He humphed. After a moment, added, “I suppose the distraction of measles will at least have ensured none of the gossipmongers caught any whiff of your abduction.”
“Mama said they haven’t, so all’s well there.” She glanced up at him again, a soft, confident smile in her eyes. “And the news of our engagement will wipe all other thoughts from their heads.”
“True.” He couldn’t deny the surge of pure masculine satisfaction that filled him at the sight of that eminently feminine smile. When he’d dragged her out of Lady Herford’s salon on that fateful night so many weeks ago, she’d been . . . like a chrysalis waiting to unfurl. Through her abduction and their journey, through the trials they’d faced since, she’d transformed into the beautiful, assured, scintillating lady who would be his viscountess.
His lover, his wife.
She tipped her head, eyes studying his face. “What is it?”
She’d grown so much . . . what about him?
He halted. Started to think, to evaluate. Stopped himself. Drawing in a breath, he turned to her, his hand sliding to caress hers. He looked into her eyes. “You’ve given me everything I need of you—thanks to you I have all my heart desires, all I thought I might never have. All I need for a wonderful, fulfilling future. And I nearly lost it all.”
She held his gaze but was wise enough not to interrupt. If she had . . .
He drew breath and forged on, “Nearly dying clarified things. When you stand on the border between life and death, the truly important things are easy to discern. One of the things I saw and finally understood was that only fools and cowards leave the truth of love unsaid. Only the weak leave love unacknowledged.”
Holding her gaze, all but lost in the shimmery blue of her eyes, he raised her hand to his lips, gently kissed. “So, my darling Heather, even though you already know it, let me put the truth—my truth—into words. I love you. With all my heart, to the depths of my soul. And I will love you forever, until the day I die.”
Her smile lit his world. “Just as well.” Happiness shone in her eyes. She pressed his fingers. “Because I plan to be with you, by your side, every day for the rest of your life, and in spirit far beyond. I’m yours for all eternity.”
Smiling, he closed his hand about hers. “Mine to protect for our eternity.”
Yes. Neither said the word, yet the sense of it vibrated in the air all around them.
A high-pitched giggle broke the spell, had them both looking along the path.
To Lucilla and Marcus, who slipped out from behind a raised bed and raced toward them.
Reaching them, laughing with delight, the pair whooped and circled.
Heather glanced to left and right, trying to keep the twins in sight, uncertain of what had them so excited. So exhilarated.
Almost as if they were reacting to the emotions coursing through her, and presumably Breckenridge. Her husband-to-be.
“You’re getting married!” Lucilla crowed.
Catching Lucilla’s eye as the pair slowed their circling dance, Heather nodded. “Yes, we are. And I rather think you two will have to come down to London to be flower girl and page boy.”
Absolute delight broke across Lucilla’s face. She looked at her brother. “See? I told you—the Lady never makes a mistake, and if you do what she tells you, you get a reward.”
“I suppose.” Marcus looked up at Breckenridge. “London will be fun.” He switched his gaze to Lucilla. “Come on! Let’s go and tell Mama and Papa.”
The pair shot off, racing up the grassy path.
Along with Breckenridge, Heather stood and watched them go. Remembered . . .
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Breckenridge said, “just how you came to topple backward off that rail.” He looked at her. “What with one thing and another, the point slipped my mind.”
Heather met his gaze. “Mine, too.”
He read her eyes, then, brows rising, looked in the direction in which the twins had gone. “Ah. Perhaps that’s one of those questions that are better left unasked.”
“It’s certainly one of those better left unanswered.” Sliding her hand from his and retaking his arm, she started them strolling again.
Breckenridge was quiet for a while, then he looked up at the manor and said, “Will you think it odd of me to suggest that we should, perhaps, leave the Vale and your sometimes unnerving relatives by marriage as soon as we possibly can?”
“How about tomorrow?” She glanced up at his face.
He caught her gaze. “Immediately after breakfast. It’s too late to set out today.”
She nodded. “Indeed.” She looked ahead. “And besides, I have plans for tonight.”
“Do you?”
“Of course.” She met his gaze, her own filled with love and unexpected understanding. “The announcement you made a few minutes ago deserves an appropriate response, don’t you think?”
He inclined his head. “Indubitably.” After a moment, he added, “Who knows? With the right form of response, you might even induce me to utter the words again.”
She laughed. “A challenge.” She met his gaze. “A challenge we can wrestle with, wrestle over back and forth, for the rest of our days.”
“Indeed.” He held her loving gaze, raised her fingers to his lips. “For the rest of our days.”
Epilogue
A week later, the laird who had arranged Heather Cynster’s kidnapping walked into his great hall.
With more than an hour before the midday meal, he debated going to his office to fill the time. Instead, seeing his copy of yesterday’s Edinburgh Gazette waiting on the sideboard, he picked up the news sheet, poured himself a tankard of ale from the pitcher left ready, and headed for his carver at the high table.
He was sitting, quietly perusing the latest news, when a shriek of fury rent the air. Luckily the sound was sufficiently distanced, muted by the solid stone walls, for him to ignore it. Idly he wondered what, this time, had displeased his mother, then, deciding he would no doubt hear soon enough, went back to the news sheet.
Sure enough, less than a minute later he heard her footsteps flying down her tower stairs. She burst into the great hall, saw him, and stormed onto the dais. Reaching his side, she slapped yesterday’s London Gazette over the Edinburgh paper.
“She’s not ruined!” She stabbed a finger at a notice in the social announcements column. Shrieked at the top of her voice, “The damned chit’s not ruined—she’s engaged! To Breckenridge!”
He picked up the London sheet, found and read the notice in question, the usual bland wording announcing the betrothal of Heather Cynster to Timothy Danvers, Viscount Breckenridge. Racking his memory for what, from his days in London, he recalled of Breckenridge, matching that with his recollection of the man who’d escorted Heather Cynster into the Vale . . . yes, Breckenridge could have been that man. The man who had so thoroughly disrupted his plans.
“Interesting,” he murmured. And instantly regretted it.
“Interesting? Interesting? It’s not interesting—its infuriating! It’s—”
He shut his ears to his mother’s diatribe. Consulted his own feelings instead. Revisited his impressions, what he’d sensed of the man—Breckenridge—and his relationship to the girl . . . would that he himself were so lucky. That being so, he couldn’t find it in him to resent Breckenridge, to rail at his claiming the Cynster girl as his.
Reaching for his tankard, he sipped, silently toasting the pair. Good luck to them. They, at least, had escaped this nightmare.
“You!” His mother jabbed a fingernail into his upper arm, effectively jolting him back to his reality. She leaned close to hiss, “You were supposed to bring her here and make sure she was ruined. Ruined in the eyes of the entire ton. Instead, she’s getting married to one of the most eligible noblemen in En-gland! So you’ve failed with her, but you know my pri
ce. My nonnegotiable price. So what are you going to do about it?”
When he didn’t rush to reply but instead raised his tankard and, gaze forward, took a long sip of ale, she leaned even closer to say, “Correct me if I’m wrong, my dear”—the endearment dripped with latent scorn and fury—“but for you, time is running out.”
She was right, but he wasn’t going to let her guess at the chill that gripped his innards at the thought of what was at stake. Keeping his posture relaxed, he almost languidly shrugged. “You’ll just have to settle for one of her sisters. One of the Cynster sisters was our bargain, and either one of the others will do just as well to fulfill it.”
He’d used every last hour while they’d waited to hear the fate of Heather Cynster to search, again, high and low, for the goblet his mother had stolen and hidden. The goblet he needed to save all he held dear. His mother had never been able to bend him to her will, any more than she’d been able to influence his father. But she’d learned of the goblet, and of its importance to him, and had seized her chance.
She now had an exquisitely honed weapon she could wield, and was intent on wielding, to get him to do as she wished.
Her wish, her obsession, was insane. He knew it.
He also knew he had no choice but to carry out her manic dictates.
Still . . . sipping his ale, he allowed himself to indulge the recurring fantasy of simply telling her to do her worst and be damned. . . .
A door deep in the keep slammed open. Two pairs of small feet came clattering over the flags.
Lifting his head, he set down his tankard as two tousle-headed young boys came rushing in, bringing the fresh air of the loch, the scent of pines and firs, and three water spaniels galloping in with them.
The boys saw him, and wide grins split their faces.
If they saw his mother standing beside him, they gave no sign as, with a cheer and a whoop, they raced up the great hall, clambered up onto the dais, and flung themselves at him.
He’d shifted his carver back enough to grab them, to tumble them in his arms, wrestle them about, then settle them in his lap.
They clung like monkeys, chattering nonstop, filling his ears with the highlights of their morning’s excursion with his gamekeeper, Scanlon.
Their warmth wrapped about him, settled to his bones, dispelling the chill that dealing with his mother had evoked.
For her part, although she glared at the boys, furious at the interruption, and even more over his turning away from her to them, she knew better than to say a word against them. They were all he had left of a family he’d held dear. His cousin Mitchell had grown up alongside him, but Mitchell and his sweet wife Krista were now dead, and the boys, five and six years old, were all he had left of them. . . .
He drew in a deep breath. Struggled to harness the sudden rage that ripped through him—rage that the woman standing at his side should dare to threaten the boys, their future, and the future of every other soul under his care.
The dogs milled, whined, more attuned to his hidden emotions than the boys wriggling in his lap. One dog, the eldest, Gwarr, came to sit between him and his mother, dark eyes fixed on her, tongue lolling from between long jaws lined with strong white teeth.
His mother edged back a step, thin-lipped and tense.
He forced himself to look at her, the smile he’d summoned for the boys draining from his face. Keeping the anger, the sheer ire and fury she and her scheme provoked, from his voice—so the boys wouldn’t sense it and be disturbed—he met her eyes and nonchalantly shrugged. “One of the Cynster sisters, brought here and thus effectively ruined—that was our bargain. I’ll keep my end of it.” He held her gaze. “And you’ll keep yours.”
Eyes narrowed, her face pinched, her expression, as always, sour, she held his gaze for a pregnant moment, then humphed, swung on her heel, and stalked off.
His fury drained from him.
Idly reaching out to stroke Gwarr’s head, he turned back to the imps in his lap. Utterly trusting, their bright blue eyes looked out on the world with unalloyed hope and untarnished expectations.
He would give a great deal to ensure they had all the best in life he could give them.
Glancing at the large circular clock on the wall, he confirmed there was still half an hour before the meal. Summoning his broadest brogue, he looked down at the boys. “Shall we nae gae oot an’ luk in on the horses, then?”
Later he could think about kidnapping Eliza Cynster.
First, he would remind himself of why he would.
Turn the page
for an excerpt from
In Pursuit of
Eliza Cynster
Coming October 2011
from
Avon Books
St. Ives House
Grosvenor Square, London
It really isn’t fair.” Elizabeth Marguerite Cynster, Eliza to all, grumbled the complaint beneath her breath as she stood alone, cloaked in the shadows of a massive potted palm by the wall of her eldest cousin’s ballroom. The magnificent ducal ballroom was glittering and glowing, playing host to the crème de la crème of the ton, bedecked in their finest satins and silks, bejeweled and beringed, all swept up in a near-rapturous outpouring of happiness and unbridled delight.
As there were few among the ton likely to decline an invitation to waltz at an event hosted by Honoria, Duchess of St. Ives, and her powerful husband, Devil Cynster, Duke of St. Ives, the huge room was packed.
The glow from the sparkling chandeliers sheened over elaborately coiffed curls and winked and blinked from the hearts of countless diamonds. Gowns in a range of brilliant hues swirled as the ladies danced, creating a shifting sea of vibrant plumage contrasting sharply with the regulation black and white of their partners. Laughter and conversation blanketed the scene. A riot of perfumes filled the air. In the background a small orchestra did its best with one of the most popular waltzes.
Eliza watched as her elder sister, Heather, circled the dance floor in the arms of her handsome husband-to-be, ex-foremost rake of the ton, Timothy Danvers, Viscount Breckenridge. Even if the ball had not been thrown expressly to celebrate their betrothal, to formally announce it to the ton and the polite world, the besotted look in Breckenridge’s eyes every time his gaze rested on Heather was more than enough to tell the tale. The ex-darling of the ton’s ladies was now Heather’s sworn protector and slave.
And Heather was his. The joy in her face, that lit her eyes, declared that to the world.
Despite her own less than happy state, much of it a direct outcome of the events leading to Heather’s engagement, Eliza was sincerely, to her soul, happy for her sister.
They’d both spent years—literally years—searching for their respective heroes among the ton, through the drawing rooms and ballrooms in which young ladies such as they were expected to confine themselves in hunting for suitable, eligible partis. Yet neither Heather, Eliza, nor Angelica, their younger sister, had had any luck in locating the gentlemen fated to be their heroes. They had, logically, concluded that said heroes, the gentlemen for them, were not to be found within their proscribed orbit, so they had, also logically, decided to extend their search into those areas where the more elusive, yet still suitable and eligible, male members of the ton congregated.
The strategy had worked for their eldest female cousin Amanda, and, employed with a different twist, for her twin sister Amelia, as well.
And, albeit in a most unexpected way, the same approach had worked for Heather, too.
Clearly for Cynster females, success in finding their own true hero lay in boldly stepping beyond their accustomed circles.
Which was precisely what Eliza was
set on doing except that, through the adventure that had befallen Heather within minutes of her taking her first step into that racier world—namely being kidnapped, rescued by Breckenridge, and then escaping in his company—a plot to target “the Cynster sisters” had been exposed.
Whether the targets were limited to Heather, Eliza, and Angelica, or included their younger cousins Henrietta and Mary, no one knew.
No one understood the motive behind the threat, not even what was eventually intended beyond being kidnapped and possibly taken to Scotland. As for who was behind it, no one had any real clue, but the upshot was that Eliza and the other three “Cynster sisters” as yet unbetrothed had been placed under constant guard. She hadn’t been able to set toe outside her parents’ house without one of her brothers, or if not them, one of her cousins—every bit as bad—appearing at her elbow.
And looming.
For her, taking even half a step outside the restrictive circles of the upper echelons of the ton was now impossible. If she tried, a large, male, brotherly or cousinly hand would close about her elbow and yank her unceremoniously back.
Such behavior on their part was, she had to admit, understandable, but . . . “For how long?” Their protective cordon had been in place for three weeks and showed no signs of relaxing. “I’m already twenty-four. If I don’t find my hero this year, next year I’ll be on the shelf.”
Muttering to herself wasn’t a habit, but the evening was drawing to a close and, as usual at such ton events, nothing had come of it for her. Which was why she was hugging the wall in the screening shadows of the huge palm; she was worn out with smiling and pretending she had any interest whatsoever in the very proper young gentlemen who, through the night, had vied for her attention.