Elisabeth Fairchild (7 page)

“Is it true, Cupid?” The girl lifted her face to him. “You must give Penny a Valentine?”

Penny, not mama. Was the child not hers?

“Felicity.” Mild reproof in the elder Miss Foster’s tone, a motherly sound.

Alexander knelt to study the girl, seeking definitive proof of her parentage in her pretty little face. “Can you tell me what Valentine Penny wants?” he asked.

“No, she cannot,” Miss Foster said decisively.

“A pity.” He rose. “I do not like to remain indebted. People might get the mistaken impression I’ve no intention of honoring my commitments.”

Miss Foster bit her luscious lower lip. He did not like to see it thus abused.

“The small matter of this Valentine does not matter, Mr. Shelbourne,” she murmured.

“I beg to differ.” Still he studied the child, considering the curl of ashen curls, like Val’s. Not like Miss Foster’s. “Small things can make all of the difference in the world. If they are misunderstood, misrepresented, or confused, mistaken assumptions follow. I have known lives to be lost, for less.”

She regarded him a moment with the uniquely amethyst colored eyes.

The chid’s were blue.

 “In some instances, “ she said “perhaps you are right. In this case, you make too much of it, sir.”

“Do I? I am not convinced. You see, in the small matter of my name just such a misunderstanding might arise. You call me Mr. Shelbourne, rather than the more familiar, Shel, or Cupid. One might think you mean to distance me.”

“One might,” she agreed.

“I’m hungry,” the little girl complained.

“Come, then. We shall go.” She meant to abandon him. She took Felicity’s hand and set off briskly along the path.

“I’ve food enough for the three of us.” He hoped to stop her, wanting to spend more time in her company.

The child paused, looked back, only to be yanked into motion again by Miss Foster’s steady progress.

“But, I’m thirsty . . .”

“We thank you, Mr. Shelbourne,” Miss Foster said stiffly. “But I fear we must decline your kind offer. We mean to visit the nearest inn.”

“That is miles away,” he protested.

“Miles?” A whine in earnest. The child’s discontent became his ally. He did not hesitate to use it.

“A half hour, at best, before you find such a place.”

“Is it so far?” The child sounded pitiably forlorn.

“A half hour is nothing,” Miss Foster bolstered the girl’s flagging patience.

“And another half hour before the food is served.” He played devil’s advocate.

Her pace did not slow. She shook her head. “I do not think . . .”

“It really requires no thought.” He had no intention of allowing her to leave. “You could relax beside the lake and feed the child.”

“I’m thir-rr-sty,” the little girl said.

“We shall cup some water from the beck.”

“I’ve milk,” he suggested.

“Milk?” Miss Foster stopped so fast he almost ran into her. She turned in her tracks,  gazing at him with frowning skepticism, much like the moment in which he had bent to kiss her. “You have milk?”

“In the jug in the beck?” the child asked.

“Yes.”

Miss Foster’s brows rose.

“You do not strike me as a milk drinker, sir.”

“I thought, if I should have the good fortune to encounter you here, that you might like it in your tea.”

Silence as she absorbed this.

“Darjeeling or China Black? I’ve a camp kettle to boil water.”

She frowned, uncertainty clouding her brow, defenses breached.

“If nothing else, let the child have a drink before you go,” he suggested.

She sighed, stood ready to succumb. He delivered the
coup de gras
. “I will press you no more. It matters too much to me that we should remain friends.”

Her frown became more pronounced. “Were we ever?” she asked frankly.

“Were we not?” He turned the question back on her.

She pursed her lips. “I know too little of you to regard you as friend, Mr. Shelbourne. I have only just learned your name.”

“Oh? I knew from the moment we met we were to be friends.” His lips, gone dry now, remembered the moist, willing potential of her mouth. They had stepped already beyond the limitations of mere friendship. She knew it as well as he, and he was not going to let her run away from that without a struggle. “We’ve no chance of any kind of relationship if you cannot forgive me,” he pointed out.

She looked at the child. Val’s child?

The child looked back, her desire for food and drink hovering in a soulful gaze.

“Forgiveness is a quality worth nurturing,” Penny said. “You must remember that, Felicity.”

He wanted kiss her  again--for capitulating, for any reason whatsoever, and no reason at all.

The girl’s face brightened. “Shall I run fetch the jug?”

“Ask Mr. Shelbourne.”

He nodded. “Go then.”

She skipped ahead, Miss Foster watching, love in her eyes.

“A pretty child,” he said. “She looks like you.”

“Do you think so?” The brilliance of her gaze dimmed. “I see so much of her father in her.”

“Do I know him?” he asked carefully.

She studied him a moment before responding with an enigmatic smile, “I do not think you do.”

Not Val then. Not the love child he had feared she must be. “He leaves her care to you?” He had to know more, and yet he would step lightly over heavy ground.

“Entirely.”

Beyond that, she was not forthcoming.

“About your kisses, Mr. Shelbourne.” She effectively diverted his attention.

His brows rose involuntarily. “My kisses, Miss Foster?”

 She blushed, and looked away. “I would not have you think I encourage them.”

He let the words hang between them a moment, tension building. He watched the pulse beat faster in the vein in her neck. “Not at all,” he said at last. “I understand they discomfited you.”

“Yes.” She looked up.

“Such was never my intention.”

“No. I’m sure you were led to believe I would welcome them.”

“I was not led at all,” he contradicted. “I simply charged in where I was not yet wanted. Can you forgive me?”

Her eyes, those remarkable amethyst eyes, fixed on him in a manner most provocative, though he was certain that was not at all her intention.

“This time,” she said.

He found himself distracted by her mouth--the mouth that he must kiss again, and soon, for she implied there would be another time.

“I trust that I shall never need to forgive you again?” she said.

He nodded, bowed, and vowed to himself that the next time he kissed her, forgiveness would prove entirely unnecessary.

Chapter Seven

They chose a patch of sunshine, sheltered from wind, with a view of the lake. The force made a distant hushing noise, the lapping of the lake overriding it. He built a fire, boiled water, made tea, and poured milk for the child into a telescoping tin cup. With the smell of wood burning in the open air, military campfires came to mind. He frowned, no desire to remember.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He shook away the past, poured her a mug of tea, and set the camp kettle in the coals.

“Never better.” He forced the cheer with which he chose to supplant all melancholy. “I must thank you for agreeing to stay, for suggesting this place. It is--” his voice faded.

“Beautiful?” Her gaze fixed on the lake.

He studied with fascination the golden glitter of sunlit hair against the water’s silvered shimmer.

“Sublime.”

She turned, her eyes the color of the sky, changeable as the wa, questions there.

“I would not have enjoyed it half so much alone,” he said.

“What did you bring to eat?” the child interrupted.

Penny quickly corrected Felicity for her forwardness.

Val’s cook had provided mutton sandwiches, apple tarts, a crock of mustard, another of chutney. Simple fare, but tasty. The child ate heartily, then looked skyward asking him to identify all of the birds she could spy. She had a keen eye. It was an hour before she lay her head in Miss Foster’s lap and snuggled close for a nap, clutching the locket, the bothersome heart-shaped locket.

He poured fresh cups, then sat back to enjoy the aromatic brew that warmed him as much as the sight of Penny Foster stroking the child’s hair away from her brow, the little girl’s face gone slack with sleep--both of them tender, vulnerable, beautiful.

Miss Foster looked up, shuttering away that tenderness, eyes wary, when she looked at him. He had seen that same fear in men’s eyes, in hand-to-hand combat. He did not like to think he provoked it in her, now.

“Tell me about the lake,” he suggested. “These peaks. Have they names?”

“Place Fell.” She twisted to point, careful not to wake the child. “Hellvelyn. Stybarrow Dodd, and Great Dodd backed by Fairfield and Great Seat.” The russet flanks were grayed by distance. Her hand swept northward, over her shoulder. “Loadpot Hill.”

He smiled. “Odd name.”

She nodded, smiling back at him, his heart touched by the sight of those lips upturned. She looked across the lake. “Then there is Little Mell Fell.”

“Mustn’t forget that,” he murmured.

She blushed, and turning serious, told him of lead mines near Glenredding, and the damming of Goldrill Beck, and the forests of Glencoyne, the names like music on her tongue, her love of the place undisguised.

“There is a tower, there.” Again she pointed, and he found himself far more fascinated by the tilt of her wrist, and the curve of her back, and the curls of golden hair that blew in the wind than in the Duke of Norfolk who had built a hunting lodge.

“And over there . . .”

She twisted. He breathed deep as her movement revealed the swell of breast and hip, a bit of cleavage.

“A pre-Roman ruin, Dunmallard Hill is difficult to see for the trees, but Romans, Saxons, Celts, Vikings, Norsemen and Scots have fought to hold it.”

He  closed his eyes, imagining the clash of swords, the echo of gunfire from the slopes. “One cannot escape it,” he muttered.

“What?” she asked mildly.

“Man’s violence.” His bitterness was real, each word clipped. “His need to conquer, possess and kill.”

With a stricken look, she covered the sleeping child’s ears. “Yes,” she said. “But that is the past.”

He rose, startling a flock of ducks, their muted honking striking fear in the grebes and cormorants, all of them taking wing, a flock of angels rising, their combined wing beats enough to wake the dead.

The child opened her eyes with a moan.

He regretted his sudden move, unsettling the peace of the lake, and the violence of his words.

So much to regret. So very much to regret.

Chapter Eight

He rode in silence for the first half hour of their return journey, a weight of thoughts hanging about his head like a dark cloud. The gray horse set the pace for their steady trot, long tail swishing. Archer kept up well enough.

His leg, slightly higher than her own, on the taller animal, drew Penny’s eye. Well muscled and rock hard, clad in breeches that clung, limbs worthy of study. The legs of a man who had spent hours in the saddle. She did not try to fill the silence, simply watched the flex and bulge of muscle, wondering if he tired of her company, of their company.

Felicity, little magpie, chattered non-stop, spewing questions unending, about the trees, the clouds, and the squirrels that skipped across the road ahead of them in quick, red flashes. She responded patiently, quietly, wondering if their conversation disturbed him.

He roused at last, as they crossed the bridge at Temple Sowerby, when at last she asked, “Do you mean to fish while you are here, Mr. Shelbourne?”

He broke his speechless reverie with a puzzled grimace. “Fish, Miss Foster? It is Oscar who is mad for fishing. Why?” He eyed her up and down, as if imagining her in gumboots, rod and creel in hand. “Do you enjoy angling?”

“For safe topics, yes.”

His gaze sharpened. He shifted in the saddle, and looked past her, toward Cross Fell. “I am poor company,” he apologized.

She sighed. “Lost in thought. I often do the same. What were you thinking?”