Regency Surrender: Forbidden Pasts: Lord Laughraine's Summer Promise / Redemption of the Rake

He stood still and met her eyes, let the guard he kept round himself drop. Did she really want this man she once loved to beg? No, it couldn’t have been love in the first place if she did. So here she was up against words she didn’t want to say.

‘Yes...’ she breathed at last, then saw pain and bleak loneliness in his gaze before he blanked it and realised he thought she meant yes to him going away. ‘I mean yes to Raigne and us, you idiot,’ she told him brusquely. ‘But that’s all for now,’ she reasserted even if she had seen the truth of his longing behind his wary eyes.

‘It’s enough,’ he said shortly and she could see from the way his shoulders relaxed that the hard control he’d kept his mouth and those dear, familiar green-shot grey eyes under was lifted.

Feeling a little ashamed of herself for making him reveal more than he wanted to in order to combat her attack of the dithers, she still felt as if she were walking the edge of a precipice.

‘Well, that’s finally settled then,’ she said briskly and began packing as few boxes as she could to take away tomorrow.

‘Good, I’d hate to have come after you if you change your mind, because I warn you, Callie, I won’t go away quietly this time. I’ll follow you and make a nuisance of myself even if you travel the length of the land to avoid me. You have given me hope, Lady Laughraine, and I can’t give up on it now.’

‘I won’t go back on my word now. I admit when I thought about it again the whole idea of being at Raigne together frightened me, but I’m steady now and only want to be quit of this place, so you’d best let me finish packing before I go to sleep on my feet.’

‘Very well, concentrate then and stop trying to distract me, Wife,’ he said with a cocky grin that reminded her again of her young love. Who would have thought she’d be so glad to see that young scapegrace under all the frost the years had put into Gideon’s gaze?

* * *

It was done, her life for the past nine years packed and ready to go. The small pile of luggage by her bedroom door seemed a poor showing for twenty-seven years of life. Callie concluded travelling light taught her people matter more than things, but had she been weak to agree to go to Raigne with Gideon? Instinct said no, here was a chance for a bigger life than the one she had here, yet her imagination reeled at the very idea of being a wife again. Torn between hope and fear, she knew any chance for their marriage must be grasped, but it felt so huge to let go of the past and seize it.

She tossed and turned on the narrow bed that had seemed perfectly adequate for so long, but now felt restrictive and hard. The real trouble was she couldn’t put all the wild hope Gideon’s arrival had rekindled in her heart back in its box and lock it away again. There had been such passion, such love, under their youthful infatuation with each other, that her most hopeful self whispered those huge forces couldn’t simply be dead between them now. Yet their dreams of mutual love and need and a future together were smashed all those years ago. What if Gideon didn’t share her fantasy? She squirmed against the sheets and told herself it was so humid tonight it was no wonder she couldn’t drop off to sleep as if nothing much had happened.

Her whole world had changed, so what was the point of lying here fooling herself she was about to drop off as contentedly as if it was just another day? Unable to endure even the added heat of a thin and patched sheet over her as the heat seemed relentless and sticky all around her, she knew she must face the biggest fear of all about her new life some time. What if she still loved Gideon under all the bitterness and pain and loneliness? And what if he didn’t love her? Impossible, she would never have been able to go on with her restricted and very single life for the past few years if she was secretly panting with passion for a lover who it turned out had not really existed.

Except maybe she had been secretly, deep down where she didn’t let herself think too much but just feel, maybe there she had been waiting for him to ride up and carry her off. Despite all the pain and bitterness and tears and wild arguments of that brief year of marriage when they were both so young, looking back that was the part that felt like her real life and this one some sort of wicked enchantment that kept them apart and only almost alive. An image of her aunt as the wicked sorceress with legendary power to keep two lovers lost in a dream world and obedient to her commands almost made her laugh for a moment, until she reminded herself how serious Aunt Seraphina’s sins were.

Unable to stay still and contain the fury that wanted to howl and weep at all the chances she and Gideon lost to live and love together because of Seraphina Bartle, she got out of bed to pull the curtains wide and very gently inch up the sash to let more air into this stuffy room. Never mind the dangerous night air Aunt Seraphina insisted on keeping out of the house like demons from hell, or the bright moonlight that shone in and might even keep a less wakeful person from their slumbers. It felt good to connect with the greater world, to feel the air and see the moonlight she shared with the rest of this vast racing world of theirs and Gideon in particular. Maybe he was doing just as she was, sitting in the uncushioned seat of his window and breathing in air still heavy with heat as he stared at the miracle of a night almost bright as day? Close on the heels of that thought came the idea of one day sitting with him dreamy, well loved and content as they shared everything she now had to sense alone.

No, that was going too far. If she was to stay sane she must learn to be practical and a lot less idealistic. For now she would learn to be as happy as she could be with what seemed graspable instead of aiming for the moon. If it all went wrong for them at Raigne, at least she and Gideon knew they could live by their own efforts now and perhaps be happier doing it. There, now she was thinking their reconciliation was inevitable and it couldn’t be. How could she trust her inner self to a man who had betrayed her at least once already?

It was a dour thought to try and go to sleep on, so she pushed it aside as best she could for another day. It was time to stop looking back and go into the future as best they could, but she wished she was a wild girl again just for tonight, so she could be free to do as she pleased and walk into the hills one last time by the light of the July moon. She had come to love both the remoteness of this sturdy old house and the half-tamed emptiness of the wide hills all around it and she would miss that and the girls she had done her best to equip for lives that would not always be as easy as they might seem to anyone less fortunate.

So was Gideon struggling to sleep alone as well tonight, or already lost in weary slumber after his demanding wife-hunting trip and last night’s excitements? No, thinking of him asleep without her was never going to lull her into dreamland; it felt too wrong for them to lie apart like enemies in different camps dreading the next battle. She sighed heavily, then went back to bed to try counting sheep. No, they looked too much like Aunt Seraphina, and wasn’t that an uncomfortable thought? Sheep wearing unlikely flaxen wigs and a superior expression would put her off the silly creatures for life and there were far too many of them in this part of the world to risk that calamity.

In the distance she thought she heard a soft thud and a murmur, but it was over almost as soon as it began and she turned over when she heard a vixen bark a warning at cubs big enough to know better by now and blocked her ears to the normal noises of the night. It wasn’t term time, so she didn’t need to worry about nightmares or wakeful girls away from home for the first time and longing for their parents. She felt herself retreating from this little world that seemed so safe for so long, Miss Sommers’s days were numbered, but could she really be Calliope Laughraine again? She had married Gideon ten years ago, but it would feel like living with a man she didn’t know if they took up where they left off. Whatever happened between them, she was about to live in a house beyond most women’s wildest dreams.

The very thought of trying to make some sort of life in the mansion she visited on sufferance as a child felt so alien she might lose an essential part of herself if she tried to see herself as wife of the next Lord Laughraine. Deciding she preferred a world she had some control over, she set about plotting the knottiest bits of her next book in her head. The intricacies of it soothed her and she was halfway to dreamland when she realised her latest hero looked exactly like Gideon. Already drifting, her mind was too wrapped up in a sleepy fantasy of finding a happy ending in her husband hero’s arms to reject the notion he might still be her hero, after all, and she fell asleep with a welcoming smile on her face.

* * *

‘So where did you end up sleeping last night, Gideon?’ Callie asked the next morning when they were on their way from Cataret House so early this might be a dream, as well.

‘On a chair in your office, lest your aunt can pick locks as well as escape from upstairs windows,’ he replied gruffly.

‘I knew I should have woken up properly and investigated the noise I heard in the night,’ she said with a grimace for the empty room and improvised rope of bedsheets they had discovered this morning. ‘At least Kitty wasn’t here to give you a matching pair of black eyes, but I’m surprised you didn’t hear my aunt escape as you seem to have the senses of a cat.’

‘I knew she would go, why else do you think I was dozing in that uncomfortable chair? I had to make sure she took nothing of ours with her this time,’ he said and shifted his shoulders as if they were still stiff from holding such an unnatural position for so long.

‘You have had a difficult time since you arrived, haven’t you?’ she said with a wry smile for his poor bruised face and the shadows even under his good eye from lack of proper sleep. ‘Poor Gideon,’ she added and surely it wasn’t quite right to feel such a rush of joy at the mere sight of the boyish smile she remembered from the old days in response?

‘Lucky Gideon,’ he corrected softly and the look he slanted her made it clear she was the reason he thought it was worth it.

She smiled back and let herself enjoy this odd journey through a luminous dawn. They were sitting on the box of what she still thought of as her aunt’s carriage. As he was driving the sturdy pair she refused to be shut inside a stuffy, swaying box on wheels on such a perfect morning. So the little kitchen maid was inside the coach in her stead, dressed in her Sunday best and feeling like a Queen of England, she assured Callie, and shook her head at an offer to sit in the fresh air, as well.

‘I’ve never rode in a real coach before, miss, I mean, my lady, and the missus would scold me something wicked if she caught me getting that wrong again, wouldn’t she?’ the girl said with a happy grin.

Callie smiled back in silent glee neither of them need tiptoe round her aunt’s notions of propriety ever again. Now she let herself feel the thrill of a new start life in the shape of Sir Gideon Laughraine as well as the fears she struggled with last night. His stray lady was about to be reborn as a potential aristocrat and apparently Biddy was going to scale the dizzy heights of lady’s maid without going through any of the stages in between.

‘She’s never going to fit anyone’s idea of a proper lady’s maid,’ Gideon warned softly as they moved on to the main road to Manydown and Biddy waved regally at a startled farm labourer about to go off to the fields for the day.

‘That’s why I engaged her,’ Callie admitted, the thought of a silently critical dresser who would sniff and disapprove of her new mistress making Biddy’s pleas not to leave her behind a good excuse not to engage one. ‘I couldn’t let her be turned into the world with nothing, now could I?’

‘Perhaps not, but we could still find her a place more fitted to her skills when we get to Raigne. Your personal maid will have to cope with a large collection of gowns and can the girl sew? She won’t know how to clean a riding habit or wash the ostrich plume fashionable females festoon their bonnets with. If all Biddy can do is wash pots and pare vegetables, she’ll be in the suds the first time she’s called on to do something less than straightforward to my lady’s wardrobe.’

‘No, she won’t, suds are what she’s escaping from. For one thing, I’m not a fashionable female. For another, she can sew perfectly well, because my aunt insisted all the maids she employed could do so to save a sewing woman’s wages. I’m sure someone at Raigne will be glad to show her how to keep my habits clean and what to do about anything I manage to spill on my favourite gown and she might as well learn to be a lady’s maid at the same time I find out how to be a lady.’

‘You are already a lady. Let’s not have that old argument again.’

‘Very well, we’ll leave it for another day,’ Callie conceded with a look about her at the early morning sunshine and another fine day. ‘Where do you think my aunt has gone?’ she asked after they had driven through Manydown to startled faces as the early risers saw Mrs Grisham’s niece on the box and Biddy waving regally at them from inside the carriage as if practising for her coronation.

‘How would I know?’ Gideon said as he got the feel of the pair and set them bowling along the better road to the main highway that would lead them to the other side of the county and Raigne, hopefully before the sun could climb too high and make the journey wearisome.

‘You seem to find out what makes a person tick a little too easily nowadays,’ she replied, feeling the tug of intimacy as she adapted to the movements of his strong body brushing hers as he expertly flicked his whip or softly reassured the more skittish of the two glossy chestnut horses he was driving to an inch.

‘I don’t much care where she is or want to understand her,’ he said shortly.

She sensed something held back and turned to give him a very wifely look. ‘Now I’m wondering why I don’t believe you,’ she said as he tried to be inscrutable again.

‘So am I.’

‘Maybe I know you too well?’ She paused and took another look at the blank expression he was trying to fix as he concentrated on his horses as if they were far more restless than they appeared on a fine morning with a smooth road ahead. ‘You let her go, didn’t you?’ she said as the unlikelihood of such a daring escape dawned at last.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said with a smile that would have looked just right on a fox picking hens’ feathers out of his strong white teeth of a morning. ‘First we had a little talk and then I suggested she leave before I called the Runners.’

‘I hope you’re not going to tell me my aunt has taken to highway robbery?’

‘No, but your unlikely maid is probably resting her feet on an extra box I slipped into the carriage before we set out.’

‘She had my parents’ letters as well as ours, didn’t she?’ she said, and it was as much a statement as a question. He’d seen the echo of their own tale in her parents’ ill-fated love affair and known exactly what to look for. Apparently the wild young man she married had grown up to be a clever and subtle man.

‘Yes. It’s all about power, Callie, a need to control those around her without them realising she’s doing it,’ he said wearily and she felt cold even on this sunny July morning at the idea she’d been dancing to Seraphina Bartle’s tune all her life without realising it.

‘Why extort money from anyone else, though? She already had what I earned for her with our pupils as well as what you sent me to live well on while you struggled.’

‘Only at first, I do very well now.’

‘Stop trying to divert me with your tale of rags to riches, Husband, and kindly answer my questions, you’re not in a courtroom now.’

‘I feel as if I might be,’ he teased her, then sobered. ‘Last night she confessed Bartle ran through any money they had and left her a mountain of debts. Whatever the details of his death might be, she didn’t deserve that.’

‘Now who’s making excuses for her?’

‘I’m trying to understand. She always knew right from wrong, your grandfather would see to that, so why lie and cheat and take such pleasure in making her family unhappy?’

‘Because she married Mr Bartle, perhaps? Maybe a cow looked at my grandmother the wrong way when she was carrying her and that did it? Who knows? She lied and stole and did her best to ruin our marriage and nearly wrecked my mother’s life beforehand.’

‘She didn’t need to do much to part us, did she? I did most of it for her before you even got back to King’s Raigne and fell into her clutches again,’ he argued bleakly.

‘Don’t, Gideon,’ she protested, fighting tears at the desolation in his voice.

‘Very well then, let’s talk of the weather, shall we?’ he said bitterly. ‘I’m heartily sick of your aunt as a subject of conversation and we might as well find something neutral to while away the tedium of our journey.’

‘Of course, it seems set fair to last out the week, don’t you think?’ she said stiffly; she could hardly complain that he’d lapsed into brittle social chit-chat when she was the one who didn’t want to talk about her aunt.

‘The harvest will be ready long before its time if it continues thus, don’t you think?’ he went on relentlessly. ‘Lord Laughraine must be fretting about the chances of sudden downpours and thunderous tempests ruining the crops as we speak.’

‘If he happens to be awake so early in the morning, of course.’

‘There is that,’ he agreed as they reached the next village and he was so preoccupied holding back his pair to let a herd of sheep cross the road there was no need to talk at all.

Callie fixed her gaze on the horizon, but saw little of it. He was right to shut himself off from her in a way. Towards the end of their marriage he did all he could to keep them together, although they were so young they scarcely knew how to go about the daily business of life as man and wife, until that last day when she must have decided it wasn’t worth it. She couldn’t think about that right now, but wasn’t she the one who never quite believed she deserved to find true love? Miles slipped by and they pretended interest in the passing scene and she tried to let the subject slip out of her mind, because they were too shocked and weary to talk of the past without making things worse right now.

She managed her usual escape from too much reality by considering how this scene or that chance encounter with a group of travellers, a market day, or a drove of cattle might change or bend the plot of her next book. Nothing more noteworthy happened until she was holding the horses while Gideon went to buy the next set of tickets from the toll keeper.

‘You don’t look like any coachman I ever encountered,’ a deep and amused male voice drawled from behind her.

A gentleman she’d never seen before in her life halted his dancing mount beside the carriage very much against that fine animal’s wishes. He bowed from his saddle with such elegance she felt dowdy and windswept and fervently wished he’d go away. ‘Good day, sir,’ she said with distant politeness.

‘It is now,’ he said with a rogue’s grin. ‘And a good day to you, as well, Miss Whoever-You-Are,’ he said, with a wary glance at her gloveless left hand that made her blush and wish she hadn’t thrown Gideon’s rings back at him when they parted all those years ago.

‘Sommers,’ she said impatiently, more out of habit than a wish to deny her husband and then it seemed foolish to correct herself to a stranger she would never see again.

‘I can see that,’ he murmured with a grin that made her realise what was meant by wolfish and she wished Gideon would hurry back.

‘I am called Sommers,’ she explained shortly, doing her best to ignore Biddy’s cough of disagreement and her fine imitation of a disapproving chaperon.

‘And every bit as lovely as a summer’s day you are, too, Miss Sommers. What a fortuitous coincidence that I happened on you today whilst we’re in the midst of that fine season, as well,’ the wolf told her with such admiration in his oddly familiar green-and-grey eyes she might have been all of a flutter, if Gideon hadn’t already dazzled her for good.

‘Nonsense, I’m not lovely and neither is being too hot for comfort day after day,’ she snapped with a glare at the heat haze on the horizon. ‘I do wish people would stop comparing me to a summer’s day, it really is most unoriginal.’

‘Shakespeare? I feel I ought to know, but I never did mind my books at school.’

‘It is from one of the sonnets and I was flattered to have it quoted at me once,’ she said, recalling the heart-racing sound of it on Gideon’s lips, but then, if he’d recited a list of linens when they were young and in love it would have taken her breath away. ‘It grates sadly upon repetition.’

‘I shall obtain a book of sonnets and learn them off by heart for future use,’ the stranger said with what looked like real admiration in his eyes and Callie wished she hadn’t forgotten her married status in a moment of absent-minded annoyance.

‘I’m not interested in an idle flirtation, or any other sort of idleness for that matter. I wish you good day, sir,’ she said firmly.

‘It might not be so idle as you think,’ the man said and made her wonder if all the gentlemen in so-called polite society required eye-glasses and were too vain to admit it.

‘It had better be,’ Gideon’s darker voice said from behind them.

Chapter Eight

‘Peters, what the devil are you doing here?’ The stranger greeted him as if they knew each other. Plainly they didn’t, or the rake would know her husband’s real name.

‘Winterley,’ Gideon replied coldly and it made her think again about his other life and how many secrets it held. Apparently he had another name altogether and what else had he failed to tell her about his existence since they parted?

‘You know each other then, gentlemen?’ she asked as brightly as she could when they looked about to challenge each other to a bout of fisticuffs, if she was lucky.

‘Not as well as we think,’ Gideon said tightly and wasn’t that the truth, Callie thought cynically, wondering if anyone knew Sir Gideon Laughraine but Gideon himself.

‘But perhaps better than you would like us to?’ the man challenged him. If they were friends at all, it was clearly a prickly sort of friendship.

‘Perhaps,’ Gideon said, and addled Callie’s brain by climbing back into his seat and holding her hand as they faced his dashing acquaintance together. ‘We certainly don’t know each other well enough for you to have met my wife, Winterley, and that makes me wonder why you felt free to accost her on a public highway.’

‘Now here’s a dilemma,’ Mr Winterley drawled with a hard glance in Callie’s direction to tell her what he thought of her lapse of memory. ‘To give the lie to a lady, or admit you and I know each other not at all?’

‘Well, my dear?’ Gideon said with a frown as he dared her to deny him again.

‘I am indeed Lady Laughraine, but tend to forget it now and again. I beg your pardon, Husband, Mr Winterley,’ she said with a nod of curt apology towards each of them.

‘Lady Laughraine?’ Mr Winterley asked blankly. He shot another shocked glare at Gideon that said there was indeed more to her husband’s other life than she knew. ‘What a truly dark horse you are, Mr Frederick Peters.’

‘My husband’s full name is Gideon Frederick Peter Dante Laughraine, sir, but I shouldn’t take it as a slight you didn’t know him as such until today because he only lets the world see as much, or as little, of his true self as he thinks it needs to know,’ Callie told him with that alias of Gideon’s going round and round in her thoughts as she wondered what he had been up to in order to need it.

The tall stranger seemed to pause on the edge of giving at least one of them a blistering set down before he took in Gideon’s ponderous string of names, then a look of unholy glee lit his face instead and he sent Gideon a mocking grin, as if he now knew far more about him than such a private man could want him to.