘Billy’ll do. He talk about me, then?’

‘Lord Brandon spoke fondly of you. He told me that you taught him how to shoot and how to treat girls.’

The old man gave a crack of laughter that had the dog looking up. ‘Well, he shoots damn fine, I just hope he listened about girls.’ He got at least one
u
into the word, but Meg was beginning to understand the accent now.

‘I really would not know.’

‘Aah.’

‘I am his housekeeper,’ Meg said repressively. ‘Lord Brandon—’

‘Don’t be calling him that, that’s his father, God rot him. Ross ain’t his father.’

‘Well, it is his title now, and he has to manage this estate and find himself a wife and settle down. And be happy.’

‘Why not marry him yourself then, maid?’ Infuriating old man. Meg glared at him. He had hardly any teeth and the few she could see were brown with tobacco. She suspected he hadn’t washed in a year and probably, if the sea breezes were not blowing from her to him, smelt like a ferret, and he had no business whatsoever talking to her like this. But Ross loved him. And he obviously loved Ross. Ross needed love. She couldn’t bring herself to snub Billy.

‘That would be impossible. He is a baron. I—’
I am forbidden from marrying any decent man because of what I have done.

‘You’re a widow, and an officer’s widow too, he says. A lady. Respectable.’

‘Not respectable enough.’ Impossible that she ever could be. She should be sinking with shame at such a frank conversation, but talking to this old man was more like confiding in a wild animal or an ancient tree than confessing to a person.

‘Boy’s a fool,’ the poacher said. At least, that was what Meg guessed he said. ‘I’ll sort him out for you.’

‘No!’

The dog sat up and barked. Old Billy blinked at her, slowly, like a very thoughtful lizard. ‘Don’t you want him then, maid?’

‘I…Certainly not.’

‘Hah! Never thought Ross’d be such a gommuck. Good day to you, maid.’

‘G-good day,’ Meg stammered. The old man picked up his stick and walked away up the beach to where the scrubby woodland ended. He whistled, sharply. The dog sprang up, swiped a hot tongue over Meg’s bare feet and when she looked back to the wood both man and dog had vanished as mysteriously as they had appeared.

She brushed the sand off her feet, put on her stockings, laced her shoes and made her way back up the lane, uncertain whether she was amused or alarmed by that encounter. Would he take Ross to task and lecture him on marriage? What if Ross thought she had put the idea into Billy’s head and not the other way around?

The thought of marrying Ross had never entered her mind—her conscience was quite clear about that. She had married once, thinking herself in love, and that had not been what her romantic soul had thought it might be. She was older and wiser now, knew that no man was all hero, all saint, however handsome his face and sunny his smiles. And Ross was not handsome and he rationed
his smiles like a miser. Was she—could she be?—in love with him?

‘Have you been out a-gypsying?’

Meg stopped short. Without realising it she had reached the edge of the terrace and there was Ross, his shoulder propped against one of the lichen-encrusted urns that edged it, towering over her as she stood on the grass below him. Her insides did the complicated flip-flop that the unexpected sight of him always produced.

‘I have been down to the beach.’

‘And returned without your bonnet, with flowers in your hair and, I will bet a guinea, you have sand between your toes.’

‘I am afraid I have.’ He straightened up and kept pace with her as she walked along to the shallow flight of steps in the centre of the terrace. ‘But I have never been beside the sea before, so I could not resist paddling.’ She put up a hand to remove the cherry blossom before she utterly undermined what authority she had with the staff by walking in with it in her wind-blown hair.

Ross leaned down and plucked it out before she could reach it, his fingertips ruffling into the fine hairs at her temple and sending a shiver down her spine. ‘Did you meet any smugglers?’ He stuck the stem into his buttonhole and waited for her to climb the three steps to his side.

‘Why, are there any? I saw a fishing boat, that was all.’

‘My head keeper tells me we have smugglers in the bay. There are caves if you know where to look and the tide is right—not big ones, but enough to stow a few barrels of brandy in.’

‘Oh.’ Smugglers had a romantic reputation, but no doubt in reality they were just as unglamorous and unpleasant
as highwaymen. ‘Did your father turn a blind eye to it?’

‘He must have done.’ Ross set his shoulder against another urn and looked out towards the sea. ‘The brandy I’ve been drinking is the good French stuff, and the barrels it is coming out of have no marks on them.’

‘And do you condone it too?’

‘They did a lot of damage when we were at war. It was a prime route for intelligence to reach the French. That danger has gone now, but I must take a stand before they start intimidating people on the estate. And when I’m sworn as a magistrate I will have to take an active interest, and not just on my own land.’

My own land.
An admission at last that it was his. The relief at hearing the unconscious note of possession in his voice made her suddenly light-hearted. ‘Ross, what is a gommuck?’

‘A fool, a clumsy fellow. A clodpole. Why, where did you hear that?’

‘Oh, just a country person I passed.’ Would Billy tell Ross he had spoken to her? Was it best to admit she had seen him, or not? Then the moment to mention it was passed. Ross laid a hand on her forearm as she turned to go in and her breath caught.

‘I have heard from Kimber, my solicitor. He has a young man he recommends as a confidential enquiry agent and he is sending him up to speak with you on Monday. His name is Patrick Jago, the second son of the squire of a parish a few miles north of here. He has carried out some commissions for Kimber and he speaks well of him.’

‘Thank you, it was thoughtful of you to arrange it. It is such a relief to be taking action at last.’ His hand was
warm on her arm and she did not want to move. Or think. But she must. ‘You will make an accounting of Mr Kimber’s time and deduct it from my wages, of course.’

‘Why? In case I should extract payment for it in some other way later?’ His brow lifted in that devilish way he had when he was on his dignity.

‘No.’ Meg moved away so his hand fell from her arm. ‘In case you should suppose that I presume upon my position.’