public or private, ma’am,’ he told her in an undertone he hoped he’d pitched too low to carry to the ears of a nearby knot of overgrown schoolgirls giggling over something best known to themselves.
‘We should not linger anywhere, then? You are very unsociable, Mr Carter, and the title ma’am is reserved for ladies with considerably more years in their dish than I have.’
‘Forgive my ignorance, Miss Winterley. It’s as well I have no inclination for high society and it has none for me,’ he said with an odd pang at his exile from the polite world that felt nothing like the burning resentment he had once struggled with.
A Mr Carter had to shape his life around his work, so Colm tried hard not to meet Miss Winterley’s challenging gaze with one of his own and wondered how it would feel to have the wealth and status his father took for granted back right now. Perhaps then he could meet her gaze for gaze and it wouldn’t matter that his father once ran off with her mother. With all that noble blood and nabob wealth at his back Colm Hancourt might have challenged Miss Winterley back and…
No, there was no and…for them and there never would be. Even when he was under his uncle’s roof and being himself again he wouldn’t have much more than a rifle and a tiny annuity. Mr Hancourt worked for his uncle and most of his salary would go on being the Duke of Linaire’s nephew. He must have better clothes and a sturdy horse and anything else could go into a small dowry for his sister. He and Miss Winterley would still not meet as equals and she would probably hate him for who he was when she found out. So he hoped she would tire of such a stiff-necked block and dismiss him before he said something disastrous.
‘You go off into a world of your own at the drop of a hat, don’t you, Mr Carter? That could get you into all sorts of trouble at Derneley House,’ she warned lightly.
‘I beg your pardon, Miss Winterley,’ he said. ‘I’ll go about my business and leave you to enjoy the sunshine.’
‘Please don’t go,’ she protested impulsively. ‘My cousin has met some old school friends and is catching up on all she’s missed since they last met.’
The three of them were standing a few yards away, so absorbed in excited conversation they might as well be the only people in the park. ‘I thought your cousins were still in the nursery,’ Colm said, revealing he knew more about her family than he wanted to admit.
‘Uncle James’s various chicks are, but Verity is my stepmama’s niece. I’m surprised you haven’t heard the story yet; it caused a sensation five years ago when my father married Lady Chloe Thessaly and the truth had to come out.’
‘I have spent the last eight years in the army. The sayings and doings of the great and the good passed us by for most of that time.’
‘I suppose you had more important things to think about than gossip and scandal, but you must have been little more than a boy when you took up your commission to have been in the army for so long, Mr Carter.’
‘A compliment, Miss Winterley?’
‘An observation,’ she said with a slight flush on her high cheekbones that told him she thought it might have been as well.
‘I was sixteen,’ he said, his eldest uncle’s brusque dismissal of his hopes and dreams of being a writer and scholar one day like his determinedly absent Uncle Horace sharp in his voice. He heard the gruff sound of it, shrugged rather helplessly and met her gaze with a rueful smile. ‘I thought myself the devil of a fellow in my smart green uniform,’ he admitted and suddenly wished he’d known her back then.
He’d felt so alone under his boyish swagger the day he entered Shorncliffe Camp and began the transformation from scared boy to scarred Rifleman. Mr Carter came into being in a regiment where officers won their rank largely by merit and gallantry in battle. Colm wanted a plain name to go with his dashing uniform mainly because he wanted to fit in and the Hancourts wanted nothing to do with him and Nell. Eight years on he must be Carter for a little longer, but at least nobody was trying to kill him.
‘Were you a Rifleman, then?’ she asked and he supposed he must have looked bewildered. ‘Since you wore a green uniform it seems a strong possibility,’ she added logically.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘some folk call us the Grasshoppers because of it.’
‘To survive eight years as a Rifleman you must be brave as well as fortunate, whatever they called you,’ Eve managed to reply lightly enough.
Instinct warned her not to let him know how she pitied a boy who began his dangerous career so young. What if he was born rich and well connected instead? Would she have met a rather dazzling young gentleman in an expensive drawing room when she came out and fallen for his easy charm? Or would she have thought him as shallow and unformed as the other young men who paid court to her with an air of fashionable boredom she didn’t find in the least bit flattering? She could have found the way his thick honey-brown hair curled despite his efforts to tame it fascinating. His gold-flecked eyes might have danced with merriment and lured a discerning young lady into falling in love and his scarred forehead would be unmarred. As for that lame leg—that would be as long and strong and lithe as the rest of him. That charmed and charming man would laugh and smile with her, then grow serious long enough to look deep into her eyes with his soul alive and clear in his own. And then he would kiss her.
Her breath caught in heady anticipation in the much less magical here and now and she almost gave her thoughts away by moving a little closer to him and behaving like a besotted ninny. A dreamer deep inside her whispered it would be almost unbearably glorious, whichever version of him did the kissing, but that might be Pamela’s daughter speaking and Eve didn’t want to listen to her. Carter certainly didn’t adore her and he was the Duke of Linaire’s clerk and librarian, for goodness’ sake.
‘I was just lucky, I suppose,’ he said with a self-deprecating shrug as if nothing else could account for it.
Eve shivered at the thought of a stray bullet or sabre slash that might have ended his life and refused to think of the number he must have survived right now. ‘I doubt any officer could survive long on luck in a regiment like yours,’ she challenged.
‘You would be surprised and at least I had enough of it to know when it ran out. This summer I was at the end of it and sold out as soon as I recovered enough to sign my name after Waterloo.’
‘You seem determined to make light of your experiences.’
‘A limping man stands little chance of surviving a forced march or fighting retreat, but let’s not speak of such horrors on a day like today. Didn’t you promise me a fine story about your cousin by marriage and your stepmama just now?’
‘Did I?’ Drat the man, having a conversation with him was like trying to hold a slippery trout wet from the river. Last night he seemed almost too dashing to be an upper servant, today he carried his shallow dark hat as if itching to have it back on his head and go before someone caught him speaking to a lady. ‘It’s no secret now, so you might as well hear it from me. Lady Chloe and Verity’s mama were twins, Mr Carter. At much the same age as you joined the army, Lady Daphne Thessaly wed a young naval lieutenant to avoid an arranged marriage. Her father was furious at being robbed of what he saw as his right to sell his daughter to a rich old man so he had her husband pressed, then left his twin daughters to birth her baby in such dire conditions it’s a miracle Verity and her aunt survived, but Lady Daphne died in childbed. Lady Chloe spent the next decade acting as Verity’s mother and became a housekeeper, then my father spent most of it trying not to be in love with her.’
‘And when he couldn’t resist any longer they told each other their secrets and seized the day?’
‘I don’t recall it being that simple, but the end result is they are very happily wed and Verity lives with us when her father is at sea,’ she said and wondered why she hadn’t let him go in the first place. It was that bland mask of the onlooker on life that did it, she supposed. For some reason she itched to rip it off and show the world a real man stood here, despite the repressive black garb and his fiercely guarded aloofness.