all tangled red hair and huge green eyes, climbing the trees in the home park like a tomboy. She had fallen out of an old oak tree and Tom had laughed and Nat had been the one to offer her a hand to help her get up again. And so it had started, with Nat easing Lizzie out of the scrapes she had got herself into, always there for her because neither Monty nor Tom cared a whit.
But this…This was more than a scrape. This was a full-blown disaster. Yes indeed, Lizzie would be the most difficult, intractable, headstrong wife imaginable, the most unsuitable countess and in the fullness of time the least appropriate duchess in the kingdom. Marriage to her might well be a living hell. But hell was precisely where he was heading. He knew there was no escape.
LIZZIE HAD CLIMBED IN at her bedroom window, scaling the ivy, reaching for the handholds that only she knew were there in the old stone of Fortune Hall. She had climbed in and out of the house this way for as long as she could remember, coming and going as and when she pleased, avoiding the discipline of her chaperones, such as it was, and with her half brothers in blissful ignorance of her behavior. Tonight Monty was still awake—when she had slipped past the window she had seen him drinking on his own in the library. There had been no sign of her other half brother, Tom, although the presence of another glass beside Monty’s on the table suggested that someone else had been there earlier that evening. Lizzie’s half brothers had patched up their quarrel now that Tom was no longer a wanted man. Monty had conveniently forgotten that he had disowned his brother and Tom had seemed prepared to forgive him. Lizzie thought that their rapprochement was largely convenience, since no one else in the village of Fortune’s Folly would give either of them the time of day now. Everyone hated Monty for his unscrupulous greed in applying more and more of his medieval taxes to fleece the populace, but people hated Tom more for his ruthless seduction and abandonment of Lydia Cole. Lizzie would not have set foot back in her brother’s house if it had not been for the fact that Monty had threatened legal proceedings against anyone else who gave her shelter. He had then neglected to find a chaperone for her with the result that Lizzie had no one to account to on nights like this. Or alternatively, Lizzie thought, one could say that no one actually cared what she did.
She desperately wanted a bath. She was aching, her body sore there, between her legs, and sore inside. Not so raw as her heart, though. She could smell smoke on her clothes and in her hair. She could also smell Nat’s scent on her body like an imprint, but perhaps that was a trick of her imagination. She did not want to remember him holding her close enough to put his mark on her. She did not want to remember him inside her. She shuddered, closing her eyes, closing her mind.
Cold water would have to do. She would have jumped into the moat when she had got back had it not been for the fact that she was terrified Nat would find her. Instead she lit one pale candle, making sure that the curtains were drawn so close that no light would show outside, and then she stripped off her tattered clothes. Usually she dropped her gown and underclothes on the floor for the maid to pick up but these were ruined, the laces torn, the hooks ripped out. That would cause gossip. That would be difficult to explain.
Such passion. Such pleasure…
She had thought that she would die from such pleasure. She had never imagined it, never dreamed it. Such bliss at Nat’s hands…She had felt as though her very body would melt, honey-soft, with satisfaction and fulfilment.
She had felt a soul-deep contentment as well, but that had fled fast enough when she had seen the expression on Nat’s face. Some pain stirred deep inside her and she soothed it quickly back to sleep. No need to think of that. It was over. It was her secret and it would remain so.
She bundled the clothes up carefully and hid them under a pile of blankets in the chest. She would take them out and burn them when she could, and watch the memories drift away on the smoke and ash. Nat would be married by then and gone from Fortune’s Folly with his bride.
Avoiding her reflection in the long mirror, she started to wash herself with the cold water from the ewer and the cloth that was on the dresser. Her hair would have to wait until the morning. There was nothing she could do about that. She started with her face, the ice-cold water from the bowl shocking her a little, wakening her. Neck, shoulders, the curve of her arms…She paused as she raised the cloth to her chest, the irresistible memory intruding of Nat’s mouth at her breast, tugging, nipping, licking…Her body tightened, aching inside, wanting him again. It was impossible to erase that knowledge now. The hand holding the cloth fell to her side and she turned slowly to examine her body in the long pier glass.
She did not look the same. There were marks on her body, faint bruises that indicated the intensity of their lovemaking and also showed the loss of her innocence, the extent of her experience now. She stared at them whilst her body resonated with the knowledge of what she had done. She waited for feelings of shame or regret. None came. That must prove she was as wild and brazen as everyone claimed. She had no shame for the act of making love. All her regret was saved for the terrible mistake she had made in loving where her feelings were not returned. That humiliated her beyond bearing.
There was a small smear of blood on her inner thigh. She scrubbed it away, vigorous now. Her virginity was lost. This was the proof. Some faceless, unimagined future husband would probably cut up rough about her lack of chastity. Men were so often odiously hypocritical about such matters. She found she did not care. Perhaps she should. But she had never been able to imagine herself married. Marriage required compromise and maturity and she was painfully aware that she was not very good at such things. Truth was, she had never wanted to be. Now the possibility of marriage seemed more remote than the moon.
She put on her nightdress but rather than getting into her bed she sat down on the velvet cushioned window seat. Was Nat out there in the shadows of the darkened garden? She felt an almost irresistible urge to pull the curtain back and look. The thing that stayed her hand was the knowledge that if he were there it would be for all the wrong reasons. He would not have followed her because he loved her. He would have followed her because of a sense of responsibility. He would want to make sure that she was safe home and to put matters to rights.
He could not.
Nat cared about her. She knew that. But caring was so mild an emotion compared to the wild love she had for him. Caring was for infants and the old and the sick. Nat did not share her passion. He had shown her lust and she had confused it with love. It was an easy mistake to make, a naïve mistake, she supposed. She felt a boundless love for him. He cared for her. She had poured out her feelings in their lovemaking. He had met her love with his desire. The disparity between their feelings for one another was enormous.
Her hand had crept up to pull back the curtain, driven by the need she had to see Nat again and the crumb of comfort that his caring would offer her. She deliberately let it fall. For her it was all or nothing. Crumbs were not good enough.
She went to bed. She tried to sleep and tried to ignore the ache within her body and the greed with which it grasped after the pleasure it had experienced just the once. Her body, it seemed, did not care whether she loved Nat or not. It wanted him and it did not like to be denied now that it had been wakened. She tossed and turned and when she did sleep she dreamed about her mother, the notorious Countess of Scarlet, wilful, reckless runaway wife. She could smell her mother’s perfume and feel the softness of her arms about her. In her dreams Lizzie grasped after the absentminded affection her mother had shown her on the rare occasions that Lady Scarlet remembered she had a daughter. It comforted her but when she woke in the morning she remembered that Lady Scarlet was long lost and she was alone.
Chapter Three
MISS FLORA MINCHIN stood in the drawing room of her parents’ elegant home in the village of Fortune’s Folly—new, shiny, spacious, everything that money could buy, no converted medieval building for them—and studied the Earl of Waterhouse, who was standing on the Turkish carpet in front of the fireplace in the exact same spot as when he had proposed marriage to her four months before. Four months had been the engagement period prescribed by Mrs. Minchin as the shortest possible time in which to assemble Flora’s perfect trousseau. That self-same trousseau was now packed and ready for the wedding trip—Windermere