His Christmas Countess Page 7

  Grant tied the gelding to a ring on the rear wall of the building and strolled round to the front. There were stone benches set under the portico and it would be good to rest there awhile and think about his grandfather.

  The sound of laughter stopped him in mid-stride. He recognised Charlie’s uninhibited shrieks, but there was a light, happy laugh he did not recognise at all. He walked on, his boots silent on the sheep-cropped turf, and stopped again at the corner.

  A rug was spread out on the grassy flat area in front of the temple steps and a woman in a dark grey gown was sitting on it, her arms wrapped around her knees, her eyes shaded by a wide straw hat as she watched Charlie chasing a ball. An open parasol was lying by her side.

  ‘Maman, look!’ Charlie hurled the ball high, then flung himself full length to catch it.

  The woman clapped, the enthusiasm of her applause tipping her hat back off her head to roll away down the slope. Long brown hair, the colour of milky coffee, glossy in the sunlight, tumbled free from the confining pins and she laughed. ‘Catch my hat, Charlie!’

  Maman? Grant started forward as Charlie caught the hat, turned and saw him. He rushed uphill shrieking, ‘Papa! Papa! Look, Maman—Papa’s home.’

  The woman swung round on the rug as Charlie thudded into Grant, his hard little head butting into his stomach. He scooped him up, tucked him under his arm and strode down to her. She tilted her head back, sending the waves of hair slithering like unfolding silk and giving him an unimpeded view of an oval face, blue eyes, a decided chin and pink lips open in surprise.

  ‘My…my lord, we did not expect to see you for another day at least.’ Her face lost its colour, her relaxed body seemed to tighten in on itself.

  Kate? Of course it is Kate, but… He did something about his own dropped jaw, gave himself a mental shake and managed to utter a coherent sentence. ‘I made good time.’ He set Charlie on his feet. ‘Maman?’

  ‘Stepmamas are in fairy stories and they are always wicked. So I asked Mr Gough for the words for mama in lots of languages and we looked them up and I chose maman. Maman likes it,’ his son assured Grant earnestly. ‘She said it was elegant.’

  *

  ‘Will you not sit down?’ It was extraordinary how it was possible to sound quite calm outwardly when her insides were in a jumble of feelings, the overriding one of which was confusion. Kate gestured towards the open basket and managed what she hoped was a welcoming smile. ‘Do have some luncheon. We have enough food to withstand a siege. Charlie, as always, assured Cook that we might be lost in the woods for days. We never are, but Cook does not like to take the risk.’

  When in doubt when dealing with a man, feed the beast, her mother had always said with a chuckle. Kate kept her tone serious and was rewarded by the slight upward tilt of one corner of Grant’s mouth. He had a sense of humour, then. It had not been possible to detect it in his dutiful letters, which had not been made any less dry by the fact they contained nothing but gossip. Presumably that was all wives were supposed to be interested in.

  Wives, of course, were perfectly capable of reading the newssheets and keeping informed that way, although that simple fact did not seem to occur to men. Her brother, Henry, had always been amazed when she revealed an opinion on anything from income tax to child labour and he firmly believed that thinking led to weakening of the feminine brain. Kate pushed away the resentment and watched her husband as he moved round to drop to the rug at her side and discovered Anna lying under the parasol, kicking her legs and chewing on a bone ring.

  Grant reached over and tickled her and the resentment retreated some more. He was good with the children, she must remember that.

  ‘She has grown and she looks to be thriving. As do you,’ he added. ‘I scarcely recognised you.’

  From the way Grant shut his mouth with a snap he realised that was a less than tactful remark. Instead of saying so Kate wrestled her hair into a twist and jammed the hat back on top. ‘Babies tend to grow in the natural course of things. But she is very well, as am I.’ She sent him a considering, sideways glance, making sure he saw it. ‘You look much better than I remembered.’

  That very forward remark obviously caught him by surprise. Grant tossed his low-crowned hat aside and shifted round to look directly at her, eyes narrowing. ‘Thank you. I think.’

  She had known him to be a good-looking man when she married him, but not this attractive, with a London gloss on his hair and clothes, his face tanned from his long ride north. ‘In December you looked haggard, bruised and exhausted. You were recovering from a blow to the head and you were grieving,’ Kate said with a slight shrug. His eyes moved down to her breasts as she moved and she caught her breath at the answering flare of heat in her belly. The fact that she had a figure obviously interested him. No doubt it was the transformation of her bosom; men could be very predictable.

  It was nearly five months since Anna’s birth now. She had passed through exhaustion to a conviction that when she felt stronger she never wanted a man to touch her again. After all, her first, and only, experience had not been so pleasurable as to have her yearning for more.

  And that comfortable state had lasted for three months until the moment when she had looked up from the dinner table to see Grant’s portrait hanging on the opposite wall, just as it had since the day she arrived. It had been part of the decoration of the house, hardly regarded, but that evening she had felt a startling stab of attraction as she met the direct green gaze. The feeling had been so visceral, so unashamedly physical, that she’d choked on her fish terrine and Mr Gough had rushed round the table to offer her water.

  Since the arrival of Grant’s letter announcing his return she had been in an unseemly state of confusion, alarm and anticipation. This was her husband—and husbands expected their rights.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘After all, I was in the process of giving birth,’ Kate continued calmly, hoping the frankness of her words accounted for the heat in her cheeks. The thought of Grant exercising his husbandly rights made her positively breathless. ‘It is hardly surprising that we both now appear to be tolerably well looking in comparison. Of course, I could tell that you were a well-favoured man, even then, but it must be a relief for you to discover that I am not quite as bracket-faced as you feared.’

  ‘It is difficult to know how to reply to that.’ Grant was not used to being left at a loss for words, she could tell. Possibly he was slightly flattered, although he must be accustomed to being regarded as good-looking. Possibly also he was feeling a trifle awkward about letting her see what he had thought of her before.

  ‘There is no need to say anything.’ She was not a conventional beauty, she never had been, but she thought that these days she looked at least tolerable, and, if Grant now thought so, too, she was content with that.

  ‘I have been away a long time, longer than I intended.’ He had decided to get all the apologising over at once, it seemed. Kate wondered if the length of his absence had anything to do with his mental image of his new wife. Had he escaped to London and the arms of a beautiful mistress? As apologies went, it was not very effusive, more a statement of fact than of regret.

  ‘We have managed very well and you were a most regular correspondent.’ Not that I understand you any better now than before you left. And you are a man, not a saint, so I must not feel jealous of a mistress—she is only to be expected. But if you take one up here, one that I know about, that will be a different matter. The stab of jealousy was unexpected and she diverted it into a vicious cut at the pastry in front of her. ‘Would you care for a slice of raised pie?’ she enquired to cover the impulse to snap out a demand to know all about this theoretical other woman. ‘It is chicken and ham.’

  ‘Papa, are you home for long?’ Charlie had been sitting almost on his father’s feet, obviously on the point of bursting with the effort to Be Good and not interrupt the adults.

  ‘For the summer. Ough!’ Grant fell back on the rug under the impact of Charlie’s
flying leap and hug. ‘You are too big for jumping on your poor father. Big enough to come out with me and start learning about the estate, I think, provided you keep up your lessons to Mr Gough’s satisfaction. Now, sit quietly and eat your picnic while I talk to your stepmama.’ Grant settled the boy between them and against her side Kate could feel her husband’s encircling arm and the child’s skinny little body quivering with happiness like an overexcited puppy.

  The arm was warm and it was tempting to lean into it, to feel the muscled strength braced to support her. Kate sat up straight and filled a plate for Grant from the picnic basket.

  ‘Thank you. Have you heard from your brother yet?’ he asked as he took the food from her.

  ‘No. I have not written to him and I would, of course, have mentioned it in my letters if I had. I do not want him to know of this marriage. I do not want him to know where I am. To be perfectly frank, we were not close. We did not part on good terms and it would be awkward…’ She’d scoured the newspapers daily, looking for the arrest or trial of Sir Henry Harding, baronet, for blackmail. But perhaps aristocrats had other ways of dealing with the potentially explosive matter of extortion. She shivered. But there had been no notice of Henry’s death, either.

  ‘Awkward to have him asking questions about our marriage?’

  She nodded, grateful that he had jumped to the wrong conclusion. She did not want Henry to know about her marriage because, beside him embroiling her any deeper in his schemes, she had no idea how he would react. At best, he would attempt to borrow money from his new brother-in-law. At worst, he could cause the most dreadful scandal and she could not inflict that on Grant.

  ‘I would be much happier if you did not make contact with him.’ And find out who Anna’s father is and realise just how I came to lose my virginity to the man and became an accomplice in blackmail. Grant was the kind of principled gentleman who would never allow such dishonesty to go unpunished, whatever the scandal. Let sleeping dogs lie…

  Grant shrugged. ‘We are going to have to deal with him sooner or later. In the meantime, are you opposed to entertaining a small house party? It had not occurred to me to propose it, but now I see you looking—’

  ‘More the thing?’ Kate suggested, swallowing the hurt. Had he really thought to shut her away up here, an unpaid housekeeper and guardian for his son, simply because he considered her plain and awkward? Now, it seemed, he did not fear she would embarrass him in front of his friends. The fact that she had welcomed the seclusion was neither here nor there.

  ‘More rested,’ Grant supplied smoothly. ‘And from your letters it sounds as though you have the household well in hand.’

  ‘Your staff are well chosen and well trained. Once they had accepted that I really was your wife, and not some stray you had picked up on the moors, they have proved most cooperative.’ Not that she would have stood for any nonsense. She had been used to helping run a small household, so she knew the principles, and she was all too aware that if she did not secure the respect and loyalty of the staff of this much larger one right from the start, then she never would. It was another mark in Grant’s favour, the loyalty and affection they showed for him.

  ‘How small a house party?’ she enquired, leaning away from him to give Anna a quick kiss and to hide the uncertainty that she could manage the sort of gathering an earl might hold. Provided it was here, on what had become her own turf, she was not too anxious.

  ‘No more than three close friends of mine, potentially with partners. I’ve had enough formal socialising in London to last me several months. Charlie, do you remember Lord Weybourn?’

  ‘Uncle Alex?’

  ‘Yes. He was married in January. I thought to ask him and his wife to stay. And, if they are still in the country, Lord Avenmore and Lord Edenbridge. They are old friends,’ he added for Kate’s benefit. ‘The two bachelors might bring their unmarried sisters, perhaps, to balance out the men.’

  ‘That sounds delightful.’ Kate took a bread roll from the basket, then sat with it in her hands, wondering why she had picked it up. The longer Grant sat beside her, the more her appetite deserted her. It was nerves, that was all. She was happy that he was back, for Charlie’s sake if nothing else—only, there was a hollow feeling of anticipation, as though the air had been sucked out of her lungs. This was her husband and he was going to expect to begin a normal married life, with all that entailed. Part of that hollowness was apprehension, but a good part was excitement and she had been making herself face that ever since the arrival of the letter announcing his return.

  She put the bread roll back untasted, handed Charlie an apple turnover and smiled as he ran off, mouth full, to retrieve his ball. Beside her Grant was silent and she sought for small talk to fill the void. ‘It has been…quiet. I am glad you are back. The children are very absorbing, of course.’

  ‘But they are not adults. You have been lonely.’ When she murmured agreement he asked, ‘Have none of our neighbours called?’

  ‘Dr Meldreth and his wife and the vicar and his sister, that is all. Please, do not make too much of it. I am in mourning, after all, and in the country people do observe that very rigorously. I see them in church on Sunday, naturally, and I usually dine with Mr Gough.’

  ‘Now I am back I will visit all our neighbours, let the ladies know we are not in strict mourning any longer. You should get any number of calls within days.’

  Charlie’s voice floated down from the portico of the mausoleum. ‘…and now Papa’s back I will help him with the estate, just like he helped you, Great-Grandpapa. You’ll be proud of me when I do that, I expect, Mama.’

  ‘What the devil?’ Grant swung round, sending the lemonade jug rocking. ‘Who is he talking to? My grandfather, his mother? Is the child delusional?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Kate grabbed his arm as he began to get to his feet. Grant shot her a frowning look, but settled back down beside her when she did not relax her grip. ‘He missed his great-grandfather, so we started coming down here so that he could talk to him. And then he realised that his mama was here, too. He understands that we do not know what happens after death and he doesn’t think he is talking to ghosts or anything unhealthy like that. But it comforts him, helps him to sort out his feelings. Rather like writing a diary, I suppose.’ Kate came up on her knees beside Grant, her hand on the unyielding arm braced to push him to his feet. ‘Did I do wrong? He is not at all morbid about it and this is a lovely place. A peaceful place, where he can remember happy times.’

  ‘He cannot remember his mother, he never really knew her, she died when he was only just two.’ Grant stayed where he was, but the tension radiated off him. Had he loved his first wife so much that he could not bear any mention of her? But that was not what Dr Meldreth had implied. The staff in the house acted and spoke as though Charlie’s mother was a grief that could not be spoken about, becoming thin-lipped and awkward if Kate made any reference to her. There were no portraits, not even in Charlie’s room.

  ‘He says he remembers her scent and the fact that she always wore blue, but that is all. I have no idea whether it is accurate, but it helps him to have that faint image. He is certain that she was beautiful.’

  ‘She was.’ Grant’s voice softened. ‘Blonde and blue-eyed, which is why she favoured blue in her dress. She always wore jasmine scent and on a warm evening it lingered in the air like the ghost of incense…’ Kate closed her eyes at the hint of pain beneath the reminiscent tone. ‘Charlie would do well to forget she ever existed,’ he said and turned so his back was to the little temple.

  ‘Grant!’ Kate stared at him, then scooped up Anna as the baby began to cry, as unsettled by his abruptly harsh tone as she was.

  ‘She was a disaster as a mother.’

  And a disaster as a wife? ‘He need not know that,’ Kate said fiercely.

  ‘Of course not, what do you take me for?’

  ‘I do not know. I do not know you. But he needs the confidence of knowing he had a mother who loved hi
m, even if she was not very good at it in your eyes. What does it matter if you do not like it, if it is best for Charlie?’

  ‘Damn it, Kate. You presume to lecture me on my own child?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’ She glared back at him over the top of Anna’s bonneted head, aware that she was bristling like a stable cat defending her kittens. Then she saw the darkness in Grant’s eyes, the memory of goodness knew what past miseries. ‘I am sorry, but I am his stepmother and you left him with me to look after. He is still only a little boy, not ready for harsh truths.’ She rocked the baby, trying to soothe her. ‘What did she do that was so unforgivable?’

  Grant got to his feet in one fast movement, a controlled release of pent-up tension. ‘I am sorry, but I have no intention of raking over old history. Madeleine is in the past and there is nothing you need to know.’ He bent to pick up his hat. ‘If you will excuse me, Kate, I will ride on to the house and take Charlie with me. I assume a footman is coming out in the gig to collect you and bring the basket back?’

  ‘Yes, I expect him very soon.’ Kate was glad of Anna grizzling in her arms, demanding her attention. She did not want to look into those shadowed eyes and see his anger with her, or his pain over his beautiful, lost wife.

  He called to Charlie and the boy came running to be hoisted up into the saddle in front of his father. Grant gave him the reins. ‘Wave goodbye to your stepmama.’

  When the sound of hooves died away and Charlie’s excited chatter faded amongst the trees, Kate fed and changed Anna, packed away the baby things in one basket and the remains of the picnic in the other and got to her feet, too restless to wait for the footman and the gig.