This Perfect Kiss (27 page)

She stared in wonder at this rare glimpse of him—so unexpected even to him. She smoothed the hair from his face and kissed him. How could anyone have married him and not loved him so completely?

“I
think I am in heaven,” Christel said, a wine goblet in her hand as she sank lower in the hot scented water with Camden at her back, both of them watching firelight dance with the other shadows on the walls of the small kitchen at Seastone Cottage.

They had been coming to the cottage for a month. Christel returned to feed her chickens and tend to the small vegetable garden Heather had planted before she and Blue had left Scotland. April had exploded with a rare blast of sunshine. Bluebells carpeted the meadows for as far as the eye could see, transforming the brown terrain into a kaleidoscope of color and scent. The cottage had become their private Eden, always beyond the shadows and the darkness, away from the past and the future. Somewhere safe. A place that was totally hers and Camden's alone away from society's strictures and the weight public censure carried, especially for her. At Seastone Cottage, the earl of Carrick belonged to her and not to the world.

She recognized now what her mother must have felt for her father, deeply in love and sharing blissful solitude in the cottage by the sea, a world apart from his responsibilities at Blackthorn Castle.

“What will happen between you and Sir Jacob Westmont?”

Camden had made no mention of his old friend since he had interceded for Reginald Ferguson and Blue. Sir Jacob had not visited Blackthorn Castle since.

“I do not think he is a nice person to blame you for what happened under his own purview. If he receives a royal reprimand, it serves him right.”

“Do you see this scar?” Camden placed her hand on the puckered and purple scar on his thigh. “I have little memory of the battle itself. Even to this day, I do not know if the stories people talk about are true.”

The stories being the battle itself: that a storm had separated two ships from the British fleet, leaving one severely damaged. Camden could have saved himself, but he had stayed behind to cover the second ship's retreat. He had faced five French warships that day, sinking two before his own had gone down into the churning sea. He had been hailed as a hero by those who had survived, and a scapegoat by an admiralty who had failed to prevent the French from coming to the aid of the colonists.

She became at once protective. “I do not know how you survived.”

“If not for Jacob, I might have never learned to walk again,” he said. “After I had been back a month with no desire to even feed myself, he told me that I had been waited on enough and that if I wanted to eat, then I could bloody well join my grandmother and my wife downstairs at mealtime. He would not allow people to feed or bathe me any longer. As you can imagine, I learned to walk again if only to go beyond the walls of my room before I starved.”

He seemed to contemplate the wine before drinking. “Jacob returned me to fencing to help condition my mind and leg. He got me back on my ship again as a partner in business. You ask how I survived. Jacob Westmont.”

Chapter 16

B
umpy and nearly impossible to travel even on horseback, the road to Rosecliffe wound through whin and heath and sandy, bent hills interspersed with once grassy hollows where cattle would return to graze in the summer. Christel finally drew rein atop the crest of the hill overlooking her old home. The house faced south. She had come in from the backside, and with the afternoon sun high in the sky, the leaded glass windows beneath the gabled roof were awash in cold. The horse did an impatient turn before she rode through the dilapidated iron gates and continued down the long, winding slope.

She'd left Blackthorn Castle early that afternoon after she'd finished her lessons with Anna. The complexity of her emotions exasperated her. Forcing her hands to loosen their grip on the reins, she took a deep breath. This meeting with her sister was long overdue.

She found Tia on her knees digging in the garden near the old garden wall in the same place Christel used to come to be alone or to hide in the beds of flowers when she had gotten in trouble. The garden had changed in nine years only in that it had been transformed into earthen mounds overflowing with wintergreen, yellow dock and wild carrot, mixed among a colorful array of daffodils and tulips.

Tia saw her enter through the gate and sat back on her heels. Her chestnut braid spilled over one shoulder to her hips. Dirt streaked a white smock that framed her simple woolen serge. Her narrowed eyes were a stark contrast to the black fringe of lashes that only served to intensify the angry spark in her blue eyes. A breeze whispered through the blanket of leaves overhead, touching Christel softly as if to calm her.

Christel motioned at the stables behind her. “I left the horse in one of the stalls. I didn't see a groomsman.”

“We had to sell off most of the stock years ago.”

“I did not know.”

“Why should you? You have been gone.”

“Is that why you are involved in . . . whatever Leighton is involved with? Do you need the silver?”

“He said that we owe you for what you did when ye drew away the dragoons from the kirk yard, so I will give you your due respect for that bit of heroics, but I will not say anything else.”

Christel stepped past Tia and looked around. “You have done an incredible job.”

Tia climbed to her feet and shook the dirt off her skirt. “Grams is not here. The Mayfest fair is arrived in Prestwick. You know how she and the dowager enjoy the fair. Oh!” she said. “I forgot. You would not know that since you have not lived here in almost a decade.”

Christel looked up at the stone house. The casements needed painting. There was just enough of a neglected feel that made Christel sad. But the garden was magnificent. Ignoring Tia's surliness, she walked between the mounds, impressed by the amount of work someone had done to create this. “These are mostly medicinal herbs and flowers.”

“Aye. This is my garden. I have managed to make myself useful to the shire folk. I am an herbalist,” she said.

“I think that is . . . quite useful actually,” Christel said, more than impressed.

Tia removed her soiled gloves. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought it was time that we talk.”

“Is that a joke? We have not talked for most of our lives. So you are welcome to go now.”

“What did I ever do to you, Tia?”

“Do?” Tia flung out her hand. “Look at you. Riding a fine horse from Blackthorn stables, playing governess to Saundra's daughter. All your life, you have managed to do what you wanted. Say what you wanted. Dressed as a boy, you wandered the ranks of deprivation with complete freedom,” she said. “You got away with it because no one ever had any expectations of you. You have no idea how I have envied that about you. How I
hated
you.”

The words hurt. Christel's first instinct was to walk away. It was what she had always done in the past rather than engage her sister in an unpleasant argument. But this afternoon something stopped her.

“How can you have nothing and still manage to have everything?” Tia said.

Christel stepped nearer. “And how can you have everything and think you have nothing? Do you have any idea how I have envied
that
? You had your debut. You have waltzed and worn your pretty dresses. Lived at Rosecliffe. Papa's ancestral home. Have you ever had to sleep on a straw pallet? Been hungry? Watched your friends die while the world exploded around you? Have you ever been alone in the dead of night? Truly alone?”

“How have I ever been able to be alone? I have always been the staid one. The one who remained behind.
I
was the one who tried to comfort Grams after Grandpapa died and after Saundra died, and now 'tis
you
Grams talks about.
You
that Grams visits at Blackthorn Castle. Even Anna spends these days talking about that silly dog you named
Dog
.” Tia rolled her eyes. “When she ran away, she ran to you.”

“You have Grams and Rosecliffe and respectability—”

Tia folded her arms. “You had Papa and two parents who loved each other. Then after he left and returned to the sea, Grams brought you here and expected that I should tolerate you because you had nobody. In the beginning, I thought your heartbreak was justice. I reveled in it.” Tears filling her eyes, she looked away.

Tia's emotion shocked Christel. “But not anymore.”

Tia studied the toe of one wooden patten. “I ceased reveling the night Saundra was betrothed to Lord Carrick . . . and I came to your room and heard you weeping. You thought no one was there, but I was. I had won. Yet, I sat outside your door wondering how I could talk to you because your pain was my fault and I could do nothing to make it go away for both of us. It suddenly was not important to hurt you anymore.”

“Nothing was your fault, Tia. He chose her.”

Tia shook her head. “He found your golden slipper on the beach the morning after the masquerade. I know because I heard Grams and the dowager talking about the mysterious woman seen with his lordship and how she had vanished in the mist. I sent him an anonymous note and told him he would find the other slipper at Rosecliffe. He went to Rosecliffe looking for you.”

Shaking her head, Christel could only look up at the sky and wonder why she did not ball up her fist and give her sister a facer. “It matters little,” she finally said, because in truth, the past no longer mattered. “I could never have wed him. I still would have been sent to Virginia.”

“But maybe we would not now be strangers. So much has changed.”

“Do you miss her?” Christel asked.

Tia nodded. After a moment, she said, “I remember when Grams nearly had an apoplectic fit after you removed the draperies in the salon and made clothes for all of our dolls.”

“If I remember the incident correctly,
you
were the one who told me Grams was putting up new draperies in the salon.”

“If
you
remember correctly, I told you the green salon, not the blue. Grandpapa strapped my backside for that and sent me to bed without supper. He thought I had lied to you.”

The incident had occurred a month after news of Papa's death had reached them. Her father's world had still been so new to her. During those months, she had lived in continuous fear that her grandparents would send her away.

“ 'Twas Saundra who defended us both.”

They were both silent for a moment. Tia lifted Christel's hand to peer at her right index finger, where a ring used to be—a gift her father had once made to Christel on their thirteenth birthday. He had given one just like it to Tia for her thirteenth birthday the year before Christel's.

“What happened to it?” Tia asked.

With its tiny emerald and ruby cabochons, it had helped finance her trip to Scotland. “It paid for my passage here.” Christel noted Tia no longer wore her ring. “And yours?”

“I lost it years ago. I remember when Papa gave you that ring. I was so angry.”

“I felt cheated, too. I only wore mine in front of you because I knew you had one just like it, and I wanted you to see that I was special, too.”

The corners of Tia's mouth lifted. “Me, too.”

Discovering common ground between them was much like discovering the glint of a penny in the grass. One could leave it or pick it up.

“Would you like some tea?”

“Perhaps you can invite me in.”

They had spoken at the same time. The shock of it was enough to startle a laugh from both.

“Only if you tell me about you and Leighton,” Christel said lightly, aware that she might have been tramping on sensitive ground.

But Tia sighed. “There is nothing to tell. He hardly knows I am alive. He does not want me involved with what he is doing.”

“Then why are you?”

Tia shrugged. “He needs me. I do not want to see him killed.”

“You are in love with him.”

“I suppose I have been since we were children. But he only had eyes for Saundra.”

Christel shook her head. “How pathetic does that make us?”

And from the bleakness in Christel's own heart, a sense of camaraderie with her sister was born.

C
hristel stayed late at Rosecliffe that night. It had been a long time since she had traveled anywhere alone at night. She reached the edge of the woods two miles from Seastone Cottage and reined in her horse. A ribbon of moonlight cut a narrow swath through the meadow spread out before her. Wrapped in her cloak, she leaned over to pat the horse's damp neck and listened to the night sounds. Camden had gone into Prestwick that morning. Rather than return to Blackthorn Castle, she decided to go home.

She smelled the smoke first.

And then she saw a strange orange pall shimmering against the velvet sky, burning like dusk.

By the time she crested the distant hill, Seastone Cottage was already full ablaze. Terrified by the fire, the horse reared. She jumped but hit the ground hard, rolling to get away from the horse's hooves. Heedless of rabbit holes, she scrabbled down the incline and reached the yard in a full run. The thundering hooves bore down on her as another horse and rider skidded to a prancing halt in front of her, a dark ebony silhouette against the flames licking at the sky.

“Christel!” Camden shouted over the roaring of fire. “Get back!”

He held the reins of his horse tightly clenched in his gloved hands. Then he, too, slid from the horse and let it go, taking Christel by the arm and leading her away from the sparks and embers floating on the air above them. Her bedroom, the room where her parents had lived, was now a flaming pyre. Glass began to shatter as windows exploded all over the cottage. Her ears hurt from the roaring noise the fire made, as if it had been a living, breathing beast, a fierce dragon of lore.

Where was Dog?

A part of her mind grasped that she had left him at Blackthorn Castle that afternoon.

She stumbled, too shocked to fight the grip on her arm. Too numb to protest as she felt herself lifted and carried into the cooler breeze of the night, but not so far that she could not hear the cottage dying. He held her close to him, and together they watched the fire consume all that remained of her childhood. The walls collapsed inward, sending sparks roaring into the sky. The portraitures she had made of her parents. Her mother's costumes. Her father's saber. Everything that was her past.

Gone.

D
awn had yet to burn the night away, and the sky still glowed. Camden had taken Christel to the beach, where he waited in hopes that someone from Blackthorn Castle would see the ethereal glow of the fire and come.

He'd seen that kind of orange pall against the sky many times in his life during night battles that had sent ships to the sea floor. The ship could burn for hours, her timbers crackling with flames before finally surrendering to the sea.

Waves broke over the sand. He turned. Christel sat with her legs pulled to her chest. She had not spoken, as if she was determined to keep whatever was inside her there. He laid his cloak over her shoulders.

“It's cold,” he quietly pronounced, sitting down beside her and pulling her against his shoulder. In a detached sort of way, he noticed he was trembling.

There was nothing he could do until daylight. If no one came, he would make the trek back to Blackthorn Castle himself, unless he could find the horses. He tightened his arm around her shoulders.

After awhile she gave up the struggle and sobbed as though her heart would break. Then, curling into a tight ball, she laid down and wept, as if letting the years fall away in a river of grief that suddenly seemed to overwhelm her. He wanted to lay her on the beach and kiss away her tears, as if he'd had the power of God to heal anything. She was bleeding inside, and he wanted to love her in the sand.

There was a copper taste of fear in his mouth that mingled with smoke. He would not have even been here tonight if he had not arrived home earlier than planned from Prestwick and found her gone. He hoped to God that whatever had started the fire had been a candle left burning or a spark from the hearth. He didn't know why she'd not been in bed when the fire had begun, but by whatever providence, she hadn't been.

He held her tightly and her sobs weakened. The sound of approaching horses came to him above the crash of waves on the beach. He had left his pistol in the saddlebag on his horse. He had no weapon. But the pace of the horses did not imply someone who was traveling in stealth.

A rider came out of the salt sea mist. It was Leighton. He held the reins of the two horses trailing behind him, heads down. He stopped a few feet away. “I saw the fire,” he said as if it had only been yesterday that he had left Blackthorn Castle.

“Which direction did you come from?”

“South. No one came that way from this direction.”

Christel had not stirred, and Camden realized she was asleep.