Amanda Scott (31 page)

“Red is rather a noticeable color,” he said apologetically, swinging his right leg over the pommel and sliding down from the saddle. “You did well to get away. Did they harm you?”

She shook her head, watching him, as her heart began to pound. “How did you know?” she asked. “Did Godmama tell you about that stupid note?”

“Hercules told us,” he said, regarding her with a warm glow in his eyes that sent the blood rushing to her cheeks.

“Hercules?” She hardly knew what she was saying.

“Yes, Hercules.”

Carolyn gave herself a shake. “Sydney, that’s nonsense. Hercules is a dog.”

“A very rude and obstreperous dog. Matilda was returning from her walk when she came upon him, trying to keep my head gardener confined to his shed. The silly clunch was afraid Hercules would bite him. When Matilda brought the little monster into the house, we knew something had happened to you. Neall must have thought no one would bother to follow.”

“Cumberland never told him the truth about what happened at the grotto,” Carolyn said. “And Hercules bit Neall.”

“Good for him,” Sydney said. “I never said he wasn’t intelligent. It was fortunate for him that Matilda came along when she did, however, for she was able to deter Frachet from bashing him with his shovel. Matilda has thus redeemed herself in Mama’s eyes by saving Hercules’ life. Mama demanded that I sack Frachet, of course, but I don’t think I shall.” He opened his arms to her. “Come here, my love.”

She went to him, and when his arms closed around her, she sighed with contentment. “Oh, Sydney, say that again.”

“I shall say it many times, no doubt.” He tilted her face up and kissed her on the lips. “I don’t doubt I shall regret this to my dying day, but I believe I must ask you to marry me, Caro. Do you think you can bring yourself to do so?”

“Why should you regret it?” she demanded, trying to pull away and finding, to her great satisfaction, that he would not let her do so.

He kissed her again and then said as though he recited a litany, “Emotional upsets, apple pie beds, very expensive chinaware that has to be thrown into the dustbin—”

“No, did you really have to throw it out? I thought hot water would dissolve that glue.”

“It doesn’t. Ching Ho did the unhappy deed. ’Twas a very fine bit of Sevres, but I prefer Chinese porcelain and no doubt it was never happy in its ignoble role and was just as glad to meet its end at your fair hands.”

She chuckled. “Tell me, sir, is this your notion of a properly romantic proposal and the sweet talk that ought to accompany such a moment, because I must regretfully inform you that it is not mine. Only look at us! And at this place!” She gestured toward the barren, weed-filled field around them.

“I see nothing amiss,” he said, looking down into her eyes. There was no laughter in his expression now, nor the least sign of affectation, and she found it suddenly a little difficult to meet his steady gaze. “Must you have roses and candlelight to answer my question, Caro?”

“No,” she whispered. “I was only teasing. Oh, Sydney, I knew you would come, but when you did, it wasn’t in the least like I imagined it would be.”

He smiled at her. “What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. I don’t suppose it would have been at all the thing to have knocked the duke down again—”

“No.”

“But you might have done so to Neall!”

“My dearest love, you had already completely incapacitated the poor fellow! What would you have had me do?”

She grimaced. “I know, it was not necessary.”

“More than that, you unnatural woman, it would have been viciously and most needlessly cruel.”

“Well, I don’t care for that. He is a dreadful man.”

“You,” Sydney said shrewdly, “wanted a knight on a white charger.” He glanced at the hack, grazing placidly nearby. “My poor fellow’s not even the right color. How dismal for you!”

She laughed. “You are a wretch. I won’t deny that over the past weeks, I have frequently felt as though I were dwelling in the pages of one of those books written by my gentlewoman of Bath. Whoever that industrious lady may be, I should like to pull a few caps with her, for she most grossly misled me.”

“And how is that?” he inquired, bending to kiss her again.

“Sydney,” she protested, “there are doubtless any number of persons watching us from the other side of that hedge!”

“I don’t mind if they watch. Do you?”

His arms were tight around her, and she realized she didn’t care a whit who was watching, for delicious new feelings were running rampant through her body, and with each new one, she looked forward to the next. When his right hand moved beneath her cloak and gently over her breast to her waist, she caught her breath but made no attempt to move away from him. Indeed, she moved closer, placing her hands at his waist and standing on tiptoe to encourage him to kiss her again.

“Tell me, how were you led astray, my love?”

She blinked at him. “Led astray? Oh, well, I thought love must be the way it is in books, or not be at all.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No, of course not.” But she paused, and when her lips parted, he kissed her again, much more thoroughly than before. When she could speak, she looked at him, bemused. “At least, I didn’t think it was. I kept waiting for true love to strike me like a lightning bolt, but it never did. The books didn’t say it could start with just liking and trusting someone, and finding comfort in being with him, and then grow until one day when he frowns or goes away—even if it’s just out of the room—one is miserable until he comes back again. Love isn’t a great flash, Sydney. It starts small and grows and grows, and sometimes where one least expects to find it.”

“Like a weed?” he suggested, grinning at her now.

“Don’t be rude. You certainly won’t tell me that you just saw me and fell flat.”

“No, only the time you pasted my slippers to the—”

“Sydney,” she said, striving to sound very firm, “if you mean to talk nonsense, I think we should go home.”

“I don’t have to talk at all,” he said, kissing her again, “but I do agree that we will be more comfortable at home. I shall carry you back in true heroic style, my love, upon my saddlebow. Just don’t muss my coat.”

THE END

A fourth-generation Californian of Scottish descent, Amanda Scott is the author of more than fifty romantic novels, many of which appeared on the
USA Today
bestseller list. Her Scottish heritage and love of history (she received undergraduate and graduate degrees in history at Mills College and California State University, San Jose, respectively) inspired her to write historical fiction. Credited by
Library Journal
with starting the Scottish romance subgenre, Scott has also won acclaim for her sparkling Regency romances. She is the recipient of the Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award (for
Lord Abberley’s Nemesis
, 1986) and the RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award. She lives in central California with her husband.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Bath Trilogy

“M
URDERING HIM IS OUT
of the question, I suppose,” Lady Flavia Bradbourne said wistfully as she straightened the frothy lace cap perched atop her snow-white curls. A thin little woman dressed in a wide-skirted gown fashionable twenty years before, she sat in one of the two armchairs flanking the drawing-room hearth, well out of the way of drafts from the tall, narrow windows, her tiny feet propped on a tapestry stool.

“My dear ma’am!” Petite, auburn-haired Nell Bradbourne, her dark-blue eyes alight with unaccustomed laughter, turned from the window through which she had been contemplating the serenity of Laura Place with its gently-spraying central fountain, and the broad, deserted, rain-dampened length of Great Pulteney Street beyond. Her great-aunt’s tone, as much as the words themselves, having successfully distracted her from the brown study into which she had fallen during a pause in their conversation, she shook her head in fond reproval. “You cannot mean it.”

“I suppose you are right, but your father’s cousin Jarvis seems to be no better than his own sire, and that generation of Bradbournes was sadly lacking, I fear, though the worst anyone ever said of your papa—until last year, at all events—was that he was bringing an abbey to a grange and had no sense. Jarvis now … Well, all I can say of him is that if the world would be better without him …” She paused significantly.

Nell choked back a gurgle of laughter. “No, no, Aunt Flavia. You know that that was not at all what I meant when I said I should prefer the world with him out of it. I shan’t deny that I haven’t wished from time to time that I might make him disappear in a puff of smoke, or that—”

“Oh, I daresay it would not be so easy as that,” Lady Flavia said, twinkling, “and poison will not do, for I cannot imagine how one might prevail upon him to ingest it. Nasty tasting stuff, it must be, for one cannot expect to be so fortunate as to come by one of those mysterious, unnoticeable Oriental poisons one so frequently encounters in Gothic romances, particularly when one does not know a single mysterious Oriental person from whom one might acquire such a thing. But wait.” She held up a hand with the index finger extended for a brief, thoughtful moment before adding, “I believe Sydney Saint-Denis, up on Bathwick Hill, has an Oriental servant. Perhaps he might—”

Nell’s laughter could no longer be contained. “Aunt, will you be serious for a moment,” she implored when she could speak. “We must think of a solution far more practical than murder.”

“But, my dear,” Lady Flavia protested, “though I may have suggested murder only to make you laugh, you cannot call it impractical. Not with everything in such a tangle, what with your father’s losing Highgate in that idiotic wager, and then your brother’s duel, and the tragedy that followed. You even suspect that Jarvis had a hand in Nigel’s trouble, if not in your father’s death, so if he now believes the only way to salvage your reputation from the ashes of theirs is to ally yourself with him, you must know you will never convince him otherwise.”

“I know nothing of the kind, ma’am. Indeed, I do not doubt that he will cease to plague me the moment he discovers that I have sunk myself so low as to seek genteel employment.”

Lady Flavia stiffened in her chair, and her right foot began to tap irritably upon the footstool, beating time to the cadence of her words as she said, “I take leave to remind you, Nell, that that is simply not to be thought of! What would people think?”

“But surely, dear ma’am, they would think even less of a murderess,” Nell responded in a teasing tone.

“They would never know,” her ladyship said tartly, “and goodness knows, ladies of quite the highest quality have been known to do such things before now—even queens, I believe—though they do
not
seek employment, Nell, genteel or otherwise. Oh, I know I have been talking nonsense, but if you should do such a thing, and in Bath, of all places, people will think perfectly dreadful things.”

“Only that I have not got sixpence in my pocket, which is no more than the truth,” Nell said with a sigh. Then, seeing that her aunt was truly distressed and only too ready to continue the argument they had had over and over since Nell’s arrival in Bath four days before, she stepped impulsively toward the old lady, kneeling beside her chair and taking one of the thin hands firmly between her own. It trembled a little, but when she squeezed it, the squeeze was returned. “Aunt Flavia,” she said gently, “what can it matter what people think? If I do not care—”

“Then I suppose I am not to care either,” Lady Flavia interjected. “Well, and perhaps I would not if I believed you will not. But you will, my dear, you will! Oh, and I would, too, if I were such a zany as to allow you to attempt to earn your living. You were not brought up to it, Nell, any more than I was. Your father was only a baron, of course, and began life as a younger son, for that matter, but your mother was from an excellent family, just as I am, and there is nothing really amiss with the Bradbournes that a little ambition could not cure. Ah, if only Robert and I had been blessed with children!” She lapsed into a brief reverie, but then, giving herself a shake, she added sharply, “To pretend you do not care what people say—What a farradiddle! If you did not care, then why did you come here? Why did you not simply stay at Highgate and let Jarvis frank you as he wished to do? Surely he never asked you to leave.”

“Indeed, and you know he did not.” Nell bit her lower lip. “He was all consideration, as only he can be, but when he enters a room, one feels somehow as though a snake has slithered in. I do not know how it is, for to own the truth, he has treated me only with kindness, but even while he remained at Crosshill, one frequently felt his frustration that my papa and not his had inherited the seat of the Bradbournes. When he informed me of his intention of removing to Highgate, pretending to be doing so out of a sense of duty, I could not bear to remain there.”

“I cannot think,” Lady Flavia said, “how, with his fine notions of propriety, he expected to move in with you without ruining your reputation. One must suppose he intended to force you to accept his hand.”