“No.” Roddy stood rubbing her tingling hand. “I think you would like me to be.”
He raised his dark brows. “You don’t believe what I’ve told you?”
“I—I hardly know what to believe, my lord.” She was floundering, and missing her talent painfully. What had seemed like freedom a few moments before now felt like a prison with blank, unbreachable walls. “I cannot think you have killed men for nothing.”
His smile was sour and hard. “It’s always for nothing that men are killed, my sweet child.”
“I don’t believe you’ve shot any young men over trifles,” Roddy said resolutely. “You wouldn’t even race your horse when I told you he might die.”
His blue eyes narrowed. He inclined his head in a slight, chilly bow. “Ask Cashel,” he said. “He has acted second for me. He may also tell you that an accusation of blackmail is no trifle.”
She stiffened at the steel in his voice. “I will.” She was glad to hear that her own words only quivered a tiny bit. “Geoffrey will tell me the truth, even if you won’t. Have you more tales to frighten schoolroom misses?”
His face became a mask. “Many,” he said curtly. “I think the most celebrated of them must be the rumor that I murdered my father when I was ten years old.”
If Roddy had never perceived the same word flitting through Geoffrey’s mind, she might have stopped herself from instinctive recoil. But self-discipline came too late. The earl saw her start, and a smile of acid satisfaction twisted his mouth. He lifted her chin with one finger. “My lovely innocent. Will you let me kiss you, little girl? I would dearly like to do so.”
It was a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down to cover what had gone before. He had made himself out to be a monster, and he dared her to accept him still. She could make no conscious choice; she half believed and half did not. Yet she raised her face to his in a move that must have been an invitation, for his bitter smile suddenly faded.
He stared down at her, his face bleak and still as a winter sky. With a low moan, more like pain than pleasure, he pulled her toward him, trapping her hands at her sides. His mouth closed hard on hers. Cruel and yet gentle, harsh but tender; a confusion of sensations enfolded her. His punishing demand forced her head back, and yet his arms were there to hold her, to cradle and caress her.
He kissed her mouth, her cheeks and eyes, and then took her mouth again and kissed her until darkness swam in the back of her brain. He tasted like the wine they had drunk. Deep and drowning. Intoxicating.
“Curse you,” he breathed as his mouth moved in a rough trail over her exposed throat. “You’ll haunt me all my life—you and your damned witching eyes.” His teeth closed on soft skin, and fire bloomed in the pit of her stomach. With an urgent move, he pulled her hips against his, as if he could make her part of him by force. Roddy found that she wanted the same, and answered him in kind, her body arching close; her hands seeking warmth beneath his coat and shirt.
She found the heat she sought. A hoarse sound escaped him as her fingers burrowed under his waistcoat and splayed across his back where taut muscle and hot, smooth skin lay under a shirt of thinnest lawn. He moved away suddenly, a quick, rejecting push, as if her touch burned him. Her hands fell free. Then, before she could even moan in protest, he had pulled her back into his rough-gentle embrace, sliding his hand to the nape of her neck and trapping her cheek against his shoulder. He held her tightly, too tightly to move; so tightly she could feel the faint tremor in his palms. She resisted a moment and then rested there, listening to his harsh breath, feeling the beat of his pulse and her own, while his hand and his lips moved softly in her hair.
“Little girl,” he whispered against her temple. “It’s not too late. Tell me you won’t marry me.”
She thought of what he’d told her, in a voice that mocked itself. She thought of what she wanted. A life of her own. A family.
Love.
A day ago, an hour—even a minute—she might have obeyed him. But the taste of his mouth on hers, his arms around her and his warmth beneath her hands…
Roddy shook her head without lifting it from his chest.
He groaned softly, and held her closer. “God help you. God help you. I’ll do my best, but there’s so goddamned little I can give you.”
This is all I want, she could have said, but she knew he would not heed her while this dark mood held him. She rested in his arms, closing her mind to doubt. She would deal with what was real, not rumors. What she could see with her own eyes. He hated the man whose sins he described, whether that man was himself or a creation of vicious gossip. Of that much she was certain, and it was enough for now.
They were halfway back to Roddy’s home when the pastured mare’s distress came to her like a dog’s howl on the wind: distant and distorted at first, gone for a moment, then closer and sharper as the phaeton moved on at a brisk pace.
She said nothing of it, having nothing logical to say to someone unaware of her talent. Instead she searched, her eyes focused hard on the horizon for the first reasonable moment when she could say she had seen the horse. She only hoped the animal was in view of the road. Pain rendered her gift deceptive, overcoming distance with intensity, driving all closer consciousness into background. And this pain was increasing by the moment, expanding into something she’d never experienced before. She could not tell how far away the mare might be, or even in which direction.
As the discomfort grew she cupped her elbows and squeezed, clenching her teeth and closing her throat against the moan that rose in unthinking response. She wanted to move as the mare did, wanted to cry out under the swelling strength of the anguish that gripped her. The carriage rolled on. The torment increased. Roddy dug her fingernails into her arms. She had not held back to protect herself, leaving her full gift open to locate the horse. Too late, she realized her mistake. By then the pain was beyond controlling, beyond any barrier she could possibly raise. Merciless. She would have screamed with it if there had been air in her lungs to move.
“Are you all right?”
The question seemed to come from far away. As the phaeton jolted to a halt she lifted her head and stared at the man beside her, hardly knowing who he was. Her lips would not form words. He asked again, more sharply. She felt as if she were splitting in two, trying to answer and trying to push away the pain. She looked at him and past him, desperate for words, for a way to explain what was inexplicable. A dark blur took shape in her watering eyes—the mare, black against the faded green in the shadow of the far hillside.
She pointed, which was all she could manage of sense in her torment. He turned.
“Help.” Her voice came out a croak. “Help.”
His gaze swung back, dark brows drawn low over a bright question. She felt his hand close hard and urgent on her arm. “Are you ill?”
“Not me.” She shook her head, wild with the pain. “The mare.”
He let go, looking again toward the hill. And then moved, leaping out of the phaeton with an oath.
Roddy gathered sense and strength and scrambled after him. He went over the wall in one easy vault, but Roddy stumbled back from her attempt in a tangle of hampering skirts. Her legs threatened to collapse under her. She gathered her skirts and tried again, her throat choked with sobs of effort and pain and frustration. She was halfway across and falling back when his strong hands closed at her waist. He dragged her over and lifted her down, setting her feet without hesitation in the mud that had already ruined his boots.
They both ran. The horse was laid out flat on the rocky ground in a hollow of the hill, her legs stiff and restless with distress. The pain had eased for a moment to something duller, but Roddy knew it would come again. It hung over her like a robe of chain mail, dimming reason to disorder. Faelan snapped, “Careful,” as she came too near a flailing hoof.
“Hold her head,” he ordered, with an authority that penetrated the blind and unreasoning urgency in Roddy’s brain. She obeyed him, unable to think farther through the
haze. The mare jerked in fear as Roddy went down on her knees, but habit and instinct brought the right music to Roddy’s tongue, the ageless soothing croon to comfort animals and babies. She bent over the mare’s head and rocked and sang a lullaby in the velvet ear, keeping one hand free to gather the animal’s soft upper lip into a pinched fold, a trick that always worked at home to deaden pain and terror.
“It’s breech,” Faelan said, from a thousand miles away. “We’ll have to make her stand.”
Roddy looked up in blank stupor, saw him shirtless and bloody, and still made no sense of it. The mare groaned and twisted. Roddy whimpered. She bent her head as another wave of dark agony rolled through her mind.
Faelan grabbed her hand and hauled her to her feet. He drew her roughly toward him, gripping her chin and forcing it up. “Don’t you dare faint,” he hissed, shaking her head as if to drive reason into it. “Stay with me. You stay with me. Hear?”
Roddy stared up at him, breathing hard. Her eyes searched for focus and found it in his, blue light in the darkness. She swallowed and nodded.
He released her, glaring at her hard a moment, as if he thought she might fall. Roddy pulled anger out of the pressing pain, a tonic for her wits. She bared her teeth in something like a smile. “All right,” she panted. “All right. So let’s get her up.”
Between them, they did it. With Faelan’s shirt for a halter and his strength for a crutch they prodded and pulled and coaxed the mare to her feet in the short intervals between contractions. He made the horse and Roddy walk, both of them, and if the mare tried to lie down he slapped her hard on the rump with a stick.
He was adamant in his purpose. When the stick lost effect he began to yell, to wave his arms in the mare’s terrified face. Her eyes rolled white as Roddy dragged at the horse’s head and stumbled on, thinking dimly that he would probably take the stick to her, too, if she faltered in her job of leading.
Walk and walk. Walk and stumble and walk again. The pain came in huge tearing waves, rising and falling and rising to a higher peak each time. It seemed to go on forever. Never in all the years in her father’s stable had she been present at a breech birth, but in the rational part of her mind she knew Faelan was right in his insistence. The moment had to be postponed, as long as possible, and then, when it came, completed in a frantic rush.
That was how it happened. The mare went down with a heavy grunt, pulling Roddy into the sweep of straining agony. Roddy closed her eyes and bit her lip until she tasted blood. The smell of sweat and horse and fear filled her nostrils. The mare breathed in great moaning gusts. The pain mounted and the world dissolved, one long excruciating moment in which the mare was screaming and Faelan was shouting something and Roddy could not tell human sound from animal. She felt blackness closing and the liquid salt of tears in her mouth.
Then it was over.
It left her as weak and wobbly as the newborn foal that Faelan scrubbed with the shirt Roddy had dropped.
She watched him, too drained to think. When he’d finished, seen to the mare and foal both, he left the tiny bundle of legs and nose and came to where Roddy was crumpled at the exhausted mare’s head.
He held out a hand to her. She took it, letting him pull her to her feet, and leaned on him as he led her a few yards away to a patch of grass.
He drew her against his shoulder, hard and warm, and she focused for the first time on the fact that her dress was in ruins and his shirt far beyond recall.
She thought vaguely that she ought to be embarrassed. Instead, she was only tired. She rested her cheek on his bare skin and watched the age-old tableau unfold before them as the mare lunged to her feet and turned to inspect her new foal.
A creature of the moment, the mare was. The pain was forgotten already, fading and dulled in the new interest of this appealing little fellow that smelled like herself. She began to lick the tiny creature, pausing often to look up at Roddy and Faelan in mild and protective suspicion.
Roddy found words in her thickened throat. “Thank you,” she said to her muddy toes.
He looked at her sideways. She thought there was a lurking smile at the corner of his mouth. “I thought I’d lost you once or twice.”
She kept her eyes down. “Your boots are ruined, I’m afraid.”
He bent one knee and leaned over to inspect his formerly polished footwear. “Salvageable. Which is more than I can say for my shirt.”
The foal splayed out one leg and fell back. Roddy saw Faelan’s half-smile widen.
“I’m—” She searched for a way to say it. “I’m glad you knew what to do.”
He shrugged, his eyes on the mare and foal. “Whose are they?”
“I don’t know.”
He glanced at her, and let out a breath of amusement. “You are a wonder, Miss Delamore.”
“Am I?”
“You feel it, don’t you?” he said. “What the horses feel.”
The blood drained from her face. “What—what do you mean?”
“At Newmarket with my stallion. And just now.” He shook his head at her look of horror. “I’ve known one other who could do the same. It’s a damned God-given gift. You knew about the mare long before you saw her.”
“Of course not. I—”
“The devil you didn’t. You looked like death by the time we stopped.” His hand closed on her arm as she started to rise in panic. “Don’t run away.”
She tried to relax, tried to act easy. “I wasn’t feeling well for a moment,” she said. “That’s true. It was the salmon, perhaps, and then the—all the excitement. I’m better now.”
He looked at her again, a long, deep, speculative look. Roddy managed to hold her gaze steady beneath his.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t much help,” she said.
For a moment she thought he would say more, but then his smile broke into a sudden grin and he splayed his fingers through her hair, pushing her head down in the kind of affectionate shake that her father gave her brothers. “You kept her walking, little girl.”
Roddy smiled too, then, a little shakily. “I thought you’d smack me with that stick if I didn’t.”
He nodded. “So I would have.” He pulled a stalk of dry grass and stripped the grains from the stem, biting carefully into one. He spat it out with an expert puff. “Volunteer wheat. What’s that doing here?”
Roddy looked at the stalk in his manicured hands, those strong hands that were stained now with blood and dirt. At his once perfectly laundered shirt, sacrificed without a thought. She thought of him tending the mare, with moves expert and certain and not at all fastidious. She sat up and looked at him. “You’re not a rake,” she cried. “I believe you’re a bloody farmer!”
His blue eyes crinkled in humor. “Watch your language, child. Do you think the one mutually excludes the other?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what to think,” Roddy muttered.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” he said, reaching out to drag her against him in a hard hug. He kissed her ear, and then her mouth when she turned in confusion. Colors were pin-wheeling behind her eyelids and breath had almost failed her before he let her go. He gave her a smile that made her toes curl in her muddy boots, and then flicked a gentle finger across her cheek. “I think that we shall suit, my love.”
A week later, Mark and Earnest returned empty-handed of grouse.
“Not that we should grouse about it,” Earnest said, which was something Earnest would say, when Roddy ran out to meet them amid the bustle of baggage and servants in the drive. He gave her a bear hug that lifted her off her feet, so that blond hair flew in her eyes and she couldn’t tell if it was hers or Earnest’s; a hug as warm as his feelings on greeting her.
Mark was not so cheerful. He was determined, in fact, to grouse loudly and long about the poor shooting. In view of his temper, Roddy reserved her great news for later, and joined with her parents in demanding an account of every boring and wasted day of shooting.
The silence on the subject
of her engagement held through dinner and after. Every time Roddy’s father worked himself up to speak, his throat would go dry and he’d take another sip of wine or sherry or whatever happened to be at hand, until finally he forgot what it was he’d been trying to announce and went to sleep in his chair by the fire.
It was long after the household had retired that Roddy gathered the courage to tiptoe to Earnest’s room and knock softly on the door.
He was still awake, as she’d known through her gift, awake and sitting in a dressing robe reading by the light of one candle. He closed the book and smiled when he saw her. “You’ve come to congratulate me,” he said. “I deserve it. ’Twas devilish hard to miss my shot every time Mark did.”
Roddy set her candle down and went to stand beside him, leaning over to give his short queue a playful tug. “A noble effort.”
He put his arm around her and chuckled. “Base self-interest. It doesn’t do to plague Mark when he’s carrying a loaded gun.”
A memory of Mark’s angry frustration rose in Earnest’s mind, and Roddy marveled at how amusing their hot-tempered sibling appeared, in the midst of a tantrum, through his elder brother’s eyes. Earnest looked up and caught the smile that quivered on her lips. He grinned, making the picture in his head more and more absurd, distorting poor Mark’s imaginary features until both of them burst out laughing.
“I think I shall go into print,” Earnest said.
“And have your life forfeit in ten counties,” Roddy predicted. “I know what pictures you’d draw of all our neighbors.”
“Perspective, my dear sister. A simple matter of perspective. As I’m sure you well know.”