The Lady Most Willing . . . (14 page)

Byron stood and moved to the fire, onto which he carefully placed two more logs. As
she watched him, it occurred to Fiona that he probably did everything carefully. He
returned to the sofa, but somehow ended up seated not at one end, but in the middle.

His hip touched her slippers, in fact. Once again, he slung his arm along the sofa
and picked up a lock of her hair. Unsure how to react to this, Fiona pretended not
to notice.

“What happened to the frame?” he asked.

“She began stealing the portrait and hiding it, after which I would tear apart her
bedchamber looking for it. Eventually, my father heard of our battles, and he sent
off to London to have a precise duplicate made, but with a portrait of Marilla’s mother
rather than mine. She was, you understand, very beautiful.”

“Your mother must have been extraordinarily lovely as well. What was your father’s
secret?” His eyes held an expression she recognized, though it wasn’t often directed
at her. She’d seen it too often in the eyes of men looking at her sister to mistake
it. He must be drunk to feel lust for her. Quite drunk.

“In fact, my mother was an ordinary woman,” she said, hugging her knees.

“I doubt that.” He paused, then: “How did she die?”

“She caught pneumonia one particularly cold winter. I was quite young, so I haven’t
many memories of her, but she was motherly, if you know what I mean.”

“Dark red hair like yours?”

She nodded.

“Your hair has all the colors of the fire in it, like banked logs that might burst
into flame any moment. And it curls around my finger like a molten wire.” Without
stopping, he asked: “What happened when the portrait arrived?”

“Nothing,” Fiona said, rather sadly. Her sister had tossed the portrait—painted by
Sir Thomas Lawrence from an earlier likeness—to the side as if it had cost mere pennies.
She could still picture her father’s crushed expression. “Pearls are old fashioned,
Papa,” Marilla had snapped. “Don’t you know
anything
? I swear I don’t belong in this mud hole. I belong in London.”

The earl tugged the lock of her hair that he held, rather as she had tugged Marilla’s
that morning. “Lord Oak—”

He tugged harder.

“Byron,” she said, reluctantly. “This conversation isn’t at all proper. Not at all.
I don’t wish to call you by your given name.”

“And why is that?”

“Because this is some strange fairy-tale moment, and tomorrow, or possibly the next
day, the snow will stop and then the pass will open, and you will return to your life.
And I will return to mine.”

“Will you come to London for the season this March?”

“No,” she said swiftly, knowing instantly that she would rather die than sit on the
edge of a ballroom and watch the Earl of Oakley waltz with another woman as everyone
attempted to decipher his haughty expression. “I didn’t like you very much when I
saw you there.”

He nodded, seeming to understand. “You wouldn’t like me this time, either. But couldn’t
we pretend that I’m someone different? Likable? After all, we’re buried.” He gestured
toward the windows. They were encrusted with snow and ice.

“I’m not very imaginative,” she said apologetically. “All I can see is an earl who
is well-known as a most punctilious man, but has apparently lost his head. It would
be one thing if I were Marilla. But you’re not struck mad by my nonexistent beauty,
so the only way I can explain your flirtation is to believe that you do so in order
to avoid my sister. And that doesn’t make me feel very flattered.”

“Why couldn’t I be enthralled by your face? Because, as it happens, I am.” He reached
over and poured more cider into both of their cups.

She frowned at him. “How strong is that cider?”

“You are very beautiful, in a quiet way. You’re like a flower that one sees only after
wandering away from the coach into a field. And then, behind a rock, one finds a tiny
blue flower, like a drop of the ocean in the midst of a brown field.”

“Goodness,” she said, startled by this flight of lyricism. “Perhaps you do have something
in common with Lord Byron.”

“Absolutely not,” he said, his lip curling. “The man leads a licentious life and deserves
every drop of notoriety he’s earned.”

“Reputation is tremendously important to you by all accounts.”

“An excellent character is a person’s greatest blessing,” he replied. It sounded as
if he was repeating a sentence he’d heard many times.

“It’s far more complicated than that. The public nature of one’s character can differ
from the nature of one’s intrinsic self,” she answered, feeling her heart ache. Surely
she wasn’t falling in love with a man she hardly knew. Clearly, she was feeling
too much
. More than she’d allowed herself to feel in years, since the wrenching horrible days
when she realized that her father didn’t, and never would, believe her about Dugald.

Byron stretched his feet out toward the fire. A log cracked in half and sent a shower
of sparks like live bits of gold up the chimney.

“My father believed that nothing mattered except for one’s reputation,” he said, staring
into his mug.

“He would have approved, then, of your broken betrothal?”

“Without question. Though I should say that, in point of fact,
she
broke the engagement after . . . after the incident.”

“Did you love her?” Speaking the words sent a little pulse of savage longing down
her neck. Why would his fiancée kiss a dancing master when she could have kissed this
complex, beautiful man? It was inconceivable.

“No,” he said morosely. “And obviously, she didn’t love me, either. But I didn’t ask
for love.” His expression made it clear that was an important distinction. “I never
asked for that.”

“You should have,” Fiona exclaimed, before she could catch herself.

He pushed to his feet and squatted before the fire, using the poker to move a half-burnt
log closer to its heart. He moved with a powerful grace that belied his large physique.
“I begin to share your opinion.”

She raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t look back at her. “Neither love nor affection
is a prerequisite for marriage amongst the nobility,” he continued. “But faithfulness
is. That’s what a woman’s reputation means: that she won’t sleep with another man,
and leave a cuckoo to inherit one’s estate.”

“I think kindness is important,” Fiona said, thinking of Dugald and his lack thereof.

“Of course. Sanity is also a good attribute in a spouse.” Humor laced his words again,
albeit humor with a dark edge.

“You’ve omitted physical attractiveness,” Fiona offered. “From what I’ve seen during
the season, gentlemen find beauty tremendously important.”

He was placing another log on the fire, but he half turned in order to see her face.
“Why do you single out my sex? Don’t ladies feel the same about their future husband’s
appearance?”

She thought about it. Dugald hadn’t been handsome, not in the least. Of course she
would have preferred a good-looking man, but when her father had presented her with
the marriage, it never occurred to her to say no for that reason. “We generally don’t
have the freedom to choose on that basis.”

He looked back at the fire. “The dancing master was going bald. That’s what I remember
most: the way his head shone in the back.”

Without conscious volition, Fiona rose and walked a step to his side. But once there,
she was at a loss. Obviously, he had cared about his faithless fiancée, no matter
how much he protested to the contrary. She put a hand tentatively on his shoulder.
Her velvet sleeve was a little too long; its folds fell over the arm of his coat.
“I’m sorry,” she said.

He got to his feet. “I didn’t care about her overmuch.” Perhaps he was telling the
truth, but she knew instinctively that he would never admit it if Lady Opal had broken
his heart.

Byron was a stubborn, stubborn man. That square chin conveyed a level of obstinate,
masculine strength that a woman could lean against—and battle—for the whole of her
life.

Fiona found herself smiling at him as if he were a true friend, as if genuine affection
flowed between them. Somehow, beyond all reason, she felt as if she had just become
friends with a pompous, irascible turnip of an English lord.

From the look in his eyes, he had come to the same realization at the same moment.

Then his eyes fell to her lips. She licked them nervously. “Of course,” she said,
her voice coming out in a breathy tone that reminded her uncomfortably of Marilla,
“of course you didn’t love her!” Somehow she managed to give the sentence a perky
tone that was utterly inappropriate.

His eyebrow shot up. He was mocking her, and yet . . . yet there was sensual promise
there as well.

“No,” she whispered.

He didn’t answer, at least not directly. Instead, he reached over and pulled one of
her hairpins and, before she could stop him, another. Without pins to hold it up,
her heavy hair tumbled down over her shoulders.

Byron made a sound in the back of his throat that sounded like a hum.

“What are you doing?” Fiona said, stepping back and frowning. Her spectacles had slid
down her nose; she pushed them back up. “I have already informed you that I am not
an appropriate person with whom to conduct a flirtation, Lord Oakley.”

“And I have already warned
you
about using my title,” he said, his voice throaty, and just as she remembered his
threat of a kiss, his arms came around her and his mouth descended on hers.

It was not her first kiss. In the heady days before her father matched her with Dugald,
she had kissed two boys. For years afterward, she had remembered one of those kisses
in particular. She could even remember the sharp smell of the pine needles that crackled
under their feet as she and Carrick Farquharson stood in the shade of a garden wall.
There had been no second kiss. Carrick had left to fight in His Majesty’s army, and
never returned; his body lay in a grave somewhere in France.

Byron’s mouth brushed across hers, and she smelled pine needles, like a ghost of a
promise. It was awkward. She didn’t know what to do with her arms, or her spectacles.

The only thing she felt was a deep sense of rightness . . . and an equally powerful
sense of wrongness. “We mustn’t do this,” she whispered.

He eased back enough to remove her spectacles. Holding her gaze, he carefully put
them on the mantelpiece.

That just meant that Fiona could see his face even more closely. Her brows drew together
as she tried to make sense of what was happening. “Why are you kissing me?” she said,
keeping her back straight, so that she didn’t relax against him like the veriest trollop.
And then, fiercely, “Is it because you know of my reputation?”

“Have you kissed a dancing master as well?” His voice was threaded with a lazy sensuality
that made her step back, though his face blurred when she did it.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Then what spurred your lost repute? Not that I would believe such a rumor, because
any fool could see that you’re not the one in your family handing out kisses like
bonbons.”

“My fiancé’s name was Dugald,” she began. She took a deep breath, but he interrupted.

“A terrible name.”

Words bubbled up in her chest, but she didn’t open her mouth to blurt out the story
of ivy, and windows, and a reputation so blackened that she was infamous throughout
the Highlands. The truth was that she longed for another kiss, just one, before he
learned the truth and turned his back in disgust.

When she didn’t speak, Byron cupped her face with his long fingers, carefully—as carefully
as he did anything else. Yet when he put his mouth to hers, there was nothing sensible
about his kiss. She opened her mouth to his without thinking, wrapping her arms around
his neck and standing on her tiptoes.

It was a wicked kiss, deep and wild and
glad
. She could taste it in his mouth, that sudden, vivid delight, as clearly as if he
had said so aloud.

The knowledge of his pleasure curled in her stomach, flared into an odd heat that
made her shiver against him, and then he was kissing her so fiercely that her head
tilted back.

It was dark behind her closed eyelids. She concentrated on the taste of him and the
smell of him, and the way one kiss melted into another, kisses that made her ache
and breathe as if she were running, but not away—toward him, closer to him.

Her arms curled more tightly around his neck; then his hands slid to her back and
he pulled her against his body. As if it mattered to him that she feel all that hardness
and strength.

Their tongues tangled and she slid her fingers into his short hair. Part of her was
frozen in stark disbelief that an English earl with white-blond hair and a muscled
body was kissing her. Making her feel meltingly soft, and impatient. Making her long
for more.

That thought was instantly followed by a rush of panic. She—
Fiona
—didn’t allow herself to long for anything. She never had. That way was madness. She
kept herself sane by never wishing for what she could not have, by recognizing that
life had sensible boundaries.

Longing would mean acknowledging that she wished that her mother hadn’t died, that
her father cared about her more, that she had never met Dugald, that people had believed
her . . . It meant the heartbreak and desperation of knowing that she wanted children,
that she wanted a husband, that she . . .

Her panic was as chilling and as overwhelming as an ice-cold wave breaking over her
head. She pulled back. “I can’t do this,” she said, her voice rising to a squeak when
she looked up at Byron and understood that
longing
wasn’t strong enough to describe what she was feeling. She seemed to have succumbed
to a kind of madness, though she hardly knew him.

In an impulse for self-preservation, she reached out, put her hands on his chest,
and pushed at him. She felt hard planes of muscle under her fingers as she pushed,
which merely increased her alarm. He didn’t even fall back a step.