“Plenty of water, bracing cold though it may be.” Mrs. Cartwright pulled a clean towel from a shelf. “I’ll just leave this towel here for you, dear.” Setting the towel on the washstand, she glanced around. “My son built this for us when he and his wife were living here.”
“You must miss them,” Heather said.
Mrs. Cartwright sighed. “Aye, we do, but you can’t keep young people from living their lives, now, can you? Wouldn’t be right.”
She led the way back into the kitchen. Heather followed her in, then excused herself to return and make use of the “necessaries.” After washing her face and hands, she felt considerably more presentable. A tiny mirror hanging above the basin allowed her to neaten her thoroughly disarranged coiffure. If her London maid could see her, she’d faint.
Feeling considerably more the thing, she rejoined Breckenridge and Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright in the kitchen. Breckenridge and Mr. Cartwright had settled to discussing the land around about and local farming.
Mrs. Cartwright ladled out two steaming bowls of soup and set half a loaf of bread and two pats of butter on the table, then directed Breckenridge and Heather to “eat up.”
They sat and did, while Mr. Cartwright produced a pipe and quietly puffed, and Mrs. Cartwright filled their ears with a catalogue of little things—like the harvest she hoped to get this year from her prize damsons, and speculation that their son and his wife would return for a few days at Easter.
It was a curiously soothing half hour, a reminder that, despite their flight and the potential threat posed by the mysterious laird, life still went on in myriad calm and quiet ways.
By the time she mopped out her soup bowl with a piece of bread, Heather felt a lot more inwardly settled and satisfied than the soup alone could account for.
This was the country. The Cartwrights, like all country folk, retired early. They bade Breckenridge and Heather a good night, and left them seated about the kitchen table, a single lighted candle between them.
Heather studied the flickering flame, then sighed. “We should get to bed, but I’m going to seize the chance to have a proper wash first.”
Breckenridge pushed the candlestick toward her. “Go ahead.”
Heather rose, and with the candle retreated first to their little room to fetch her cloak and shawl, then out to the bathing chamber. There she set her teeth, stripped to the skin, washed, dried herself, then, teeth close to chattering, hurriedly redonned her chemise, wound the shawl about her torso, then enveloped herself in her cloak. Slipping her feet, now clean, back into her new walking boots, swiping up her gown, she rushed back into the kitchen and straight through into their little room, saying as she passed, “I’ve left the candle in there for you. There’s another one in here. I’ll light it in a moment.”
Breckenridge watched her streak past. Any impulse to laugh was slain by the thought that she almost certainly wasn’t wearing much beneath her cloak.
Which wasn’t going to make the night any easier for him, trying to find sleep while in the same room as temptation incarnate.
Why she now figured as temptation incarnate to his lustful mind wasn’t a question he wished to dwell on.
Rising, he retreated to the bathing chamber and made use of the facilities, taking his time in the hope—almost certainly vain—that she would fall asleep before he returned to the room. He examined his beard, now grown in and thickening, and made a mental note to hunt out his shaving kit in the morning. And washing and combing out his rumpled hair wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
Eventually acknowledging that there was a limit to how long he could put off the inevitable, he picked up the candle and headed back to the kitchen. He checked that the fire was nicely banked, then pushed open the door to their room . . . to see Heather snuggled down in the bed, closer to the wall, leaving more than half the bed vacant.
She was lying on her side, the covers outlining the quintessentially feminine curves of her hip and shoulder. Her hair was down. She’d brushed it; gleaming strands of gold laced the ivory pillows.
She’d left the candle burning on the cabinet beside the bed. Shifting her head, she looked at him as he paused in the doorway.
Her expectation couldn’t have been clearer.
Moving slowly, thinking furiously, he stepped into the room and shut the door. He hadn’t got much sleep in the barn the previous night; if at all possible, he’d like to sleep tonight. Blowing out his candle, he crossed to place it with the other still burning on the cabinet. Keeping his eyes from Heather’s, he moved back to the end of the bed, sat, and pulled off his boots. Setting them by the door, he straightened, glanced around at the available floor, then bent to pick up his cloak.
“What are you doing?”
Without looking her way, he flicked out his cloak, let it fall. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw her jerk upright. Fleetingly—instinctively—he closed his eyes, then peeked sideways through his lashes. She’d clasped the covers over her breasts as she’d sat up—thank Heaven; beneath the sheet, all she appeared to have on was her flimsy chemise.
The candlelight flashed off the gold band on her finger. His ring. The sight momentarily transfixed him. He shook off the effect, told himself he might as well get used to it; that band and all it proclaimed would be real soon enough.
Predictably, she frowned at him. “Don’t be ridiculous!” The words were a forceful whisper. She hesitated, then said, “I know a bed is—stupidly in my view and very likely yours, too—considered to be a somewhat different proposition than a pile of hay in a barn. But I’m no princess, and you’re no lowly knight. We’re in this together, and there’s no reason we can’t share this bed.”
Oh, yes there is. He was tempted to tell her why, graphically, but stating such facts aloud might not help.
Stating, for instance, that he no longer trusted himself to keep a proper distance—not after last night, not after the events of the day. A thousand little things had abraded his control; he didn’t need it stretched further, put under more strain.
And on top of his own compulsive desires, there were hers to manage as well. She was attracted to him; most women, most ladies, were. And young unmarried ladies—like her—were the worst; as a rule, they glorified him, more or less casting him as some sexual god. That was simply a fact—one he’d grappled with all his adult life—and as he knew to his cost, in a deeper sense that type of adulation meant nothing at all.
In this, he trusted her even less than he trusted himself.
And while not being able to trust himself to keep her at arm’s length—even though she was virginal, totally inexperienced, enthusiastic rather than accomplished, in uncounted ways the antithesis of the sophisticated ladies whose beds he occasionally deigned to grace—was of itself distinctly odd, that was another issue he didn’t want to dwell on.
Not now. Certainly not here.
Slowly turning his head, he met her gaze, his own steady, his expression impassive. “I’ll sleep on the floor because we don’t need any further complications in our relationship at present.”
When he was serious, as he was now, most people had the sense to give way.
Her lips thinned. Her eyes narrowed on his. “I realize,” she stated, her tone sharper, but still at a whisper, “that you want to be bullheadedly protective, honorable, and all the rest. But in case you haven’t noticed, the temperature is already falling, and will assuredly fall even more dramatically before dawn, and as there’s no fire I’ll freeze, and be too busy shivering to sleep, so if you really wanted to be protective and honorable you’d lie down here”—she jabbed a finger at the bed beside her—“and keep me warm.”
She held up the finger. “Furthermore, if you look down, you’ll see that the space between the bed and the wall is significantly narrower than your shoulders—which is why you’re standing at an angle
right now. If you try to sleep there . . . what if you turn over and knock yourself out on the bottom of the bed? Who’s going to protect me from that damned laird if you’re unconscious?”
Hands rising to his hips, he narrowed his eyes back at her. That she was attempting to manipulate him shouldn’t be a surprise. Regardless . . . his ring continued to flash in the light, taunting him. “I—”
Up shot her hand; the ring flashed again. “I haven’t finished yet.”
Heather held his hard gaze, driven by she knew not what to win this argument. The notion that he would rather sleep on the cold floor than in the comfort of the bed beside her offended her, infuriated her, at some level she didn’t truly understand. If they were partners, equals, together facing all this, then they should share the bed; that was all there was to it.
And she knew what particular scruple was, beneath all his excuses, keeping him from complying.
“You don’t need to imagine that by sharing a bed with me you’ll compromise me—or rather that that fact will affect my future life in any degree.”
He blinked; in his usually unreadable face she detected a moment’s confusion.
“Yes,” she went on, “I’m perfectly well aware that after a journey such as this my prospects of ever marrying will effectively be nil. But they already were.”
Because the one man she might possibly have married had never seen her as a marriageable female. He stood before her now, and almost certainly still saw her as a too-young young lady. Witness this argument.
He stood before her refusing even to share a bed, even in these circumstances, arguing as only he would, deeming it an unwise “complication,” no less.
Regardless of anything, they never would, never could, marry now. The only reason he would now offer for her hand was because he felt forced to it by honor, by circumstance—a reason for marriage she would never accept. A reason her mother, her sisters, her aunts, all her female acquaintance would understand that she could never accept.
To have a man forced to marry her would be anathema.
To have Breckenridge forced to marry her . . . was unthinkable.
“I know society as well as you do.” She continued more calmly, but no less decisively, “I’m twenty-five. In a few months, I’ll be declared formally on the shelf, and that will be that. I’ve already decided what to do with the rest of my life—this journey and its outcome won’t materially affect my plans.”
He was frowning. After a moment, he asked, “These plans of yours—what are they?”
As if he didn’t believe she truly had any.
She smiled, tight-lipped. “I like children, and I know Catriona has many under her wing, quite aside from her own. I’d already thought to visit the Vale this summer and stay for a time, learning more about what Catriona and her staff do, then go home to Somerset and explore what I might do there. So, you see, I have it all worked out—this journey merely moves my plans forward a few months. Whatever social repercussions flow from my kidnapping and this subsequent flight with you won’t affect me in the least—in large part I won’t even be aware of them, of what the ton might think and say.”
Holding his gaze, yet as usual totally unable to read his expression, she decided that, in this instance, total honesty would serve her best. “And just to make matters crystal clear, while I comprehend that society might well deem a marriage between us the only acceptable outcome, I will not be a party to any socially dictated marriage. I would never marry a man who only sought to marry me to preserve his, and possibly my, honor.” She paused, still holding, or more accurately now trapped by his hard hazel gaze, by eyes that seemed to bore into her with an intensity she couldn’t quite comprehend.
She drew in a tight breath, fractionally tilted her chin. “So I trust that’s now clear. And that now you understand that no part of this journey, including you sleeping beside me in this bed, is going to change my future in any way, you will simply shut up”—she let her eyes blaze, let her chin firm—“and damn well lie down!”
To cap her performance—her clear challenge—she glared, jerked up the covers, slid down in the bed, turned on her other side, away from him, and slumped down in the bed.
Leaving Breckenridge staring at one belligerently hunched shoulder.
And struggling with a riot of emotions.
He felt . . . insulted. Infuriated. He wanted to shake her.
To shake some sense into her stubbornly dismissive mind.
In all her wonderful plans, her careful planning, she’d forgotten one thing.
She’d forgotten him.
Fighting a nearly overpowering urge to stomp about the room, to rake his hands through his hair, clutch at the locks, then continue arguing with her—raging at her if need be—he clenched his jaw and glared . . . while beneath the churning feelings that part of him that had more in common with a warrior-general than any civilized, sophisticated, bound-by-convention gentleman swiftly reassessed.
He’d thought—clearly wrongly—that she hadn’t seen the social implications of her kidnapping and his involvement in her rescue. Instead . . . the element she hadn’t seen was that he might hold a different view from hers.
Hands locked on his hips, he stalked silently to the side of the bed. Staring down at her, he revisited his thoughts and requestioned his conclusions, his adamantly held belief that he and she had to marry. That that was the only way he could countenance this adventure ending.
His belief, his certainty, his absolute, unshakable conviction hadn’t altered, hadn’t shifted, hadn’t been undermined by her arguments in the least. So . . . lips setting grimly, hands still on his hips, he narrowed his eyes on her. It appeared he had a significantly greater challenge before him than he’d foreseen.
The simple truth—one she refused to acknowledge—was that in the wake of this adventure, he being him and she being her left him with no alternative but to marry her. Not simply because society would otherwise howl and figuratively, if not literally, call for his head, nor because he needed a wife and she was in many ways the ideal candidate, but because, over and above every other consideration, on that plane on which he’d long ago vowed never to venture again but with her found himself walking on anyway, marrying her was now . . . mandatory.
To him their marriage was now a foregone conclusion.
And the warrior within him refused to give that up.
He looked down at her, at the sheen of the candlelight caressing the silken smoothness of her shoulder, at the golden glimmer of her wheat-blond hair. The only reason he had, to this point, fought to keep the sexual barriers between them up and functioning was because he’d foreseen that if he gave in to the increasingly sharp prodding of his instincts and seduced her, using as his excuse the fact that society would dictate they had to marry anyway, she would later view him as having taken advantage of her. Of him using the situation to unfairly tie her to him, of him capitalizing on her relative social naivety to ensure they married, that all played out as he wanted regardless of what she thought or felt.
He’d thought that seducing her would leave her resenting him, resenting him for strengthening his claim on her. It was one thing for her to view society as forcing them to marry, quite another for her to view him as actively forcing marriage on her, too.
Given he’d assumed that she hadn’t seen the social implications, that reasoning had been sound.
But she had seen, had considered, and had instead set her mind on not marrying at all, not him or any other man.
That changed things. Fundamentally altered the landscape.
Staring down at her, he assessed the new terrain.
If once they reached the Vale, she held to her present stance and refused to marry him, refused to bow to the dictates of society . . . seducing her now wouldn’t necessarily give him any useable lever with which to change the outcome.
He knew the
Cynsters, all of them, knew that if she put her delicate foot down and refused to marry him, established intimacy notwithstanding, while all the men would be on his side, the women—potentially all of them—might very well side with her. And the Cynster women were a formidable force. If push came to shove, he suspected that they would prevail; when it came to all things family within the Cynster clan, they were the ultimate authority.
So seducing her wouldn’t strengthen his hand, not in that way, but . . . in seducing her, he had one more ace up his sleeve. He wasn’t widely acknowledged as the ton’s foremost rake for no reason.
And she was attracted to him. He had little doubt that attraction arose from the usual fascination most young ladies felt for a man of his lauded experience, but it gave him a place to start.
And looking at the entire scenario objectively, what had he to lose? As matters stood, the only way he could win her hand was to convince her to bestow it on him of her own accord.
He reviewed his options one last time, but nothing varied, nothing changed. No other option reared its head.
Accepting, embracing his new purpose, he considered the space beside her, then shrugged off his coat, unknotted his kerchief, undid the laces at his throat and wrists. He glanced at her, knew she was listening for all she was worth. Stooping, he stripped off his hose, undid the closures at his breeches’ knees, then blew out the candle, stripped off his breeches.
Clad only in his shirt, reaching over the bed’s head, he drew back the curtains covering the window in the rear wall, allowing faint moonlight to flood the small room, then he lifted the blankets. As he’d assumed, she was lying under the soft sheet. He slid into the bed on top of the sheet, leaving that as a last barrier between them.
Not that it would hold back the inevitable.
Laying his head on the pillow, he let himself relax as far as he was able.
Looking up at the ceiling, he waited for nature to take her course.
For fate to raise her head and have at them both.