Regency Rumours (10 page)

‘I was speaking in jest.’ How attractive he was when he laughed, his handsome head thrown back, emphasising the strong line of his throat, the way his eyes crinkled in amusement. Isobel found herself smiling. Slowly she was beginning to see beyond the perfect looks and the outrageous tongue and catch glimpses of what might be the real man hiding behind them.

There was that suspicion about secrets again. What would he be hiding? Or was it simply that his faultless face made him more difficult to read than a plainer man might be? ‘I thought about a convent the other
day when I was reflecting on just how unsatisfactory the male sex can be.’

‘We are?’ He was still amused, but, somehow he was not laughing at her, but sharing her whimsy.

‘You must know perfectly well how infuriating men are from a female point of view,’ Isobel said with severity, picking up the trailing skirts of her riding habit to keep them out of the thick dust as she went to examine one of the better-preserved panels more closely. Surely they could not all be so suggestive? It seemed they could. Was it possible that one could do that in a bath without drowning?

‘You have all the power and most of the fun in life,’ she said, dragging her attention back from the erotic scene. After a moment, when he did not deny it, she added, ‘Why is the thought of my being a nun so amusing?’

Giles’s mouth twitched, but he did not answer her, so she said the first thing that came into her head, flustered a little by the glint in his eyes. ‘I am amazed that the countess allows this room to be unlocked. What if the girls came in here?’

‘The whole building has been locked up for years. Lady Hardwicke told the children that they were not to disturb me here and I have no doubt that her word is law.’

‘I think it must be, although she is a very gentle
dictator. So—will you recommend that the place is restored?’

‘I do not think so.’ Giles shook his head. ‘It was badly built in the first place and then neglected for too long. But I am working up the costing for the earl so he has a fair comparison to set against Repton’s ambitious schemes.’

‘But that would be such a pity—and you like the place, do you not?’

‘It is not my money. My job is to give the earl a professional opinion. I am not an amateur, Isobel. I am a professional, called in like the doctor or the lawyer to deliver the hard truths.’

‘But surely you are different? You are, after all, a gentleman—’

Giles turned on his heel and faced her, his expression mocking. ‘Do you recall what you called me when I kissed you?’

‘A…bastard,’ she faltered, ashamed. She should never had said it. It was a word she had never used in cold blood. A word she loathed.

‘And that is exactly, and precisely, what I am. Not a gentleman at all.’

‘But you are,’ Isobel protested. He was born out of wedlock? ‘You speak like a gentleman, you dress like one, your manner in society, your education—’

‘I was brought up as one, certainly,’ Giles agreed.
He did not appear at all embarrassed about discussing his parentage. Isobel had never heard illegitimacy mentioned in anything but hushed whispers as a deep shame. How could he be so open about it? ‘But my father was a common soldier, my grandfather a head gardener.’

‘Then how on earth…? Oh.’ Light dawned. His
eccentric
mother. ‘Your mother?’ His mother had kept him. What courage that must have taken. What love. Isobel bit her lip.

‘My mother is the Dowager Marchioness of Faversham.’ Isobel felt her jaw drop and closed her mouth. An aristocratic lady openly keeping a love child? It was unheard of. ‘She scorns convention and gossip and the opinion of the world. She has gone her own way and she took her son with her.’ He strolled back into the large chamber and began to gather up the papers on the table.

‘Until you left university,’ Isobel stated, suddenly sure. A wealthy dowager would have the money and the power, perhaps, to insist on keeping her baby. Not everyone had that choice, she told herself. Sometimes there was none. ‘She did not want you to study a profession, did she?’ She made herself focus on the man in front of her and his situation. ‘That was when you went your own way.’

‘Perceptive of you. She expected me to enliven society,
just as she does.’ He shrugged. ‘I am accepted widely—I know most of the men of my age from school and university, after all. I am not received at Court, of course, and not in the homes of the starchier matrons with marriageable girls on their hands.’

Isobel felt the colour mount in her cheeks. No wonder he was wary of female attention. If his mother was notorious, then he, with his looks, would be irresistible to the foolish girls who wanted adventure or a dangerous flirtation. Giles Harker was the most tempting kind of forbidden fruit.

‘Of course,’ she said steadily, determined not to be missish. ‘You are not at all eligible. I can quite see that might make for some…awkwardness at times. It will be difficult for you to find a suitable bride, I imagine.’

‘Again, you see very clearly. I cannot marry within society. If I wed the daughter of a Cit or some country squire, then she will not be accepted in the circles in which I am tolerated now. There is a careful balance to be struck in homes such as this—and I spend a lot of my time in aristocratic households. We all pretend I am a gentleman. A wife who is not from the same world will not fit in, will spoil the illusion.’

‘It will be easier as your practice grows and your wealth with it.’ Isobel bit her lip as she pondered the problem. ‘You could wed the daughter of another successful
professional man, one who has the education and upbringing to fit in as you do.’

Giles stopped in the act of rapping a handful of papers on the desk to align them. Isobel’s reaction to his parentage was undeniably startling—it was almost as though she understood and sympathised. ‘Do you plot all your friends’ lives so carefully for them? Set them all to partners?’

‘Of course not. It is just that you are a rather different case. Unusual.’ She put her head on one side and contemplated him as though trying to decide where to place an exotic plant in a flower border or a new ornament on a shelf. ‘I would never dream of actually matchmaking.’

‘Why not? It seems to be a popular female preoccupation.’

Now, why that tight-lipped look again, this time accompanied by colour on her cheekbones? ‘Marriage is enough of a lottery as it is, without one’s acquaintances interfering in it for amusement or mischief,’ she said with a tartness that seemed entirely genuine.

‘You are the victim of that?’ Giles stuffed his papers into the saddlebag he had brought up with him.

‘Oh, yes, of course. I am single and dangerously close to dwindling into a spinster. It is the duty of every right-thinking lady of my acquaintance to find me a husband.’

There was something more than irritation over being the target of well-meaning matchmaking, although he could not put his finger on what it was. Anger, certainly, but beneath that he sensed a deep unhappiness that Isobel was too proud to show.

‘Ah, well,’ Giles said peaceably, ‘we are both safe here, it seems. The Yorke girls are well behaved and well chaperoned and there are no eligible gentlemen for the countess to foist upon you.’

‘Thank goodness,’ Isobel said with real feeling. ‘But I am disturbing you when you have work to do. I will go on with my walk now I have admired the view from up here.’

‘I do not mind being disturbed.’ He thought he had kept the double meaning out of his voice—he was finding her unaccountably disturbing on a number of levels—but she bit her lower lip as though she was controlling a sharp retort. Or just possibly a smile, although she turned abruptly before he could be quite certain. ‘Where are you going to go now?’

‘I do not know.’ Isobel stood looking out of the window.

‘The avenue running north from here is pleasant. It skirts the wood.’

‘And leads to the lake.’

‘That frightens you?’

‘No. No, of course not.’ The denial was a little too emphatic.

‘Then you did not dream?’ Giles buckled the saddlebag, threw it over his shoulder, picked up his hat and gloves and watched her.

‘No…yes. Possibly. I do not recall.’

‘I will come with you,’ he said. ‘I have been sitting too long.’

‘But your horse—’

‘I will lead him. Come and see the best view of the Gothic folly.’

Isobel followed him down the stairs and out into the sunshine, allowed him to take her hand as they negotiated the mud and then retrieved it as she fell in beside him. They walked beneath the bare branches of the avenue, Felix plodding along behind them, the reins knotted on his neck, the thin February sunlight filtering through the twigs.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A
FTERWARDS
G
ILES FOUND
it difficult to recall just what they talked about on that walk. His memories seemed to consist only of the woman he was with. Isobel seemed to be interested in everything: the deer grazing in the park, the lichen on the tree trunks, the view of the roofs of the Hall, complex and interlocking, the reason why he had named his horse as he had and what an architect must learn. He made her laugh, he could recall that. She stretched his knowledge of botany with her questions and completed his verse when he quoted Shakespeare. But under it all there was still a distance, a wariness. She was no fool, she knew she was playing with fire being with him, but it seemed, just now, as if she was suspending judgement.

She held her bonnet against the breeze. ‘A lazy wind—it does not trouble itself to go around,’ she said. ‘Oh.’ The lakes spread out below them in the valley, chill and grey.

‘And there is the folly.’ Giles pointed to the tower
on the opposite hill to bring her eyes up and away from the source of her apprehension. ‘Shall we go and look at it?’

If you fell off a horse, then the best thing was to get right back on, and the narrow bridge where the broken timbers showed pale, even at this distance, was her fall. ‘Of course, if you are too tired…’

Isobel’s chin went up. ‘Why not?’

They followed the path down into the stock ditch and through the gate in the fence at the bottom. Felix’s hoofprints from the previous day were clear in the turf. It had been a good jump, Giles thought as they climbed out at the other side.

Isobel was silent as they walked down the hillside towards the lake. Then, as the muddy patch where they had clawed their way out came in sight, she said, ‘I thought she had drowned. I thought I was not going to be able to save her. What if you had not heard us?’ The words tumbled out as though she could not control them and he saw her bite her lip to stem them. Her remembered fear seemed all for Lizzie, not for herself, and he recalled how she had cradled the child on the bank. For the first time it occurred to him that a single woman might mourn her lack of children as well as the absence of a husband.

‘Don’t,’ Giles said. ‘What-ifs are pointless. You
did save her, you found her and hung on until I got there. Now run.’

She gasped as he caught her hand and sprinted down the last few yards of the slope, along the dam, on to the wooden bridge, its planks banging with the impact of their feet. Moorhens scattered, piping in alarm. A pair of ducks flew up and pigeons erupted from the trees above their heads in a flapping panic. Giles kept going, past the break in the rail and on to the grass on the other side.

He caught Isobel and steadied her as she stopped, gasping for breath. ‘You see? It is quite safe.’ Felix ambled in their wake.

‘You—you—’ Her bonnet was hanging down her back and she tugged at the strings and pulled it off. She was panting, torn between exasperation and laughter. ‘You idiot. Look at my hair!’

‘I am.’ The shining curls had slipped from their pins and tumbled down her back, glossy brown and glorious. Her greatest beauty, or perhaps as equally lovely as her eyes. Isobel stood there in the pale February sunlight, her face flushed with exertion and indignation, her hair dishevelled as though she had just risen from her bed, her breasts rising and falling with her heaving breath.

Kiss her
, his body urged.
Throw her over the saddle and gallop back to the Hill House and make love to her in the room made for passion
. ‘You are unused to country walks, I can tell,’ he teased instead, snatching at safety, decency, some sort of control. ‘I will race you to the folly.’ And he took to his heels, going just fast enough, he calculated, for her to think she might catch him, despite the slope.

There was no sound of running feet behind him. So much the better—he could gain the summit and give himself time to subdue the surge of lust that had swept through him. Just because Isobel was intelligent and poised and stood up to him he could not,
must not
, lose sight of the fact that she was a virgin and not the young matron she often seemed to be.

The thud of hooves behind him made him turn so abruptly that his heel caught in a tussock and he twisted off balance and fell flat on his back. Isobel, perched side-saddle on Felix’s back, laughed down at him for a second as the gelding cantered past, taking the slope easily with the lighter weight in the saddle.

God, but she can ride
, Giles thought, admiring the sight as she reached the top of the hill and reined in.

‘Are you hurt?’ Her look of triumph turned to concern when he stayed where he was, sprawled on the damp grass.

‘No, simply stunned by the sight of an Amazon at full gallop.’ He got to his feet and walked up to join her. ‘How did you get up there?’ She had her left
foot in the stirrup and her right leg hooked over the pommel. Her hands were light on the reins and she showed no fear of the big horse. Her walking dress revealed a few inches of stockinged leg above the sturdy little boot and he kept his gaze firmly fixed on her face framed by the loose hair.

‘There’s a tree stump down by the fence. Felix obviously thought someone should be riding him, even if his master was capering about like a mad March hare.’

‘Traitor,’ Giles said to his horse, who butted him affectionately in the stomach. ‘Would you care to explore the folly, Isobel?’