Elizabeth Beacon - Regency Surrender - Forbidden Pasts

‘Well enough, but I’ll never understand you if I live to be a hundred, Winterley,’ Gideon said with a manly shrug. ‘Ours has never been a conventional marriage,’ he added casually, as if he and Callie kept it to themselves out of a perverse delight in secrets. Since she was the one to demand it came to an end nine years ago, she could hardly complain if he was making weak excuses for that deception now.

‘Then perhaps you should consult with your wife and match up your stories better in future. I wish you both a good morning and hope to see you at dinner. If you dine together as man and wife and not under your chosen aliases in different counties, of course?’

‘Then you are staying at Raigne?’ Gideon asked as if it confirmed his worst fears.

‘Lord Laughraine will invite me, d’you see? This time I rashly agreed to stay for a week or two to escape the husband hunters, since the little darlings will go to Brighton on Prinny’s coattails to carry on their craft out of season. Like a gullible innocent up from the country I agreed to his latest invitation to enjoy some bucolic tranquillity at his expense and quite forgot he was a great friend of Virgil and Virginia’s. Although given what has happened so far this year, I should feel less of a fool now I’m looking at the very good reason he wants me there, shouldn’t I?’ Mr Winterley said mysteriously.

Callie supposed Gideon knew what the man meant, since she felt him flinch and heard a bitten-back curse. The only Virgil and Virginia she knew of were the last Lord and Lady Farenze; Gideon’s late grandfather and his wife. Still with that look of unholy amusement in his eyes, Mr Winterley blithely gave them both a seated bow before wishing them a genial farewell. Then he rode off as if he’d happened on an amusing sideshow at precisely the right moment to enliven a tedious moment.

‘Who on earth is that?’ she asked.

‘A friend, although you wouldn’t think so at times,’ Gideon replied tersely.

‘A friend you were about to call to account for simply exchanging greetings with me?’ she reminded him recklessly.

‘I have no patience with Winterley’s sort of politeness. You should be wary of him, too, Callie. He’s slippery as an eel and about as trustworthy as a fox.’

‘Maybe it takes a rogue to know one.’

She tied the trailing strings of her bonnet into a militant bow she regretted as soon as the close-woven straw closed the heat in and threatened to make her head ache. Refusing to undo it after making such a grand gesture, she silently dared him to comment.

‘There’s no maybe about it,’ he said with an unrepentant grin and they resumed their journey in what she hoped was a dignified silence.

‘I have no wish to know what you have been doing while my back was turned,’ she managed to lie after they had continued for half a mile with her staring everywhere but at his face. An internal picture of a parade of his lovers kept plaguing her, as if a grey mist had settled on her shoulders in the most unlikely cloud and was blighting a glorious morning.

He sighed as if she were proving to be the most exasperating of travelling companions and answered the question she had been trying so hard not to ask ever since he came back into her life. ‘No, Callie, I don’t have a mistress, nor a discreet married lover bored with her husband after filling his nursery with heirs. I’ve been celibate as a monk for lack of you, but you’d be sensible to wish I was busy chasing every strumpet in town right now. You’re right to watch me as if I’m a starving wolf about to swallow you down in one hungry bite, so maybe you’d best avoid provoking me with the likes of James Winterley again. I want you so badly every inch of me is on fire and at least now you can’t say you haven’t had fair warning.’

‘No man who loves as passionately as you could go nigh on a decade without a woman,’ she said sceptically, the image coming into her head of him in the arms of some sensual charmer purring with pleasure at his splendid body and skilful lovemaking.

‘I am a married man, in case you had forgotten,’ he said shortly.

She tried to shrug off the doubts that made her want to smack the smile off that smug imaginary siren’s face, but he was a fully adult man and she couldn’t seem to get reason to overcome jealousy now they were side by side and she had felt the flex and steel of his body next to hers for mile after mile. Perhaps she should have agreed to travel in the stuffy carriage away from him, after all.

‘You revelled in being my lover, then my wife, before you decided I was a villain and you hated me. Don’t pretend you don’t want me nigh as much as I want you.’

‘You taught me not to trust my one and only lover, Gideon,’ she said as images of them locked in the wilder excesses of passion threatened to leave her certainty she never wanted to risk loving him again in the dust.

‘This isn’t the time or place for picking at old wounds,’ he warned with a significant nod back at the carriage where Biddy was fanning herself in the growing heat and beginning to look as if she regretted choosing that seat over this one. ‘I won’t admit to something I didn’t do, though,’ he added in a low, driven voice.

‘I don’t want to love you again, Gideon,’ she warned. She was breathless and on the edge of something dangerous and had to protect herself from being so vulnerable again.

‘Maybe I won’t ask you to,’ he replied flatly, before halting the carriage and insisting Biddy squeeze into the space atop the graceful little vehicle between them.

* * *

They were close to the end of their journey at last and Callie spotted familiar landmarks and the outlying parts of her grandfather’s former parish. She distracted herself from her galling and petty jealousy of Biddy for her place next to Gideon on the narrow coachman’s seat by wondering who still lived where they were when she left and who had moved on. Inevitably some of the parishioners would have joined her grandfather in the peaceful churchyard of King’s Raigne Church. She winced at the very thought of that grave and knew she had to visit it before very many days had gone by in her temporary home to make peace with the past.

It seemed best to tell herself this was temporary. The very idea of being mistress of such a huge and venerable house one day might terrify her half to death if she dwelt on it. She glanced at her husband over the top of Biddy’s head and knew she would be more open to his persuasion if he wasn’t Lord Laughraine’s heir. Then they could simply return to London when the heat of midsummer died down and live a humdrum life. A sense of justice her grandfather instilled in her argued she must put her dread of the Laughraine inheritance aside and see Gideon as he was, rather than one day lord and master of Raigne.

There, now they were almost through Great Raigne and a particularly strait-laced widow she recognised as an incurable gossip was waiting to cross the road. The lady took a second look at the modest carriage and exactly who was driving it and her mouth fell open like a cod fish.

‘Oh, dear,’ she muttered to Gideon, then summoned up a cheery smile as they swept past as if a Laughraine always drove his own carriage with his wife at his side and a maidservant for company. ‘Our eccentric method of travel will be all round the Raigne villages by the time she’s walked the length of the high street.’

‘I have no intention of keeping our arrival quiet so they might as well get used to us,’ he said, a challenge in his voice she hoped Biddy wouldn’t notice.

‘If your uncle really wants you to stay here and begin to learn the management of the estate we must live here for at least part of the year, though, and Mrs Prosser never did like me,’ Callie said with a sigh.