A Year of Scandal

Chapter Two

Gideon fought to hold his much-tried horse back from bolting. The woman Lady Virginia ordered him to seek out and come to terms with had wilted like a faded lily at the sight of him and made the wretched beast panic even more as she fell to the ground. As he tried to soothe the beast his heart thudded to the beat of iron-shod hooves too close to her contrary head.

‘To think I was afraid I wouldn’t find you here,’ he murmured between curses as he finally fought the animal to a weary standstill.

Nobody could accuse the Calliope Sommers he knew of being vapourish and his heart ached. Sir Gideon Laughraine must be a worse rogue than he thought if his wife fainted at her first sight of him in nine years, so what hope was there for his sooty soul?

‘And a very good afternoon to you, too, Lady Laughraine,’ he muttered, wondering what his noble clients would think of ‘Mr Frederick Peters’ under his real identity.

He almost laughed at the idea; this name was hardly a true one, but it was the one he had to call himself when all aliases were stripped away. Too late to gallop back to town and save her from confronting her worst nightmare now, so he quietened his hack and avoided looking at his wife until his breathing calmed as much as it was going to today. The bitter knowledge that she once told him not to bother her again as long as he lived made him gasp as if she had written it a moment ago. She hadn’t replied to a single letter he sent since so she still thought their woes were his fault. Still, he’d be damned if he’d ride off and leave his wife sprawled in the road for any fool to trip over, so he couldn’t leave again yet.

Gideon jumped from the saddle of his weary horse to crouch over his wife with a fast beating heart and a gut-deep fear for her safety that told him he still cared. He frowned at the shadows under her eyes, then his gaze lingered on the dusky curve of her eyelashes as he recalled how they felt blinking sleepily against his own skin. No, that wasn’t a road he could travel and stay sane. Compared to the skinny girl she was her face was softer and yet more defined; his coltish Callie had grown up and he hadn’t been here to watch it happen.

Of course, the old Callie was vital and lovely, her glossy dark hair always tumbling out of whatever style she tried to tame it with. Her dark brown eyes were full of life and often brilliant with mischief, or passion, as she urged him recklessly to match her, as if he needed urging. Of course, the young man he was must be flattered, but he’d truly loved her. No other woman could rival her even now. He’d met accredited beauties and numbered one or two as true friends, but they didn’t hold a candle to the Callie he first fell in love with. His young love was as lively and adventurous as she was lovely and it tore at his heart to see so little of her in the contained and outwardly staid woman lying in his path.

He watched her slavishly for signs of returning consciousness, or was that a story he told himself so he could gaze at her? Her lush curves were accentuated by the tiny waist he used to span when he lifted her off her grandfather’s steady grey horse when they met secretly. He could only see it because gravity defeated her high-waisted gown and was it foolish or wise of fashion to conceal such a figure from the gaze of hungry male predators like him? he wondered. Considering the allowance he’d struggled to make her in his days as a clerk, then an unconventional lawyer, and the increases he’d made since, he wondered what she spent his blunt on, though, because it sure as Hades hadn’t gone on clothes.

Her gown had been washed so many times the white of the base cotton was yellowed and a simple print of gold rosebuds faded. It was hard to pick out pattern from background and he doubted it was in the first kick of fashion when it made its debut far too long ago for her to be wearing it now. Shock at the sight of her dropping to the ground in a dead faint might be making his attention swerve to unimportant things, but it was a puzzle he intended to solve as soon as she felt well enough. It was infernally hot, though, so maybe she didn’t want to mire a good gown on a tramp through a sweltering countryside.

‘What the devil are you up to, Callie?’ he murmured as he settled his hack by a nearby tree and frowned as if he might read answers on her pallid face.

She looked heartbreakingly vulnerable lying in the dust as he strode back to her. The rise and fall of her bosom told him she was breathing steadily, but she had been unconscious far too long. He wanted to pluck her up off the dusty road and guard her from any threat life could throw at her, even if he was the worst one she could think of. For a breath-stealing moment he wondered if she had a terrible illness. No, he could see no sign of prolonged ill health in her smooth skin and unwrinkled brow, so she hated him so much she lost her senses rather than meet him face to face.

He checked her breathing, then stood over her so his shadow would shield her from the sun. He watched her achingly familiar heart-shaped face for a long moment, then averted his gaze. He was too much of a coward to watch her wake up and see revulsion tighten her features when she realised he wasn’t a bad dream. His wife lay unconscious at his feet and now he was lusting after her like a green boy as well and it shamed him. He also felt fully alive for the first time since he left her, despair biting harder with every step he took. She was smiling faintly in her sleep next time he looked, as if drifting happily in a world that didn’t have him in it. He suppressed the urge to howl like a dog at her latest rejection and went back to brooding over a past that couldn’t be altered.

* * *

Callie was drifting on a thick cloud of feathers while angels whispered benedictions in her ear. For a moment she really believed Gideon had come back for her, so it was perfectly rational to hear angels, but why did this one sound so angry? And did they really carry tall ebony canes and have masses of snow-white hair and piercing dark-brown eyes? Her grumpy angel frowned and remarked it was little wonder she was bad-tempered with two idiots like her and Gideon to worry about when she had better things to do.

Acting like a die-away miss never solved anything, young lady. A fortnight of Gideon’s three months has already been used up with his shilly-shallying. Best to let sleeping dogs lie indeed—whatever is the boy thinking of? It doesn’t make sense to do anything of the sort when they’re only sleeping their lives away as if that’s all there is for them to worry about. Just you wake up this minute, my girl, and stop being such a ninnyhammer. You haven’t been happy without him since you sent him away, so get up and face him and a few facts at the same time, the spectre ordered her with a stern look and Callie frowned as waking up suddenly seemed a good idea.

Her airy cloud deflated and she felt far less comfortable avoiding Gideon than she had when she welcomed unconsciousness with a sigh of relief. She wrinkled her nose as a bit more reality crept in; this was a hard resting place with too many stones for a lady to lie about on as if she had nothing better to do.

‘Go away,’ she croaked, hoping to reclaim her quiet cushion of feathery peace instinct warned her not to relinquish as the dragon-angel ordered. She might be lying on a dusty road dreaming impossible things, but she didn’t want to face real ones right now.

‘Would that I could,’ Gideon’s voice replied and a heavy thump of her heart reminded her why she’d welcomed an attack of the vapours in the first place.

At last she gave in and blinked her eyes open, because she didn’t want to dwell on the regret in Gideon’s voice. He sounded absolutely here and far away all at the same time and wasn’t that trick typical of him?

‘What are you doing here?’ she murmured with an unwary shake of her head. Dark spots wavered in front of her eyes and warned her some shocks weren’t to be got over lightly and she lay down again until they went away.

‘Straight to the nub of the issue, as usual,’ her husband said wearily.

She glanced up at him looming over her and saw worry and frustration in his grey-green eyes, but still couldn’t stand up and face him. Maybe in a moment or two she’d find the right blend of courage and calmness, and maybe never, a sceptical voice whispered and she wasn’t sure if it was hers or belonged to the forceful spectre she dreamt up just now.

‘If you can endure me carrying you, you’ll recover far better in the shade.’

‘Be quick then,’ she ordered, waving her dusty hand imperiously as a defeated queen.

‘Your wish is my command, Highness,’ he joked as he lifted her up as if she were made of fairy dust.

Callie knew perfectly well that wasn’t so and felt the power of him when he plucked her from the ground without a hitch in his breathing. Was it right to be insulted by his rock-like composure? The Gideon she remembered was slender as a lath and she could read him as easily as a child’s primer, yet this man was a closed book to her. Her body responded to his as if it recognised him and that would never do. Callie the lover—the wife, came alive again in a hot flash of fiery need. Horrified to feel so aware of him, she squirmed and he told her testily to keep still lest he drop her.

Once upon a time he was the sun to her moon; the reason she got up in the morning and slept at night, if they could spare time for sleeping. Surely she had more sense than to fall under his spell twice? Of course she had. The moment she could set one foot in front of the other without falling over, she’d march away and prove he meant nothing to her.

‘Put me down, Gideon,’ she demanded in a breathy voice she hardly recognised.

‘You’ll fall over if I do.’

‘Nonsense, I’m perfectly well.’

‘Of course you aren’t.’

‘I wish you’d let me walk, I’m not a child,’ she complained, even though she sounded like a pettish one to her own ears right now.

‘Stop behaving like one then,’ he said in a preoccupied tone, as if he had more important things to do than tidy his inconvenient wife off the King’s Highway.

‘I’m not. I feel sick,’ she said querulously, wondering what had come over her. Gideon had, of course, and he was as calm as a rock while she felt as if her whole world had been turned upside down.

‘Then I’m definitely not putting you down.’

‘It’s a lie,’ she confessed with a blush she hoped he couldn’t see under the liberal coating of dust miring her cheeks. ‘I thought such a neat gentleman as you wouldn’t want that fine silk waistcoat spoilt and you’d put me down.’

‘You really can’t wait to get out of my arms, can you, Wife?’ he said with a quirk of his mouth that might pass for a smile in a dark room.

‘No more than you can to ride off and forget me for another nine years,’ she retaliated childishly, unable to stop her tongue saying things she’d rather it kept quiet about.

‘You do me an injustice, Calliope. How could I ever forget you?’

She distrusted his words, took them as mockery. Tears stung her eyes for a perilous second, but the thought of tear tracks in the dirt made her wince. She blinked hard and stared into the little wood he was carrying her towards until they dispersed. She should dismiss him from her life as lightly as an old gown, but perhaps she could lie about a lover to disgrace him with and persuade him to go away. Except she’d never met a man who made her feel the way he did. If she wasn’t careful she’d become the sort of female who lay about on sofas half the day and wafted about like a low-lying cloud for the rest of it. Or hoped for impossible things, and wouldn’t that be a waste of time?

‘I can still walk, you know,’ she said crossly.

‘Of course you can,’ he replied, a hint of laughter in grey eyes that had an inner ray of green round the pupil only a lover would know about.

The thought of long-ago intimacy with this man caught at her heart. Now he looked and sounded almost familiar it made her recall times when they looked and looked at each other for what felt like hours, or simply lay close marvelling at one another until desire was too hot for peace and they peaked into the sort of earth-shattering climax that made her shiver even over such a chasm of time. That wasn’t the way to be cool and armoured while they agreed terms. It was good for him to hide his true self now; it would make life easier while she waited for him to go again.

‘And I wish to do so right now,’ she told him emphatically.

‘I may not be much of a husband, but I’m not going to watch my wife stagger about the countryside half faint in this heat like a drunkard.’

‘Nonsense, I can cope with the sun perfectly well.’

‘Of course you can,’ he said indulgently.

How come she could hear him smile as he soothed her like a fractious infant again? ‘The shock of seeing you made me faint, but I would be perfectly well if you hadn’t taken me by surprise,’ she claimed with a frown that was clearly wasted on the barbarian.

‘You were so overcome with delight at the sight of me you lost your senses then?’

‘That wasn’t delight,’ she snapped.

‘I know.’

‘And what the devil are you doing here, Gideon?’

‘Now that sounds more like the outspoken Callie Sommers I know. I thought I’d mistaken you for someone else for a moment back there.’

‘I am someone else,’ she told him gruffly, doing her best to believe that was good.

‘Not from here you’re not,’ he teased as he shifted her slightly in his arms and they finally reached the little wood that ran alongside the road. ‘You feel exactly like her to me.’

‘Well, I’m not,’ she said crossly. She hadn’t been since Gideon put his ring on her finger and the blacksmith at Gretna pronounced them man and wife.

‘No, you’re Callie Laughraine,’ he said blankly and she told herself that was a good thing. One of them should have their feelings under control and hers were anything but.

‘I spent a long time forgetting her and manage perfectly well without a husband to tell me what to do and how to do it nowadays,’ she insisted.

‘As if I ever could awe, persuade or bully you into doing a thing you didn’t want to. You were always your own person and even as a silly stripling I never wanted you any other way, Calliope.’

‘I have no idea why my mother gave me that ridiculous name,’ she said to divert them from the memory of how much he’d loved her when they eloped to Gretna Green. It hurt to linger on the past and wonder if they could have built a wonderful marriage together, if life was a little less cruel. ‘She might as well have put a millstone round my neck as named me for one of the Muses.’

‘Lucky you have a beautiful voice and a love of poetry like your namesake then, isn’t it? Perhaps she simply liked it. I always did.’

‘Yet how you used to taunt me with it when you were a repellent boy. If I had the gift of epic poetry, would you stop carrying me about like an infant?’

‘Because you’re named after a goddess?’

‘No, because I asked you to, although I should like to be a bard, if we lived in better times and women were taken seriously as such, but I never wanted to be a goddess with so many unpronounceable sisters to quarrel with.’

He wasn’t to know how serious she was, so she supposed it was unfair to stiffen in his arms when he chuckled. At least now she felt icy and remote again and he’d almost done it—he’d nearly disarmed her with flattery and wasn’t that another warning to be wary? Best to remember he was a professional advocate now, a pleader for apparently lost causes, and that they could never be friends. At least then she would hurt less when he walked away again.

‘You can put me down over there,’ she ordered, pointing at a convenient tree stump.

‘I’ll drop you in the stream if you’re not careful, Your Majesty,’ he muttered darkly.

She shot him a glare as he set her down as if she was made of bone china, then stepped back with a mocking bow. ‘Now go away,’ she said sternly.

‘I wouldn’t leave your aunt stranded in the middle of nowhere ill and prey to any rogue who happened along and I never liked her, so how can you imagine I’d leave you, Callie?’

‘I’m not my aunt,’ she defended herself absently.

‘Something I thank God for on a daily basis, my dear.’

‘Don’t call me your dear and don’t blaspheme.’

‘But I’d hate to be wed to your narrow-minded and joyless relative, my dear.’

‘She stood by me when nobody else would and I told you I’m not your dear,’ she told him shortly and wondered if it was worth standing so she could stamp her foot and show him she hated that false endearment on his lips. Deciding it wasn’t a good idea to stand up and wilt, then sit down again before she proved anything, she tried to look serenely indifferent instead. Clearly it didn’t work; he was having a job to conceal a grin at her expense.

‘Perhaps you’ll allow me the one freedom a married man can safely claim, which is the privacy of his own thoughts?’ he said with a pantomime of the henpecked husband that made her heart ache for all they’d lost.

‘And perhaps I won’t,’ she snapped.

‘Afraid you won’t like them, Calliope?’

Terrified if he did but know it. She sniffed and tossed her head to let him know she was completely indifferent, then regretted it immediately as the wild thundering in her ears told her she hadn’t recovered enough to flounce off and leave him standing like a forlorn knight spurned by the damsel he’d got off his horse to rescue.

‘If I was I’d have no wish to know, would I?’

‘As well if you don’t, perhaps,’ he told her gruffly as he turned from rummaging in the pack of his weary horse and removing a flask.

‘Please don’t try and force brandy down my throat, Gideon,’ she protested.

‘I don’t indulge in alcohol now,’ he said as he handed her a flask of clear water lukewarm from its journey.

He drank too much wine during the latter days of their marriage and the memory of him drunk and bitter as gall made her shudder. Not that he’d laid violent hands on her, but the thought of all that darkness and despair chilled her to the bone.

‘Never?’ she was startled into asking as his words sank in.

‘Only when a cook puts it in a sauce or some fanciful dessert when I dine away from home, but not otherwise. I drank too much and made things much worse between us. So you see, I’ve managed to put one of my baser impulses behind me,’ he said with a rueful smile that did unfair things to her insides.

‘Abstain from alcohol for your own good, but don’t pretend it’s got anything to do with me. If you set any store by what I wanted, you wouldn’t have come here and cut up my peace like this,’ she told him disagreeably to disguise it.

‘I can’t leave yet, but the drunken, headlong boy I was back then was repellent and I promise you I’ve done my best to kill him off. I doubt anyone mourned him.’

I did, argued an inner Callie who refused to be silenced. I wept myself to sleep for the lack of him by my side every night for far too long. Until I realised he was never coming back and I was the one who told him to go, in fact.

‘Devil take it, but I’m a rogue to plague you when you’re as unwell as a person can be without being carted about on a hurdle,’ Gideon exclaimed and she couldn’t stop a wobbly smile at the sight and sound of him as familiar to her as her own face in the mirror at last.

There—he was her Gideon again; a quick-tempered and passionate young man who could turn her knees to water at the very flicker of that self-deprecating smile or a sudden urge to wild action that made living with him such a clash of surprise, dread and delight. ‘Come, Wife, let’s get you home before you drop unconscious at my feet for the second time today,’ he added masterfully and she frowned at him again, wondering if she could ever bring herself to live with a gentleman who was so used to getting his own way, then shocking herself with the idea she might like to try, if things were different.

‘If you arrive on her doorstep, Aunt Seraphina will have the vapours even if I don’t,’ she warned him, and he actually paled at the thought of her aunt, who hadn’t liked him even before he ran off to Gretna with her niece.

‘She has plenty of experience,’ he said darkly and turned towards his hitched horse.

‘You could simply ride away again, nobody would know,’ Callie suggested desperately. Being lonely and a little unhappy was a state she knew so well that the idea of changing it in any way looked strange and frightening from here.

‘We would, wouldn’t we?’ he said as if that decided the issue.

‘Yes,’ she admitted with a sigh, ‘so we would.’

Chapter Three

Simply getting Callie to ride his horse while he led it caused an argument. Gideon wondered if they could stop carping long enough to put the fragments of their marriage together and called up all the patience he’d learnt during his years without her. He should have remembered that aspect of marriage better and the magical glee of loving her less, he supposed grimly. Still, they were talking, even if it was in snaps of irritation. The odd moment of rediscovery made this all seem heartbreakingly familiar then strange by turns and he almost wished he’d slung his unconscious wife across his saddle brow and ridden off with her like a pirate with a princess.

‘Comfortable?’ he asked after the silence had stretched so thin he couldn’t endure it any longer.

‘What do you think?’ she challenged. ‘You should have let me ride astride as I asked instead of perching me up here like a doll.’

‘And have half the yokels in Wiltshire looking at your legs? I think not,’ he managed to say as even the idea of it made him rampantly jealous.

‘I doubt they would bother when they saw the rest of me,’ she said with a sweep of her hand at her dusty person that set his steed dancing and set Gideon’s overstretched nerves on edge. He tried hard to rein himself in at the same time as he clamped a firm grip on the bit and forced the idiot horse to stop wasting its energy, as well.

‘They would. You look magnificent,’ he told her tersely and surely that wasn’t a pleased little smile she was doing her best to hide behind that hideous bonnet? ‘As a girl you were lovely, now you’re beautiful, Callie,’ he added and heard her snort of disbelief with mixed feelings.