Elizabeth Beacon - Regency Surrender - Forbidden Pasts

‘Put me down, Gideon,’ she demanded in a breathy voice she hardly recognised.

‘You’ll fall over if I do.’

‘Nonsense, I’m perfectly well.’

‘Of course you aren’t.’

‘I wish you’d let me walk, I’m not a child,’ she complained, even though she sounded like a pettish one to her own ears right now.

‘Stop behaving like one then,’ he said in a preoccupied tone, as if he had more important things to do than tidy his inconvenient wife off the King’s Highway.

‘I’m not. I feel sick,’ she said querulously, wondering what had come over her. Gideon had, of course, and he was as calm as a rock while she felt as if her whole world had been turned upside down.

‘Then I’m definitely not putting you down.’

‘It’s a lie,’ she confessed with a blush she hoped he couldn’t see under the liberal coating of dust miring her cheeks. ‘I thought such a neat gentleman as you wouldn’t want that fine silk waistcoat spoilt and you’d put me down.’

‘You really can’t wait to get out of my arms, can you, Wife?’ he said with a quirk of his mouth that might pass for a smile in a dark room.

‘No more than you can to ride off and forget me for another nine years,’ she retaliated childishly, unable to stop her tongue saying things she’d rather it kept quiet about.

‘You do me an injustice, Calliope. How could I ever forget you?’

She distrusted his words, took them as mockery. Tears stung her eyes for a perilous second, but the thought of tear tracks in the dirt made her wince. She blinked hard and stared into the little wood he was carrying her towards until they dispersed. She should dismiss him from her life as lightly as an old gown, but perhaps she could lie about a lover to disgrace him with and persuade him to go away. Except she’d never met a man who made her feel the way he did. If she wasn’t careful she’d become the sort of female who lay about on sofas half the day and wafted about like a low-lying cloud for the rest of it. Or hoped for impossible things, and wouldn’t that be a waste of time?

‘I can still walk, you know,’ she said crossly.

‘Of course you can,’ he replied, a hint of laughter in grey eyes that had an inner ray of green round the pupil only a lover would know about.

The thought of long-ago intimacy with this man caught at her heart. Now he looked and sounded almost familiar it made her recall times when they looked and looked at each other for what felt like hours, or simply lay close marvelling at one another until desire was too hot for peace and they peaked into the sort of earth-shattering climax that made her shiver even over such a chasm of time. That wasn’t the way to be cool and armoured while they agreed terms. It was good for him to hide his true self now; it would make life easier while she waited for him to go again.

‘And I wish to do so right now,’ she told him emphatically.

‘I may not be much of a husband, but I’m not going to watch my wife stagger about the countryside half faint in this heat like a drunkard.’

‘Nonsense, I can cope with the sun perfectly well.’

‘Of course you can,’ he said indulgently.

How come she could hear him smile as he soothed her like a fractious infant again? ‘The shock of seeing you made me faint, but I would be perfectly well if you hadn’t taken me by surprise,’ she claimed with a frown that was clearly wasted on the barbarian.

‘You were so overcome with delight at the sight of me you lost your senses then?’

‘That wasn’t delight,’ she snapped.

‘I know.’

‘And what the devil are you doing here, Gideon?’

‘Now that sounds more like the outspoken Callie Sommers I know. I thought I’d mistaken you for someone else for a moment back there.’

‘I am someone else,’ she told him gruffly, doing her best to believe that was good.

‘Not from here you’re not,’ he teased as he shifted her slightly in his arms and they finally reached the little wood that ran alongside the road. ‘You feel exactly like her to me.’

‘Well, I’m not,’ she said crossly. She hadn’t been since Gideon put his ring on her finger and the blacksmith at Gretna pronounced them man and wife.

‘No, you’re Callie Laughraine,’ he said blankly and she told herself that was a good thing. One of them should have their feelings under control and hers were anything but.

‘I spent a long time forgetting her and manage perfectly well without a husband to tell me what to do and how to do it nowadays,’ she insisted.

‘As if I ever could awe, persuade or bully you into doing a thing you didn’t want to. You were always your own person and even as a silly stripling I never wanted you any other way, Calliope.’

‘I have no idea why my mother gave me that ridiculous name,’ she said to divert them from the memory of how much he’d loved her when they eloped to Gretna Green. It hurt to linger on the past and wonder if they could have built a wonderful marriage together, if life was a little less cruel. ‘She might as well have put a millstone round my neck as named me for one of the Muses.’

‘Lucky you have a beautiful voice and a love of poetry like your namesake then, isn’t it? Perhaps she simply liked it. I always did.’

‘Yet how you used to taunt me with it when you were a repellent boy. If I had the gift of epic poetry, would you stop carrying me about like an infant?’

‘Because you’re named after a goddess?’

‘No, because I asked you to, although I should like to be a bard, if we lived in better times and women were taken seriously as such, but I never wanted to be a goddess with so many unpronounceable sisters to quarrel with.’

He wasn’t to know how serious she was, so she supposed it was unfair to stiffen in his arms when he chuckled. At least now she felt icy and remote again and he’d almost done it—he’d nearly disarmed her with flattery and wasn’t that another warning to be wary? Best to remember he was a professional advocate now, a pleader for apparently lost causes, and that they could never be friends. At least then she would hurt less when he walked away again.

‘You can put me down over there,’ she ordered, pointing at a convenient tree stump.

‘I’ll drop you in the stream if you’re not careful, Your Majesty,’ he muttered darkly.

She shot him a glare as he set her down as if she was made of bone china, then stepped back with a mocking bow. ‘Now go away,’ she said sternly.

‘I wouldn’t leave your aunt stranded in the middle of nowhere ill and prey to any rogue who happened along and I never liked her, so how can you imagine I’d leave you, Callie?’

‘I’m not my aunt,’ she defended herself absently.

‘Something I thank God for on a daily basis, my dear.’

‘Don’t call me your dear and don’t blaspheme.’

‘But I’d hate to be wed to your narrow-minded and joyless relative, my dear.’

‘She stood by me when nobody else would and I told you I’m not your dear,’ she told him shortly and wondered if it was worth standing so she could stamp her foot and show him she hated that false endearment on his lips. Deciding it wasn’t a good idea to stand up and wilt, then sit down again before she proved anything, she tried to look serenely indifferent instead. Clearly it didn’t work; he was having a job to conceal a grin at her expense.

‘Perhaps you’ll allow me the one freedom a married man can safely claim, which is the privacy of his own thoughts?’ he said with a pantomime of the henpecked husband that made her heart ache for all they’d lost.

‘And perhaps I won’t,’ she snapped.

‘Afraid you won’t like them, Calliope?’