“Lady Blake shall partner you,” Mrs. Ansby proclaimed. “It will do you good, my dear, to come out of your corner for once. You are a deal too reclusive, y'know. It must be months since you made a four.”
“It is indeed,” Merrie murmured tremulously. “But it does not seem kind to inflict on Lord Rutherford a partner so lamentably out of practice.”
“I am certain his lordship's skill will make up for any you lack, Lady Blake,” Mr. Ansby boomed kindly in ample support of his wife's happy notion.
Damian's face bore witness to his dismay at the prospect, then all emotion was politely extinguished as he hastened to express his delight in the arrangement. He offered Lady Blake his arm and, with much tutting and twittering at his kindness, she took it.
“Stop it!” he hissed, escorting her to the card room. “It is bad enough to be obliged to partner a half-wit without having to listen to that nonsense.”
Merrie's shoulders shook imperceptibly to all but her companion, who stood arm to arm with her. His lordship began to wonder how he was to survive the evening without yielding to the temptation to wring her neck.
At the end of the bidding, he thought that he had possibly misjudged her. When she led to his singleton heart, he was convinced. What did interest him was why, when it came to cards, she was prepared to reveal her true colors. True, she continued to flutter, dropped her fan and her gloves with irritating regularity, and laughed in that self-deprecating way whenever she won a trick, but she played with a cool calculation that left them clear winners at the end of the rubber.
“Ah, Lady Blake, I had quite forgot how you and Sir John used to trounce us all.” Mr. Ansby laughed, then his already florid complexion reddened, and he coughed awkwardly. “So sorry, m'dear, didn't intend to bring back unwelcome . . . ”
“Pray, Mr. Ansby, do not trouble yourself,” Meredith said hastily although a scrap of lace appeared from her reticule, and she dabbed at her eyes.
Lord Rutherford rose from the table, unable to bear the affecting spectacle a minute longer. How he had fallen in love with a mischievous, consummate liar, actress, hypocrite, and lawbreaker would forever remain a mystery. He wanted to shake her as often as he wanted to kiss her and, at the moment, could not decide which desire was uppermost. One thing was clear, she had drawn him into her game and with every outrageous sally invited his laugher. It was high time he laid some other cards upon the table.
There was little opportunity for conversation of any kind as the evening progressed through some indifferent playing and singing by aspiring daughters of the gentry, all of whom his lordship was obliged to applaud and compliment with indiscriminate evenhandedness. At the end of an excruciating harp performance, he heard Meredith's voice raised in exaggerated praise, requesting an encore.
“Will you not play for us, Lady Blake?” he enquired in silken tones.
“Oh, dear me, no.” Meredith flapped her hands in distress. “I am such a poor player, my lord, and have no voice at all. Why it would put me to shame in front of these accomplished young ladies.” She smiled in nervous appeal around the room.
“Perhaps Lady Blake will honor us after supper.” Patience came to her rescue with the smile of kindly condescension that set his lordship's teeth on edge, but Meredith gave her a look brimming with gratitude and fluttered to her side.
“Do you again intend returning home on foot, Lady Blake?” his lordship enquired in her ear, catching up with her as she left the supper room.
“Thank you, but I have the gig,” she replied as if he had made some offer of transport.
“Then you must allow me to escort you,” he said.
“You are too kind, my lord. But my groom is here to accompany me.”
“Send him home beforehand.”
The instruction was delivered in the colonel's incisive accents and Meredith inhaled sharply. “I have some things I wish to say to you,” he went on quietly. “You will prefer to hear them alone.” He moved away from her then and showed no inclination to talk again with her for the remainder of the evening.
Meredith found this most disconcerting. Not only was he so sure of her obedience that he would offer no further explanation or inducement, but there had been a note of deadly seriousness in his voice as if the time for games playing had passed. Intrigued, in spite of the distant pealing of alarm bells, she went into the hall where the butler stood at the door.
“Jacobson, would you have a message conveyed to the stables, please? Tommy should return to Pendennis immediately. He will have to be up betimes in the morning and I'll not keep him overlong from his bed.”
“Yes, my lady.” Jacobson was not unduly surprised at the instruction. Lady Blake was well known for the care she took of her servants, particularly of the young ones. It was not like her ladyship to keep late hours herself though, but she seemed in little hurry to make her farewells this evening.
When she did leave, it was at the instigation of Lord Rutherford. “May I fetch your cloak?” he inquired pleasantly as she stood talking to Lady Collier. “Your carriage has been brought round.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say that she had not ordered her gig and had no intention of leaving just yet, but to do so would look most singular. Smiling compliance seemed the only choice. To her relief, Rutherford made no attempt to accompany her publicly. She was allowed to make her farewells and drive the gig out of sight of the house before the black stallion caught up with her.
“You are learning to be an apt pupil, it would seem,” Lord Rutherford said with approval, drawing up alongside.
“Indeed, my lord? You, I presume, were never taught to be gracious in victory.” She held the reins loosely in her lap. Even had she wished to outrun him, the prospect of the dappled mare and gig against the black was merely amusing.
“I might become so, were I ever to be certain that a victory over you would not turn out to be Pyrrhic,” he retorted, looping Saracen's reins around the pommel before, with a deft movement, swinging himself into the gig beside her.
“You have something you wish to say to me, my lord?” Merrie kept her eyes on the road ahead.
“First, there is something I must do. Something I owe you if you recall.” He removed the reins from her hand. “Does this animal know its own way home?”
“Probably. Oh, what are you doing?”
“I hope that was a rhetorical question,” he said, slipping an arm around her and drawing her across his lap. Merrie, in sudden panic, struggled in good earnest, but the muscular thighs beneath her squirming body tautened, both arms encircled her, turning her sideways and cradling her against his chest. The hold was quite invincible and with that realization her struggles momentarily subsided. The skirmish had been fought in silence. Now, with her head pressed to his chest, she could hear the steady thud of his heart against her ear, in the crimson-shot darkness behind her closed eyes. “That's better.” His voice, that infuriatingly carried a note of laughter mingled with undeniable satisfaction, brought her back to a sense of reality.
“Let me go!” She pushed against his chest, anger, not panic motivating her now. Damian chuckled, reveling in the feel of that lithe body twisting against him. His new knowledge of how and why Merrie Trelawney possessed such strength and muscular control merely added to his guilt-free determination to ignore all the rules of chivalry in the pursuit of his purpose. This mischievous little smuggler in the crook of his arm broke more than enough rules of her own to make her fair game in the battle of love he must wage. And he was in no doubt that the strongest card he held was his recognition of her deep well of passion that, he was convinced, had not yet been fully drawn by anyone.
He loosened his grip sufficiently to give her room to wriggle, although not to escape, and, having no desire to be used as a punchball, prudently took possession of her hands in one of his. “Why do you fight me, little one? You know I will not hurt you, just as you know that you are fighting yourself as much as me.”
“I am not!” she denied even as the urge to fight became something else, as her body shivered like a sapling in a gale against the hardness of his, and desire shimmered, unmistakable and undeniable.
“You are such a little liar,” he said softly, catching her chin with his free hand. “Do you think I cannot feel that longing in you? Do you think I cannot see it in your eyes?”
Meredith instinctively closed her eyes as if, by doing so, she could deny the truth. Damian released her wrists and touched the tip of her nose with a long finger. “Answer me, Merrie Trelawney,” he commanded, bending to press his lips to the quivering, blue-veined eyelids. The tip of his tongue ran hotly over the thinly covered orbs before dancing across her cheek to her ear. Merrie moaned as he nipped the tender lobe, and then his tongue moved in and around, tracing the whorls and contours of that vulnerable shell that she could never have believed could be so sensitive. The hand left her chin, ran down over the open column of her throat, moved to the gentle swell of her bosom. She arched against him, half in protest, half in joy, and heard his own groan, felt his pleasure in hard evidence against her silk-covered thighs. Her nipple pressed urgently into his caressing palm, burning against the constraints of camisole and bodice. His mouth moved to hers in a tantalizing butterfly kiss until she made her own demand, sucking on his lower lip as if it were a ripe plum, and then her tongue pushed into the sweet, warm cavern where, for some unaccountable reason, it seemed to belong.
Then the dappled pony stumbled in a pothole and the gig lurched. Damian's arm tightened in immediate, instinctive support around the body across his knees, his head lifting as he reached for the reins and steadied the animal. Meredith found that she was unable to move, to take advantage of the break in his hold that a few minutes ago she would have welcomed. Having lost all sense of perspective, she just lay still in the circle of his arm, waiting in patient subjugation until he would come back to her.
“For such a little liar, you have the most honest eyes.” He touched the tip of her nose with a long finger. The finger moved to her mouth, tracing the full curve of her lips; her tongue darted between them, dampening his fingertip even as she drew it between her teeth, nipping in a movement that was as mischievous as it was sensuous. His breath whistled in the still night air as, urgently, he raised her body, catching her chin again with his free hand, bringing his lips to hers.
Nothing existed but this wondrous joining of lips and tongues, the hot moistness of his breath against her throat as he kissed the pulsing hollow, the liquid weakness in the recesses of her body preparing itself for the inevitable conclusion of this wanting. Fingers caressed her ankle, circling the sharp bone, before pitpatting up her calf, pushing aside the layers of silk and cotton, reaching her thigh and the bare skin above her garter.
Maybe it was the intimacy of that skin contact, maybe it was the light breeze springing up to fan her cheeks, to brush her exposed leg, that brought the real world crashing in on this sensate dream. Whatever it was, Merrie abruptly pulled herself out of his hold, pushing frantically at the invading hand.
“No, this is madness. You do not understand.”
“What do I not understand?” He held her tightly for a minute, staring into her eyes where the truth of desire still lingered behind a film of confusion and fear. Then the sloe eyes seemed to glaze, blanking out the candor.
“You do not understand that I must live in this place with as much comfort as I can. There will be precious little of that if I am found behaving in this disgraceful fashion with a man whose reputation does not depend on Cornishmen. You may go home whenever you please, sir, and escape what censure comes your way. I
am
home.”
Her words carried the conviction of truth, but he knew that it was yet another of her convenient half-truths to obscure the real issue, whatever that might be. The fear was real enough, though, whatever caused it. She was shiveringâand not with the passion of the last moments.
Deciding he had nothing to lose by taking the bull by the horns, he spoke with gentle determination. “Meredith, my world, my home can be yours.”
“Whatever do you mean?” She looked at him, uncomprehending.
“I wish you to marry me,” he said simply.
She stared at him blankly for a minute, then produced the only explanation for such a ludicrous statement that she could think of. “I fear, my lord, that you are become moon mad! It is quite unchivalrous to make mock of me in that manner.” Merrie caught up the reins, flicking them against the mare's rump. The pony broke into an indignant trot.
“It is you who make mock of me,” Rutherford countered. “I am in earnest, Meredith. I do not know how or why it should have happened, but I love you.”
Meredith spoke slowly, as if to a half-witted child. “Lord Rutherford on your own admission you came into Cornwall at a loose end, depressed and unhappy. You met a woman unlike those you are accustomed to. I challenge you, perhaps; amuse you, perhaps. Whatâwhat has just taken place between us is . . . ” her voice faded.
“Unconventional, certainly,” he completed for her in level tones. “Was that what you were going to say?”
“It should not have happened.” Her voice sounded small and unconvincing. “I do not know how or whyâ”
“Don't talk nonsense! You know perfectly well how and why, just as I do. You are no schoolroom miss, Merrie Trelawney.” He spoke harshly although he had not wanted to, but somehow her denial of the passion that had informed her responses angered him almost as much as did her casual dismissal of his declarationâangered him but did not alarm him. Deny it as she would, the passion of that response went far deeper than the transitory desire of a neglected widow. He would just have to teach her that, if she could not learn it for herself. Time was one commodity he had in great supply, and patience was a quality he had learned the hard way.