Folly's Reward (12 page)

They were barely damp. So he must have swum naked and put them on afterward.

A hot flush burned her cheeks and washed through her belly.

She tried desperately not to notice, when he bent to slip from their little tent, how the fabric below the knotted tapes clung to the hard, rounded, muscled shape of him, every bit as revealing and far more enticing than the nakedness of her dreams.

“Oh, goodness!” she said under her breath, but she scrambled from the warm bed and hurried after him, gathering the voluminous folds of her muslin nightgown in both hands.

Hal stood silhouetted against the dark, willow-covered banks of the canal, as lovely as the silkie. Prudence hurried her gaze up over his lithe midriff and chest to the enchanting lines of his strong throat and jaw.

Moonlight broke suddenly through the clouds. As it caught his features, she could see that he grinned at her and that this time his amusement was genuine, though it was only a riotous, wild mockery directed at himself.

“And if I am a Casanova, Miss Drake, with a trail of ruined women and bastard children behind me, would I feel the enormity of that, too?”

Without removing the unmentionable garment this time, he dropped back into the water.

Prudence leaned over the low rail.

“Are you mad? You will die of cold.”

His head moved sleekly through the water as he swam back to her.

“Would you care, angel?”

He somersaulted and disappeared for a moment, before surfacing again in a different spot.

“Of course I should care if you made yourself ill.”

Spreading his hands in the water in an exaggerated gesture of surrender, he laughed up at her, his black hair spilling over his face.

“Because how then would you get Bobby to your sister’s?”

His strong, long-fingered hands closed on the rail. Hal slipped out of the canal, water streaming down his body, and grabbed at a towel that he had apparently left ready.

With a burning confusion of emotion, Prudence watched his neat movements as he dried himself.

“Well, of course, that’s a consideration—but only for Bobby’s sake.”

He toweled vigorously at his hair. “And is there nothing you want from me for your own sake? You have been avoiding me as if I carried the plague. For God’s sake, seize the day! Take the opportunity to discover something outside of the schoolroom. How do you know if the chance will ever come again? Why don’t you use me while I’m here?”

She felt frantic, trapped by his forcefulness. “Use you? How?”

“We could see what we could learn from each other.” He reached out a cold hand and touched her cheek. The gentleness of it was infinitely disarming. “With honesty, even with affection, perhaps. I don’t ask for your virtue, for God’s sake! ‘Be not coy, but use your time, / And while ye may, go marry.’ Or at least try a little harmless courting. Was what happened at the waterfall so dreadful? I felt your response then, and again in Gretna Green, deny it though you may.”

“You think I should kiss you again?”

“Maybe. After all, you survived twice, didn’t you?”

“But what could we discover, sir?”

He turned with a desperate violence that left her shaken. “Whether I am really a rake, perhaps. How the devil can I know? But a lady should be able to tell.”

“So you will use me to find out something about yourself? What on earth can I learn?”

“Whatever you desire! You are in charge. Wouldn’t you like to know something about pleasure? The delight of a caress, a shared touch. Remember, we are married.”

“No, we’re not. That business in Gretna Green was a mockery. I don’t imagine I shall ever marry.”

“Oh, yes, you will.” He took the loose end of her long plait to run it idly over the palm of one hand, sliding the knobby braid past his fingers. “You just don’t know why you must. Have you never felt your own hair? It’s so soft, like the down on a chick. Close your eyes and just feel.”

He took her hand and turned it palm up, then brushed it softly with the silky blond plait.

“Now that is a harmless enough pleasure, isn’t it, Prudence?”

“Don’t!” she said blindly, closing her fingers over the delicious sensation, before tearing her plait out of his hand. “I don’t want to learn anything from you.”

Hal turned away and slid to his haunches, dropping his damp head to his knees. He remained quite still, his hands pressed over his eyes and mouth, the curve of his back sculpted in the moonlight.

Prudence glared down at him. “And don’t laugh at me! I know I seem foolish and ignorant to someone like you.”

“Oh, dear God, angel! I am far from laughter. Though the amazing absurdity of my situation brings me daily amusement, of course.”

As he lifted his head, Prudence saw his face clearly in the moonlight.

Like Abou Hassan, I might believe I am the caliph, for I’m damned if I know otherwise.
Abou Hassan, the young man of Baghdad, carried in the night to the bed of the Caliph, Harun-al-Rashid, in the
Arabian Nights
.

Hal was ravaged, not by laughter, but by despair. The frost of it seemed to have sunk to his bones.

Hot tears slid down her cheeks. Without thinking, Prudence tugged a blanket from their bed and wrapped it about his shoulders.

As she did so, Hal caught her hand in his own and pulled her down into his arms.

“Don’t offer largesse to a rogue unless you mean it, angel,” he said fiercely, tucking her with him into a fold of the blanket.

He captured her chin in his palm and turned her mouth up to his.

His cold mouth pressed against hers, drinking in her warmth, plundering her generosity. A kiss with a searing depth of passion.

Prudence was caught in a tangle of muslin, crushed against his naked chest, while the ice melted away in the flame where their lips met.

Through the thin fabric of her nightgown, intense fire burned from his skin into hers. They fell back together against the canvas, while Hal’s lean fingers ran boldly over her shoulders and down her back, following the curves of her waist and hips. He kissed her neck and the corner of her jaw, then ran his tongue down to the pulse at the base of her throat and suckled there, like a child. She knew only enchantment, the rapture of it, and moaned softly into his damp hair. This was so very, very, lovely.

She did not know that she returned his embrace, until she discovered for the first time the delectable feel of a man’s muscles under her hands, and the softness of the fine down that curled over his chest. He was so firm and smooth. It was so delightful to touch him. She wanted to discover everything about him, all of his mysteries and all of his subtlety.

With her hands and with her body, Prudence longed to know how and why he was so different, to discover all of his powerful, masculine secrets.

“What the hell is all this damned muslin?”

His voice was a soft rumble of amusement as he bit gently at the lobe of her ear. His hands were caught up in the voluminous folds of fabric.

Prudence knew to her shame that she wanted to tear open the buttons at the neck of her nightgown and let his sensitive fingers explore where they would. Her breasts ached. Surely only his touch would assuage that?

Yet he released her. Holding her firmly by the shoulders, he kissed her once in the center of her forehead.

“Sweet, foolish Prudence.” He was breathless, but healing laughter seemed to well up in him once again. “Your name belies you. There is nothing you can learn from a rake, dear kind soul, except the road to ruin. I wish you would slap me as hard as you can, marry a fine upstanding fellow with a brace of hounds and a house in the country, and send him after me with a double-barreled shooting piece. I deserve death in a ditch for this, and the wind wailing over me.”

“I don’t understand!” It was almost a sob.

The gentleness in his voice threatened to break her heart. “Don’t try, please, to understand. Go to bed. I shall sleep outside.”

Hal pushed her into the little nest under the canvas and pulled the covers over her, before he thrust back out into the cold night. He picked up the abandoned blanket and dropped away out of sight.

Prudence silently cried herself to sleep once again, as cold water slapped in a slow rhythm against the boat.

* * *

The next morning Hal walked along the towpath with the two boys and the horses, leaving Prudence on the narrow boat. In the clear, innocent light of morning, the entire encounter of the previous night felt like a dream.

He had treated her with a warm, gentle courtesy over breakfast, putting her at ease and allowing her almost to believe that it had never happened. Yet she had no desire to talk with Sam, who stood silently at the tiller, so she sat at the front of the boat and—for Bobby’s sake—did her best to act the dutiful wife.

Prudence didn’t want to meet Hal’s eyes, or allow herself to see anything of what he was feeling, but she was mending his jacket.

You hardly notice the way your eyes are sometimes green and sometimes brown, or that your eyelashes are two shades darker than your brows.

There was no decent mirror on the narrow boat. And anyway, it was nonsense. The practiced, deceitful nonsense of a rake. Prudence stabbed the needle blindly back toward the rent in his coat. Something hard turned it aside.

Or that if you smile there is the most enchantingly severe dimple in your left cheek.

How could he! She had been perfectly content with her life as a governess, before he had opened those eyes that reflected the sky and thought to amuse himself by tormenting her.

She pulled the needle out of his jacket, then rammed it back. The needle struck the obstruction again. How very odd!

Prudence felt carefully along the seam. Yes, there! A distinct lump in the fabric. This was the jacket that Hal had been wearing on the beach, the sailor’s jacket that no gentleman would dream of wearing. The jacket he had worn with the rough trousers—although now she knew that beneath them lay the undergarments of a gentleman.

Nothing about him made sense. Why on earth would he have lumps in his clothing? Without compunction, Prudence picked apart the stitches along the seam. In seconds she had uncovered a tiny, tight roll of oilskin.

Her fingers shook a little as she unrolled it. The oilskin contained a slip of paper with a set of odd symbols written across one side. Some were letters or numbers. Others were signs that seemed totally occult to her.

She had not known what or who he was, but she had been enthralled, hadn’t she? As fascinated by him as if he really were an alien creature from a fairy tale, the silkie who shed his skin to rear up at the foot of a lady’s bed in the shape of a man, then leave her with child, desolate.

The paper burned in her fingers. The writing might as well have been the witless scribbling of the wee folk, for none of the symbols made any sense.

Prudence clutched her hands together in her lap. This was proof. Proof that Hal was indeed something extraordinary. For ordinary people did not appear mysteriously on beaches in Scotland when no regular passenger ship had gone missing. Ordinary people did not wear the underwear and boots of the wealthy with the outer garments of the poor.

And ordinary people did not carry secret messages concealed in their clothes.

She tried to remember exactly what Hal had been telling Sam. For it was obvious that the paper was in code, and Hal had brought it from France just as Napoleon was leaving Elba. Which meant that Hal was either a spy or a traitor, or very possibly both.

She glanced up at him where he walked ahead with the boys. With those elegant, clever, gentleman’s hands he took Bobby around the waist and tossed him onto the back of one of the horses. The child’s squeal of delight echoed across the water.

Prudence quickly folded the paper and slipped it inside her own pocket, until she could decide what on earth to do about this appalling discovery.

* * *

Three days later, in a deathly silence broken only by the insistent ticking of the large clock on the mantelpiece, Lord Belham received the news that his quarry had dropped off the face of the earth. They had been seen last in Liverpool—and then nothing.

No carriage, either private or public, had carried a woman, a boy, and a black-haired man south. His agent would swear his soul on it. An ever-widening net of questioning at coaching inns had uncovered no sign of the fugitives.

Surely Miss Drake could not have carried the boy north again?

Liverpool was a major port. God help him, if she had boarded a ship and taken to sea and the child with her!

The marquess studied the letter from his agent once again. The man was thorough and knew his task. Miss Prudence Drake, daughter of a respectable and canny doctor, had earned her own living since she was seventeen. She had siblings, orphaned and scattered about the globe. Apparently her upbringing had been dour and restricted. Everything pointed to the hypothesis that she was naive and trusting.

Did she trust this mysterious black-haired man to rescue her? Miss Drake no doubt cared for the child and desired his safety, but was she capable of protecting him?

Belham looked up and cursed aloud, shattering the quiet of his study. Devil take this black-haired man, whoever he was! By all accounts he was careless and cavalier, but he had somehow managed to secrete little Lord Dunraven and his governess—and so well that trained spies had lost track of them.

So the dissolute Marquess of Belham was going to have to take a hand in this damnable business himself. He stood up, then crossed to his sideboard, his movements as lithe as a stalking cat’s, and poured himself a brandy.

If the man with black hair was indeed a gentleman, it was likely that he was a member of one of the London clubs. Had anyone gone missing? Was there a family concerned over the whereabouts of a son or a brother? He was rumored to have come from France. Was there anyone who was known to have gone there, and was expected back?

Thank God the agent had sent such a very complete description, for something in it was painfully familiar. Perhaps the identity of the fellow wouldn’t be so hard to discover, and that might determine where the hell he was likely to be going—and the little heir to Dunraven Castle and its fortune with him.