Unmasked by her Lover, page 3
Though the reality of his injuries distressed her, he so clearly didn’t want to talk about them that she allowed the change of subject. However, her quiet word to the innkeeper’s wife caused two cushions to be brought in and placed without fuss on his chair.
He seemed surprised when he saw them, but he merely cast her a wry smile and inclined his head in gratitude.
Chapter Three
The meal was plain but plentiful and, taken with a glass of wine, revived Meg’s flagging spirits. She was pleased the tightness around Harry’s mouth had eased somewhat by the time the innkeeper interrupted them with the news that the wheel would take considerable mending.
“It won’t be ready before morning, sir. And even then, the smith thinks you should replace the whole wheel as soon as possible.”
“I suppose you have no vehicle you could lend us?” Harry asked.
The innkeeper scratched his head. “There’s only the pony and trap we use for market day. Which is tomorrow.”
“Hmm. What if we took that today, and left you the curricle for market day? If it would be fixed by tomorrow?”
Meg intervened. “I doubt a pony and trap would deliver us to Ca—to my sister’s house,” she corrected herself hastily, “in time. Besides, surely the curricle lacks the space to bring much from the market. Could you accommodate us here until morning?”
The innkeeper brightened. “Oh, yes, madam! The best bedchamber will be prepared immediately.”
“Perhaps you have two?” Harry intervened.
“Two?” the innkeeper repeated, bewildered.
“Two bedchambers,” Harry explained patiently. “My wife snores.”
Meg stared at him, speechless, while the innkeeper, clearly trying not to laugh, assured him both bedchambers would be ready by the time they had finished dinner and hastily departed. They could hear him guffawing through the closed door.
“I do not,” Meg said dangerously, “snore.”
“How do you know?” he countered.
She opened her mouth and closed it again. The teasing gleam in his eyes had never used to have quite this effect on her.
“You’re not my wife either,” he pointed out.
“If I were, I would divorce you!”
“Be fair. I should be the one divorcing you for snoring.”
“A divorce would never be granted on such feeble grounds. In any case, my maid, my sister, my fellow ladies of the princess’s household, would all deny it. And you would be reviled for ungentlemanly conduct. What with that and the actresses.”
“Actresses?”
“Of course. It would be found you kept strings of them all over town. The tables would be turned, and then I should divorce you.”
“But I have been on the Peninsula for five years. When could I have seduced one London actress let alone strings of them?”
“I expect you brought them with you from Spain.”
“I suppose I could have,” he acknowledged. “Only then, when did I have time to court and marry you?”
Her lips twitched. “My father palmed me off quickly on the first man who asked. On account of the snoring.”
He laughed and raised his wine glass to her. “I have missed you, Meg Winter.”
She smiled, blushing with unexpected pleasure. “I missed you, too. I wish we had written.”
His gaze was steady, the twinkle of laughter fading as other emotions she couldn’t read flickered there and were lost beneath his concealing eyelids.
“No point in regrets,” he said lightly. “Let’s just enjoy the adventure. Even if Robert’s curricle let us down.”
She sighed. “It’s all such nonsense, isn’t it? We did absolutely nothing wrong, my fellow ladies-in-waiting and I, and yet the consequences affect our whole lives. While the men who were there—several of whom call themselves gentlemen and who were not hiding—will just carry blithely on. Even though at best, they were robbing the princess, and therefore the prince.”
“How did you even come to be there when Her Highness had gone?”
“I received a note summoning me. We all did. Well, apart from Hazel Curwen, who was meant to begin her duty that evening, and no one had written to put her off.”
“Was the summons written by the princess?”
“It wasn’t in her hand, but then she wouldn’t have done it herself. I took it to be written by one of the other ladies. The signature was only a scrawl, but it was on Her Highness’s paper, with her seal.”
“Then someone tricked you?”
“I suspect they did,” Meg admitted. “Though I can’t think why. I expect the newspaper that wrote the piece will sell a lot more copies than usual, but they must know my father will come after them. And Juliet’s father is the Earl of Cosland. But that is another thing, Harry. Someone delivered that newspaper to Winter House even before I got home from Connaught Place, and my parents would never order such a rag. Even Johnny would not. It’s as if someone is trying to hurt me, although I can see no reason why they would.”
“Have you upset anyone lately? Rejected any suitors of a vengeful nature?”
“No, I have been very good. Boringly so, if you want the truth. I did wonder if it was someone with a grudge against my father. A political grudge perhaps, for he and Cosland tend to be in alliance, and Cosland’s daughter Juliet was with me. Only… Someone could simply have forgotten to notify Hazel Curwen not to come, so she could just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But Deb Shelby was summoned, and her late father was merely a country vicar with no political interests at all. There is nothing that binds all three of us in common, let alone all four of us.”
“Except that you were with the princess’s household.”
“You mean the prince might have done it just to inflict the last bit of damage on his wife? But I don’t see how anyone can blame her when she was not there. Besides, by all accounts, he is so looking forward to being rid of her that he would not deign to look back.”
“Perhaps others might look back for him.”
“Perhaps,” she said doubtfully. “But it seems a lot of trouble to go to, even delivering the newspaper to my parents.”
“Hmm. You are right. It is bizarre. However, it must have been someone with a connection to the princess, who had access to her paper, her seal, and your direction.”
Meg frowned. “All of our directions. They even knew Juliet was staying with her betrothed’s family. I just cannot imagine anyone in the princess’s household doing such a thing. There is no reason for it.”
“We’ll get to the truth of the matter,” he said with quiet certainty.
“I feel we should. And yet… I’m ashamed to say part of me thinks the scandal might be just what I need in order to live quietly by myself.”
He seemed to consider the matter. “I’m not sure you would find that as much fun as you think it would be.”
“No, and it does also affect my family.” She sighed. “And Hazel and Deb who have no one to fight for them. And Juliet, whose betrothal might now be on shaky ground. It is a mess.”
“Well, you are used to those,” Harry said cheerfully, rising to his feet. “Would you care for a post-prandial stroll?”
The walk was a gentle one, merely round the inn yard, before they were shown to their bedchambers. Meg wondered if the stairs would trouble him, but he climbed them with apparent ease. She graciously accepted the best bedchamber, although she inspected the other to make sure it was comfortable.
The innkeeper’s wife left them to it. Meg sat on Harry’s bed, surreptitiously testing it.
“I’m sorry about this,” Harry said abruptly.
“Why should you be sorry? It was I who persuaded you to the journey in the first place.”
“It was always thus,” Harry said with mock self-righteousness.
“Actually, it wasn’t,” she retorted. “As I recall, you got us into several scrapes, although I’ll allow you got us out of most of them again. And took the blame for the others.”
A smile glimmered in his eyes. “They were not all my idea. You were an imp of a child.”
His smile had never used to cause butterflies in her stomach…
With a jolt, she remembered that it had. She had been sixteen years old, and she had not seen him for several months when he had strolled into Dearham Abbey and grinned at her. The flutter of her heart, along with the delight in his presence, had taken her by surprise. She had not liked the feeling. It threatened to change everything. She had avoided him for several days before she realized he was still the same Harry. And she would not allow herself or their relationship to change. He was her best friend.
“I was led astray,” she managed now, aiming for lightness. She stood up. “I think I shall go and lie down for an hour or so.”
“Good idea,” he said.
She hoped he would do the same but knew better than to advise him. As she passed him on her way to the door, she realized suddenly that she was alone in a man’s bedchamber. Of course, this was Harry. The whole pack of children from his family and hers had stayed often under the same roof and been quite used to popping in and out of each other’s rooms. But they were no longer children. Harry was very much a man, a veteran of war and, she was suddenly sure, affairs of the heart. A handsome, attractive stranger with a mere illusion of comfortable familiarity.
“I’ll knock on your door in an hour or so,” she said hurriedly and hastened from the room, aware of his wry, steady gaze on her until she closed the door.
Unaccountably agitated, she returned to her larger chamber next to his. This is silly. I must be very tired…
With difficulty, she fought her way out of her gown without assistance, draped it over the back of a chair, and slid into bed.
That summer, six years ago, when her heart and her stomach had behaved so oddly at Harry’s unexpected appearance, had also been the summer Lord Calvert had come into their lives. Her eldest brother, Johnny, had brought him to stay, and Meg and Martha had been allowed to associate with the adults for the first time. Calvert had seemed unattainably adult and sophisticated, and yet he deigned to notice the youthful twins. He had even flirted mildly with them both. She had preferred that to the treacherous flutter in her heart for Harry…
She was asleep in moments.
*
She woke with a start, disoriented and anxious.
Harry.
Although it was not quite dark outside her window, she had clearly slept longer than the hour she had intended. Hastily, she rose from the bed, dropped her gown over her head, and dragged her shawl around her to cover its looseness.
When she opened the door, she could hear low voices coming from the taproom below. But it was hardly noisy. She walked quickly to Harry’s door and scratched at it. Receiving no response, she knocked more loudly.
He must be asleep. I should leave him. And yet, the pain from his unseen wound bothered her. What if it had opened? What if he lay on the bed, unconscious and bleeding while she trotted back to bed and slept until morning?
The innkeeper would find it exceedingly odd if she sent him to investigate her “husband’s” health, rather than simply going in herself. So, with an unaccountable feeling of guilt, she opened the door and went in.
In the dusky gloom, it wasn’t easy to make out much detail. But she saw at once that he lay in bed.
“Harry,” she murmured. “Are you awake?”
The figure in the bed did not move. Her heart in her mouth, she crept nearer. His eyes were closed. She stretched out her hand until she felt his breath on her fingers and let out a sigh of relief, not unmixed with embarrassment at her silliness.
His face was peaceful, so achingly familiar that her lips curved involuntarily. Because she couldn’t help it, she touched his cheek with the very tips of her fingers so lightly that even awake, he would have barely felt it. She skimmed over rough stubble, then the smooth, warm skin that stretched over his cheekbone.
“I’m not asleep,” he said.
She jerked her hand away. “Then why are you lying there so silently as if you were?” she demanded.
His eyes opened. “I didn’t know it was you until you came in. What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said crossly. “I came to see if…if you wanted supper.”
He moved, propping himself half up on the pillows. Only pride kept her from backing away, for his shoulders looming out of the bedcovers were naked. “Supper,” he repeated.
She swallowed. “I was worried about you,” she confessed.
She thought he might be irritated by that, but he didn’t appear so, at least in the darkness. In fact, he said nothing, although his gaze remained steady. The silence stretched.
“Why did you not write?” he asked abruptly.
“Why didn’t you?” she countered.
“Because, in the absence of any word to the contrary, I had to assume you would not be pleased to hear from me.”
Without thinking, she sank onto the edge of his bed. “Perhaps I wouldn’t,” she admitted. “I was very confused. I thought my heart was broken, and I had lost my best friend in the bargain. I was a child.”
“So was I, or I wouldn’t have done anything so stupid as to offer for you the week after your sister became engaged to Calvert. I didn’t even know if your father had told you.”
“He told me and forbade me to think of you. Which is one reason it’s so insolent to expect you to marry me now!”
She thought he smiled in the deepening darkness, but it was impossible to tell. She reached for the flint on his bedside table, meaning to light the candle, but to her surprise, his fingers closed around her wrist.
“It seems we talk more in the dark,” he said.
For some reason, she found it difficult to breathe. And yet, his grip was not tight. “What more do you want to say?” she managed.
His fingers brushed back and forth across the veins of her wrist, causing a novel and far from unpleasant sensation. “Oh, everything.” There was a kind of rueful amusement in his voice. “And nothing.”
“I’m listening,” she said breathlessly. A sweet excitement flowed through her veins from his fingertips.
“Are you?”
She was glad of the darkness now, hiding her blush, her confusion. “Is this the nothing part?”
A breath of laughter kissed her hand. The world seemed to halt. Yet the sudden tension was curiously intimate. She knew an urge to grasp his broad, naked shoulder, to trail her fingers across his chest…
The laughter had died on his lips, but she found herself remembering their sculpted shape and texture. Silence stretched between them like an unspoken question. She was aware of nothing except the large man in the bed beside her, still holding her hand. The handsome stranger with Harry’s face and his memories…
Was it forbidden to lean forward and rest her head on his chest? To press her cheek to his and feel, perhaps, his mouth against her skin. Was this the question hovering between them?
She heard his intake of breath, and then he turned her hand, and his lips brushed against her knuckles before he released her. “You should go back to your bed,” he said, not quite steadily. “Before I forget, I am saving you from ruin.”
She sprang up. “Then you say no to supper,” she managed, backing toward the door. “You are quite right. It is too late.”
Without any recollection of getting there, she found herself in her chamber, where she closed the shutters and let her gown fall to her feet. Her heart beat so fast she pressed her fist over it in wonder.
Harry had kissed her hand.
Why had she never realized before how handsome he was, how overwhelmingly attractive?
But as she climbed back into bed and lay down, she knew she had recognized it a long time ago. It had just seemed wrong to her sixteen-year-old self. She had buried it, refused to recognize it, had even talked herself into sharing her sister’s passion for Calvert.
My broken heart was hurt pride. It was Martha I missed. And Harry…
She had been too young, too confused to cope with changing feelings, and she had let him go.
Well, now it was too late. She was ruined and would never, could never, marry him now. Even supposing he offered, which he had told her categorically he would not.
In any case, it makes no difference, she told herself blithely. She was older and wiser and would no longer let a little physical excitement get in the way of their friendship.
Chapter Four
In the morning, Harry could only be grateful that he had, mostly, kept his hands to himself. But to have wakened to the heady knowledge that she was in his bedchamber was so much the stuff of his wayward dreams that feigning sleep had seemed the only protection for them both. Until her anxiety had hit him like waves. Until she had touched him, and he couldn’t be still.
His gentlemanly instincts had won in the end, though it had been a hard fight. Especially when he had felt her racing pulse beneath his fingers. Whether that betokened desire or fear, that had not been the moment to find out. And God help him, he was not about to ruin their so recently renewed friendship by a crass and mistimed attempt at seduction.
And so he had let her go. That did not, of course, prevent him imagining how it would feel to hold her in his arms at last, how she would kiss… If she would kiss. Knowing Meg, she was more likely to slap him and tell him to stop teasing her.
His shoulders shook with silent laughter as he washed and dressed. He anticipated the rest of the day with some pleasure.
As he walked downstairs, his wound only ached a little, certainly not enough to distract him from the delicious smells of frying bacon and newly baked bread that made his mouth water.
The distraction came in the unexpected form of an altercation that clearly began beyond the inn’s front door but spilled suddenly inside with the arrival of an angry lady leading a small child by the hand. However, it was not her anger which caused his foot to pause on the step. It was that he recognized her.
He had seen her before. At winter quarters in Spain. She was not the sort of woman one forgot. The only name he could dredge from his memory was Aline.
