The Windflower (57 page)

"And chivalrous," Devon's mother amended glumly. She folded her arms as a pillow under her head. "I can't tell you how much he respects me. All these years he's been the best of friends to me." Still more glumly, "He has a mistress."

Taken aback, having no idea what to say, Merry finally asked, "Is she beautiful?"

Aunt April spoke from the pianoforte. "If you like tall, mannish females who stride and brighten their hair with chemicals."

"Don't be so loyal." Atine grinned. "She's beautiful. I've seen her at the opera. They aren't in love, people say, but it's an oh-so-convenient relationship." She grimaced. "How I'd like to cause them both a little inconvenience. I've known since June that I love him, but nothing's worked. If I sway toward him in the garden, he turns all concern and takes me inside to rest from the heat! And when we had to take shelter in an abandoned cottage after being caught in the rain, what should he do but make me a long speech about how I mustn't be afraid, because he placed my honor above all things. I could have
wept.
I'm convinced that things would have been much easier if I'd fallen in love with a libertine. Why, April, are you giggling at me?" Aline propelled herself to a sitting posture. "How dare you? When I know you've a beau-ideal of your own— the way you dream off sometimes."

"Humdudgeon," Aunt April maintained stoutly, though to Merry's amazement her aunt's cheeks were reddening.

Smiling with creamy satisfaction, Devon's lovely, grubby mother flopped backward in the grass. "Humdudgeon nothing. We're all three of us infected with the same disease.
Love."

The London season had ended some months earlier, but when the senior Dowager Duchess of St. Cyr gave a ball, the upper ranks of the British aristocracy sighed and sent their best jewels to be cleaned. Postilions brought their full-dress livery out of camphor and prinked their carriage horses, blacking hooves, currying, oiling tack. Modistes and milliners and hairdressers smiled over their profits.

Walking on Devon's arm among pillars and statues and grand strangers, Merry had time between the smiles and murmured pleasantries to take stock of her impressive surroundings. /
will not be afraid, I will not be afraid,
she had said over and over to herself on the carriage ride to the ball, and now, to her amazement, she discovered that she was not. Over the months she had become accustomed to the hard talk and tempers of rough men; compared to them these genteel pale ladies and their smooth-tongued escorts were startlingly tame. She was too much an American to turn meek under the stare of an exalted title; she was too much a product of Morgan's careful if inconspicuous tutoring to let down her guard in this unexplored environment.

It fascinated her how little Devon seemed to care for all this. She had thought his mother must be exaggerating his lack of interest in the ton. Merry found Aline had hardly told her the half of it. This—the light, superficial interchanges, the flattery, the cunning invitations from painted pouting lips—bored him. Only when they met his grandmother had Merry felt his interest stir.

She was a grand dame indeed, Devon's grandmother. It was small wonder people were afraid of her. Her piercing dark eyes were filled with a mocking scorn that reminded Merry of no one as much as Rand Morgan. She was not tall, she was not attractive; but she gave the impression of being both. Her first words to Devon were "It's been three years since I've seen your face. And now, by God, I give a ball to countenance your mewling bride, and what thanks do I have for it? If it had been left to that rabbity mother of yours, your wife would be my age before she made her curtsy. You're still angry at me, I suppose, for having you transferred out of the European war last year. You might have given me a chance to explain instead of running off to Morgan! By God's teeth, you and your damned heroics! Do you think I wanted to see the last of the Crandall blood enrich some European cabbage patch?"

"Not only do I dislike your interference, I dislike your methods," Devon said, the voice soft, the eyes hard. "You've been too busy forcing favors from your old lovers. The night I left England, the street pamphlets carried a ballad about the great St. Cyr family tradition of patriotism—how both you and I served under Wellington."

One thin ash-gray eyebrow tilted. The fan in one kid-gloved hand snapped open, snapped shut. "I can hardly be blamed that the canaille will carry tales about their betters. What do the penny ballads say about your hole-in-the-corner marriage? Yes, look savage, if you like! How did I feel, not to see my only grandson wed in a church? It was all vengeance, I suppose—that nattering fool Cathcart and his talebearing. You know all, I suppose. Have you told Morgan
4
yet that you've married his filly?"

Merry felt Devon's hand tighten on her arm as he said grimly, "Rand is aware. He should be delighted after the months he's spent throwing Merry at my head. Between the pair of you everything's been done but leaving her stripped in my bed. It seems to have escaped both of you that Merry is human—she thinks, she breathes, she feels, and whether anyone believes it or not, so do I, and I won't tolerate another attempt to toy with us like a pair of trapped ferrets. I i love her."

From her vantage point of near objectivity, ignored like a gnat, Merry had watched the fight move from Crandall to Crandall, seeing in the clash of strong spirits all the good will they were missing in each other. Or they might have seen it, but the years of suspicion and conflict had Jeft a history between them that would not be rewritten overnight. It was clear they were not people who thrived on family harmony. They simply seemed to believe it would be impossible to maintain their independence without struggle— not that either of them was likely to have analyzed the other's motives. There were too many other things on their minds for that. Even so, the Crandalls' family problems seemed to her to be far from hopeless. What they needed was a sensible, interested neutral party to escort them diplomatically through the channels of threatened pride. But though she had that thought, it would have amazed her to learn Rand Morgan knew that in time she would become that person.

Though her surroundings might be foreign and worrisome, Devon's hand on her arm was a warm, enlivening pressure through the soft white satin of her glove. With a sideways glance she made a lover's inventory of him: the angel's face with those bright demon eyes, the fluent body that managed to look just slightly overdeeorated in tight breeches and a king's blue frock coat. No neckcloth in the vast room was tied more simply—a knot and a twist-—but on Devon it appeared raffishly suggestive, as though it meant to come off as easily as it had gone on, and Aline had said with a grin that Merry need only wait till the
next
ball to see half the young cubs there with their neckcloths worn in the same lax fashion.

As though he felt her study, Devon turned to smile back into her eyes, and Merry's blood quickened its course when he bent to touch Ins lips to her ear.

"Look at me like that again," he whispered languorously, "and I swear I'm going to take you to the first unoccupied room and make love to you. As it is, come dance with me. I want to take you in my arms."

The silvery essence of twenty perfectly tuned violins flooded from the hidden musicians' gallery, tingling through her limbs. His hands took and held her lightly. His touch carried her like fairy dust on a summer wind. His gaze was a caress.

She suddenly spoke. "It was a trick, wasn't it?"

"Love?"

"The cards with the ... the card deck you made me draw from. You knew how to draw a higher card."

He started to smile. "You'll remember the dogs wearing little pointed hats? On the face cards the hats have an extra stripe. It's very hard to see." He held her in a hot, lazy gaze that teased. "Don't spare my feelings. Confess. You never would have come willingly to my arms, if you hadn't lost the draw. It was a debt of honor." He drew a quick breath. "Love, don't smile like that. You're tempting me beyond all reason."

The intimacy of the embrace, the tremor of her skirts as his legs moved against them, seemed to turn her blood to coursing sherry. The air she breathed was the same, a honeyed golden fluid, transformed by alchemy from equal parts of the rustle of silk, the warmth of many bodies, laughter, the singing strings, and the exotic mingle of perfumes. Vivid candlelight bathed the sweeping dancers in a benevolent amber gilt, unflawed and splendid, and Merry felt like a bird flying through bright fields of cirrus clouds, her bones weightless, her muscles light bands of taut and graceful strength. This was the first time she had danced in a man's arms. The first time. And with Devon.

There were other dances, other partners. Men, some young and eager, some older, with poise and contagious humor, held her in the weightless movements of dance. By every dictate of her nature she ought to have turned shyly from their glowing compliments instead of laughing them away; she ought to have blushed when they teased her instead of issuing rejoinders and rebuffs that made their eyes shine with smiles. She had become so accustomed to the company of | men that it didn't occur to her to be bashful. Some eyes followed her
',
with fascinated envy, but to most she seemed dazzling, self-possessed « beyond her years, refreshingly natural.

Only one man, watching her, understood fully how much of that ' "natural" ease of manner she owed to the ironclad ethics of a pirate captain who wasn't likely to get much thanks for it. Cat stood with a shoulder propped against a black marble pillar, assessing Merry's success, following the elegant sv/irl of her skirts. The ivory Berlin silk draped like a spill of crystal moonlight over her figure, the bodice tantalizingly deep to expose the St. Cyr rubies that rose and fell so fetchingly on her lovely chest. Jesus, they became her.

Cat looked away because it wouldn't do her any good to be pointed out as the object of his interest. The glances he was drawing were not so benevolent as those she received. He was far too experienced to miss the interest that focused on himself, the upraised quizzing glass, the giggle stifled hastily behind a fan, the timid peeks from little blue-blooded virgins, and often the frankly sexual interest that gleamed under lush feminine lashes and, once in a while, male ones also. On the
Joke
the relationship Morgan allowed the world to believe existed between them had been Cat's protection; the looks he was getting now were what one might call the afterglow of Morgan's patronage. Morgan's legend was too widespread for it to be possible to hide the fact that the stainless Cathcart had a son who was Rand Morgan's companion, and a pirate. Choosing not to infect Merry with that taint, he did not allow her to approach him until supper, when under the distracting cover of clinking glass and porcelain he let her see him slip through one of the tall glass doors into the garden.

It took Merry ten minutes to rid herself of the many escorts who seemed, for some mysterious reason, intent on attaching themselves to her. Finally in desperation she sent them off on disparate missions, to fetch her punch, a syllabub laced with wine, pink champagne, and made a silent escape.

The gardens of the Dowager Duchess of St. Cyr were large by city standards, with acre upon wooded acre holding off the encroachments of urban development behind high stone walls frilled in a tangle of whispering ivy. Hugging herself for warmth in the damp coolness of the night air, she ran down the veranda steps into the vast chaotic haze of the deserted garden with its softly leaping shadows and peastone paths blackened by twining branches that met overhead in rambling arbors. The gravel was painfully cold and cutting under her thin dancing slippers as she slowed, lifting her rustling skirts, and peered down an alley between the glossily blackened foliage of twin dark hedges. She began to walk again, stepping quickly, catching the cool waxy scent of holly.

"Cat?" she called softly, entering a small clearing that echoed with the tinkling of an unseen fountain. The moon's dead light destroyed color and showed objects only in musty, distorted forms. She thought she heard a sound behind her, and her heart began to thump unevenly in her chest.
"Cat!"

"Merry? I'm here." Firm, strong hands came from the blackness to grip her shoulders. His fingertips brushed against the bare upper swell of her breast as he found her hand, carrying it to his body so she could find his braid. He felt her tremble, relax, stir.

"Devon told me," she said softly. "I could hardly believe it. Who would have imagined that half the British aristocracy would be floating around the Atlantic on a pirate ship?"

"Two isn't half," he said dryly. "And in my case the link to the upper elect was a matter of pure chance. For all I know, Morgan had the papers with my birth date forged."

"Don't!" There was a kind of frantic anger in her voice. "Don't put new images in my head of Rand Morgan and his conspiracies. I can't live with another one. For months I've felt like someone's tied me cross-shaped to a cartwheel and made me go around and around, head up, head down." She laid her cheek on his chest, feeling the embroidery pattern of his waistcoat on her skin, inhaling the faint aroma of cognac on his breath. "Why did you keep running away from me tonight? Devon told me that you probably would but—I don't understand."

"I know. I know you don't. But it's one of the few ways I can help you, sweetheart. Don't take it away from me." Her fingers trembled slightly in his clasp; he tightened his grip gently and slid an arm around her. "Back there"—a movement of his head indicated the direction of the house—' 'do they frighten you?''

"Not so far," she said. "But they may eventually. Devon's mother. Aline, seems to be terrified of them. Actually I met a soul or two 1 might like to become friends with." The point of her nose was cold. She warmed it in his braid. With deliberate mildness: "What do
they
think of your earring?"