The Many Sins of Cris De Feaux (Lords of Disgrace) Read online

  ‘No, he is not a duke,’ Gabriel said furiously. ‘Allow me to introduce the Marquess of Avenmore.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘A marquess?’ It was a joke, of course. They would both laugh in a moment.

  They did not.

  And then it all began to make sense. Cris’s fine clothes, his superior manservant, his air of utter confidence, his foreign travels. His whole attitude of assurance.

  ‘My name is de Feaux.’ He gave it a slight French intonation. ‘Not Defoe. I was not trying to lie to you, but my voice was hoarse.’

  She waved away the explanation with an irritable flick of her hand. ‘You could have told the coroner anything—that we had both been up looking after a sick horse, that Mr Stone played cards with us all night—anything than let everyone think we were lovers.’

  ‘But that would not be true,’ Cris said with maddening reasonableness. ‘I do not lie under oath. If I could have seen a way to prevaricate, I would have done. If what I said was going to ruin you, then I would have had to keep silent for now. But once I said I intended to marry you there was no danger of that, Tamsyn.’

  ‘And thanks to my own willingness to tell half-truths you are not leg-shackled to a wife your close friend regards as a disaster! Why did you do it?’

  ‘Because it was an explanation that convinced both the coroner and the jury and, as for your reputation, almost anything will be forgiven to the betrothed of a marquess.’

  ‘And anything at all will be forgiven of a marquess, I suppose?’

  ‘It is the way of the world.’

  ‘Maddening, but true,’ Gabriel observed.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Stone, I do not need you to point that out to me,’ she snapped.

  ‘I am the Earl of Edenbridge, actually,’ he said with a rueful grimace. ‘I suppose I had better tell you while we are laying our cards on the table.’

  ‘And the ruse served its purpose. Goode ran, exposing his own guilt.’ Cris shrugged. ‘No one has to marry anyone.’

  ‘I suppose I got in with my explanation just as you were about to explain your cunning deception to the coroner.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Cris had both his voice and his horse under perfect control now.

  She was so angry that she was unsure whether it was with him, or with herself for being so shamefully weak in wanting him to love her, to tell her it had been no ruse at all, but a ploy to make a humble country girl the wife of a marquess. Tamsyn gathered up the reins, dug her heel into Foxy’s side and gave the gelding his head, thundering along the road that led back towards Stibworthy. Anything but think, anything but risk him reading the feelings in her face.

  *

  ‘We must keep her in sight.’ Cris spurred Jackdaw in pursuit.

  ‘But I would advise you not to actually catch her.’ Gabriel jammed his hat on his head and drew level with Cris. ‘That is not a happy woman.’

  ‘She is an unhappy woman who is not sitting in a cell awaiting the next assizes,’ Cris said grimly.

  ‘She might not be in a cell, but you as near as damn it landed yourself in a parson’s mousetrap. And don’t tell me you were about to tell the coroner it was all a ploy—you didn’t think of that until she was on her feet digging you out of the hole you’d made for yourself.’

  What in Hades was I thinking? I do not need Gabe to tell me that I was risking creating a storm in London, in the diplomatic corps, at Court.

  But he had simply been incapable of watching Tamsyn stand there, brave and honest and truthful, while the snare tightened around her. ‘So I should have let her be accused by the coroner’s jury, allowed her to be carted off like a felon to prison and let her languish there with prostitutes and Lord knows what scum while I worked out how to disprove that so-called solicitor’s clerk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can always rely on you for the ruthless answer, can’t I?’

  ‘You can. Tamsyn would have survived a few weeks in gaol. She’s not some sheltered society miss.’ They reined in as a flock of sheep swept across their path, spooked by a circling buzzard. Gabriel pushed his mount in front of Jackdaw. ‘Cris, listen to me, I am worried about you. You are half-tempted to tell her you won’t withdraw your offer, aren’t you? You’ve slept with her and I know you when you’ve a fit of gallantry on you.

  ‘But think what you owe to your name, your reputation. You might not want to help out the Foreign Office again and you certainly don’t need the money, but you enjoy the work. You’d lose that—which ambassador’s wife is going to want to receive a smuggler’s widow? The Queen most certainly wouldn’t have her at Court. Let Tamsyn go now, let her calm down. Ride back slowly, take her at her word that she doesn’t want you.’

  ‘I know all that. Don’t think I haven’t had what is expected of me dinned into me since I was old enough to understand.’

  But she didn’t say she did not want me. What if she loves me? What have I done?

  The frustration and anger came down like a red mist in front of his vision. Cris urged Jackdaw forward alongside his friend’s mount, bunched his right fist and hit Gabe square on the jaw. He held his panicked horse in check for long enough to see Gabriel sit up on the heather, rubbing his chin and swearing, then kicked into a gallop after Tamsyn.

  He had no time for thinking as he raced after her. She knew this country like the back of her hand, and so did Foxy, but he did not and the track was treacherous. He caught sight of her only as Jackdaw plunged skidding and sweating down Stibworthy’s cobbled street past the inn, and by then she was already vanishing down the track to Barbary Cove.

  He reined in, reassured that she was going home and that nothing much could happen between there and the house. Jackdaw was tired, but game, and proved a handful to keep to a trot. On impulse, when they reached the fork that led to the clifftop where they had picnicked, he dismounted, tied the reins up and slapped Jackdaw’s rump. When the big black trotted on down to the stable Cris walked up to the summit, then made for the almost hidden path to the lookout hut.

  Inside, he shut the lower half of the door, sat down on the bench and stared out at the square of blue sea, blue sky, until his anger with Gabriel subsided and his brain started working clearly again. He had done the only possible thing, he told himself. The only honourable thing. He had slept with Tamsyn and that had put him even more under an obligation to defend her. But he had no obligation to marry her now. Unless she expected it. But she had rejected him in court when she thought he was plain Mr Defoe and had been horrified to discover he was a marquess.

  The crunch of feet on stone was the only warning he had before the hut door opened and someone ducked inside. For a moment there was simply a figure in silhouette against the brightness, then he recognised her at the same moment that she saw him. ‘Tamsyn.’

  ‘You.’ She recoiled in shock and he leapt for her, his stomach clenching in fear at the thought of the closeness of the cliff edge, the narrowness of the path. He caught her by both wrists as she teetered on the brink, yanked her back into the hut and fell with her in a tangle of limbs on the hard wooden bench.

  She was quivering in his arms and he realised he was shaking with the sheer horror of that moment when he thought she was going over the edge. Then his mouth was on hers and her hands were clenched in his hair and they were kissing with a ferocity that swept everything away but the urgency to mate, there, then, on the hard wooden bench.

  Tamsyn’s hands were on his falls and he twisted to give her access even as he dragged up her skirts and found the hot, wet core of her. She pressed into his hand as she freed him from the tangle of shirt tails, the constriction of breeches that had become too tight on his aroused flesh.

  ‘Cris.’ It was a demand, a plea, an order, and he came down over her, into her with a single thrust. She came apart on the instant and her cry, the hot, tight grasp of her, almost sent him over the edge before he could withdraw.

  There was a moment’s perfect bliss as they lay in a hot, tangled, s
ticky heap, the aftershocks of his release sending spikes of pleasure through him. Then Tamsyn shoved at his shoulders, hit out, writhed beneath him.

  ‘Stop fighting me, damn it.’ He sprawled on top of her as she bucked against his weight and in sheer self-defence he caught her wrists above her head.

  ‘Let me go.’

  ‘The moment you promise not to scratch my eyes out or go rushing out on to that cliff edge again. You took ten years off my life, woman.’

  She subsided, panting, and Cris sat up, keeping his distance as much as possible in the cramped space as he stuffed his shirt back into his breeches and fastened his falls.

  Tamsyn wrenched down her skirts as she struggled up. ‘You lied to me.’

  ‘A moment ago you were crying out in ecstasy in my arms.’

  She buried her face in her hands, then pushed back her hair impatiently. ‘I don’t know what that was.’

  ‘Fright, relief, sheer irrational lust. And I did not lie to you. I withheld information.’

  ‘Why?’

  Cris had asked himself the same question often enough over the past few days. Now, as the mists of sexual release began to clear, he forced himself to focus. ‘Because I found I enjoyed being Mr No One in Particular. I can hardly recall what it was like not being the Marquess of Avenmore. This is the first time, as an adult, that I have ever experienced that freedom. I found I liked Barbary Combe House and its inhabitants. I found I valued the peace and the informality and the lack of fuss. If I had said who I was, what I was, you would all have treated me differently. I did you no harm by not telling you my title.’

  ‘I would never have slept with you if I had known.’

  ‘Why not? A naked marquess is no different from any other man in a bed.’

  ‘Don’t be disingenuous.’ Tamsyn sounded more weary than angry now. She was flushed and he could see a red mark where the collar of his riding coat must have chafed her neck. ‘You know perfectly well why not. You might like to take a holiday from who you are now and again, but the rest of us cannot. You had the arrogance to think that it did not matter, deceiving me. You enjoyed playing the knight in shining armour and setting out to protect me, and now your pride has almost landed you with a scandal that you have escaped by the skin of your teeth.’ She drew up her legs and wrapped her arms around them, rested her head on her knees so he could only see part of her face.

  ‘Tamsyn, you should take no notice of Gabriel. He is my friend and he is simply trying to protect me. Dukes have married actresses before now and the heavens have not fallen.’

  ‘But presumably they both wished to be married to each other.’

  The sarcasm in her voice was like a slap on the face. Cris realised that he had believed, deep down, that Tamsyn would want to marry him, and her rejection, whilst it had to be a relief, was an assault on his pride. He was eligible beyond her wildest dreams, they were good in bed together, they seemed to get on well—yes, she was angry and upset about him implying that they were lovers in open court, but once she had got past that…

  ‘You wouldn’t want to be married to me?’ He should take her rejection thankfully, and leave it, leave her. He was free to marry the right wife for the Marquess of Avenmore. And yet some demon had control of his tongue. ‘Leaving aside my title for a moment—’ He ignored her muttered response to that, ignored his own common sense telling him not to pursue this argument. ‘What else makes you react like this?’

  ‘I cannot marry you.’ There was something desolate in her tone before her chin came up and her voice hardened. ‘One of the benefits of being an ordinary peasant, dust beneath your lordship’s boots, is that one can marry whom one loves, someone who loves you back. And ours would have been no love match, would it, my lord?’

  ‘I am not sure what being in love means.’ That was certainly true. He had almost died because he had got his head into such a mess over Katerina. ‘I like you, I desire you, I would have tried to make you happy.’

  Leave it, drop the matter, you have done all that honour demands.

  The memory came of his father’s voice as they had walked down the long gallery at Avenmore Park together. He had pointed out each ancestral portrait and enumerated the reasons why each wife had been chosen, her bloodlines, her connections, her dowry.

  ‘Each marriage strengthens our house, our line. There is nothing more important than the choice of your marchioness, the mother of your children.’

  ‘You cannot.’ Tamsyn gave a deep, shuddering sigh. ‘And I know it, even if you cannot accept that you would not be every woman’s dream husband.’

  Well, that answers that. She is not in love with me, she doesn’t want to marry me. I am, quite definitely, free. Perversely it did not make him feel any happier, but presumably that was his wounded pride.

  ‘What do you want to do now?’ Cris asked. He knew what he wanted, which was to take her into his arms and let her weep, something he suspected she was fighting against with every ounce of her willpower. He wanted to tell her to look after herself, cosset herself against the stress of the day, but she would only fling that back in his face as patronising.

  ‘I will go back down to Barbary, tell the aunts that everything is all right, tell them…tell them what happened in court so they do not hear rumours and gossip and be taken unawares.’

  ‘Will you tell them who I am?’

  ‘No. Not until you have gone and perhaps not even then. They would not understand why you could not tell us.’ She stood up, hunched under the low roof. ‘And you are going, aren’t you, Cris? Soon.’

  He followed her out along the narrow ledge, up on to the cliff, acutely conscious of the drop to his right, of the sea crashing on the rocks beneath as she stood looking out to sea, the wind whipping her uncovered hair back into a ragged banner behind her, her skirts tight around the long horsewoman’s legs.

  ‘You want me to leave?’

  ‘Yes. I want you gone.’ She said it without apparent anger, with a weariness that hurt more than harsh words would have done.

  ‘And I want you safe.’

  ‘I will pay the two chairmen to stay here as bodyguards, I will puzzle out what it is that Franklin wants so badly he will kill for it. I will employ more of the villagers to guard the farm and the flocks. I will do all those things I would have done before you ever came into my life, my lord.’

  My lord. She uses the title like an insult. Yes, he would go and he would pursue Chelford with every resource he could muster and, if he could not find out what the man wanted with Barbary Combe House and its occupants, if he could find no proof that would stand up in law, then Franklin Holt was going to find himself in the hold of a ship bound for Australia.

  He watched Tamsyn walk away from him, back straight, head up. This was the woman who had seen her husband leap to his death like a hunted stag, who had faced down a courtroom, who had dragged him from the sea. And she was walking out of his life, and he must be glad because that was what she wanted.

  *

  She could not face the aunts, not yet. Tamsyn closed the door of the summer house and struggled to find some composure. What was she becoming? What was this nightmare doing to her? One moment all she wanted was to be part of Cris in the most carnal way possible, the next she was seized with disgust at herself for throwing herself at a man who wanted her only for the moment.

  This mystery had brought her Cris, and love, but she could not be glad, not even for the memories of those two perfect nights in his arms. He would be gone soon, back to London and the world that he belonged to and to the search for a wife who was a well-bred, well-dowered, well-connected virgin who would bear his children. All the things I am not and cannot be.

  Eventually, when she had her hair and her clothing and her face under as much control as she could manage, she ran across the lawn and slipped in through the front door. There was no sound of anyone talking, the aunts must be in their room. She reached the foot of the stairs when a heavy tread made her turn. ‘You.’
/>   ‘Yes, me, the nasty Lord Edenbridge.’ He leaned against the table on which she had left her flower arrangement, his gypsy-dark, dangerously masculine looks a startling contrast to the wispy grasses and the lush femininity of roses. ‘Where is Cris?’

  She shrugged. ‘Up on the cliff.’

  ‘Where you made love and had a thundering row, I suppose. Tamsyn—’

  ‘Mrs Perowne to you, my lord.’

  How does he know what we have been doing? I suppose I still look as though I’ve been tumbled like some country trollop. Which is what he thinks I am anyway.

  ‘Mrs Perowne. I mean you no ill, but Cris is my friend and I’ll not see him brought down by an entanglement.’

  She held up a hand to stop him. ‘I have untangled him from my lures, such as they are. He will go back to London very soon, rest assured, my lord. You will have him safely back in his rightful environment, far from scandal and unsuitable women.’

  Something changed in his expression, some slight shift towards sympathy. ‘Are you in love with him, Tamsyn?’ He did not wait for an answer. ‘It is better this way, believe me. Cris is a prisoner of his responsibilities to Avenmore and he would not thank you for freeing him from those chains.’ He turned abruptly and walked away, his elbow catching a spray of roses, sending the soft crimson petals shaking and tumbling on to the polished oak.

  Tamsyn picked up the trailing skirts of her riding habit and climbed slowly up the stairs to her aunts’ door, tapped and went in.

  Izzy, always demonstrative, jumped up from her embroidery and ran across to hug her. ‘Oh, my dear, that nice Mr Stone looked in to tell us it was all right and that you were on your way home, safe and sound. He said you’d found it rather upsetting, so not to expect you back immediately.’ She went back to her chair beside the sofa where Rosie was lying and the pair of them gazed at her expectantly.