The Lady Most Willing

Chapter 21

For a second, Robin considered pretending he hadn’t seen her—again—and bolt down the adjacent corridor. By avoiding her thus far, he had avoided sampling what he could never wholly have.

True, manners had demanded that he make an appearance at dinner the first night, but he’d seated himself at the opposite end of the table from her and escaped as soon as Marilla had commenced her campaign to win Bretton’s . . . Well, if she won anything of Bretton’s, it certainly wasn’t ever going to be his heart. But, then, any fool watching her manhandle the duke would soon realize that Bretton’s heart was never her objective.

But now Robin found he could not resist the opportunity to spend some time alone with Lady Cecily before her rescuers came thundering through the passes. When they arrived, he would be gone. He had no intention of standing by while Marilla Chisholm convinced her father that events had occurred that could only be satisfied with a wedding. Particularly if it was his own.

Besides, perhaps if he spent some time with Lady Cecily, he would discover that she was not what every fiber in his heart declared her to be but simply a young lady whose lovely visage and pretty manners summed up the total of what she was or aspired to become. At least, he thought as he strode toward her, he could hope.

“Lady Cecily,” Robin hailed her, his amusement growing with each step.

She’d exchanged yesterday’s antique morning weeds for an even older ball gown, dating from an era when women would have had to turn sideways to enter through a door. But without the support of the underlying panniers that would have once jutted out from her hips, the heavy skirts dragged along the ground on either side of her like two broken wings.

The once rich ruby red silk had turned a dull rusty color, and the heavy application of silver thread embroidering the sleeves and hem had become green with age. Huge silk cabbage roses, once white but now dingy and yellowed, hung disconsolately from her elbows, waist, and hips.

Even during the height of George VII’s reign, when low-cut dresses were in vogue, the décolletage would have been indecent, but on Lady Cecily’s slight frame it hung so loosely that she’d been forced to wrap some sort of velvet shawl around her neck like a muffler before stuffing the ends down the bodice to preserve her modesty. The effort had apparently caused her hair to fall from its neat knot, and it, too, lay tucked beneath the velvet wrapping.

An image of how she’d look had she not been so enterprising with that damned shawl beset his imagination; her hair rippling over her naked shoulders, loose curls playing at her cleavage. Heated desire quickened his body. Ruthlessly, he vanquished the taunting vision.

“Heavens, Comte, whatever are you doing here?” Lady Cecily asked.

Avoiding you, my love. “Taking my morning constitutional. My doctor prescribes clambering over rubble in frigid temperatures at least thrice daily,” he said, and she gratified him by laughing at his absurdity. “Might I inquire the same?”

She glanced down at her bedraggled skirts and gave an unexpectedly gamine grin. “One can only wear a gown twice before retiring it. Surely you know that, Comte? I found this in the trunk Mr. Hamish brought to the room and as for this . . .” She grimaced, plucking at the shawl.

His eyes widened. By God, it wasn’t a shawl she’d wrapped around her shoulders, but an old velvet bed curtain. He recognized it as coming from a room he’d once occupied as a child! Apparently, she’d ripped it from its moorings.

“I will, of course, make restitution,” she added.

“My dear,” he said, shaking his head mournfully, “I hardly know what to say. One doesn’t find relics like that just lying about, you know.”

“No,” she answered. “One finds them hanging about.”

He stifled a chuckle, trying to look stern. “What is even more distressing than your pillaging my uncle’s home is that having torn the family tapestry from its rods to decorate yourself, you are now on the hunt for more things to loot.”

“Terrible, I know,” she admitted, her gaze unsettlingly direct. “I am afraid that when I find something I want, I will fight to the end for it.”

He looked at her with renewed appreciation. Those had hardly been the words of a model of propriety. And her gaze was too direct and her expression filled with delight and naughtiness. Indeed, her ripe lips trembled with ill-suppressed merriment.

Damn it.

“How rapacious of you,” he said, realizing he’d been staring. “But then, how can I find fault with that? Especially as I have been accused of similar failings.”

“Oh. Is it a failing?” she asked innocently, glancing at him out of the corner of her remarkable eyes. With each word and glance, she delighted him more.

This was far worse—and so much better—than he’d expected. The conversations he’d had with young ladies during his first season had been unremarkable exchanges: bland pleasantries, light chat about the latest play, the weather, the most recent exhibitions. There’d been no repartee, no subtext, no—God help him—flirtation.

He must leave Finovair before lunch.

“Besides,” she said, “your cousin claims that you are the very model of restraint.”

Once more, she’d caught him off-guard. He burst out laughing. “Either you are twitting me, Lady Cecily, or you have discovered a cousin who is entirely unknown to me and who, obviously, knows just as little about me in return.”

“He seemed quite confident. But then, you never know with men, do you?” she said. “They always appear to be certain of everything. It must be exhausting. Is it?”

“As I am not certain of anything, particularly this conversation, I dare not answer.”

“Oh, I believe you think yourself very certain of who and what you are, Comte.”

There was amusement in her voice and he didn’t quite know what to make of that. He smiled to cover his discomfort and said, “Please, the title is less than a courtesy. You must call me Robin, especially as Marilla has announced that we are all on first-name terms.”

Some of the light faded in her extraordinary eyes. “I should have liked to call you Robin at your own behest, not someone else’s.”

“It is my request. I should like you to call me Robin.” He heard the slight imploring note in his voice, but could do nothing to prevent it. He wanted to hear her say his name in every mood: shouted in glee, whispered in intimacy, spoken with easy familiarity.

“Only if you will call me Cecily.”

“Your father would hardly approve.” The words slipped out unintended. When had he turned into such a pedant? But she really shouldn’t be giving the use of her Christian name to a rake.

“But he is not here, and I would never presume to know of what he would approve or disapprove,” she said with feigned haughtiness. “I find it rather audacious that you do.”

Her sophistry delighted him almost as much as her mental adroitness. Besides, what harm if they played at friendship . . . or even something more, for a few short hours?

“I see I have no choice but to cede to your greater knowledge, La— Cecily. Until I have been told otherwise by the gentleman himself, I will be ruled by your superior understanding. Now, whatever are you doing in these inhospitable climes so early in the morning?”

“As I told you, I am looking for something to wear. Something that fits better than this,” she said, tugging at the sagging skirts. “The hunt has led me here.”

“I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed,” Robin said. “This part of the castle has been uninhabited for generations. Anything worth keeping was removed long ago.”

“Drat.”

He grinned at this small imprecation. “Exactly. I’m sorry.”

“No matter. I’ll just look elsewhere. There must be something somewhere.”

He doubted it, but why dampen her spirits when she was so obviously enjoying her treasure hunt?

“Did you have in mind somewhere particular to look?” he asked.

“Not really. I’ve already been in every room in this corridor.”

“Then perhaps you’d allow me to escort you back to a more likely hunting ground? Finovair might not be very large but it can be confusing. Purposely so.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s all part of our national heritage. All those Jacobites and Hanoverians littering the countryside, plotting and counterplotting, ferreting out secrets and squirreling others away. Small wonder Scottish castles tend to be warrens of secret passages and blind ends, priest bolts and lovers’ cupboards. And the Fergusons were the worst of the lot. As such it only stands to reason their stronghold would be one of the most abstruse. Yes. You really had best let me accompany you—”

She held up her hand, laughing. “Have done, Robin! I am convinced.”

Had he sounded so eager? He must indeed be bewitched. His sangfroid was legendary.

“And by all means, I accept,” she went on. “I should hate to end up lost in these walls for eternity. Take me where you will. I am yours!”

His heart lurched at her words and he glanced at her to see if she understood what she’d offered, but not a bit of caution clouded her face. She smiled sunnily up at him, sovereign in her consequence. No one would dare assail her. After all, she was an earl’s daughter.

Foolish girl, she was far too lovely to make such assumptions. After all, she’d been abducted, hadn’t she? Kidnapped and dragged through a storm to a heathenish, frozen castle for the express purpose of becoming its heir’s bride.

His bride.

The thought hovered with tantalizing effect in the foreground of his imagination. What if he stayed and wooed her? Seduced her? Used all his much-vaunted skill to try to win her for his own? Would she succumb?

Would he?

She tucked her hand into the crook of his arm, unaware of the profligate impulses shivering through him.

“I admit,” she said, “the idea of being lost here does conjure an amusing image: my poor spirit moaning dolefully through the walls at your descendants, only to have them shout back that I deserve my fate for not accepting your escort. ” She peeked up at him through sooty lashes. “At least I assume that any descendants of yours would have scant pity for fools who don’t know enough to take what was offered.”

He checked, startled by an interpretation of her words that she could not possibly have meant. She gazed at him, all innocence and trust. He swallowed. “You think you know me well enough to predict my unborn descendants’ dispositions?” he asked, discovering that he liked the idea that she knew him; he even liked the idea that she thought she knew him. Though, of course she couldn’t. His lovers had often complained that his laughter and wit deflected any hope of achieving any intimacy that didn’t involve the flesh.

But here, at this moment, with this girl in her oversized dress and bed-hanging shawl, looking like a child who had raided her grandmother’s wardrobe to play dress-up, walking along a hall where frost rimed the windows and crept like silvery lichen along the ceiling as their breath made little shrouds in the air, in this strange fairy-tale land of predawn glitter and soft, frosted sheen, Cecily’s assumption of familiarity felt warm and companionable and . . . right.

Perhaps he needn’t avoid her after all. Perhaps they really could just be friends . . .

But then he glanced at her, just a glance, and noted the way the angled light limned her full lower lip, the elegant line of her nose, the glossy sheen of her rich dark locks, and the small shadowed vale just visible above where she’d tucked the velvet material into her bodice and realized, no, they could not just be friends.

“Am I presumptuous?” she asked, not looking the least abashed. “I’m sorry.”

“Not at all,” he said easily. “I am just appalled that my predictability is so blatant you can foretell what traits my descendants will inherit.”

“You are kind, Robin,” she said, studying him.

Her words made him uneasy. He was a rake and a ne’er-do-well. And a pauper. She must know that.

He drew her back to his side and they proceeded at a leisurely pace, as if they were strolling in St. James Park during the height of the season, not a frozen corridor in a ruined castle in the dead of winter.

“You might well be correct about my presumed offspring,” he said. “If future Comtes de Rocheforte were to be found lounging about the castle. But I doubt they will be.”

“How so?” she asked. “The older gentleman gave me to understand that you will inherit Finovair.”

“The older gentleman? Oh. You mean Taran. Hardly a gentleman, though definitely older. And yes, my mother having been so shortsighted as to have given birth to me prematurely, and thus two weeks before Byron’s mother bore him, Taran has deemed me next in line to have this great pile foisted upon.”

He spoke with a great show of amused indifference. “But even I at my most persuasive—and I can be most persuasive”—he angled an amused glance at her, and was rewarded with a faint blush—“even I would be hard-pressed to talk any lady into living here, let alone raising her children in such a place.”

“Why?” She stopped and looked up at him, by all appearances sincerely confused.

Why? His gaze swept down the length of ruined gallery. A vine had crept through a crack in one of the windows and hung bare and twisted as a witch’s finger from the ceiling, pointing accusingly at a broken chair tipping woozily against a water-stained wall. She was being disingenuous. She had to be.

“The latest fashions,” he said with supreme insouciance, “eschew blue lips. Or so I am told. And I refuse to have an unfashionable wife.”

She burst into laughter and he could not help but notice that her lips were, indeed, touched with a violet hue. Wordlessly, he shrugged out of his jacket and, without asking permission, draped it over her shoulders.

She backed away a step as he performed this unasked-for service, clearly startled by the liberties he’d taken. He took the opportunity for even more, tucking the collar around her neck and gently teasing a tress of hair free from under his jacket. Then he smoothed it along her shoulder, smiling down at her as he slowly followed her retreat, step by step. Her shoulders bumped into the wall behind her.

“My pardon, Lady Cecily,” he said, coming to his senses. “I am simply doing my part to see that Scotland stays au courant with London. Your lips were turning blue, m’dear.”

He didn’t mean to do anything more. But her golden eyes trapped him in time, and all he was aware of was the beating of his heart, the sound of his own labored breathing, and then, amazingly, impossibly, she leaned forward, tipping her head back, her eyelids slipping shut, and her lips pursed in a delicious invitation.

A kiss. Something to remember her by. What harm a kiss?

He could no more have declined that wordless offer than he could refuse to breathe. He lowered his head and carefully, gently pressed his lips to hers.