Regency Rumours (15 page)

‘You do? But—’

‘But it is quite impossible, of course,’ he said with a harsh edge beneath the reasonable tone. ‘You might be mine, but I can never have you. You do not have to say it. I am who I am—you are what you are. You must forgive me for speaking at all,’ he added with a smile that did not reach his eyes. ‘I have embarrassed you now.’

‘No. No, you have not.’ What did he really mean? What did he want, feel? She did not know, dared not ask. This was not some smooth attempt at seduction, this was bitter and heartfelt—the words seemed dragged from him against his will.

‘I want you as more than a friend. I had hoped that I had hidden it. I knew I should not feel it. But I cannot help it,’ she added despairingly.

‘I should never have kissed you.’

‘Two kisses are not what makes me feel like this.’ She put her hand to her breast, instinctively laying it across the heart that ached for him.

‘You fought very hard against what you feel?’ he asked. His hands had come up to her shoulders. He
was holding her so close that her skirts brushed his boots and she had to tip her head back a little to look into his face. The taut lines had relaxed into a wary watchfulness.

‘Not as hard as I should have,’ Isobel admitted. ‘But I was afraid you would think me like the women you have to avoid, the ones who pursue you.’

‘I doubt any of them would stand here, this close, with me looking like this,’ Giles said with a return to the bitterness.

‘I have seen better shaves,’ Isobel admitted, seeing what humour might do. No good was going to come of this, she knew that. How could it? He was, as he said, who he was. But that was for tomorrow. Today she knew only that she was desired by this man. ‘And I could wish your mouth was not so bruised.’

‘Just my mouth?’ He raised an eyebrow and winced.

‘I would like to kiss you,’ Isobel admitted, beyond shame at saying it. ‘But I do not want to hurt you.’

‘Kiss it better,’ he suggested, pulling her closer and bending his head so his words whispered against her lips.

She slid her hands up to the nape of his neck to steady herself and trembled at the unexpected, vulnerable softness of the skin beneath her fingertips. With infinite care she met his lips with her own: the
slightest pressure, the gentlest brush. He sighed and she opened to him and let him control the kiss.

This was so much more than that passionate exchange in the library, that foolish tumble in the shrubbery. So much more intimate, so much more trusting. Giles made a sound deep in his throat, a rumble of masculine satisfaction, and she met the thrust of his tongue with her own, learning the taste of him, the scent of his skin, the rhythm of his pulse. Their lips hardly moved as the silent mutual exploration went on, but Giles’s hands travelled down her back until he held her by the waist, drew her tighter against his body.

He was lean and long and fit and Isobel pressed against him out of need and yearning and felt the heat and the hardness of his need for her. She wanted to get closer, to wrap herself around him, but she stopped herself in time, recalling his ribs.

‘What is it?’ Giles lifted his head.

‘Your ribs. Lord James said you had been kicked.’

‘If you can be thinking about my ribs while I am kissing you, it does not say much for my lovemaking.’ Giles bent and brushed his uninjured cheek against hers, his mouth nuzzling at the warm angle of her neck and shoulder.

‘You want to make love to me?’ How brazen she
was to ask such a thing. How wonderfully liberating it felt to do so.

‘I would give a year of my life for one night in your arms.’ His voice was muffled against her skin as she lifted her hand to touch his hair.

Isobel gasped. It was all her fantasies about Giles, all her wicked longings, offered to her to take. All she needed was the courage to reach out.

Almost as soon as he said it, she felt him hear his own words. The enchanted bubble that surrounded them shattered like thin glass. Giles’s body tensed under her hands, then he released her and stepped back.

‘I am sorry. I should never have spoken, never touched you.’ His face was tight with a kind of pain that his physical injuries had not caused. ‘I did not mean—Isobel, forgive me. I would not hurt you for the world.’ He turned on his heel and walked away without looking back, up the gallery and into the book room that led to the library.

She stared after him, still shaking a little from the intensity of that kiss, unable to speak, unable to call him back.

He had only wanted a brief amorous encounter and his sense of honour had stopped him before they both were carried away. Isobel sank down on the nearest
chair, stared unseeing at a landscape on the opposite wall and tried to tell herself she had just had a narrow escape.

The earl broke up the meeting shortly before noon. Giles suspected that such a short morning’s work was on his behalf, but he could not feel sorry for it. Between the lingering effects of the doctor’s potions, the pains in his body and his anger with himself over Isobel, it had been an effort to think straight at all, although the other men did not appear to notice anything amiss.

Of all the damnably stupid things to have done. But somehow he had not been able to forget that moment of waking to find her beside him in the big bed. All his good resolutions, all his self-deception that he could treat her as a friend, had fled to leave only a raw, aching need for her.

He could have controlled it, he told himself savagely, as he turned left out of the steward’s room and, on impulse, took the steps up from the basement. He emerged into the grey light of a blustery, cold day that threatened rain before nightfall. Giles jammed his hands into his breeches’ pockets. He
would
have controlled it if she had not chosen that moment to
come to him, her face full of hurt at the way he had coolly ignored her.

That vulnerability, that honesty, the way she confronted him so directly had somehow wrenched equal frankness from him. And because she was older than most of the unmarried girls he encountered, because he had been so open with her, he had let himself believe that they could have an affaire.

And of course she was too innocent to understand where their kisses were leading—even if she was not, it would have been wrong. By his own action he had cleared her name of all disgrace—now she could go back into society, find a husband, marry.

She was a lady and that meant marriage—but not to him, he told himself savagely. Not to him and she knew it, had remembered it when he had blurted out his desire for her. He had thought he had come to terms with his birth and with the limits it placed upon him: it seemed he was wrong.

‘Idiot,’ he muttered, kicking gravel. Of course a woman like her would not offer herself to a man she did not love. She had thought him her friend, nothing more, and he had betrayed her trust. ‘Damnation.’ What had he done?

‘Harker, I could follow you across Cambridgeshire just from the muttered oaths.’ He looked up to find
James, his cane in his hand, standing in front of him. ‘What is the matter? Are you in pain?’

‘Not as much as I deserve to be. What are you doing out here?’ Giles took in his friend’s thick greatcoat and muffler. ‘It is no weather for a walk.’

‘I went over to the stables to see how they were progressing in the search for a blacksmith. What’s the matter with you? If you want to talk about it, that is.’

He could trust James, more than he could trust his own sense, just at the moment. ‘Strictly between ourselves I’ve made a mull of things with Lady Isobel. More than a mull. Are you warm enough to walk? I don’t want to risk being overheard.’

‘Of course.’ James fell in beside him as he walked past the stables and the church down the drive to the east. ‘Have you told her you love her?’

‘What? Of course not! I’m not in love with her. I do not fall in love with well-bred virgins. In fact, I do not fall in love with anyone.’ James snorted. ‘I want her, that’s the trouble, and she caught me with my guard down and I damn nearly propositioned her.’

‘Clumsy,’ James remarked. ‘And unlike you. But of course she, being female and having more intuition than the average male, presumably took your intentions to be honourable.’

‘I don’t know what she took them to be,’ Giles retorted,
goaded. ‘She knows who I am, so how could she believe them to be anything but dishonourable? And what makes you think she wants me? Your fine understanding of female sensibility?’

‘Not being able to see means I use my ears, my dear Harker. And I listen to the silences between the words as well. You two are, as near as damn it, in love with each other. What are you going to do about it?’

‘Nothing. Because you are wrong, and even if you were correct, even if I was fool enough to allow myself to fall in love, I would do nothing. I am not even going to apologise for what happened between us in the Long Gallery and perhaps that will bring her to her senses. And stop snorting, it is like having a conversation with a horse. I’ll leave as soon as I can.’

‘So you make love to her and then snub her. An excellent plan if you wish to break her heart, although I doubt Lady Isobel deserves that.’

‘Then what do you suggest?’ Giles demanded.

‘Marry her.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘M
ARRY HER
? A
RE
you insane?’ Giles slammed to a halt. ‘Isobel is the daughter of an earl.’

‘And so? She’s a second daughter, she’s perilously close to being on the shelf and she’s had a brush with scandal. From what my sister tells me she was only doing the Season reluctantly in any case. Perhaps her father would be delighted for her to marry an up-and-coming architect with society connections, a nice little estate and a healthy amount in the bank.’

‘You
are
insane,’ Giles said with conviction.

‘All right.’ Albright shrugged. ‘Go right ahead and break her heart because you won’t risk a snub from the Earl of Bythorn.’

‘Snub? I’d be lucky if he didn’t come after me with a brace of Mantons and a blunt carving knife. I would in his shoes.’

‘Coward,’ James said.

‘I am trying to do the honourable thing,’ Giles said between gritted teeth. ‘And that includes not knocking your teeth down your throat. You’re the only man
who can get away with calling me a coward and you know it.’

‘If you want to do the honourable thing, then you want to marry her,’ Albright persisted. ‘Let’s go back inside, it is raw out here and it must almost be time for luncheon.’

‘Of course I do not.’ Giles took the other man’s arm and steered him down a path towards the back of the house. ‘I am not in love. I have never been in love, I do not intend on falling in love. I intend,’ he continued with more force when that declaration received no response, ‘to make a sensible marriage to a well-dowered young woman from a good merchant family. Eventually.’

‘That’s three of you who’ll be unhappy then,’ James retorted as they went in through the garden door. ‘Give me your arm as far as my room, there’s a good fellow.’

Lord James was particularly pleasant to her over luncheon, Isobel thought. Perhaps he was trying to make up for the misunderstanding over the house-party incident. Sheer stubborn pride made her smile and follow all his conversational leads. She wished she could confide in him, for he seemed both intelligent and empathetic and he knew Giles so well. That was impossible, of course—he would have no more
time for her foolish emotions than Giles had and, besides, she could not discuss Giles with anyone.

She had bathed her red eyes and dusted her nose with a little discreet rice powder. Giles would never guess she had been weeping, she decided, studying her own reflection in the overmantel glass.

‘You think this new census is a good idea?’ he was saying now in response to Lord James’s speculation on how accurate the results of the government’s latest scheme might be. He sounded not one wit discomforted by what had occurred that morning. Isobel tried to be glad of it.

‘What do you think, Mr Harker?’ she challenged him, frustrated by his impenetrable expression. He was treating her as though she was unwell, fragile, which was humiliating. It seemed to her that when he spoke to her his voice was muted. His face, when their eyes met, was politely bland. But she knew him too well now to believe he was indifferent to what had passed between them that morning. There were strong emotions working behind the green, shuttered eyes.

‘I think that it will all depend on the competence of the parish priest entrusted to fill in the return in each place,’ he said now. ‘Better if each person was questioned individually. Or every householder, at least.’

‘You think that would expose more of the truth?’
Isobel asked. ‘That people would reveal their circumstances honestly?’

‘Perhaps not,’ Giles said slowly. ‘And perhaps it is a mistake ever to ask for too much honesty.’ Isobel had no difficulty reading the meaning hidden in his words. He had been honest about his desires, had led her to the point of seduction and now he was regretting it.

‘Sometimes people do not know the truth because they are too close to it,’ Lord James observed, making her jump. She had forgotten that she and Giles were not alone. ‘The observer often sees more of the picture, don’t you think?’

‘So gossips and old maids like to say in order to justify their meddling,’ Giles said harshly.

Startled, Isobel glanced between the two men. Albright’s mouth twisted into a wry smile, but he did not appear to feel snubbed by what had sounded like a very personal remark. Giles, on the other hand, looked furious with his friend. Something had passed between them that morning, it was obvious.

The earl looked up from his plate of cold beef, unconscious of the undercurrents flowing around his luncheon table. ‘The census? Very good idea in my view. I’d be glad if they did it in Ireland, then I might have a better idea of what to expect of conditions and
problems there. I may suggest it when we see how this works out.’

The talk veered off into discussion of Irish politics, social conditions and, inevitably, sporting possibilities. Isobel placed her knife and fork neatly on her plate, folded her hands on her lap and watched Giles.