No wonder Gillian wanted him. He was a beautiful man, even with those little lines around his eyes.
He looked over his shoulder and smiled at her lazily.
Imogen’s heart was beating quickly, though why she couldn’t explain.
“Would you like to race?” he asked. “I’ll give you a lead.”
As much to get away from her thoughts—almost sinful it felt, to think of Rafe that way—she didn’t even answer, just pressed her knees against Posy’s sides. She leaped forward with such a great spring that Imogen’s clever little hat flew away before Posy’s front hooves even touched the ground.
She bent low and shouted encouragement, feeling the wind whip her hair into a frenzy. They were going so fast that Rafe couldn’t catch up, but he was, he was…Imogen gripped her knees harder and urged Posy on, and then Posy showed that great heart for racing that she always had. She switched into that other pace she had, the one where she almost floated above the ground; or that’s how it felt.
Then Imogen knew that Rafe had no chance of winning. “Oh you beauty, you beauty,” she crooned to Posy, and signaled her to the right, into the great driveway leading to Maitland House. Posy pulled a beautiful turn, gravel spraying out from her heels but never losing her stride. And then Imogen saw the great curved gates of the house appearing and she began easing up.
She’d won; she’d won fair and square.
If Rafe was only a whisker behind her, it was still the kind of whisker that costs a man a golden cup given out by a royal duke.
A second later Rafe raced past with a laugh, and they ended up tumbling through the open gates of Maitland House, Imogen with no bonnet, and Rafe whooping like one of those wild men of deepest Africa in the London circus.
Imogen leaned over Posy’s neck, gasping. Rafe had already leaped off his horse. To her considerable annoyance, he wasn’t even out of breath. In fact, she couldn’t help noticing the way his old shirt pulled free of his trousers as he leaped. What happened to that gut that used to hang over his trousers? Could it have disappeared in a mere few weeks? Because now that body looked as lean and hard as his brother’s…even more so, perhaps. After all, Rafe always rode, every morning. Whereas scholars, one would have to think, sat at a table….
But Imogen pushed that thought away as disloyal. After all, Gabe was her…her something. She led Posy over to the mounting block, but Rafe was already at her side, arms outstretched.
She had a moment’s qualm. He was framed in the sunlight, grinning up at her, all tumbled hair, the old linen shirt and a coat that was as old as the shirt. And then a second later she was on the ground and he was turning away, greeting the Maitland butler with a cheerful “How do you do,” and a flurry of chatter.
Imogen knew exactly what Rafe was doing. He was giving her time to get her bearings.
After all, this was the courtyard to which Draven brought her as a new bride. This was the house where they lived as man and wife. It was from this house that her husband’s body was carried forth to burial, a mere two weeks after they married.
The courtyard was lined with old stones, warm in the fall sunshine. Thistledown was blowing over one wall, filling the air as if gentle snow were falling, the kind that spins and dances in the air before landing in a hand and keeping its perfect shape for a second.
The butler, Hilton, positively tumbled down the stairs to greet her. “Lady Maitland!” he said, bowing.
She smiled at him. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Hilton.”
“If we had known you were coming,” he was saying, “we would be more prepared, we would have a tea for you and his lordship.”
“I have no wish for tea,” Imogen said, “but I would be dearly grateful for a drink of water, if I could trouble you so far.”
His face brightened and he trotted back to the open door. Imogen followed him slowly. There were no ghosts in the bright courtyard, but in the house, perhaps?
Yet she walked in without hearing an echo from the querulous voice of her mother-in-law, Lady Clarice. Nor yet the rather bullish, boyish voice of Draven. The house felt like a place dreaming in the afternoon sun along with its courtyard…at peace, waiting.
She looked up at Rafe. “I do believe…” But she couldn’t put it in words.
He took her hand, as if she were a child of five, and led her into the sitting room. It was a gay room, papered with cheerful sprays of flowers.
“Lady Clarice loved this room,” she said softly, touching the little china cat on the mantelpiece. There was no dust.
Rafe stood in the middle of the rug, looking like a man of the outdoors rather than a duke. More like old Henry who lived in the field. “It’s a good old house,” he said, looking around. “Strong bones, as one says.”
“Is it as old as your house?”
“No. My house goes back to the days of Henry VII, and if I remember rightly, this little manor was constructed in anticipation of one of Queen Elizabeth’s progresses. She stayed at Holbrook Court, but her people spilled over here.”
Lady Clarice’s sewing basket sat next to her favorite chair, a scrap of white linen poking from the top. Annabel bent down and touched it, and for the first time since she entered the house, she felt a pang of true sadness.
“There’s always work left unfinished,” Rafe said, appearing at her shoulder. For a moment she felt him there, large, solid, and comforting. “Shall we go upstairs?”
So they headed upstairs, past the crimson flocked wallpaper to Lady Clarice’s chamber. It was neat as a pin, clean, swept of dust. No ghosts here.
But her own chamber…did she really want to enter?
With Rafe, there was no allowance for cowardice. “Better to get it over with,” he said over his shoulder, and before she knew it, there she was, looking at the great postered bed where she and Draven had spent all of ten days of married life before he died.
The room looked as if it had never had an occupant, as if it were waiting for those happy gentlefolk of Queen Elizabeth’s to come traipsing down the road.
Rafe leaned against the closed door to the hallway. “I found Peter’s bedchamber the hardest to manage,” he said, not looking at her. “I was such a dunce about it.”
“Tell me,” she said, moving over to smooth the cover-pane. “Please.”
“I wouldn’t let them change the sheets. I slept on a cot in his room, as if he would return any moment. Ridiculous. I wasn’t a child, you know. Peter died when I was thirty-two.”
She could feel the tears now. Her vision blurred a little, but she swallowed hard. “I did that too,” she admitted. “And I slept with Draven’s nightshirt for oh…ages.”
“Then one day, I realized that Peter had gone,” Rafe continued. “Somewhere…who knows where? But he was gone. Truly gone. And I tore the sheets off myself and walked out of his bedchamber. But I had the room repapered before I entered it again.”
“Which chamber was it?” She wandered across the room and opened the wardrobe.
“The west chamber.”
“So you put in that deep cherry stripe.”
“Yes.”
“I’m impressed,” she said, smiling at him faintly over her shoulder. He walked toward her. “Maitland’s clothing?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Hilton will give them away.”
But she was reaching out, soothing an embroidered vest that she remembered Draven wearing the very first night she met him on English soil. And so Rafe, without saying a word, helped her bring Draven’s clothing to the bed, where they left it for Hilton to distribute to the poor. And if a salt tear or two stained some of the brilliant embroidery, Imogen trusted that no one would care or notice.
She took only one thing from the room, a tiny figure of a leaping horse chased in silver, small enough to fit in a pocket.
“Rather lovely,” Rafe said, bending over her hand so that his hair brushed against her forearm, soft as silk.
“It was Draven’s lucky piece.”
“Was he wearing it when he died?”
“He always wore it,” she said sadly. “I cursed it afterward, for having not lived up to what he expected.”
“Well,” Rafe said, “he was doubtless wearing it the day he met you, Imogen. Perhaps that was all the magic this poor little horse had to give.”
She smiled at him, and then she couldn’t stop smiling, and her fingers closed over the little horse and slipped it into the pocket of her riding costume.
A second later, Rafe took her hand again—vastly improper, that was—and they walked through Lady Clarice’s room and made fast work of dividing her jewelry into piles and instructing Mrs. Hilton to have them sent to her relatives.
They started home slowly. At one point Rafe leaped off his horse and snatched her tiny hat from a long rose thorn where it was hanging. And then he caught up a bunch of hogsweed for Josie because the chicory had indeed closed itself up.
Imogen got off Posy to take a closer look, because in Scotland what Rafe was calling hogsweed was termed yellow cow parsley, a prettier and certainly more descriptive name. And then they waded farther into the field, brushing past dandelion clocks and yellow willow spears blown from the willows between Rafe’s land and Maitland land. The sun was warm and the afternoon sleepy, with not a sound in the field but the “tink tink tink” of blackbirds calling to each other in the trees.
Imogen turned around to find that Rafe had thrown himself onto the ground, and was lying in a great heap of rough yellow flowers, arms and legs all akilter, as if he were no duke, and had never heard the word “gentleman.” He was chewing a long blade of grass, like a country laborer taking a rest after a day spent hoeing.
He smiled up at her, squinting against the sun, and reached out a hand. Before she knew what happened Imogen was lying next to him, feeling the heat of sun-warmed earth at her shoulder blades, and a tingling feeling in her hand.
She stared up at the sky, trying not to think about the long fingers curling around hers. Baby clouds were floating high up, looking as pale and ephemeral as the thistledown blowing into the Maitland courtyard. Before she knew what was happening, the tears that she’d ordered away in Draven’s bedchamber came sliding from her eyes. She closed them against the sun, at the same moment Rafe pulled her against his shoulder.
There weren’t so many tears. Only a few, shed for that final good-bye to Draven, good-bye to the gaudy embroidered waistcoats he loved, good-bye to his loving, testy mama, good-bye to all the adoration she’d devoted to their marriage and to him, starting years before he even noticed she existed.
Rafe didn’t say a word, just let her huddle into the warmth of his shoulder.
When she sat up, he handed her a large white handkerchief, rather threadworn, like everything Rafe owned. It made her smile.
“Draven would never have contemplated carrying something this old,” she told him.
“I don’t see any holes in it,” Rafe said, lazy amusement in his voice.
“When we eloped, he brought four waistcoats with him. But because he wasn’t bringing his valet, naturally—”
“So one doesn’t bring a valet along on an elopement? That’s a good rule to know.”
She tapped him on the chin with a yellow daisy. “You have no need for such rules. But in fact, if you ever elope, do not bring your valet.”
“Trevick would expire from shock if I invited him to accompany me anywhere,” Rafe said, with the enjoyment of a man who hadn’t paid much attention to his valet in years.
His eyes were half-lidded now, as they used to be when he was drinking. Her stomach felt hot and muddled, so Imogen said, lightly, “Draven brought four waistcoats, but he forgot to bring enough shirts to change in the evening. He became very annoyed after a few days.”
“I am making notes. When contemplating an elopement, bring sufficient shirts. How many? Three a day?”
“One for riding, a second for dinner.” She bobbled the daisy against his chin again. “A third for evening.”
“Do you suppose that you’ll ever stop mourning Draven?” he asked, not looking at her.
“Yes,” she said, feeling a bit of heartbreak at the sound of her own voice. “Because, you see, I cry now for what our marriage wasn’t as much as what it was.”
“And what wasn’t it?”
“It was my marriage,” Imogen said, dropping the daisy and wrapping her arms around her knees. “It was all mine.”
There was silence.
“Do you understand what I mean?” she asked.
“I frequently don’t understand when women complain about their marriages,” Rafe said. “I never understood my mother, for instance, although I admit that Gabe’s existence gives me a great deal more sympathy for her.”
“Draven and I only married because I loved him,” Imogen said. “It’s humiliating.”
“Life has a way of routinely humiliating us,” Rafe said. “A passion for whiskey gave me many opportunities to experience it.”
Imogen smiled a little at that. “When I think back, I can’t remember anything between myself and Draven except my feelings for him. He didn’t truly wish to marry me. We didn’t talk about anything serious, and”—she swallowed—“I don’t think our intimacies were enjoyable for either of us.”
He reached out and took her hand without saying anything, and they just sat for a while. A blue-winged dragonfly skated over the flowers. Rafe’s jaw was strong and as chiseled as his cheekbones. A shadow of beard gave him a rakish look…as if he were drinking.
But he wasn’t. Those very things that had pointed directly to his moral rot, back when she used to watch him empty his glass over and over, now made her feel utterly different.
“Your brother is always clean-shaven,” she said suddenly.
“If he shares my beard, he must retreat to his room to shave during the day.”
“And you don’t?”
“Sometimes before the evening meal. It’s tiresome, allowing someone to drag a sharp steel across your face.”
“Does a beard start growing immediately?” Imogen said.
“It’s the family curse,” Rafe said, closing his eyes. “We’re a hairy, fertile lot.”
The sun was hot on the back of her neck now. She picked a stalk of chicory, its petals tightly closed against the sun, and tapped it against his lower lip. His lip had an immoral curve to it. She twirled the chicory thoughtfully.
Then he turned his head slightly and opened his eyes again. It was immensely improper for her to brush the flower against his mouth. What on earth had she been thinking? He was grinning. Everything in that wicked grin was in his eyes as well: desire, mockery, and something she hardly dared guess about.
“Why is that flower unlike a woman?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Because chicory opens in the morning and shuts most close at night. As I’m sure you know, wenches do the contrary.”
She dropped the flower as if it burned her hand, but his laughter made her giggle too. She couldn’t look away, and then he reached out, slowly, giving her time to leap to her feet and declare in a flustered kind of way that it was time they returned to the house. Because Josie was there. Or any other excuse.
Except she didn’t jump to her feet, but sat there staring into his eyes. It was just Rafe, her guardian, her drunken old guardian, her—
He pulled her closer, the amusement in his eyes warring with something else, something she’d never seen on Rafe’s face before.
“What—” she asked breathlessly.
“This,” he said. And he pulled her so that she toppled over on top of him. She fell flat onto his hips, and he brushed his mouth against hers.
Imogen caught herself opening her mouth. Of course, Rafe wouldn’t think that she was a candidate for those hot, hungry kisses of his brother—Gabe!—what was she doing—
He brushed his mouth against hers again, and her mind blurred.
“I think I’ve forgotten how to kiss,” he said, sou
nding thoughtful.
She gaped at him.
“You’ve had much more experience than I’ve had in the last ten years.”
“Do you mean that you haven’t kissed a woman in ten years?” Imogen could feel her eyes getting rounder.
“No, I don’t mean that.”
“Oh.”
“I haven’t kissed any ladies in ten years.”
Imogen’s eyes narrowed. Perhaps Cristobel had sung in Silchester before.
“Now you,” Rafe continued lazily, “you have kissed any number of people. So perhaps you could put me back into the spirit of it, so to speak.”
She just stared at him.
Rafe sighed. “Luckily, I begin to remember.” Large hands cupped her head and pulled her face down to his.
It wasn’t like kissing Gabe. That was an assault: a hot, hungry pursuit of her mouth. This was a Rafe-like kiss: brushing her lips so lightly that she shouldn’t have even noticed. Certainly she shouldn’t have felt all her senses spring to life, so that suddenly every inch of her skin was aware of the hard body under hers, of its ridges and curves, of the power of the hands cradling her face.
Gabe and Rafe even tasted different. Rafe tasted clean, like sun-warmed grass. Gabe tasted like mortal sin—not like the shadow he insisted he was, but like the wicked thoughts a woman only had in the dark of night, in the security of her own bed.
I would know instantly, Imogen thought, who is kissing me. Rafe kisses like a gentleman and Gabe like a devil. Oddly enough, both kinds of kisses made her ache, a muddled, treacherous heat low in her stomach.
Rafe’s kisses were slower, less feverish, pulling away to nibble on her lip and then slide his way back into her mouth. He acted as if he had the world enough and time…whereas Gabe’s kisses had a kind of urgent hunger behind them.
“Rafe,” she said, and her voice came out like a little gasp.
“Hmmm,” he said, and then he was rolling her over, his big hands still cupping her face, and he bent back to her mouth.
“Rafe!” she said, stronger now. But he was kissing her again, and he must have remembered how to kiss. Because this kiss made all her thoughts flee, and she just slipped into the moment: the hard body lying next to hers, the fingers tangled in her hair, the smell and the taste of him.