Vanquished (12 page)

The trio nodded in unison. A tall, lanky boy in a stocking cap and corded trousers patched at the knees chanced a step forward to scoop up the ball. Adam's apple bobbing, he swallowed and said, "We didn't mean no 'arm, sir, honest we didn't." He nodded to the blond-haired boy, the smallest of the lot, on whose thin shoulder Caledonia's gloved hand now rested. "Ned 'ere isn't a very good kicker is all."

"Oliver Tuttle, you take that back or else." Fear apparently forgotten in the need to uphold masculine pride, the boy, Ned, deserted his protector's side and took a step forward, hands fisted.

"Or else what?" Oliver, a good head taller, approached until the pair was all but butting heads.

The corners of Caledonia's mouth curled upward, the sight of which stalled the sharp reply Hadrian had been about to make. "I'm a crack punter or at least I used to be. Maybe I could give you lads some pointers?" Her warm-eyed gaze encompassed the group.

Ned's eyes widened to saucers. "But . . . you're a girl."

Oliver elbowed him in the ribs. "She's a lady, idiot."

Her smile broadened to a full-on grin that revealed the pretty dimple Hadrian had so far seen only once before, on their very first meeting. "I may be a girl but it so happens I grew up playing a great many rough and tumble games girls are not always encouraged to play." She reached out for the ball, and Oliver reluctantly surrendered it.

Aware that he'd become an onlooker to the scene, Hadrian backed up to his camera. Slipping beneath the cover, he leaned in to frame his shot.

Blissfully oblivious to his scrutiny, Caledonia raised the ball high above her head, and then dropped it. Catching it neatly atop her right foot, she kicked upward. The ball shot skyward, a perfect punt, its release coinciding with a sharp blast of wind. Like a stiff breeze to a ship's sail, the bluster caught beneath her skirts, showing a goodly portion of stocking-clad leg from trim ankle to shapely knee.

Peering through his camera's viewer, Hadrian froze. All he need do was flex one finger and he would have, if not the damning photograph Dandridge demanded, a very promising start toward it. And yet he kept his hands still, letting the moment pass.

She tugged down her skirt just as little Ned, hand tented above his eyes, stared across the square to where the ball landed on the ground, a tiny dot. Swinging back around to Callie he exclaimed, "Gorm, you're . . . good."

Caledonia laughed. "I shall take that as a compliment. I used to be a fair hand at cricket, too, though I'm a better batter than sprinter--having to run in skirts puts girls at a decided disadvantage," she added with a wink.

The two older boys trotted off to retrieve their ball, but Ned hung back. "Girl or not, you can play on my team anytime," he lisped, lifting worshipful eyes to Caledonia's face. He shuffled away and then stopped, turned about, and launched himself at her skirts, arms outstretched in a bear hug.

"Thank you, sweeting. That is by far the nicest thing anyone has said to me in quite sometime."

Blinking back tears, she ruffled his hair and bid him go and join his friends. With a final squeeze, the child sped off. She watched after him for a long moment, her wistful expression pulling at Hadrian's heart, the sadness in her profile a palpable thing, something he felt echoed in the aching emptiness of his own heart.

"You like children, don't you?" It wasn't really a question so much as something to say, a reason to breach the silence.

As if suddenly remembering him, she turned back. "Yes. Does that surprise you?"

"A little," he admitted, leaning forward to focus the lens on her eyes.

Wasn't it the American philosopher, Mr. Thoreau, who'd said the eyes are the window to the soul? If that were even half the truth, Caledonia Rivers must have a beautiful soul indeed. A less cautious man might find himself falling headfirst into those smoky green pools, so earnest and so sad.

"Because motherhood is womankind's sacred calling, no doubt?" The edge to her tone told him that he'd struck a nerve, that on some level she was hurting.

He thought of his mother, who'd spent half her time drunk on gin and the other half spreading her legs for any man with the requisite quid to spend. If motherhood had been her calling, sacred or otherwise, she'd hid it well.

Slipping out from under the cover, he shook his head. "Watching you with that lot, I couldn't help thinking what a wonderful mother you'd make."

She dropped her gaze to the frozen ground. "I rather think it's a bit late for a family. I'm coming on thirty." She gave up her age as one might reveal a dirty secret or at least something of which to be more than a little ashamed.

"That's not so very old."

Looking off into the distance, she shook her head. "A family would be a distraction if not an outright obstacle to continuing my work. It wouldn't be fair to anyone, the children especially."

The cold-blooded practicality of her response grated on him, perhaps because his own mother had made him feel nothing but a nuisance. "Ah, the noble cause for which no sacrifice is too great."

He'd anticipated another of her sharp-tongued retorts but instead she regarded him for a long, quiet moment before asking, "What of you, Mr. St. Claire? There must be something you care about, something for which you'd sacrifice almost anything?"

Her assumption that he harbored some innate nobility was so far off the mark he was moved to laugh. Surely those canny eyes of hers could see through him to who and what he really was?

He made a point of taking out his handkerchief and using it to dust his camera's lens. "Sorry to disappoint but I'm afraid my own survival consumes my every selfish waking moment."

"There must be something or someone you care for?"

Her steady-on gaze had him scouring his brain. Gavin and Rourke were more blood brothers than friends; certainly the closest he had to family. He cared for Sally, too, though the boyhood ardor he'd felt for her long ago had faded to friendship. Beyond that . . .

"There was a time when I fancied myself a future Roger Fenton, but that was a long time ago." Catching her questioning look, he added, "Fenton was the photographer who documented the Crimean War; but my idea was to make a photographic record of the poverty in England, London particularly."

He didn't miss how her eyes lit up. God, those eyes, they had a way of catching at the light, at a man's heart, at
his
heart, as no others ever had. "You still could, couldn't you?"

He shrugged and tucked the handkerchief back in his pocket. "Commissioned work pays, charity doesn't. At any rate, the world has martyrs aplenty. We self-interested sorts exist to keep things in balance."

She shook her head, looking not so much angry as disappointed, as though he were a hopeless case indeed. "Why is it I suspect you are baiting me?"

He grinned. "Why, Miss Rivers--or Caledonia, if I may be so bold--I'm sure I cannot say."

"If you must call me by my given name, call me Callie. The only time I am called Caledonia is when I've got myself into mischief of some sort."

She smiled then, a soft, easy smile that had him going undercover again, not because capturing the image would bring him any closer to bedding her but because for whatever reason he wanted to hold this moment for all time.

"Very well, then, Callie it is. Should you mean to go on plumbing the depths of my black-hearted soul, best call me Hadrian."

He pulled the striking cord. A muffled pop confirmed that her image, that
smile,
was embedded on the proving plate, part of history's record, theirs at least.

Straightening, he looked over the top of the camera and asked, "So tell me,
Callie,
what think your parents of your determination to remain husbandless and childless? Or do you have siblings sufficient to keep the family nurseries stocked?"

It was as if a veil had fallen over her face. Looking not so much at him as through him, she answered, "I have an older brother I haven't seen in years. He and his wife have twins, both boys, a fact that pleases my parents enormously-- carrying on the family name and all that."

"What are your parents like?"

She paused a moment before answering. "Staid, conventional. Father is the penultimate
pater familia.
Mother runs the household with an iron fist, yet wouldn't dream of picking up a newspaper and forming an opinion of her own. Aside from the occasional holiday, our contact is limited to correspondence, sketchy at best. I suppose it's fair to say my family doesn't approve of me." She kept her tone matter-of-fact, and yet he sensed the state of affairs caused her some degree of pain.

"It's their loss, I'm sure," he said not because he was working to woo her but because, quite simply, he felt it must be true.

"What of you? Do you have family here in London?"

He shook his head, marveling at how neatly she'd managed to turn the tables on him yet again. Sticking to the story he and Gavin had come up with when he'd resurfaced in London the year before, he said, "I'm an only child."

True enough, at least so far as he knew, though as a boy, he'd dreamt of having a brother just as he'd dreamt of living in the country. It wasn't until he'd left London and his past behind and made a fresh start at Roxbury House that he'd come close to realizing either dream.

"An only child and a boy at that, you must have found yourself fawned over by a great number of aunts and uncles and grandparents."

The happy family portrait she was painting was such a stark and cruel contrast to the circumstances of his actual upbringing that he felt the old buried bitterness rising up. "Hardly. My mother was a . . . widow actually." He thought of the other women who'd worked in Madame Dottie's, Sally especially, and for whatever reason was moved to embellish, "I had a number of aunts who spoiled me after a fashion. After Mum--Mother--died, I lived in an orphanage for a while."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry." Her eyes were sad-- sad for him.

He shrugged to indicate it wasn't important, and yet for whatever reason, being the object of her pity hurt him, rather profoundly. "It wasn't a bad place. Quite the contrary, in fact. It was in the country, and in time I made three friends there, one of whom lives in London now."

"And the other two?"

"There's a big, braw Scot, Patrick, though we called him Rourke after his surname. The last I heard, he was somewhere in northern Scotland working on the railways. The little girl, Daisy, was adopted by a husband/wife acting team and whisked off to parts unknown."

"So you were left all alone?"

The way she said it brought back how very much it had hurt to find himself abandoned yet again. "For the most part, yes." He punctuated the admission with a shrug and then busied himself with changing out the exposed plates for blank ones. Aware of her watching him, he looked up and asked, "What are you thinking now?" not because he was playing her but because for whatever reason he genuinely wanted to know.

She turned to face him, a smile on her lips--lips he suddenly wanted to kiss rather badly. "That it is growing markedly colder not to mention coming on time you fulfilled your end of our bargain."

He'd wager the whole of his twenty-five hundred pounds that wasn't what she'd been thinking at all but rather than press, he said, "Time to pack up and pay the piper, is it?" Straightening, he stepped away from the camera. "Ah well, it is cold, I'll grant you that. The lens of my camera is starting to fog. What say you to that cup of tea I promised the other day--Callie?"

When he'd invited her back to his flat for tea, he hadn't really expected her to agree. As a rule, well-bred women such as Caledonia Rivers simply did not consent to go to a man's lodgings, even if those lodgings did set above a shop. In point, he'd prepared himself for, if not a battle precisely, mulish, unequivocal refusal. Instead she'd sent him a worried look, a longer than usual pause, but in the end, she'd nodded that brisk nod of hers and answered "very well then."

But then beneath those high-necked shirtwaists and stiff, starched skirts, Caledonia was a woman after all.

As he was a man.

They walked back in silence, a state that seemed to suit them both. Once indoors, Hadrian kept his shop's sign on C
LOSED
and twisted the key in the lock. He turned about to find Callie roaming his studio, making a show of perusing his framed works even though she'd surely seen them when she'd sat for him before.