Regency Surrender: Notorious Secrets: The Soldier's Dark Secret / The Soldier's Rebel Lover

‘Not so much now. Perhaps one small glass of Madeira.’

The path to the lake was narrow and dark. The earth was cool against her bare feet. She had not swum for so long. She loved the water. She had not allowed herself to miss it. Now, seeing the glint of the lake in the early morning sunshine, Celeste felt her spirits rise in anticipation. The water was a strange colour, nothing like the sea. Golden and greenish, with a hint of brown. She stretched her arms high above her head, lifting her face to the warm English sun, and laughed with delight.

Jack pulled his shirt over his head. His muscles rippled. She caught her breath. He really was magnificent to look at. ‘I think I’d best retain these,’ he said, indicating his breeches.

Celeste had been so intent upon the swim, she hadn’t considered the delicate matter of attire. In Cassis, she had always swum naked. She loved the feel of the ocean on her skin. But in Cassis, she had always swum alone. She had never swum in the company of a man, and this man— She dragged her eyes away again.

‘Changed your mind?’

Celeste shook her head. ‘Go in. I will follow you but don’t look.’

Jack laughed. ‘I never make promises I can’t keep,’ he said, turning his back and beginning to wade into the water.

She watched him dive, and then swim strongly towards the far side. He barely laboured at all. His strength had all but returned. Celeste went behind the very hawthorn bush where she’d hidden that first day, and began to undress, quickly removing her gown, her corset and her petticoats. She was left wearing only her pantaloons and camisole. It was not an ideal outfit for bathing but she could not countenance the alternative.

She picked her way across the pebbles into the shallows of the lake. Jack was at the far side again, swimming steadily. The water felt warm on her toes, the mud oozed around her feet in a not unpleasant manner. She waded in and gasped as the cool water soaked through her thin camisole and met her skin. Jack turned and began to head back towards her. Hurriedly, Celeste waded out, until the water was waist high, and then she dived into the cool water with relish and began to swim. It was not at all like the waters of Cassis, this English lake, but there was still that marvellous feeling of freedom. She struck out more strongly, heading for the opposite bank, kicking her legs behind her, and just before it became too shallow, she turned and began to swim back, passing Jack on the way.

She swam until her muscles protested, and then she turned over and floated, her eyes closed, careless of the mud and twigs and leaves tangling in her hair. For the first time since Maman haddied, she felt relaxed, weightless, free. It was all still there, but it could wait. It could all wait. Rolling over to make her way back to shore, she saw Jack standing waist deep in the water, watching her.

She waded towards him. ‘I think I have most of your brother’s lake in my hair.’

‘Did you enjoy that?’

‘Oh—so, so much.’ Celeste beamed at him. ‘I had forgotten how swimming— It makes you forget everything.’ Her smile faded. ‘Is that why you...?’

‘Yes. And for this.’ Jack indicated his arm.

Celeste touched the puckered skin gently. ‘Does it still hurt?’

‘Not really.’

Sunlight danced on the water and in her eyes. Droplets of lake water clung to the rough smattering of hair on Jack’s chest. Her camisole was plastered to her body like a second skin, making it completely transparent. Her nipples were hard and puckered with the cold, and clearly visible. Jack’s eyes were riveted on them. She did not feel embarrassed. In fact she felt emboldened. Desire twisted inside her. Jack’s eyes met hers. She stepped towards him. His arms went around her waist. His chest was surprisingly warm. It was not like before. No flare of anger to propel them towards each other. This time it was slow, a different kind of heat. She tilted her head. Sunlight dazzled her eyes until Jack’s head blocked it, and his lips met hers.

Different. He tasted of lake. Cool. Tentative. Like a first kiss. A gentle tasting, the sweetest of touches. Slow. A kiss with no purpose but to kiss. And to kiss. And then to kiss again. She wrapped her arms around his neck. He pulled her closer. Kissing. Only kissing. Her arousal was languid, melting, none of the fierce flames of before. She could kiss him for ever. This was the kind of kiss that would never end. Lips and tongues in a slow dance. Hands smoothing, stroking. Skin clinging, damp, heating.

Jack traced the line of her throat with butterfly kisses. He kissed the damp valley between her breasts. His mouth sought hers again, and their lips clung, still slowly, but deeper now. She kissed the pucker of his musket wound. She flattened her palms over the swell of his chest. His hands covered her breasts, making her nipples ache. The sweetest of aches, the gentlest but most insistent tugging of desire, making her sigh, and then making her moan.

She’d thought it was too much before. But this was too different. The dazed look in his eyes, his lack of resistance when she disentangled herself, told her he felt it too.

‘Thank you,’ she said gently, ‘for the swim.’ She began to wade ashore. She had hauled her gown over her wet undergarments and was wrapping the rest of her clothing into a bundle when Jack re-joined her. They walked slowly back to the Manor together in silence, words for once superfluous.

Chapter Seven (#u85934387-f165-5e3f-aa83-267e9fbd9a74)

‘A very proper, very English young lady.’ Celeste repeated, looking blankly at Jack. They were in the studio, where she had been laying out her preliminary drawings to allow Lady Eleanor and Sir Charles to make their final selections, before she began the task of painting the actual canvases. ‘You think that my mother was of genteel stock?’

Jack nodded. He had taken a seat across from her at the table. In the two days which had passed since their early-morning swim, they had both been careful not to mention it or the kiss which had followed. Though as far as Celeste was concerned, it hung in the air, almost palpably, every time she looked at him.

She shuffled a bundle of rejected sketches, quite unnecessarily. ‘What makes you come to this conclusion?’

Jack tapped his pencil on the notebook in front of him. ‘A number of little things. Hasn’t it ever struck you as odd, for example, that the wife of a school teacher would employ a cook?’

‘I’ve never given it much thought. It’s just how things were.’

‘Then there’s this school you attended in Paris. It sounds as if it was a good one.’

Celeste frowned. ‘The girls were from good families. Titled, mostly, or very wealthy. Or both. That was one of the problems I had to deal with, being neither.’

‘You mean you were bullied?’ Jack’s hand tightened on his pencil. ‘I don’t know why, but I assumed that sort of thing was confined to boys.’

‘If you mean fighting, then it most likely is. Girls are more subtle,’ Celeste said grimly. ‘It doesn’t matter, I learned to hold my own. Besides, I cannot believe it was really so grand a school,’ she rushed on, having no desire to recall how effective the bullying had been. ‘We were not permitted a fire except in the dead of winter and then never in the dormitory. And the bed sheets were almost threadbare. It was hardly luxurious.’

‘Which confirms my point,’ Jack said with a tight smile. ‘My so-called exclusive prep school had dormitories that would have delighted a Spartan. Such privations don’t come cheap. Then there is her knowledge of dinner-party etiquette. And the comment about—what was it—a woman’s reputation. Your mother could draw and paint, but she couldn’t cook. Could she sew?’

‘She taught me to embroider.’

‘Precisely.’

Jack looked pleased. Celeste was unconvinced. ‘I never thought much about my mother’s origins. Why should I, when Mamanwas so determined that she had none? She would have preferred me to believe she had been baked like dough in an oven.’ Blind baked, Celeste added to herself, a brittle pastry with a hard crust.

She pushed back her chair and went over to her favourite spot at the window. Was she being unfair? Mamanhad been cold, distant, aloof. Certainly stern, and yet at other times she had looked...

Just as Jack had done that first morning at the lake.

Despair? Anguish? Whatever label one put on it, it was obvious now that her mother had indeed suffered. And she, Celeste, had been oblivious to it. All the signs had been right in front of her nose, and she had not noticed them. She shook her head in disgust at herself. ‘I have been an idiot! For an artist, quite the blind woman. Thinking I was the poor little schoolgirl, when really it was a case of all the other little schoolgirls being so very rich.’

Her fingers went to the locket around her neck. ‘That’s another thing,’ Jack said almost apologetically. ‘I doubt very much that your locket is a trinket. In fact I think you’ll find it’s made of diamonds and sapphire, not glass. There’s a maker’s mark. I’ll show you.’

Celeste took the locket off obediently. There it was. She looked at the portraits inside, painted in such a way that her mother gazed across at her. Lovingly? Her mother, who had claimed in her last letter, that she had always loved her. Was this locket proof as Jack said? Celeste found this almost impossible to believe.

Almost? She touched the miniature of her mother with the tip of her finger, an echo of Jack’s gesture with his own mother’s picture in the portrait gallery, she realised. But his had been one of unmistakable affection and love. Was hers?

She looked up, smiling faintly at Jack. ‘You have given me a great deal to think about,’ she said, snapping the locket shut.

A rap on the door heralded the arrival of her patrons. Celeste quickly made the final touches to her arrangement of sketches, ensuring the ones she favoured were most prominent, but when the door opened, it was to reveal Lady Eleanor alone.

* * *

‘My husband sends his apologies, Mademoiselle, he will be unable to join us this morning, but he desired me to make some preliminary selections from your work. I trust this is satisfactory?’

Without waiting for an answer, her ladyship made straight for the table where the sketches were laid out and began sifting through them. Jack cast Celeste an eloquent glance, and began unobtrusively to push the preferred drawings towards his brother’s wife.

‘Of course, these are just very rudimentary sketches to give you an idea of what the finished work would look like,’ Celeste said, ‘but I hope they are sufficient to allow you to make some decisions on the sequence in which you would like me to paint the formal gardens.’

Lady Eleanor examined the sketches carefully. It had always amused Celeste to witness her patrons’ reactions at this stage. Seeing their estates spread out before them on paper almost always made them view their properties afresh, made them somehow grander, more magnificent, which in turn added to their own sense of consequence.

Lady Eleanor was no different. ‘I must say, I had not appreciated the epic sweep of the estate. You have managed to cover a great deal of ground in a very short time.’

‘Thank you. Monsieur Trestain has been most helpful. He has an excellent eye for the most pleasing views.’