There were more shrieks as the two girls came rolling down the hill after her, and then the nature of the game changed as all the children demanded to roll rather than run. Phillip and Davy were taking the hill up at a run.
“And so you had your wish, Mrs. Derrick,” the Duke of Bewcastle said.
“Jolly good show!” Lord Rannulf said, grinning and looking ruggedly handsome.
“Now I am mortally jealous,” Lady Freyja said. “I have not done that in years. But today I will. Wait for me, Davy!”
Christine was hastily checking that her legs and head were decently covered and wondering if she had left any grass on the slope or if she had brought every blade of it down with her on her person. She brushed vigorously at herself as she got to her feet.
“Wulf,” Lord Alleyne said, “now that Mrs. Derrick has shown the children how to
really
enjoy themselves and set a challenge for Free, why do you not take her to show her the lake?”
“I will do that, thank you, Alleyne,” the duke said curtly, “if Mrs. Derrick wishes it. Ma’am?”
“I do indeed,” she said, laughing and taking his offered arm. “I have made enough of a cake of myself for one day.”
The Earl of Rosthorn, she noticed, winked at her.
The duke led her off through the trees, and soon they had left the noise and the frolicking behind them.
“I was merely showing the girls how to do it,” she explained after the silence had stretched between them. “They
pushed
me.”
He did not comment.
“It must have been a most undignified spectacle,” she said. “Your brothers and sisters must think me the most dreadful of creatures.”
Still he made no comment.
“And
you
must think it,” she added.
She was not quite sure what he did with her arm then. But whatever it was, she found herself the next moment with her back against a tree trunk and the Duke of Bewcastle standing in front of her, looking grim and very dangerous indeed. One of his hands was propped on the bark beside her head.
“And do you care, Mrs. Derrick?” he asked her. “Do you
care
what I think?”
It was obvious what he thought. He was furious with her. He thought her vulgar and unladylike. She had just put on a shocking display of both traits for his family. And she was his invited guest. Her behavior reflected badly upon him. She suddenly thought of Hermione’s warnings of last night.
“No,” she said, though she did, she realized. She did care.
“As I thought.” He looked arctic.
“You just do not like children, do you?” she said. “Or anything suggestive of childhood or exuberance or sheer enjoyment. Cold, sober dignity is everything to you—
everything
. Of course I do not care what you think of me.”
“I will tell you anyway,” he said, his eyes blazing with a curious cold light that she recognized as anger. “I believe you were put on this earth to bring light to your fellow mortals, Mrs. Derrick. And I believe you should stop assuming that you know me and understand me.”
“Oh.” She pressed the back of her bonnet against the tree. “I hate it when you do that. Just when I think we are launched on a satisfactory quarrel, you take the wind out of my sails. What on earth do you mean by it?”
“You do not know me at all,” he said.
“The other thing,” she said. “About my being here to bring light.”
He moved his head one inch closer, but his eyes were still like two blazing ice chips—a curious anomaly!
“You do things that are impulsive and unladylike and clumsy and even vulgar,” he said. “You chatter too much, you laugh too much, and you sparkle in a manner that is in no way refined. And yet you attract almost everyone within your aura as a flame does a moth. You think people despise you and scorn you and shun you, when the opposite is true. You have told me that you did not take well with the
ton
. I do not believe it. I believe you took very well indeed—or would have done if you had been allowed to. I do not know who put the idea into your head that you did not, but that person was wrong. Perhaps he could not bear the power of your light, or perhaps he could not bear to share it with his world. Perhaps he mistook the light for flirtation. That is what I
think,
Mrs. Derrick. I was digesting the wonder of the fact that Lindsey Hall was alive with the presence of children again, most of them the offspring of my own brothers and sisters—and then you came hurtling down the hill into my arms. You will not
dare
tell me now that I do not like children or exuberance or enjoyment.”
She felt considerably shaken. At the same time she felt a certain elation—she had made him angry! He was clearly furious with her. And his anger had spilled over. She had never, since her first acquaintance with him, heard him string together so many words at one time.
“And
you
will not dare tell me what I may or may not say,” she said. “You may have almost total power over your world, your grace, but I am not of it. You have no power over
me
. And, after hearing your description of me, we must both be glad of it. I would shame you every day of your life—as I did in Hyde Park, as I did this afternoon.”
“Unlike your late husband or his brother, or whoever it was that convinced you that you are nothing more than a flirt,” he said, “I believe I
could
stand the power of your light, Mrs. Derrick. My own identity would not be diminished by it. And
yours
would not be diminished by my power. You once told me I would sap your joy, but you belittle yourself if you truly believe it. Joy can be sapped only by weakness. I am not, I believe, a weak man.”
“What nonsense you speak!” she said as he finally leaned back away from her and removed his hand from the tree trunk. “No one else exists for you except as minions to run and fetch for you and obey your every command. And you command with the mere lifting of a finger or an eyebrow. Of
course
you would have to control me too if I were unwise enough to put myself into your power. You know no other way of relating to people.”
“And you, Mrs. Derrick,” he said, taking a few steps away from her and then turning to look back at her, “know no other way of fighting your attraction to me than to convince yourself that you know me through and through. Have you decided, then, that I wear no mask after all? Or that you were right last evening when you said that perhaps I was simply the Duke of Bewcastle to the core?”
“I am
not
attracted to you!” she cried.
“Are you not?” He raised one supercilious eyebrow and then his quizzing glass. “You have sexual relations, then, with every dancing partner who invites you to accompany him to a secluded spot?”
Fury blossomed in her. And it focused upon one object.
“That,”
she said, striding toward him, “is the outside of enough!”
She snatched the quizzing glass out of his nerveless hand, yanked the black ribbon off over his head, and sent the glass flying with one furious flick of her wrist.
They both watched it twirl upward in an impressively high arc, reach its zenith between two trees, and then begin its downward arc—which was never completed. The ribbon caught on a high twig and held there. The glass swung back and forth like a pendulum a mile off the ground—or so it seemed to Christine.
She was the first to speak.
“And this time,” she said, “I am not going up for it.”
“I am relieved to hear it, ma’am,” he said, his voice sounding as frosty as she had ever heard it. “I would hate to have to carry you all the way to the house in another ruined dress.”
She turned her head to glare at him.
“I am
not
attracted to you,” she said. “And I am
not
promiscuous.”
“I did not believe you were,” he assured her. “That, in fact, was my very point.”
“I daresay,” she said, looking ruefully up at the quizzing glass, which was now swaying gently in the breeze, “you will raise an eyebrow when we return and an army of gardeners will rush out here to rescue it. You will not be able to raise your quizzing glass, will you? Though I daresay you have an endless supply of them.”
“Eight,” he said curtly. “I have eight of them—or will have when that particular one is back in my keeping.” And he strode away from her.
For a moment Christine thought that she was being abandoned for her sins. But then she realized that he was headed for the old oak tree in pursuit of his quizzing glass. He went up the tree as he had come down the slope from the wilderness walk—with ease and elegance. Her heart was in her mouth by the time he was high enough to reach for his glass, but it was too far from the trunk, and he had to sit on a branch and edge his way out toward it.
“Oh, do be careful!” Christine cried, and set both hands over her mouth.
“I always am.” He unhooked the ribbon, dropped it and the glass for her to catch, and sat there looking down at her. “Always. Except, it would seem, where you are concerned. If I were careful, I would stay here, just where I am, until you had returned safely to Gloucestershire. If I had been careful, I would have avoided you at Schofield Park as I would avoid the plague. Earlier this year I would have shut myself up inside Bedwyn House after Miss Magnus’s wedding until I was sure you were at least fifty miles on your journey home. After one aborted plan to marry when I was twenty-four, I gave up all idea of marriage. I have not looked for a bride since then. If I
had,
she most certainly would not have been you. I would have been very
careful
to choose altogether more wisely. Indeed, you are the very antithesis of the woman I would have chosen.”
“Of course you do not wish to marry,” she said tartly, “when you have two mistresses.”
Too late she realized that she had been goaded into the ultimate vulgarity. But how dared he tell her so bluntly that she was the very antithesis of the woman he would want for a duchess.
He gazed down at her from his high perch, looking surly and gorgeously handsome.
“Two,” he said. “One for the week and the other for Sundays? Or one for the country and one for town? Or one for the day and one for the night? Your informant is
mis
informed, Mrs. Derrick. My long-term mistress died more than a year ago, and I know of no other. And you
will
forgive the vulgarity of my mentioning such a person to you, no doubt, since you were the first to refer to her.”
More than a year ago. At Schofield last summer, then, he had been trying to replace that mistress—with
her
.
“I find myself constantly infuriated and enchanted by you,” he told her. “Often both at the same time. How can one explain that?”
“I do not
want
to enchant you,” she cried. “I do not even want to infuriate you. I do not want to be
anything
to you. You have no business having feelings for a woman you so obviously despise. Imagine how much more you would come to despise me if you were forced to live with me for the rest of your life.”
He speared her with his cold glance.
“Is that what happened to you the last time?” he asked her.
“It is no
business
of yours what happened to me last time or any time,” she said. “
I
am none of your business. Are you planning to sit there all day—or until I leave for Gloucestershire? It is remarkably foolish to be quarreling thus when you might fall at any moment and I might acquire a stiff neck.”
He made his way down without another word. She watched him in silence. He was a marvelously muscular and virile man, she thought resentfully. He was also a very disturbing presence. This afternoon she had seen that there was more to him than power and ice. She had seen him angry and frustrated. He had told her that she enchanted him—and infuriated him.
Why was it, she wondered, that opposites attracted? And they were such very extreme opposites. But opposites surely could never progress beyond mere attraction. They could never coexist in harmony and happiness. She would not—oh, she
would not
—give up her freedom ever again on the mere whim of an attraction.
Even though it felt like love.
He slapped his hands over his coat and pantaloons while she looped the ribbon of his quizzing glass over her head. He was not going to use it on her again this afternoon if she could help it.
“It is too late to walk to the dovecote today,” he said. “It will have to wait for another occasion. Let me take you to walk back beside the lake—as Alleyne suggested.”
His eyes came to rest on his quizzing glass, but he made no comment or demand for its return.
“Yes,” she said, clasping her hands behind her. “Thank you.”
I believe you were put on this earth to bring light to your fellow mortals, Mrs. Derrick.
Would she ever forget his saying those words? Such strange words. They made her want to weep.
He
made her want to weep, nasty, horrid man.
18
T
HEY WALKED ALONG THE SHORE OF THE LAKE BACK IN
the direction of the house. The wind came directly across the water and, though it was a lovely day, one could feel now that it was still only early spring.
Wulfric felt shaken by the fact that he had lost his temper with her. It was something he never did. But then, falling in love was something he never did either—until now. He had told her the truth—he was constantly irritated with her and enchanted by her. Even now he was tempted to let her go, to back off, to turn on the chill again—according to her he never turned it off anyway—and to forget all about this madness of wooing her.
Whoever had heard of a Duchess of Bewcastle rolling down a long hill with a large audience of Bedwyns and Bedwyn children looking on, and shrieking with exuberance and laughing with glee as she did it? And looking so vibrantly beautiful that he had almost scooped her right up into his arms at the bottom of the hill and covered her face with kisses.
He wondered how his brothers and sisters—and the Renables—would have reacted if he had done so.