The Temptation of Your Touch (23 page)

“Then why did you command me to stay in the study last night while you were speaking to your brother?” she called after him.

He hesitated for the briefest second, then kept walking as if she hadn’t even spoken.

He was her employer. She was obligated to respect his wishes. Her duty was to meekly return to the house and find something to sweep or dust or polish so he could brood in privacy and continue to mourn his lost fiancée and punish himself for whatever terrible transgression he believed he had committed against his brother and sister-in-law.

Anne lifted her chin, feeling her temper start to rise. For the first time in a long while, she had no intention of doing what she
should
do. Contrary to what she’d let everyone believe for the past several years, she was not a woman who would so easily be dismissed.

Chapter Twenty

W
H
EN
A
NNE EMERGED AT
the back of the house, it wasn’t the spectacular view from the cliffs that made her steps slow and her breath catch in her throat, but the man standing at their edge.

Dravenwood stood with one boot propped on a large rock, gazing out to sea as if transfixed by what he saw before him. Something about his stance was irresistibly timeless and masculine. He could have been a pirate king, waiting to board a ship so he could sail the high seas to ravish and plunder. Or one of Arthur’s knights, dreaming of the lady fair he had left behind in Camelot to pine for his return.

“You might have warned me,” he said without turning around as she approached.

Anne would have sworn she hadn’t so much as kicked a pebble to betray her presence. She was quickly learning he was a difficult man to catch
unawares. She joined him at the cliff’s edge. “About what?”

He swept a hand toward the breathtaking vista stretched out before them.
“This.”

The coastline had undergone a magical transformation beneath the kiss of the autumn sun. Cottony wisps of cloud drifted across an azure sky. The moss furring the broad rocks along the top of the cliffs was no longer cast in drab shades of gray, but was revealed to be a shade of green somewhere between emerald and jade. Beams of sunlight shattered against the diamond-sharp crests of the waves, brightening the water to a blue-green intense enough to make a man—or woman—dream of Barbados and tropical breezes and swaying palms. Far below them at the foot of the cliffs, the sand of the cove shimmered like gold dust.

“It does rather take one’s breath away, doesn’t it?” Anne couldn’t completely hide her pride as she surveyed the view.

He slanted her a mocking glance. “There was no need for you to follow me out here, you know. I have no intention of flinging myself off the cliffs in a fit of pique like your impulsive Miss Cadgwyck.”

“Well, that’s certainly a relief.” She seated herself on the opposite side of the rock, ignoring her first inclination to hug one knee to her chest as she might have done when she was a girl. “I suspect you
would make a very intolerable ghost, always slamming doors and groaning and rattling your chains. I daresay we’d never get another decent night’s rest.” As the wind tugged her shawl from her shoulders, she tilted her face to the sun, wishing she could pull the pinching pins from her hair and let it ripple free as well.

“You wound me with your dour assessment of my character. It would no doubt surprise you to learn that for a very long time I was considered the most eligible catch in all of England.”

Anne remembered the words of the women in the village:
He was the perfect gent till his fiancée threw him over
. “And why should that surprise me? What woman could resist a gentleman with such a delightful temperament and affable wit?”

He snorted. “As you’ve probably already guessed, I was pursued more for my title and my fortune than my charms.”

Stealing a glance at the rugged purity of his profile and the shadows his long, sooty lashes cast on his beautifully sculpted cheekbones, Anne doubted that was entirely true. “It’s been my experience that charming men tend to think even more highly of themselves than they want others to do. I’ve never cared for them myself.”

“Then you should be
very
fond of me.”

May God help her if she was, Anne thought. She
dragged her gaze away from his profile and returned it to the sea, feeling suddenly dizzy in a way that had little to do with the height of their perch. “You certainly weren’t very charming to your brother and his wife. Especially not after they came all this way just to bid you farewell.”

The distant look in his frosty gray eyes deepened, as if he were staring at something far beyond the sea. “I shall have to beg your forbearance for my ill manners. Their visit came as something of an unwelcome shock. I hadn’t seen Clarinda since our wedding day.”

Anne frowned in bewilderment. “Don’t you mean
her
wedding day?”

He gave her an arch look.

“Oh!” Anne breathed, thankful she was already sitting down. So Clarinda Burke was the woman who had jilted him at the altar, the woman who had broken his heart and given his lips their cynical curl. She remembered the look she’d glimpsed in his eyes as he had watched his brother’s wife walk away from him, possibly for the last time. Now she knew
exactly
where she had seen that look before—whenever he gazed up at Angelica’s portrait.

“Needless to say, it came as quite a shock to society when my bride tossed me over at the altar so she could marry my brother. All of London was abuzz
with the gossip. I’m surprised it didn’t travel as far as Cadgwyck.”

Not wanting him to know that it finally had, Anne forced herself to say lightly, “Ah, but you forget—we have our own scandals to gossip about in Cadgwyck. Why did she toss you over? Did you do something to earn the slap the two of you spoke of?”

His laughter was edged with bitterness. “I was fortunate it was no more than a slap. Had there been a pistol handy that day, she might have very well shot me.”

“Were you unfaithful to her?”

“Once she agreed to wed me? Never.” Dravenwood swung around to face Anne, the frost in his eyes extinguished by a fierce fire. “Not in word or in deed. Not with my body or in my heart.”

Mesmerized by the passion in his eyes, Anne felt her own heart skip a beat. She had always dreamed of having a man look at her that way.

But not while he was thinking of another woman.

He returned his gaze to the sea, his jaw set in a rigid line. “Clarinda and my brother fell in love when they were very young. They had a rather . . .
tempestuous
relationship, and when Ash went off to seek his fortune, leaving her behind, it broke her heart.”

“And you were there to pick up the pieces?”

“I tried. After she was forced to accept that Ash wasn’t coming back for her, she collapsed and became very ill. I”—he hesitated—“I helped to look after her for several months. Until she was well enough to manage on her own.”

While a wealth of information was in that simple explanation, Anne sensed he was leaving out large chunks of the story, not to protect himself, but to protect his sister-in-law. Anne had become quite adept at doing that herself.

“Once Clarinda recovered, I offered for her. But she refused me. Since I was Ash’s brother, she was afraid she would never see me as anything more than a reminder of the love she had lost. It took me nine years to finally convince her we would suit.”

“Nine years?” Anne echoed in disbelief. “Well, no one can accuse you of being fickle, can they?”

“You don’t know how many times I wished they could! Wished I was the sort of man who could tumble a different woman into my bed every night without ever once stopping to count the cost to their hearts or mine.”

His frank confession made Anne feel oddly breathless. “After finally agreeing to marry you, what made her change her mind?”

A sardonic smile curved his lips. “Since I was the one fool enough to save Ash from a firing squad and bring him back into her life, I have only myself to
blame. On the day we were supposed to be wed, she found out that all those years ago I’d had a hand in keeping them apart because I didn’t believe Ash was good enough for her. So she slapped me across the face and walked right back into his arms. She got the man she had always loved while I got exactly what I deserved—a lifetime of regrets and a crumbling manor haunted by a spiteful White Lady.”

Anne pondered his confession for a moment. “Just how old were you when you committed this terrible crime of the heart?”

He shrugged. “Two-and-twenty, I suppose.”

A ripple of laughter escaped her, earning a puzzled scowl from him. She rose to face him. “You say your brother and Clarinda were very young when they fell in love, but you were little more than a babe yourself—a young man in the first flush of passion. You lashed out because your heart was wounded. Because you couldn’t accept that the woman you loved might never come to love you back. But now you seek to condemn that impulsive young fool with the wisdom and experience of a man full grown. Tell me—would you be so merciless and unbending toward any other soul who made such an error in judgment?”

Dravenwood drew closer, glowering down at her. “Are you mad, woman? I don’t deserve any mercy. I robbed my own brother and the woman
he loved of ten years they might have spent in each other’s arms!”

“Perhaps you did them an unintended service. You said yourself their young relationship was very tempestuous. Their love might have needed time to season and gain in maturity so they could truly embrace the happiness they’ve found today.”

“What I did was unforgivable!”

“It might have been wrong—even wicked perhaps—but was it truly unforgivable? Is any sin unforgivable if the heart is genuinely repentant?”

There was no way for Anne to let him know how desperately she needed him to agree with her. Especially while standing at the edge of those cliffs where another life had ended because a young girl had been too foolish and proud to forgive herself. A pleading note softened her voice. “There’s a difference in being sorry for what you did and throwing away the rest of your life because you feel sorry for yourself.”

He took a swift step toward her, his hands closing over her upper arms. Even through her shawl she could feel their fierce strength, their irresistible heat as he drew her toward him. He gave her a sharp, little shake, his scowl a fearsome thing to behold. “I didn’t come to this place looking for absolution. And I certainly don’t need
your
absolution, Mrs. Spencer.”

“What do you need, my lord?” she asked, feeling
her breath quicken, her moist lips part in reckless challenge.

His smoldering gaze strayed to her lips, giving her a dangerous glimpse of exactly what he needed. Not forgiveness, but forgetfulness, if only for a night or perhaps even just a few hours. What he needed was the chance to be the sort of fickle man who could tumble a woman into his bed just because he desired her, not because he had loved her for half his life.

She could almost see the effort it took for him to drag his gaze from her lips, to gentle his grip and firmly set her away from him. Instead of the relief she should have felt, her heart ached with disappointment.

“I need the same thing Angelica needs,” he said hoarsely, unable to completely purge the passion from his voice. “To be left the bloody hell alone.”

With that, he turned and went stalking away from her, skirting dangerously close to the edge of the cliffs as he followed them around to the promontory.

Anne hugged her shawl around her as she watched him go. The wind snatched the sigh from her lips as she whispered, “As you wish, my lord.”

T
HE ROGUE HAD DARED
to put his hands on her.

Hodges stood at the corner of the window in the second-floor study, his temple pulsing with fury as
he watched Cadgwyck’s new master turn his back on Annie and stride away. She stood there gazing after him, hugging herself through the flimsy protection of her shawl.

She looked so small standing there at the edge of those towering cliffs, so terribly vulnerable—as if it would take little more than a gust of wind to blow her right over them.

Hodges touched his fingertips to the windowpane, his face drooping in a mask of sorrow. He never could bear it when she was sad. All he wanted to do was coax a smile back to her lips, to hear her merry laughter ringing through the halls of the manor once again.

The butler’s eyes narrowed as they followed the rogue’s path along the cliffs.
He
was the one who had stolen her smile. The one who had left her there all alone to be buffeted by the winds of fate.

The man was a fraud, an impostor, a shameless seducer of all that was pure and virtuous. Hodges drew his shoulders back, standing so straight and true that few who had known him in recent years would have recognized him.

There could only be one true master of Cadgwyck. Once the impostor was banished, that master could return to take his rightful place.

Hearing the door behind him creak open, Hodges
whirled around, tucking both hands behind his back like a guilty child.