The Taming of the Rake (14 page)

He pulled the wobbly wooden chair over so that it was facing the door, knowing he was taking up his vigil a little late, one of his pistols on his lap, the other on the floor beside him, his knife slipped into the top of his right boot.

A log broke in the fireplace, making the only noise in the room for the past quarter hour.

It was, he realized, the first awkward silence he and Chelsea had had between them.

He didn’t think it would be the last.

“Y
OU’RE LOST
,
aren’t you?”

Chelsea sat primly and rather self-righteously on a fallen log, watching as Beau consulted his hand-drawn map for at least the fourth time. He’d look at it, look at their surroundings and frowningly consult the map again. Pace about the high, rolling meadow where they’d decided to rest the horses, and then look at the map once more. Possibly he thought it would change.

If he’d lifted his fine, aristocratic nose to sniff the air like a hound, she wouldn’t have been the least surprised.

They’d had a pleasant morning, all things considered, and Chelsea considered the fact that she could even glance in his direction, let alone hold a conversation with him to be an achievement worthy of some sort of award for courage.

They had been, for wont of any other word to explain what had happened,
intimate
last night. Now, today, they were strangers, about as far apart as two people could be without one of them leaving the country. The world certainly was a funny place.

It hadn’t precisely been a pleasant morning, especially
as they’d started out in the gray light of dawn, heading back, or so Beau had told her, to the Great North Road and Gateshead.

Which, he also had informed her, was approximately fifty miles below the Scottish border.

Which, she had then informed him, sounded as far away as the moon.

Which, alas, had probably been a nasty thing to say, because he’d gotten this sort of
pinched
look around his mouth, asked her if she felt uncomfortable in the saddle, and when she had begun to ask him why he’d ask that and then realized why he’d asked that, and lifted her chin and told him coldly that she was fully recovered, thank you very much, well, then they hadn’t spoken again until now.

She had learned something else about this man she was going to marry. He was a worrier. That usually went hand-in-hand with having a conscience. He was a man who
cared,
who considered the consequences—sometimes after the fact, granted, but it was nice to know he hadn’t just taken when she’d offered. What she’d all but thrown at his head, actually. Perhaps she was the one who should be endeavoring to develop a conscience. He was making her look rather shallow in comparison, for her conscience didn’t seem to be bothering her at all this morning, except to occasionally inquire as to why it wasn’t bothering her.

She supposed she should have complimented him last night. Said thank you, or something. Did a woman say thank you to the man who had just deflowered her—and
wasn’t
that
a silly term for the thing. She had nothing to compare last night to, but she was fairly certain that it had gone rather well. He’d seemed…satisfied.

For her part, she’d been shocked, surprised, confused, eager, hesitant, anxious and so many other things all at the same time that she wasn’t quite sure what she felt. Except she’d like to try it again, so that she could sort out what exactly she’d felt most. For now, she’d think about it as
a good beginning.

It also had been difficult. Afterward. She’d felt suddenly modest, which was the outside of stupid after what they’d just done. And she’d felt this insane urge to cuddle against him, spend the night sleeping in his arms. And that, she was certain, was not the way it was done. Her parents had kept their own separate apartments both at Brean and in London, as did Thomas and his wife, and Madelyn said she’d keep her own domicile entirely, if she could.

Only the lower classes slept in the same room, let alone the same bed, and that was simply because their dreary little dwellings did not lend themselves to separate bedchambers. Madelyn said that was why they should pity the poor.

Madelyn was a stupid cow. That wasn’t a nice thing to think about one’s own sister, but there it was. If Beau had one failing, it was in believing himself in love with her so many years ago. Chelsea sometimes thought she should tell him that he would be so much happier with her…at least once Thomas realized he couldn’t actually shoot him or something.

But now they were lost, she was sure of it. And the woman who wouldn’t point out the obvious to a man who is struggling to deny it, she was fairly certain, had yet to be born.

Beau finally stopped his pacing and sat down beside her on the log. “You know, my mother once said that you’re not ever lost if you’re happy where you are.”

Chelsea’s heart did this little skipping thing in her chest. “What a lovely sentiment. The question, Oliver, is—are you happy where you are?”

He turned his head to look at her, probably the first time he’d looked directly at her all morning. “Well, let’s see. I could be clapped up in irons in a nameless dungeon somewhere. I wouldn’t be happy there. Or captive on a galley sailing some far-off sea, rowing all day, my only scenery the back of the poor sot in front of me. I wouldn’t be happy there, either.”

He was so adorable when he was evading her questions. “You could be sitting in the tooth-drawers chair in a stall outside Covent Garden,” Chelsea said, giving an involuntary shiver. “I know I wouldn’t be happy there. Or you could be sitting on a hardback chair for nearly two hours, listening to one of Francis Flotley’s sermons. I see those two as equally painful, by the way, for both thoughts make my teeth ache. But the question remains, Oliver—are you happy where you are? Right now.”

He picked up her gloved hand and raised it to his mouth, kissing the skin between glove and cuff. “I am happy with my company,” he told her with a small
smile, and then he shook his head. “I can’t believe we’re lost. We should have met up with the Great North Road again by now, I’m sure of it. Instead, I have the terrible suspicion that we’ve been traveling in circles and will soon be back where we started.”

Chelsea lightly rubbed the skin he had just kissed, rubbing the kiss in, not out, although she didn’t know why she would do either. She’d had her hand kissed before, dozens of times. Often by supposed experts. But none of them had ever affected her in the least. Now her skin tingled, as did the rest of her. And his kiss had been an offhand gesture; he hadn’t even been trying!

Perhaps there was some switch inside females. It just sat there in its secret place, biding its time until something like last night happened, and then it was switched on, like a mechanical toy. Off for girlhood, on for womanhood. Once on, it couldn’t be turned off again, and she would spend the remainder of her life being kissed on the wrist and having her newly switched-on body whispering in her ear:
There’s more, you know. Much more.

And Beau had found that secret switch, turned it on and here she was, going round and round and round. Yes, she probably really should thank him…

“I’m very good with maps,” she told him, knowing her mind had gone as far as it could go without her making a complete fool of herself. “Let me see yours.” He hesitated, one eyebrow raised in that way men have of saying without words,
Oh, so now you’re smarter than I am?

Honestly, men were so thick sometimes. “Come on, Oliver, hand it over. I can’t do any worse than you have.”

He reached into his pocket and grudgingly handed the map over to her. “I’ll have to explain it to you,” he said as she unfolded it, her own eyebrows climbing high as she looked at the mass of lines and scribbles that might as easily have been drawn by a chicken with a length of charcoal tied to its little foot.

“No, no, I think I can understand it,” she said, hoping she wasn’t holding the dratted thing upside down. “Look, here’s London. There’s Blackthorn, yes?” She put a fingertip to the paper and traced the line leading North. “Ah, yes, and there’s the Great North Road. And all the other towns and cities we passed by but I never saw. Highgate, Hatfield, Steven—goodness, Oliver, but your penmanship is atrocious—all right, Stevenage. Litchworth, Peterborough.”

She lapsed into simply moving her lips as she counted up, up, up the winding depiction of the Great North Road and, she supposed, other lesser roadways. “Ah, and there’s Gateshead. That’s our next almost destination, isn’t it? Another tiny inn somewhere outside Gateshead? And then there’s Newcastle upon Tyne, Brunswick-upon-Tweed, and then—”

“Berwick.”

“Pardon me?” she asked, looking up at him.

“That’s Berwick-upon-Tweed,” he told her. “You said Brunswick.”

She squinted at the paper and then shrugged. “It was a guess, either way. I was trying to remember the names
as you’d told them to me a few times. I can’t really make out more than every other word you’ve scribbled here.”

“Your pardon, ma’am. I was in a bit of a hurry at the time I drew it. Something about an irate brother momentarily breaking down my front door to shoot me or worse, and a young lady whose existence I’d barely remembered impatiently demanding I elope with her. Penmanship was not my main concern.”

Chelsea nodded. “And you were three parts drunk,” she added, since he seemed to have forgotten that part. “All that considered, I think you managed very well. Now, point to where you think we are, or at least where you thought we were when it began to rain.”

He slipped one arm around her shoulder, and together they contemplated the crude map. “Here,” he said at last. “At least I think so. I want to get to an inn outside Gateshead. You don’t have to worry about anything more north than that, as Gretna Green lies much more to the west. See? The line going that way,” he added, pointing to yet another wiggly, wavy line. “Custom does have it that many eloping couples rest in Gateshead, I’m told, before turning west and moving on to Scotland in one great rush.”

“Well, that’s above everything silly, isn’t it? If everyone knows that, then everyone can just rush to Gateshead, set up camp and snatch up any runaways as they’re idiotically enjoying a leisurely dinner in one of the hotels.”

Beau laughed. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I did think of something else, if your brother hasn’t gotten
this far yet. Being a bastard isn’t always fun, but behaving like one from time to time does have its pleasures. Tell me again, how much trouble can your sister be?”

Chelsea thought about this for a few moments.

At last she thought she had a reasonable answer. “How much trouble do you suppose Hannibal had getting all of those elephants up and over the Alps?”

“A considerable amount, I’d imagine.”

“Yes, I would, too. But if we were to compare Thomas’s chore with Madelyn these past few days with Hannibal’s, as to which of them had the most difficulty, I would say we’d have to rewrite all the history books to read that Hannibal and his pachyderms enjoyed a leisurely journey over a few low, rolling hills.”

Beau laughed. “That sounds promising.”

“Yes. Even with the fact that they were on the road a full day before we were, I would say that we are now probably ahead of them, heartless taskmaster that you are, or were, until you got us lost. Sorry. What are you planning to do once you’re in Gateshead? Burn down all the hotels and inns?”

“Nothing that drastic, no.” He stood up and held his hand out to her. She folded the map and handed it to him, then got to her feet. “Come on. We’ll forget about the map for now. At least I know that we’re heading north.”

“Oh? And how do you know that? You can’t be charting our way by the stars because it’s daytime.”

They walked back to where he’d tied up the horses. “I don’t know how I know,” he told her, shoving the map
back into his pocket. “I just know that north is that way. I can feel it.”

She looked where he was pointing. What was he feeling that she wasn’t? “Really? How do you know that isn’t west? It’s gray and overcast, and we can’t see the sun. So it could be west, yes? Or northwest, I suppose. Or southeast. How can you simply sniff the air and then point and be so odiously certain you’re pointing north?”

“You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?”

“Probably. I have no idea which direction is north. But I will tell you that it’s maddening to me that men seem to know which way is north, and which way is west—and are always overweeningly
proud
about that accomplishment, by the way—and yet still you all more than likely will manage to get us poor women lost.”

“Are you referring to all men, or to your father and brother?”

“My father, brother
and
you,” she corrected sweetly. She didn’t care what they talked about. They were talking again. Teasing and joking and even arguing again. She’d take that above his concerned silence and be very happy with all of it. “Oh, and a certain male admirer who promised me a ride in Richmond Park up on his new curricle, but couldn’t seem to find his way out of Mayfair. For a while, I despaired of ever seeing Portland Place again, as a matter of fact.”

Beau smiled as he reached for her. “Come here,” he said, putting his hands on her waist. “With some women, a man might think they were talking just to hear the sound of their own voices. But with you, I
think it’s so you can hear the sound of my voice. Am I right?”

She lowered her gaze to his boot tops. “You’ve been a veritable Sphinx for the past two hours,” she said quietly. “At first I thought you were angry with me, but then I decided you were angry with yourself.” She lifted her head and looked fully into his eyes. “Which you shouldn’t be. Because I’m fine, Oliver. I really, really am.”

He began lightly rubbing her back. “You don’t complain about the hours in the saddle. You don’t complain about the food, the damp beds or the weather. You just keep smiling and enjoying yourself and making the best out of every moment in a way that makes me variously doubt your sanity and envy you the way you look at the world. However, there are times I think you’d tell me you were fine if you had six arrows sticking out of your back.”

She shook her head. “Oh, no. I’d be complaining most loudly if I had six arrows sticking out of my back.” Then she grinned. “But not for long, I would imagine.”

She was still smiling when he kissed her, and it was the most natural thing in the world to put her arms around him and kiss him back.

It was rather like coming home after a long time away, being in his arms again. Had it only been a few hours since they’d fallen into bed and he’d made love to her? It seemed like forever.