Rake's Reform

“Then I shall go there this very evening.”

She exhaled with relief as he lifted his fingers from her arm. He had understood. But then he understood everything far too well, she thought wryly as she took a step back from him.

“Rainbows!” She heard Annabel snort as she left the room. “I swear Jane is becoming more fanciful by the day.”

Chapter Three

The orange disc of the sun was just slipping below the distant horizon of the downs when Janey stepped out of the woods. A few feet ahead of her was an apparently sheer cliff, out of which sprang a small torrent of water, which foamed and sparkled as it tumbled into the shadowy pool some forty feet below. Above the noise of the water, she could hear the frantic excited barking of a dog; glancing down to the edge of the pool, she saw Jonathan Lindsay, throwing sticks for his liver and white spaniel into the calm end of the pool.

Cautiously she began to descend the narrow zigzag of a fern-lined path that threaded down the cliff, thinking ruefully that it would have been easier if she had been as close a follower of the fashions as Annabel and, hence, would have been wearing a skirt that skimmed her ankles rather than the ground.

The roar of the falling water drowned out the noise of her approach. It was the spaniel who sensed her presence first, dropping its stick at Jonathan’s feet and raising its head to bark furiously.

“Hello! I was beginning to think you were not coming, or I had misunderstood you,” he called up to her as he turned.

“No, you understood perfectly,” she shouted back, wondering why it was that seeing him should give her this peculiar feeling of instant well-being. “I am sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said as she drew nearer, “it was more difficult than I had expected to get away.”

“You are still in disgrace, I take it?”

“For all eternity, I suspect,” she said with feeling, her guardians having waxed long and lyrical about her outrageous behaviour.

“Wait, I’ll help you—the path has collapsed there.” He came forward, hands outstretched to help her down the last drop of two feet or so.

“Thank you,” she said after a fractional hesitation, and put out her hands to rest them on his shoulders as his hands closed about her waist. It would have been ridiculous to refuse. As ridiculous as it was to feel so afraid of touching him. Daniel had lifted her down from a thousand such places when they had roamed the great forests on the long trail west, looking for firewood and berries.

“Ready?”

“Yes…” The word dwindled to nothing in her throat as she glanced down into his blue, blue eyes and everything seemed to stop: time, her heart, her lungs—even the roaring, cascading water.

For a second, no more, he stared back at her. Then, with a flicker of a smile, he lifted her down. Staring at his snowy linen cravat, she waited for him to release her waist, and then she realised that he could hardly do so until she removed her hands from his shoulders, where they seemed to have become fixed.

Snatching her hands back, she pulled out of his grasp, took two steps back and dragged in a breath. She had danced with several men, even been kissed upon the mouth once by Daniel, but she had never, ever felt anything like that sudden irrational sense of belonging, of wanting to touch, hold on and never let go—

Get yourself in hand, girl, she told herself impatiently, as he regarded her a little quizzically with a half-smile hovering upon his wide mouth. Sure, he was handsome, but he had not found their proximity in the least bit earthshaking—but then, no doubt, he was used to simpering society misses falling at his feet. She took another breath and lifted her chin, preparing to be as cool, as ladylike and as English as she knew how.

“Do you always look at man like that when he touches you?”

His dry question almost made her gasp. No one she had met since she had come to England had ever been so direct, so outrageously intimate. How dare he ask such a thing! And then she almost laughed—if he wasn’t going to play by society rules, then neither was she…she would be what she was, a colonial who did not know how to behave properly.

“Only when they have dishonourable intentions.” She gave him a blithe smile as she spoke and had the satisfaction of seeing surprise flicker across his face.

“Alas, you know me so well already.” He inclined his head to her, his blue eyes sparkling with laughter. “But at least you did not slap my face; I suppose I should be grateful for that.”

“I have never cared for overly trodden paths,” she said as they walked side by side towards the camomile seat.

“Oh, sharp, sharp, Miss Hilton, I am wounded to the quick.” He put a theatrical hand to his breast.

“Not so much as Piers was,” she said sweetly, thinking it would do him no harm to be reminded that she was very capable of defending herself.

“True,” he agreed wryly, and then frowned. “You are limping. Have you hurt yourself?”

“It’s nothing. I broke my leg in a fall almost a year ago and it still aches sometimes,” she answered, as she sat down gratefully upon the springy cushion of herbs.

“Horses can be dangerous beasts, can they not?” he said as he seated himself beside her. “I broke a collarbone once, and that took long enough to mend.”

“Yes.” She let his assumption go. She did not want to have to explain about the accident, or Edward, just now. She was having trouble enough coping with his disconcerting nearness and the knowledge that she was as susceptible as any society miss to Jonathan Lindsay’s very considerable charm.

“So is that why you like to come here often, because you do not care for the overly trodden paths?” he asked a moment later, giving her a sideways glance.

“How did you know I come here often?” She paused in the act of crushing a sprig of the camomile between her fingers, wondering if the herb’s calming properties would have any effect upon her heart, which had begun to race from the moment he had sat down beside her.

“This—” he patted the springy camomile, his fingers a scant half-inch from her thigh “—has no need of weeding, someone has been doing it, and—” he reached into his pocket with his other hand and produced a glove worked with the initials J.H. “—I found this. You, Miss Hilton, have been trespassing for some time. Have you not?”

“Guilty, m’lud.” She released the breath that had caught in her throat as she accepted the proffered glove and his fingers momentarily brushed hers. “It was the one place I could be sure of escaping my guardians and—” she glanced across the pool and upwards to where the tall pines clung to the edge of the cliff above the waterfall “—there is something about it which reminds me of home.”

“Home?” His straight brows lifted as he looked about him, from the sparkling spill of water to the wild untidy tumble of ferns, brambles and once-cultivated shrubs, long since gone wild. “I cannot say this puts me in mind of the grounds of Pettridges Hall.”

“I meant America,” she said, still staring across the pool. “This reminds me of the Kentucky Trail and where we settled in Minnesota. Sometimes, sitting here watching the water and listening to the wind in the trees, I can almost believe I am back there—that if I turn around quickly enough I will see my father hitching up the team or my mother coming out of the cabin to call us in for dinner—” She broke off, wondering why on earth she was confiding such thoughts to him.

“You miss your life there?” There was the faintest note of surprise in his voice. A note she recognised all too well in carefully educated English voices, when she made the mistake of speaking about her past.

“Yes, I do,” she said with a sharp lift of her chin, telling herself that she was a fool to think that he might be different from the rest, that he might just understand. “America has a great deal to recommend it. England does not have a monopoly upon natural beauty, Mr Lindsay.”

“While you are resident in England, that is a subject upon which I shall have to disagree with you,” he said, bending down to pick up the stick that the ever-hopeful spaniel had dropped at his feet.

“Then I suppose it would be churlish to argue—” she said after the slightest intake of breath. “Do you always flirt so outrageously, Mr Lindsay?”

He straightened, threw the stick and then turned to look at her, his eyes sparkling. “Only with women whom I find interesting or desirable.”

“And into which category do I fall, Mr Lindsay?” she asked, surprising herself with the apparent uninterestedness of her tone.

“Both,” he said softly after a moment, his eyes suddenly very dark as his gaze dropped to her mouth, and then lower still to the fullness of her breasts. “Very definitely both.”

His voice had lowered to a velvety depth that made her skin prickle and grow tight, as if his hands had followed his stare, and she found herself staring back at his face, the wide slanting line of his mouth, his long clever fingers as he toyed with a piece of camomile.

Her mouth and throat grew dry as his gaze came back to her eyes and she knew that he meant it and that they had just stepped off the safe ground of lighthearted flirtation into some decidedly dangerous waters—for her, at least.

She swallowed and stared down at the glove in her hands. “Good,” she said, as matter-of-factly as she could manage. “I should hate to be merely desirable.”

He laughed, dissolving the tension that had been almost tangible. “I do not think you could ever be ‘merely’ anything, Miss Hilton.”

“You are doing it again,” she murmured, lifting her gaze to watch the spaniel heave itself out of the pool and shake the water from its coat.

“What?” he said innocently as he studied her detachedly, thinking that he had been right. She was not pretty: her fine nose was too straight, the upswept line of her jaw too clean and sharp, her forehead a fraction too high, her mouth too wide and feline. Oh, no—no insipid, dainty, English rosebud, this—more a lioness, lithe, fierce and very beautiful.

“Flirting,” Janey replied, putting a hand to her face, ostensibly to push back an errant strand of fair hair, but in reality to shield herself from the piercingly blue gaze that was making her feel decidedly uncomfortable.

“And you are not?” he mocked softly.