This Perfect Kiss (11 page)

“I— I have no idea of what you are talking.”

“All these years, I wondered why you did not come forward and tell me who you were. At least tell me that the woman I was about to wed was not the one who had so aptly intrigued me at the ball that night. 'Twas not a nobility-driven sacrifice. You were not afraid that if I knew, I would reject you, but that I might actually
choose
you despite your birth and background. Then where would your fairy-tale illusion of the world go? Where would your purpose be? Your sense of injustice?”

“How dare you!” she gasped.

“Tell me more about the man you wed,” he said, advancing against her retreat. “Daniel Claremont. What was he like? Tell me.”

“He was brave and courageous and noble. A hero to Virginia.”

“No doubt another paladin in your eyes. But I will wager you did not love him any more than you believed you once loved me. 'Tis easier to place the men in your life on a tall pedestal than it is to stand beside him, stripped to your soul, annihilated by the force of his idea of you. You like wearing your inadequacies like a crown of thorns. 'Tis easier to accept that your circumstances allow you an excuse to never live up to anyone's expectations than it is to try and then fail.”

Tears burned in the back of her eyes. His words rang with truth like a sword thrust through her precarious conceptions about herself. He was right. In so many ways, he understood her better than she wanted to understand herself. He understood because he had been living in hell these last two years.

“Our demons are not so different, yours and mine,” he said, tilting her chin. “Only the means we chose to survive. We have fought for everyone else because 'twas easier than fighting for ourselves. But I, unlike you, who tends to blame yourself for all the ails surrounding you, I tend to blame everyone else. The least we can be with each other is honest with ourselves, Christel.”

She yanked her chin from his hand. A door suddenly shut from somewhere down the corridor and she could hear the hushed voices of Smolich and another servant, the rattle of a tray in his hands. After their voices began to fade, she brushed the hair from her hot cheeks and straightened. “Goodnight, my lord.” Her voice trembled.

“I will take you to Seastone Cottage in the morning,” he said.

“I can find my own way home.”

“Ten o'clock at the stables. I have to tend to business, but it should be sufficiently light when I return to safely negotiate the road. A lot has changed since you were here last.”

“I do not intend to arrive at Seastone Cottage with you in tow, Carrick.”

“Halfway then.”

She drew in her breath, then nodded her head. It was a logical request. She walked to the doorway, stopped and looked over her shoulder. He was now sitting at the table, watching her, pretending nothing mattered to him, a devil atop a rock surveying his tedious realm. But something did matter. She had briefly glimpsed it in his eyes, but whether for his salvation or for hers he had gone no further than the kiss tonight. Aye, he was still her sin and her curse.

But when he had held her in his arms, she had felt a response inside her, when she'd thought she would never feel anything again.

Chapter 6

C
hristel awakened that morning with the remnants of a carnal dream that began to fade in the drowsy gray light of a new day. The bed covers were in disarray around her and, turning on her side, she touched her lips with her fingertips. More than Lord Carrick's words had had a profound effect on her.

There must be something terribly wrong with her, something reprehensible that she would have given herself to another man last night in an act that could be considered no less than emotional prostitution while her late husband's face was no more than a mere shadow in her memory. It could not be decent that she found her old childhood feelings bubbling to the surface when her own hands touched her body, Camden St. Giles's image in her mind.

Throwing her covers off, she crawled out of bed and welcomed the cold air against her. A pitcher of clean water and a bowl sat on the commode in the dressing room. She drew on her gown, then gathered together her few belongings, which amounted to what she currently wore, Lord Carrick's warm, costly cloak, which she considered a trade for the one he'd destroyed when she had come aboard the
Anna
, and Saundra's sewing case, which she had brought with her from the ship. Now as she looked she hesitated taking even that. But it contained thread and needles and important items that could be of use to her.

Someone rapped on the door. Christel cautiously answered the summons. A footman in black-and-gold livery, his hair beneath a powdered horsehair wig, stood in the corridor. “Her ladyship has requested your presence,” he said. “I am to take you to her salon.”

Unsure what would happen if she refused, Christel followed the footman past the same gallery in which she had confronted Lord Carrick last night. Her escort stopped at the end of the corridor and opened a gold-and-white-inlaid door. Half expecting to see the footman don an executioner's hood and ax, Christel paused uncertainly in the doorway. Lord Carrick's steel-eyed grandmother sat across the room awaiting her.

With a white lace mobcap perched atop her head like a crown, the dowager countess Carrick sat stiffly on a wing chair upholstered in bright yellow daffodils and violets. Beyond the tall windows, drizzle grayed the sky, but inside the room there was a feeling of perpetual sunshine and blue skies from the bright yellow walls, gilded scrollwork and the thick blue blanket spread over her lap. A chandelier above Christel's head captured light from the fireplace.

“Come inside, girl,” the countess snapped imperiously, inspecting Christel through a lorgnette. “Let me see you.”

As the door shut behind her, Christel hesitated. She walked forward and stopped in front of the dowager. “Good morning, my lady.”

“Good morning indeed. 'Tis dreary as watching dead leaves fall.” Reaching behind her, the countess tugged on a bell cord. “Do sit down, girl. You are putting a crick in my neck.”

Christel took the chair across from the dowager and lifted her gaze as a servant approached through a door in the wall, pushing a well-laden trundle cart in front of her. The countess motioned for the plates to be set out. “You have arrived in time for breakfast. Another five minutes, and I would have dined without you.”

Christel sat in polite silence as the parlor maid removed silver lids from various chafing dishes containing eggs and bannocks, then carefully spooned out something from each dish onto porcelain plates. When the girl finished, she gave the dowager a brief curtsey and left the salon through the same side panel in the wall.

“You have filled out from the last time I saw you,” the dowager said, having studied Christel while she had not been looking. “But the clothes will not do. You look as if you are wearing draperies from my boudoir.”

As she lifted her spoon with a certain grim amusement, Christel contemplated the dowager and managed to keep her response polite. “Is there a purpose for which you have called me in front of you, my lady? For some reason this does not feel like a social invitation.”

Delicately dabbing a slab of butter on her bread, the dowager sniffed. “You were always an impertinent one. 'Tis no wonder my grandson fancies an interest in you.”

Without managing to choke on the bite of egg, Christel set down her fork. “I beg your pardon?”

“I saw him last night watching you out the window. Oh, I did not know what had grabbed his attention. Had to send Smolich to find out for me. Would you be a dear and pour the tea? At the very least, your presence has saved me the inconvenience of dining alone whilst my grandson gallivants off with that pirate crew he employs to sail his ship. 'Twould save us all trouble if it sank.”

The dowager intently watched Christel pour the tea. Christel could be the lady of the manor when she chose, even if her hands trembled a bit with nerves. At twenty-six years of age, she should at least have been counted on to have some sense and decorum. After all, she had a grandmother who had tried diligently to train her in etiquette. She had learned at a young age how to pour and stir tea properly in one's cup, how to make a suitable impression.

She handed the cup to the dowager. “I once had a great-great-uncle the English authorities called Gray Beard,” she couldn't resist saying. “He actually wore a patch over his eye because some Spaniard plucked it out with a cutlass. Mam oft spoke of him. He was hanged in Port Royal as a pirate.”

Raising the cup to her lips, the dowager regarded Christel over its rim with her silver-blue eyes. Christel rarely spoke about herself. Few knew anything about her or her opinions, and she rarely found reason to share her thoughts. But she was awaiting the dowager to get to the point of her business, and she disliked being examined as if she were a butterfly with her wings pinned to a cork board.

“You have an interesting pedigree, Miss Douglas. Did he by chance spawn the colonial side of your family?”

The lightness in the dowager's voice caught Christel by surprise. She couldn't help that one corner of her mouth lifted in response. “To the best of our knowledge Uncle Gray Beard did not procreate, so the world is probably quite safe from his descendants.”

“I do not care for the hoity-toity types that surround the gentry,” the dowager said after a thoughtful moment. “The wealthy nabob title seekers. The ones that seem to fascinate my eldest grandson. I have at one time endured them all. But I have never experienced a colonial.”

“I am half Scots.”

“Hmpf. I know more about your family than you do. Knew your mother, too. Put a black mark on the entire Etherton clan and caused your father to break poor Harriet's heart. But he loved your mother as he never loved anything else,” she said almost reverently before Christel's initial anger took hold. “One could almost forgive him his indiscretions for that alone. Almost.”

“I do not understand. Why am I here, Lady Carrick?”

Turning her head, the dowager looked out the tall window over the pastures in the distance. Patches of dead brown grass stuck through the thin layer of slush. There was a sense of desolation in the empty fields that surrounded this estate that had little to do with winter.

“You will find much has changed since you went away. Blackthorn Castle needs my grandson. Camden has a duty to the people of Ayrshire, his daughter, his family, and to himself to make this estate whole again.”

Christel folded her hands in her lap, thinking that the dowager had another grandson, but she said nothing. Lord Carrick
did
have a duty here.

“Even if Camden feels no responsibility toward me, he owes it to the legacy left to him by his father and his father before him. He owes it to his daughter's future to remain, to marry again and to make his life here. He needs to find purpose again.”

“Perhaps he has his reasons for wanting to stay away, my lady.”

The dowager shot Christel a telling glance. Apparently, Christel's comment had not been what the older woman had expected. “That is the biggest mash of poppycock I ever heard. Of course he has his reasons. He is haunted by his wife's tragic death.”

“I do not know what it is you think I can do, my lady.”

“My grandson seems to hold a special interest in you. You resemble Saundra in some ways, but I do not think that is entirely it,” she said consideringly as she examined Christel again through her lorgnette. “There is an air about you that speaks to him, I am sure of it. You might be the one who can entice him to stay.”

Christel struggled not to laugh. “I am hardly the one to entice anyone, my lady. I have no wealth and no title. I do not even own what is on my back—”

“I will give you a thousand pounds sterling, Miss Douglas, if you can help him find his passions again. Give him a reason to stay.”

“Pardon
?”

“I am old and weary, Miss Douglas. Is it too much that I want my eldest grandson and my only great-grandchild with me? Is it too much to want him to find his passion again?”

Christel stood. She was surprised her knees didn't fold. “You do him a grave disservice, my lady.”

“But not you, I expect, Miss Douglas.”

How
dare
her ladyship imply that by virtue of Christel's parentage she was so willing to be branded the village whore, as if being her mother's daughter predetermined her character. “I know
who
and
what
I am.”

A sly look akin to excitement came from the dowager's eyes. “We can benefit one another. Your uncle mortgaged Seastone Cottage four years ago to pay for the muskets and powder that helped aid in your revolution. There are taxes that need to be paid. A thousand pounds is a fortune even by royal standards. ‘Twill comfortably keep you for years. You would be dependent on no one for your survival, as your mother was. Is that not what you want?”

More than anything in the world, she wanted that kind of freedom. “You must truly be desperate to come to me knowing that it was my mother who ruined Lady Harriet's son . . .”

“I would remind you that you have no trouble returning to the cottage purchased by your father for your mother's . . .
loyalty
to him.”

To the dowager's credit, she did not say “favors,” though that was exactly what Margaret Christine Douglas had done.

She had come to Ayr as the infamous mistress of a married man, then borne him a child. He'd given her the cottage by the sea, then given up everything, including his legitimate family, his reputation and his heritage to be with her and their infant daughter.

He had gone on to make a life for them, sailing for his brother-in-law, Christel's uncle, and they had oft gone back and forth to the colonies but always to return to Seastone Cottage. Until one day, shortly after her mother had died and Lady Harriet had entered her life, arriving at Seastone Cottage in her black lacquered coach, her father had sent Christel to live at Rosecliffe. Oh, how she had begged him not to send her away, to take her with him. But he had not.

Through the years there, she had joined Saundra and Tia in dance and music classes and worn pretty dresses, only to learn that hypocrisy and class went hand in hand.

High Society preached a good show about charity and tolerance for the unfortunate as long as those unfortunate souls did not sully the hallowed halls of the aristocracy's stately estates. Christel had never been invited or allowed to attend balls or soirées. She, who had been dearly loved by her parents, had learned about the fate of bastard children. If not for Saundra and Leighton, she might have perished from loneliness during the months her father had been gone, until one day he had not come back at all.

She knotted her hands in her skirts. “I loved her, but I am
not
my mother.”

“We are all our mothers in some way, Miss Douglas.”

C
amden reached the crossroads that dissected the edge of his estate, where the trees had thinned and the wind sweeping off the white-capped sea had grown increasingly brisk. The stone remnants of an old castle made a somber landmark against a pewter sky.

He saw her in the distance, and something that had been tight in his gut unclenched. But his stomach pitched oddly, the sensation without reason or cause except that he was cold and impatient. Moreover, he had worried that he had somehow concluded wrongly that she would be walking the five miles to Seastone Cottage via the beach or that he would not find her if she chose not to be found.

He reined in at the top of a knoll. The horse pranced in a circle until Camden stayed its movement with a squeeze of his boots against its girth. A gust pulled at the heavy folds of his cloak and almost tugged off the tricorn that covered his head.

As if recognizing his master's impatience, the horse sidled in agitation as Camden took one more moment to watch her trek across the carpet of grit and sand. He loosened his grip on the reins and allowed the horse to work its way down the steep rocky path to the beach. They had left behind the higher cliffs a half mile back. Once on the sand, he nudged the gelding into a gallop. Christel turned, a hand tented over her eyes. She lowered her arm and awaited his approach.

He reined in beside her. Foamy fingers of seawater splayed the sand near her feet then disappeared.

Christel's infernal hound bounded past him, nearly unseating him from the horse. Camden tightened his grip on the reins to keep him from bolting. “Easy lad.” He patted the gelding's neck with a gloved hand.

Her cheeks were red, and the damp air had plastered her hair against them.

He slid to the ground, catching himself on the cantle to keep from stumbling. The muscles in his thigh had cramped painfully. “In case the notion has skirted past that intelligent brain of yours, you could freeze out here.”

“The temperature has warmed since I left Blackthorn and the walk is good for me,” she said. “There is a pub not a mile from here. I used to know the owner. I thought to borrow a hor—”