Because he"d never felt more free, even with the full might of England out to find him, jail him, execute him.
He was tired, filthy dirty thanks to the road dust, and more than slightly damp due to the early-afternoon rain, when he slid off his horse in the stable yard of his good friend Rafe Daughtry. Too dirty to present himself at the front door of Ashurst Hall, he"d planned to enter through the kitchens and sneak up to his a.s.signed room, where Wigglesworth could render one of his miracles and make him human again.
But that was before he"d heard the giggles.
Alina. The woman he"d thought of night and day since the moment he"d first seen her on the docks in Portsmouth. The woman he"d dreamed of last night as he slept beneath the hedgerows. The woman who could never really be his.
d.a.m.n. He"d never before recognized this streak of melodrama he seemed to possess. He"d have to stop thinking like some lovesick swain and remember who he was. And the danger that followed him.
One of Justin"s own outriders had been lounging on a bale of hay, using a single stick of that hay to pick at his teeth. He didn"t bother to rise until he belatedly realized that the ragtag rider was his always immaculately groomed employer. He hastened to a.s.sist him with his mount, noticing that Justin"s gaze was on the open door to the stables.
"Lady Alina, my lord," he offered without being asked. "Sounds like music, don"t it? But I"m keepin" one eye on her, yes, I am. We all are, my lord. She just don"t like stickin" in one place too long, she says."
"And what is she doing?"
"Don"t know, my lord. I was told to watch, not to look."
"Very good. I"ll see for myself."
Brushing at the front of his jacket with his gloved hands, Justin left the sunshine of the stable yard for the cool stable, pausing just inside it until his eyes became accustomed to the darker interior. Rafe kept a fine stable, stalls lining it in both directions, the whole of it built into the side of a hill, so that hay and other supplies could be moved by cart, directly into the upper floor of the vast structure.
As Justin stood there, a few bits of hay came drifting down from the wooden plank ceiling above him.
And he heard another giggle.
A man could get very disturbing ideas, hearing a woman"s giggle coming from a hayloft.
He turned to the man, who was kicking at the dirt just outside the doorway, as if there was some invisible line he dared not cross. "She"s alone?"
"Oh, yes, my lord. Came back from her ride and went on in there, and didn"t come back out."
"Thank you. What"s your name?"
"Willis, sir. Did I do somethin" wrong?"
"No, Willis, you did not. Protecting the Lady Alina is paramount, but I will take it from here now. You may return to your post."
Justin headed for the ladder that wasn"t much more than a series of foot-wide slats hammered onto one of the beams, marveling that a woman in a riding skirt would attempt let alone manage the vertical climb. Lady Alina, it would appear, was a young woman who went where she wished to go, when she wished to go there, no matter the difficulty.
He supposed, if he thought about it, he could come to at least two other conclusions. The young woman in question was fairly fearless. And the young woman was probably more than slightly reckless. A prudent man would store all three conclusions away for future reference.
He removed his hat and flung it on the hard-packed dirt floor, as nothing much could be done to the hat than hadn"t already been accomplished by the rain and the fact that he"d used it for a pillow as he slept beneath the hedgerows last night, before pulling himself up to the floor of the loft.
Following the giggles, he soon located Lady Alina in a small walled-off area of the large loft. She was lying on her back in the soft, fragrant straw.
And she was covered in kittens.
At the moment, she was holding up one of the furry black-and-white b.a.l.l.s of fur and then bringing it down to her face, nuzzling the lucky thing nose to nose, as its littermates-Justin counted at least six of them-variously snuggled against her side or climbing over her as if she were some mighty Gulliver and they were the inquisitive Lilliputians.
The mother cat, that had obviously accepted the intruder, wasn"t quite as certain of Justin"s appearance, and strutted over to him, her tail high, her back slightly arched. "Put a scratch in these boots, Mother, and there will be no saving you from Wigglesworth"s wrath," he warned, and Lady Alina immediately sat up, looking at him with those wide, golden eyes.
He"d surprised her, surely. But she didn"t look shocked. On the contrary, she appeared to be pleased.
Or he was weary enough to allow wishful thinking to cloud his heretofore clear judgment.
Her pins had fallen out of her hair. Ebony curls tumbled all around her head and shoulders. Sunlight streaming in through a barred window shone on her emerald-green riding habit and touched on her slightly reddened cheeks as she quickly put down the kitten and began b.u.t.toning up her jacket, for several of the b.u.t.tons had slipped their moorings as she played with the frisky litter.
Justin caught a glimpse of snow-white skin and the soft curve of a breast above a silk chemise.
He swallowed like a schoolboy.
"You"re here," she said unnecessarily as she began pulling bits of hay from her curls.
"Your powers of observation are astounding, Alina, if a trifle belated. Still, I couldn"t be more delighted with my welcome," he told her, striving to get himself back under control, appear nonchalant while all he wished to do was take her in his arms and hold on tight to the best thing to have happened to him. Instead, he bent to pick up the kitten Alina had been playing with and brought it to his face. "Lucky little man, aren"t you?" he said before carefully putting it back down in front of its worried mother.
"Do you always sneak up on people unannounced?" Alina asked as he held out a hand to a.s.sist her. She ignored it, and got to her feet unaided. She began working at her hair, tugging loose more bits of hay.
"Your pardon, I"m sure. Clearly I should have had Willis announce me. He could beat on a drum, or perhaps crash some cymbals? Here, don"t do that, you"re only making more tangles. Let me play at lady"s maid."
She looked at him for a long moment, and then lowered her arms and nodded. "At least you look worse than I do," she said as if that made everything all right. "Wigglesworth told me you are always impeccable. Clearly I should not believe all that Wigglesworth tells me."
"I wouldn"t believe the half of it," Justin told her as he fought the impulse to thread his fingers through her hair. Her soft, silky, wonderfully warm hair. "I vastly overpay the fellow."
If he just slipped his hands into the soft curls at either side of that sweet little face, and then gently drew her toward him, then he might kiss that full pink mouth, taste her sweetness once more, lose his wickedness in her innocence...
"What are you looking at? Do I have dirt on my nose?"
Justin pulled his mind from foolish fantasies and stepped away from her. "No," he said shortly. "Are you ready to return to the house? I"ve a great need for a bath and a change of clothes before I find our hosts and thank them for their kindness in taking care of you while I was gone."
She gave a rather imperious toss of her head, marred only by the sort of snorting hrummph that accompanied the gesture. "You make it sound as if I"m some infant and need taking care of. Which I don"t, thank you. I"m quite out of charity with you at the moment. And if Brutus hadn"t gotten in the way, I would have shot that man."
As she attempted to rush past him, Justin grabbed at her elbow and spun her around to face him. "Would you mind repeating that last little bit, kitten?"
Alina pulled her arm free of his grasp. "Don"t call me that, even though I"m certain you think it"s charming. You think you"re charming. Wigglesworth insists that you"re charming. Is it charming, my lord, to go riding off, leaving me in a strange land, surrounded by strangers, and having Luka shot into the bargain?"
Justin"s blood froze in his veins. "Luka has been shot?"
"Yes, and my best traveling ensemble has been destroyed. Not that anything so trivial is so important as Luka being shot. But if you"d not had us riding all over this silly island while you did some flit as if you couldn"t stand being with me-with us all a moment longer, instead of taking us to London, as you were supposed to do, then we wouldn"t have been accosted by highwaymen intent on stealing my cloak. I shouldn"t have flaunted it on the dock, granted, because that was horribly stupid of me now that I"ve had time to reflect on the thing. But still, it"s mostly all your fault."
Justin"s head was spinning, a circ.u.mstance that he felt no need to apologize for, as the woman could have been speaking a language he didn"t understand for all the sense he could make of her words. He decided the cloak and the silly island could be disregarded as superfluous to the point for the moment, and instead concentrated on the words Luka shot and highwaymen.
"You were accosted by highwaymen on the way here, and Luka was shot?"
She looked at him in wide-eyed exasperation. "Didn"t I already say that? Yes, we were accosted by highwaymen, and Luka was shot. And then I ended up in the mud and Brutus scooped me up and all but threw me back into the coach. For a man who doesn"t speak, he can certainly make his point extremely clear."
Justin relaxed, but only slightly. She was clearly safe, and the major"s wound couldn"t have proved fatal, or else she wouldn"t have been out here, giggling with kittens. "I find myself powerless to resist asking, kitten. How did you end up in the mud?"
"That isn"t important to the point," she told him, shifting her gaze away from him. "Luka wants to see you as soon as you"ve returned. He is very put out with you."
"It would appear he"s not the only one. Alina, I had to leave. But I could only leave if I believed that you would be safe until my return, which you most obviously were. But you think I was running away from you and our...arrangement. Don"t you?"
"No, of course not. Don"t flatter yourself. I don"t even know you. I could not care a drop why you left."
She lied badly, and Justin"s heart lifted with delight.
He put a bent finger beneath her chin to hold her in place, so that she had no choice but to meet his gaze. "Ah, but I care what you think of me. We have an adventure ahead of us, Alina. I need you to feel able to trust me. Without question, without hesitation."
"I don"t understand. Are you speaking of our marriage?"
"There will be no marriage, kitten. I wouldn"t so abuse you as to saddle you with a fugitive for a husband."
She blinked, but then looked at him rather intensely. "A fugitive from what? No, now you"re lying to me. You"re an English n.o.bleman. You are your king"s choice for my husband. Of course we"re going to marry, it"s all arranged. You"re making no sense."
Why couldn"t he have left this for later? Why couldn"t he simply continue to enjoy this moment, this unexpected interlude?
He knew the answer. The more he was with her, the more he would miss her when he had to go.
There was no good place to start, no easy way to say so much that had to be said. And no time to say it all, d.a.m.n it. He may have avoided the king"s men on his way to Ashurst Hall, but the Inhaber"s men, those Alina had believed to be highwaymen, had to have followed them from Portsmouth. Someone was watching, and that someone had seen him ride into the stable yard, and word was undoubtedly already on its way to London and Inhaber Novak.
"We have to leave," Justin said, taking her hand and leading her toward the ladder. "Tomorrow morning at dawn, no later. There will be time for explanations once I have you somewhere safe."
He descended the ladder first, and then helped guide her down until she was standing in front of him once more. "I feel safe where I am, thank you. Charlotte has been everything that is kind, and Rafe apologized most profusely about the highwaymen, who he says have been a problem these past few months. I feel eminently safe here, thank you, except perhaps not quite so much now that you"re here, too. You really are a very strange man, you know. Are you really a fugitive?"
Justin picked up his hat and offered Alina his arm. "So, from your question, I take it that trusting me implicitly is not under consideration?"
"Without question or hesitation I believe I can say yes, that"s correct," Alina told him as they walked toward the house. "And I will add that this supposed marriage of convenience we both agreed to has been very much less than convenient since the moment I first saw you preening on the dock."
"I wasn"t preening," Justin objected, laughing. "I was standing there awestruck, as I was supposed to do, my considerable consequence totally eclipsed by my affianced wife, whom I"d supposed to be fat and with a hairy chin, when I thought of her at all."
"Oh," she said in a small voice. "So I don"t repulse you?"
Justin stopped on the brick path and turned her around to face him. She meant it, she really didn"t understand just how beautiful she was. "Repulse me? You thought that? Your country has no mirrors?"
She put the back of her hand to her mouth for a moment, as if sorry she"d let the words escape her, but quickly rallied. "What was I supposed to think? You all but ran out of my...my bedchamber at the inn, and then you rode off the next morning without so much as another word to me. I know I"m only a woman, but women can think, too, you know. And I think you behaved like a man who very much wished to be anywhere this woman wasn"t."
Justin threw back his head and laughed; a laugh so free and open he actually amazed himself, for he had guarded his emotions for too many long years. "G.o.d, you"re adorable. No wonder your aunt wanted you gone."
Alina rolled her eyes at this. "She considers me painfully young and gauche."
"She considers you compet.i.tion would be more to the point. But back to what we were discussing."
"We weren"t discussing anything," Alina said testily. "You have been making p.r.o.nouncements, for the most part, and very little sense for the rest of it. Fugitive or not, I don"t think I want to marry you, and not because you say we won"t. Our children would all be idiots."
"Blithering, drooling idiots, yes, I agree, if that makes you happy. But you do realize that we would then be flouting the wishes of two separate royal edicts."
"Oh. And that"s why you"re a fugitive? You went to London and told your Prince Regent that you refuse to marry me. Will they hang you now?"
"If they catch me, that"s the least they"ll do, but not for the reason you think. So you really don"t wish to marry me?"
She hesitated, as if searching for just the correct words to answer him. "You already don"t wish to marry me, so what I might want or not want doesn"t matter, does it? If you want, you can take me to my mother"s family, and I"d promise not to ever be any bother to you."
"Kitten, it"s too late for that, as you bother me very much. The devil and the delight of it is that you don"t seem to have any real understanding of just how and why you do."
She threw up her hands in exasperation. "There you go again, making absolutely no sense. I bedevil you, I delight you. You run from the sight of me, you come back again saying we must leave here and go somewhere safe, but you don"t want to marry me. You say you"re a fugitive and then you- Oh! I don"t know what you"re saying or doing."
She had a temper. Good. Fearless, possibly reckless, and with a temper. If the G.o.ds had ordered up a woman for him, they could not have done better. Except that the G.o.ds also had a sense of humor, and they had conjured her up for him knowing he would not be able to keep her. He put his hands on her slim shoulders. "All right, kitten-"
"I am not a kitten!"
"You"re certainly not purring, I"ll grant you that. I know you don"t understand what I"m saying. I"ve barely begun to understand most of it myself, as even my mind isn"t accustomed to running in such devious circles. But understand this, Alina. What I am doing is saving you from the man who is trying to kill you."
"Kill me?" Her eyes went so wide it was almost laughable. "Who is it that"s supposed to be killing me?"
He"d rather have gotten her full attention by kissing her. But then, Justin Wilde had long ago learned that one does not always get what one wishes for.
He walked her toward a nearby bench, sat her down, and proceeded to tell her everything he"d learned in London.
ALINA"S HEAD WAS STILL positively spinning as she stepped out of her tub and into the large white towel Tatiana held out for her to wrap herself in before moving to the fire so that one of the Ashurst maids could brush her hair dry.
"Thank you, but no," she told the maid as she put out her hands for the brushes. "You may go now."
"Sit, my lady," Tatiana said, already going down on her knees. "I"ll do that for you, and you can tell me why you sent the maid away."
Alina subsided onto the hearth carpet, sighing as Tatiana began working the brushes through her wet hair. "Danica isn"t going to come walking in here, her ears flapping as they do when she tries to pretend she isn"t listening, is she?"
"Not since I locked the door to the dressing room and hid the key in my pocket, my lady, no. Although when she"s done packing up most of your belongings and discovers she"s locked in there it might get a little noisy. I could see when you came upstairs that something was troubling you. Is it that his lordship has come back, or that he says we must leave this lovely place tomorrow morning?"
"It is lovely here, isn"t it?" Alina said, knowing she was only delaying the inevitable. "If everyone in England is as friendly and kind as the duke and d.u.c.h.ess, I will find it easier to be happy in a strange land. I wonder if the baron"s estate is even half so pretty."
"Is that where we"re going, my lady? I thought we were bound for London."
Alina tipped her head so that all her long, thick hair fell to one side. Tatiana lifted its bulk, fanning it out over her arm to catch the heat from the fire. "I don"t know," she said quietly. "There are so many things I don"t know...."
Tatiana"s hands stilled on the brushes. When she spoke again, it wasn"t the voice of the sweet, paid companion, but that of a woman who cared, and cared deeply. "He told you? The Englisher told you? The major said he might, once he"d come back. He should not have done that. He puts his nose where it does not belong. We would have kept you safe."
Alina closed her eyes, took a deep, shuddering breath. Now, at last, she believed, really believed: someone wanted her dead, needed her dead. "Does everyone know but me? Does Danica know?"
Tatiana made a rude sound. "That one? What good is she? She knows nothing but laces and crimping irons and how to be annoying. What did his lordship tell you?"
Slowly, to be certain she had the right of it, Alina repeated all that Justin had told her.
She was, save her aunt, the last Valentin. Not that Aunt Mimi mattered, for she had already refused to help the Romany lay claim to the land disputed between them and Inhaber Novak. If anything happened to her niece, she would sign whatever doc.u.ments the Inhaber put in front of her (for a fee, surely), revoking all possible claim to the land that her silly, romantic niece would just as surely have signed over to the Romany. But as her father"s daughter, Alina stood first, and her aunt second. Eliminate the first, the second becomes first. It was that simple, Justin had told her as he held her hand, as he"d dabbed her damp cheeks with his handkerchief. He"d been so sweet, so caring-how could he still insist he could not marry her?
Alina did not believe her aunt wished her dead or knew about the plot, but she also did not think the woman would go into mourning for her niece unless she could find a becoming wardrobe in black. She"d probably just ask for the return of the Valentin jewels, and then bury her niece with the garnets. Alina had said as much to Justin, and that had made him laugh.
But there was very little else to make either of them smile.
Everything about this business of the land was complex. Francis did not want to be forced to make the decision between the Romany claim and Novak"s claim. But she understood that; the man had many problems.