Chapter Twenty-Four

B y the time the duchess's smartly turned-out landau, with a pair of high-stepping matched bays and a footman behind, passed through the crowd of equipages entering Hyde Park, Cassie knew they had been noticed. Though neither Amabel nor her circle would be in town in August, the year-round denizens of London who took note of the duchess and her companions would fuel London's tireless gossip machine.

Around them phaetons, cabriolets, a barouche or two, and even one lumbering old closed coach streamed through the screen at the entrance to the park heading for the Ring, the place for the fashionable to see and be seen. Marianne looked about, as the duchess discreetly identified some of the more prominent members of the elite, the renowned beauty, Lady Blessington among them. An enormous gray horse carried a military gentleman. An old lord of Falstaffian proportions dwarfed his rather delicate phaeton. A daring boy in a sailor suit dashed across the line of carriages in pursuit of a small dog.

Once they entered the long line of carriages winding through the park, they became part of an unhurried scene in which voices and laughter mixed with bird cries and a band playing somewhere, and always the steady clop of horses' hooves and the crush of wheels against gravel. The grass had a golden hue, and a few leaves of stately elms showed the autumn yellow to come. The lake was a steely patch of blue, fringed with reeds. Cassie readied herself to meet Raven. The duchess insisted that Cassie sit in the forward-facing seat so that she would be spotted. She wore a gown of serene glacial blue for a calm she was far from feeling with just a dash of garnet silk ribbons on her hat for boldness.

The duchess smiled encouragement. "He will be here."

In the crush of vehicles, they had not gone far when there he was, on horseback, coming along the parallel track. At his side, also mounted on a fine horse, was the Duke of Wenlocke. Raven's face when he saw her told Cassie how ill-prepared he was for the moment. His roan horse did a little dance until he brought it under control. His stunned gaze did not leave Cassie's face.

The duchess's own carriage came to a halt. There was a moment's confusion, and then Raven slid from his mount, and the duchess's footman went to take charge of the horse. An exchange of satisfied glances passed between the duke and duchess, Marianne directed a questioning look at Cassie, and then Raven opened the carriage door, letting down the steps, and offering Cassie his hand to aid her descent. Cassie, her spirits dancing, took that hand.

He was as she remembered him from that first day, tall and elegant, with a defiant flash in his dark eyes that she now understood. He was a raven among lesser birds, no fearful barnyard fowl preening and squawking and getting his feathers ruffled. He was haughty and cheeky, too.

He took her arm in his, and they began to walk, headed anywhere and nowhere in the rich ripe summer of sun-warmed earth and drying grass. As they sauntered on, he adjusted his stride to the rhythm of hers.

"I see that my friends have conspired against me, but you should know that I was on the point of returning to you," he said.

"Were you?" She slanted him an amused glance. He could have no idea of her impatience. "A word would have been nice. I did not know the state of your feelings."

"You must have guessed," he said, gazing warmly at her.

"I did not know that your engagement had ended until last week." She nudged him with her elbow.

He gave her a quick comprehending look. "So, you came for me."

"Are you shocked?"

"Merely a little frustrated that this is not the place for all that I want to say to you." He looked about. "Who are all these people? I thought London was deserted in August."

"Those people are our ambassadors," she said. "We must keep walking so that they will see us together and… talk."

"Ah," he said. "That's your plan. You will restore me to some sort of acceptance. It won't be easy. I've made enemies now. There will be people who choose to believe Hugh, and whatever ill-repute sticks to him, he still has friends, like Tyne."

"But you have friends, too. This afternoon show, the duchess tells me, is the ladies' battleground, where we go to outdo our rivals and lay siege to manly hearts."

"You have no need to lay siege to my heart. You won it long ago."

She smiled at that. "But you did not know, did you, until the night of the ball?"

His expression turned serious. She quite liked this freedom to study him.

"Yes, that disastrous night. It serves me right for my single-mindedness and determination to have everything go according to plans I made months earlier. And I was angry with you, that is I thought I was angry with you. I told myself that if I worked only for Amabel and planned for her, I would forget you."

"Did you?"

"Not for a minute. Custom required me to open the ball with you, and your grandmother let me know that she expected nothing less. But I knew that for Amabel, who was, after all, expecting my proposal, to see me open the ball with you would be difficult." He gave a rueful laugh. "Possibly, the worst proposal ever offered a woman. I rushed it so that she could have her moment."

He fell silent, and Cassie reflected how this talking and sharing of feelings was new to her. She had done nothing of the kind with Torrington. She would have confessions of her own to make sometime in their future, now that they had a future.

"You think that if you had danced with me first, you would not have proposed? You were in a very difficult place. I knew that you had raised expectations that it would be most ungentlemanly of you to disappoint."

"If her sentiments were as deeply engaged as I had led her to believe mine were, I was bound."

He looked out over the park. "We came here sometimes as boys, at night, or very near night, in summer, just to play in the woods and climb trees. Wenlocke, before he was kidnapped, lived in his mother's house, not far from here. He knew his way around. Sometimes there were fetes and fireworks or music. I wanted to be like the people we saw from our hiding places. Courting Amabel was a way to enter that glittering world."

There was disillusionment there, and Cassie understood. She, too, had been dazzled by someone from that world. Raven was opening his heart to her, unburdening himself of wounds that lay there.

Oarsmen rowed their boats on the lake, boys launched tiny sailboats from the shore, and a very small girl and her mother fed the ducks.

"Do you think of me as a gentleman?" he asked abruptly, turning to her. The question was earnest, pressing even. Her heart lurched. She could guess what had been said to him, the wound it made.

Cassie stopped. Slowly, gently she put her hand on that wounded heart. "Unquestionably," she said. "I have never met a finer."

He covered her hand with his. They stood still as others passed around them on the path. They would certainly get themselves talked about. At last one rude comment compelled them to walk again.

"Ramsbury was quite determined to prove I was not a gentleman, but a cad who had wronged his daughter. However, Amabel does not want to marry me. She merely wants compensation for having been engaged. Their lawyers prolonged the argument as long as they could, but in the end, they didn't have a winning case."

"The duchess told me that her duke and your grandfather are formidable opponents."

"They are, and I am grateful to them. It is only right that it took some time to become disentangled from my own folly." He turned to her. "And until I did, I could not come to you."

"Do you call it folly?" she asked.

"It kept me from you," he said. "It took me long enough to know my feelings. I suspected myself of terrible disloyalty to Amabel."

"So you quarreled with me in the rain?"

"Yes. And wanted to kiss you at the same time. Now I've shocked you."

"Ah," she said.

"What struck me the night of the ball, and it flashed upon me almost like this comet everyone's going on about, was that I liked you. I liked you before I loved you. What hurt the afternoon of our quarrel was thinking that I had been wrong to like you, that you did not like me."

"I wonder that you did not see how much I liked you, more than I should have liked a man intent on winning another woman's love." She paused. "You know about my foot, but you don't know how I made such fool of myself in London over Torrington, a man everyone but me could see was going to marry another. I thought I could never love again."

He stopped walking abruptly and hauled her up a short bank to an ancient tree with drooping branches, ducking, he pulled her into a green space apart from the crowds below.

"I can see that this hat of yours," he said, tilting her chin up, "is the height of fashion." It was a little joke about the silk flowers piled on the hat's crown. In his eyes was a curious, almost disinterested expression, a man facing the mysteries of a woman's dress. He tugged the end of the wide garnet ribbon under her chin and the bow gave, letting the ribbons flutter down her bodice. An answering flutter started low in Cassie's belly. He brushed the ribbons back over her shoulders and rested his hands there. "You don't need to wear fine gowns or fashionable hats for me. I had to learn how to see you. I caught a glimpse that first day, but until the ball I did not see you… whole."

His eyes grew solemn. "I love you, Cassie. I have been calling you Cassie in my head since the day of our quarrel in the rain. I quarreled with Jay because he was happily calling you Bluebell when I had lost any chance of speaking to you at all."

Cassie reached up and lay her hand against his cheek and brushed that cheek with her thumb. "I love you, Raven."

His kiss when it came was sudden and impassioned, the end of holding back and waiting, the end of the advance and retreat of the dance they had been doing from the beginning. Cassie returned it with all the fierceness she possessed. He had invited her into this other dance, in which her damaged foot could not hold her back, a joyful dance of soaring spirits. And yet even as he claimed her, and she him, Cassie knew they would fly higher into an endless sky.

When he released her, to hold her lightly in his arms, their hearts still thundering, she remembered that they were not alone, but in the middle of the most crowded park in London.

She leaned her head against his chest. "We must turn back, you know. There is one more part of this afternoon's plan."

"And that is?" He showed no inclination to move, his voice a low, lazy rumble.

"For the duchess to take us both up in her carriage. We must be seen together for the plan to work." She pulled against his hold, and smiling, touched her fingers to his lips, a promise of other times.