An Unforgettable Rogue (9 page)

“Come now,” he said. “We are family. I am certain you must have questions that have gone unanswered for far too long. Would you not rather ask than conjecture?”

To Claudia’s exclamation and Hildegarde’s gasp, a hedgehog ran from beneath the table.  Then Beatrix crawled out from beneath and popped up between them. “I have a question, Uncle Bryce.”

“Excuse me,” he interrupted, “but did I just see a hedgehog cross the room?”

“That’s Nanny.” Beatrix, the unrepentant eavesdropper, came around to climb on his lap. “Do not worry, she will be back.”

“Nanny?” Hawk asked.

Giff chuckled. “Bea wanted to give her hedgehog a name with
hog
in it, but all she could think of was Hogmanay, except that Bea calls it Hogmananny, so that’s what she named her hedgehog.”

“Nanny, for short,” Hawk said. “Good name, Bumble Bea. I approve. Have you shown Nanny to your cousins?”

Bea shook her head. “Aunt Bree says Damon and Rafe have a cat and a dog both, so they will not care for her.”

“Ah, but I think they will. Hedgehogs are such unique pets, after all.”

“Really?” Beatrix beamed, picked up the toast Hawk had just buttered and took a bite. “When can we move back to the London house, so I can show them?”

Hawk accepted a replacement for his toast from Hildegarde. “Thank you, Aunt,” he said, taking a bite to stake his claim. “Why do we not wait, Bumble-Bea, until Alexandra joins us before I tell you how things stand with my title and estate.”

“You mean you have not even told
her
yet?” the wide-eyed child asked. “Take care or you will make her cry again.”

“Make her…. Cry? What are you talking about?” Could Bea have heard them earlier?

The child of seven-going-on-forty gave a long-suffering sigh. “Before you died—or we thought you did—you wrote to Aunt Sabrina, Damon and Rafferty’s Mama, remember? They were staying with us then?”

Why did everyone suppose that he had forgotten the members of his family while he was away? “I remember.”

“You did not write a letter to Alex when you were dying, or even think of her at the last, and that made her cry.”

“Devil take it.” Hawk rose, taking Beatrix with him, and in silence he deposited her in his chair and exited the breakfast room.

Halfway across the hall, he saw Alex coming down the stairs and waited for her at the bottom. “Alexandra, we need to talk.”

CHAPTER TEN

“No, Bryceson, I told you, I am not ready to talk.”

“This is not about what happened earlier,” Hawk said. “This is something I insist we settle, something I can at least explain.” He took his stubborn wife’s arm and urged her into the library.

“What is it? What is wrong?”

Hawk possessed himself of her hand. Surprisingly callused, it was small and pale, as opposed to her spirit, which shone bright and strong. “I am concerned by something Beatrix said.”

“If you let everything Bea says bother you, you will be disquieted for the rest of your days.”

“You cried when I wrote to Sabrina, before I supposedly died, because I did not write to you? Is that true?”

Alexandra turned to gaze out the window, except that she did not see the rolling lawn gone to seed, or the home wood overtaken by bracken, but her own life, as she had viewed it the day that letter came, stretching barren and pointless before her, without Bryceson in it.

“I was emotional, devastated, because I thought I— I thought you had died.” She shivered.

Hawk placed his cane on a nearby chair and slipped his hands down her arms to chafe and warm them. “You should have worn a shawl,” he said. “This place is as drafty as a dovecote.”

Alex closed her eyes, immersing herself in his nearness, and in his touch.

“I wrote to you first,” he said, from close behind, absently stroking her arms. “Or I began to, but I … I feared that I would expire at any moment, and I knew that Sabrina’s very life depended upon the arrangements I had made for her. So I put your letter aside, unfinished, to write hers, before it was too late.”

Hawk gazed into the past, at that smoke-hazed, bloody day, the pain and the horror of the Waterloo battlefield, of dead friends and dying comrades. Of lying atop the
heap
. He saw the blood in his eyes, tasted it in his mouth, and smelled it clogging his nostrils.

He remembered well the stench of death, especially his own.

In many ways, he
had
died that day, or a part of him had, anyway … until he beheld Alex from the back of that church, and had begun to come back to life, whether he wanted to or not, minute by minute, piece by lost and broken piece.

“Because I was incapable of writing myself,” he said. “An old woman at the Waterloo Inn wrote my final words for me. When I finished dictating Sabrina’s letter, I had no strength left, nor did I wish to share with a stranger what I could not seem to find the correct words to express to you. The last I remember, I was being excruciatingly loaded onto a dray for a trip to the country. Your letter was never finished, Alex, and I regret that more than I can say.”

“Where is it?” she asked, not turning from the window, almost as if she did not believe him.

“I never saw it again,” he admitted. “I lay delirious for weeks, in and out of my mind, despondent for months. Once I returned to London, I looked for your letter among the few meager belongings left to me, but it had disappeared.”

“I am sorry,” she said. “I would have liked to receive it, even half written. I wish someone had sent it. I would have been comforted to know that you thought of me at all, especially after the way we parted.” Her sorrow broke in a sob for their dreadful parting, for his unfinished letter, and for his hurtful words of that morning.

Hawk put his arms around her from behind, placing a hand flat against her abdomen, feeling a need to mark her intimately as his, and pulled her close.

Her head rested against his coat-front, his cheek against her hair. He must give her this much, at least, he thought. She deserved some truth. “If not for thinking of you, Lexy, I do not believe I would have survived.”

She turned in his arms then, her wide eyes bright. “That is perhaps the nicest thing you have ever said to me.”

“In that case, I should be horsewhipped.” The temptation to kiss her was strong, stronger than Hawk could resist.

“Your grace.”

They pulled apart.

“Your pardon,” Myerson said, red-faced, when he saw what he had interrupted. He held forth a silver salver with a visitor’s card upon it.

“Thank you.” Hawk took the card, read it, cursed inwardly, firmed his lips, and handed it to his wife. “Myerson, is the, ah, gentleman in question still waiting?”

“Viscount Chesterfield is in the drawing room, your grace, but he is not asking to see you. He wishes to see her grace. He was very specific about that.”

“I am certain he was. Thank you. You may go. Alexandra,” Hawk said, after the retainer had shut the door. “I shall leave you to greet your lover in private.”

“No,” Alex said.

Hawk stopped and turned, releasing his breath, clutching at hope. “Am I to understand that you do not wish to see Chesterfield?”

“No. Yes. I wish—I
must
speak with him.” She bit her lip.

Hawk shuttered his eyes and closed his expression; he knew he was doing it, but he could not seem to stop.

“I owe Judson a great deal,” Alex said, her explanation more accurate than she would wish.

“Then see him, you shall.” Hawk bowed. “Good morning to you, Madam.”

Chesterfield appeared astonished when Alex entered the drawing room, though he did not take a step toward her, for which she was grateful. “I did not think he would let you see me,” he said.

Alex remained by the door. “I am so very sorry about our wedding.”

Judson firmed his lips, much as Bryce had just done. “What happened was not your fault.”

“I deserve your anger and more,” Alex said. “Five thousand pounds you gave me in exchange for my promise to wed you, but I failed to fulfill my part of our bargain, and I cannot repay you. Not yet, at any rate.”

“Why do you not let Hawksworth worry about repayment?”

“I do not want him to know about the money, Judson, please. He would be angry that I took it. Let me repay you, myself, in time?”

“For once in his charmed life, let Hawksworth face his responsibilities. Everything has always come so bloody easy to the rogue. Looks, money, a title, women, all handed to him on a gilded platter.”

“You are not being fair. Hawksworth fought for his country and suffered mightily for its cause. His looks are altered irreparably; his title and wealth have gone to another.”

“But as for women, he ended with the best.” Chesterfield bit off a curse. “You understand do you not, Alexandra, that he set off to play at war and left you to carry his burdens? That is why he was shocked out of countenance and damned near broken. He discovered that war was not a devilishly entertaining sport or particularly glorious, either.”

Chesterfield’s words resembled her own often-uncharitable thoughts after Hawksworth first left. “No, there you are wrong. Do not be angry with him.”

“I have lost my bride and my future, yet you do not want me to be angry with the man who took them from me.”

“You do not love me, Judson. You wanted a mature wife, and I wanted a secure future for my family. No matter what has passed between us, it is finished now. Let us at least be honest with each other.”

Chesterfield nodded. “So be it.” He turned to the window. “You are in alt, I take it, that your true love has returned from the dead?”

True as the words were, Alex did not appreciate the way Chesterfield sullied the sentiment with his caustic tone. “Hawksworth is well liked by everyone,” she said. “Why do you dislike him so?”

“For that reason, I suppose. Because everyone else likes and accepts him, without question, while I see him as a spoiled boy, who takes and takes, but never learned to give. The very same reason he despises me. I see him as he really is. Selfish.”

Alex had learned long ago that Hawksworth disdained Chesterfield as much as Chesterfield disdained her husband, and where they were concerned, emotions ran high and animosity had festered too long to give credence to much one said of the other. But in her mind, it all boiled down to one thing. “You have always been jealous of Bryce, have you not?”

Chesterfield gave her a half-smile and shook his head, almost in wonder. “Yes, but that does not change the facts.”

“No, but it does color them. Let us be friends. Please.”

“The three of us? No. But I will not tell Hawksworth about the money, yet. That is as friendly as I can be right now.”

“Thank you. I will repay you before you feel the need to tell him. Why are you here? Is there something that I can do for you?”

Chesterfield cursed again, and sighed, as if in resignation. “I came to make certain you were all right. You had not come around by the time he took you away the other day, and I was worried about you. I came yesterday as well.”

“I am fine, but I was in shock then, I think. Anybody would be.”

He stepped toward her. “Anybody, except you, my strong one.”

Alex stepped back. “
Can
we be friends?”

“If you find yourself in need of a friend, I would be a fool to apply for the position.”

Alex pulled her jilted bridegroom away from the door, where someone might hear them, and toward the center of the room. “I do need a friend, Judson. I need one badly. I need help.”

Chesterfield stepped closer and took her hand. “Tell me what I can do.”

“I need to stage a seduction and I do not have the least idea how, nor do I know anyone else I can ask.”

At the reverberating slam of the door, Claudia stepped from behind the drawing room curtains with a huff of frustration.

Alex exclaimed in surprise as she did.

“Drat,” Claude said. “I thought you had both left.” The seventeen-year old grinned. “You certainly set fire to his tail with that request.”

“You were listening,” Alex charged, partly in accusation, partly in admonishment, but mostly to hide her mortification. “You are worse than your sister.”

“I adore Chesterfield. He is my destiny. Of course I was listening, though I do wish he did not seem so broken by the loss of you. Do you not think that fate tore the two of you apart at the very last moment, so that I may still have him?”

“I think Hawksworth’s excellent recuperative powers were responsible, not to mention the little matter of our previous marriage.”

“Still I wish Chesterfield had been willing to discuss seduction,” Claude said dreamily. “I would dearly have liked to know how
he
would go about one.” Her gaze changed from otherworldly to worldly in a questioning blink. “Why do you need to seduce Uncle Bryce, anyway? I thought he was a master of seduction.”

“Who in the world told you that? Never mind, I do not wish to know.”

Claude giggled. “Do you want to know what I think you should do to seduce him?”

“Good Lord, no.” Alex lowered herself to the settee and covered her face with her hands, doubly chagrined. But as Claude sat beside her, she regarded the sagacious teen with a curious respect. “Claudia Jamieson, what do you know about seduction, anyway?”

“Not nearly as much as I would like, but— Does this mean that you are still untouched?”

“Claudia, really.”

“Oh, all right. I have often found that words alone can be very … stirring in the right circumstances. I was thinking you could tell Uncle Bryce that I have begun to ask some, er, rather embarrassing questions, which you, in your untouched state, cannot answer.”

“What good will that do?”

“Then you
are
untouched.”

“Claude.”

“Sorry.” The girl sighed in resignation. “Perhaps, if you can get Uncle Bryce to explain all the things every young woman wants, or at least needs, to know about dealing with the male of the species, you can, ah, ask a few more leading questions. You could even require a demonstration, which might, er, stimulate … things, enough to let nature take its proper course.”

“You devious little brat. Shame on you.” Alex grinned. “But you already sound knowledgeable. What
do
you know?”

“Only what I have garnered from watching the horses.”

“But horses are nothing like….” Alex regarded Hawk’s niece rather warily. “Of course they are not.”

“I do think they must be. I swam once with the Cruikshank boy—you remember little Harold—and everything on him, seemed a teeny, tiny version of, er, those things, on a male horse.”

Alex remembered Hawksworth as a child, though the word
small
had not seemed to apply even then. Then there was that growing
something
prodding her in the night, and standing as if at attention beneath his dressing gown this morning, which did seem to be very much like….

So much became clear to Alex of a sudden that she gasped. “But a man cannot possibly grow as long as a horse?”

“Well how the blazes would I know?” Claude spoke with utter disgust for her ignorance. “I hoped you would tell me.”

That absurdity sent Alex into peels of laughter.

“However long
it
might become,” the precocious teen said, giggling as well. “I would not know what in Hades to do with it, if it were dancing before my eyes.”

Alex composed herself as she straightened the pleats in her skirt. “I shall tell you when you are older,” she said, which set off a further bout of merriment between them. “Gad, what an inappropriate conversation.”

“Outrageous,” Claude agreed. “But nothing half so scandalous as the five thousand pounds you accepted from Chesterfield. How could you Alex? And what in heaven’s name did you use it for?”

Alex sat straighter. “My reason is not your concern. That I took it, and why, is between me and Chesterfield.”

Claudia narrowed her eyes and turned a becoming shade of envy-green. “Besides your promise, were you forced to give Judson anything
else
in exchange?”

“In exchange for what, pray tell?”

“Uncle Bryce!”