Chapter 18

—after a month Kay apparently decided he'd had enough, for he stood up, glared at me, and announced to his tutor, ‘Since she has all the answers, why doesn't she do the bloody assignment?' "

Thomas laughed. They had stopped beneath a hawthorn tree. The sunlight piercing the feathery foliage above cast a shimmering mosaic of light and shadow over Fia's upturned face.

"And did you?" he asked.

Fia cast him an impish look. True, a month ago he probably would not have been able to identify it as such, but they'd spent so much time in each other's company that he'd begun to discern the subtleties of her expressions.

It was rather like peering over the edge of a boat into deep water. One had to look past the reflected sky to see the glories hidden beneath the surface. It was an immensely addictive endeavor. He lo—He delighted in watching Fia.

"Did you?" he prompted again, and won a brief, self-deprecating smile.

She leaned her back against the tree and crossed her arms. "No. Mr. Elton began giving me private lessons and thus stopped me from interrupting Kay's with my disastrously uninformed queries. We were both much happier for it. Kay," she said confidingly, "is quite competitive, you know." At his look of speculation, she nodded sagely. "And he crows something terrible when he wins."

The darling! Somehow he managed to refrain from telling her that Kay had said pretty much the same thing about her. He'd disbelieved the lad then, but no longer. He believed quite a bit he would never have credited.

"Didn't your—didn't you have instructors when you were a child?" By tacit agreement they both had excluded the name "Carr" from their vocabulary, as well as "James Barton." "Or perhaps you didn't attend those you had very well?" he teased.

Fia loved to be teased. Her eyes fair gleamed with pleasure with the smallest bit of badinage … as they did now.

"We had none," she said lightly. "Though I think Ash received a sporadic education at the hands of the local vicar. And Raine was at Eton until he was expelled."

"But you were not educated."

The faintest of colors washed up her throat. If he hadn't been looking for it, he wouldn't have noted it.

"I knew how to read and write, though not what to read. Remember, I was being groomed for a different role." She picked her words carefully.

"When I arrived at Bramble House I was wiser than a woman thrice my years but I was also as ignorant as a turnip. I remember eavesdropping on Kay's lesson one of my first days there. I couldn't believe the magnitude of what I did not know." Her voice grew hushed. "And I undertook learning it all."

She glanced at him and a spark of amusement lit her eyes. "And before you comment, I realize that I have not in all ways been successful."

It was true. Every now and again in the course of one of their conversations, he would make some remark that would cause her to stop him. She would make him repeat himself and then, with the skill and tenacity of the most seasoned barrister, query him until she'd exhausted whatever knowledge he had on the matter. The gaps in her learning were broad and unpredictable and her thirst for the knowledge to fill those gaps was immeasurable.

"I am a gentleman, I would never point out a lady's shortcomings."

Her arms dropped to her sides. "Yes," she said, taking a step forward, bringing her closer to him, "you are a gentleman."

He smiled at her and, before he realized what he was doing, lifted a tress of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. It was silky and warm where the sun had toasted it.

"Are you disappointed?" he asked.

In answer, she turned her head as though to catch the touch of his knuckles against her cheek. He must be imagining it. He'd taken to investing her expressions with his own yearning.

Yearning. What a pallid term for this feeling. He leaned toward her a little, hoping she would lift her face to his. She didn't.

"Do you know what the word ‘platonic' means?" he asked.

She stepped away, concentrating. "I believe it is a form of … affection, defined by the Greek philosopher Plato."

"Exactly. And what type of affection is it?"

She met his gaze, shadows advancing to cloud the blameless blue of her eyes. "The affection of deep friendship."

He would never presume she might view him as a friend … he wasn't even sure he wanted her to. It might preclude something else. But the darkness eclipsing her bright eyes made him immediately aware of the ridiculousness of suggesting to her that any relationship exist between them—most especially something else .

He'd kidnapped her, for God's sake! He was keeping her here so that she might not bring harm to his best friend. Or so he'd once told himself. He was no longer sure what he was doing or why he kept her. He only knew it had very little to do with James Barton anymore.

She, on the other hand, was simply making the best of an untenable situation. He should be thankful that since they'd taken dinner together in the kitchen a week ago she'd not once alluded to, or evinced the slightest inclination of, seducing him.

More's the damn pity.

Instead, he'd begun … begun … wooing her. Yes. Trying to coax out one of her rare smiles, make her laugh, make her speak without first considering her words. She was still standing, waiting patiently for … for what?

The answer was loweringly obvious—for them to continue their walk.

"Is something amiss?" she asked.

Once more, his humor saved the situation. "Forgive me," he said, pulling himself together. "I swallowed something unpalatable."

"All's well now, I trust?" she inquired innocently.

"Everything is fine."

"Perhaps you'd like to return to the manor?"

"By no means. Please, let us continue." He offered her his arm, and after a brief hesitation she took it and fell into pace beside him.

"You speak fondly of your stepchildren. You've mentioned Kay several times."

She seemed to find the return to more mundane subjects a relief. "Yes. I like him very well."

"Tell me about him."

As usual when he asked something of a private nature, her chin rose a small degree as though she was bracing herself. Would he betray her trust? How much would he absorb before he used what she told him against her? she would be asking herself. He knew because he asked himself the same question each time she asked him to reveal something of himself. Yet she had not backed down from his queries. And neither had he.

It was heady and dangerous, this conversation they enjoyed, both of them wanting so much to believe in the other that they ignored the deep-seated suspicion neither had been able to purge. And only lately Thomas had become aware of an unforeseen consequence of their verbal intercourse: It was immensely arousing.

There was, he now suspected, a very good reason the biblical cant for coitus was "knowledge."

"I shall never forgive myself for Pip's having been wounded," she said instead of answering his question about Kay. He'd noted that the evenness of her voice was often in direct contrast to the depths of the emotions she guarded.

He no longer blamed her for Pip. He'd learned too much since. Some she'd told him, some he'd guessed, filling in the areas she was loath to speak about.

Fia had met Pip and been touched by his boyish playfulness. With no template to follow, she'd treated Pip as she'd treated the only other boy of her acquaintance, a boy who patently had no romantic interest in her, her stepson, Kay. She'd not foreseen that Pip would misconstrue her easy camaraderie for something else. And when she'd discovered it, it had been too late.

"I am sorry," he said.

She did not ask for what, but her fingers tightened briefly on his sleeve. They walked silently for a while, the scent of flinty, wet rock and pine needles rising with each step.

"Does young Kay miss his father?" he asked.

"Gregory? Some, but then Gregory wasn't with us much."

"And do you miss your husband?" He had no idea why he asked.

She stopped abruptly, turned, and considered him a long minute before saying, "Gregory MacFarlane was a dull-witted man with no greater aspiration than to be approved of by rakes, roues, and rotters. He treated his children with benign neglect and me with alarmed tolerance, which is better than most parents treat their children and far better than I expected. I neither loved nor hated him, respected nor despised him, which made our marriage a most unremarkable one."

"Why did you marry him?" It was an unfair question; she might not even know why Carr had wed her to MacFarlane.

"I married him for his house," she said, and walked away.

"Certainly there was more to it than that," he insisted, catching up and stopping her with a hand on her arm. "Carr wouldn't have need of a farmhouse in the lowlands."

"Carr?" she echoed. "What has Carr to do with this?"

"I assumed he'd … persuaded you to wed MacFarlane."

"Why would you think such a thing?" she asked.

He watched her in growing consternation. "Because," he said gently, "as you yourself acknowledged, Carr had groomed you from an early age—"

"Be damned to Carr," she suddenly whispered in a violent undertone. "Be damned to Carr's plans. I married MacFarlane to escape Carr and his plot and machinations. Because once MacFarlane died I thought I'd be free from ever being molded and prodded and manipulated by anyone again. I thought I'd be independent."

"But how could you believe that?" he asked. "What with MacFarlane's having a son—"

"I didn't know MacFarlane had any children when I married him," she said tensely before her expression softened. "I had no idea."

The vehemence in her voice made no sense. If Fia loathed Carr so much, then why was she so often in his company? Carr paraded Fia before the ton as a horse trader might a prime mare. He scowled, something in his unconsidered analogy fitting more closely than it ought.

Beside him, Fia's thoughts moved on kinder currents. Kay and Cora. How she'd resented them her first few weeks at Bramble House. But the resentment had faded, the emptiness it left filled with startling rapidity by something else, some unnamed and hitherto unexperienced emotion. For a long time she'd struggled to put a name to that thing, amazed that it should find a home in her hard heart.

Oh, she loved Gunna well and she owned a late-blooming affection toward her brothers, but to find that she loved two Scottish brats! Incredible.

How deeply she'd grown to love them she hadn't known until Gregory's death and Carr's appearance. She'd do anything to protect them. Her gaze slew toward where Thomas regarded her with a pensive, suspicious air.

Abruptly thoughts of Kay and Cora and Carr vanished. She could not stand to see that expression on his face. She swept rapidly past him. Why should the motives for her marriage matter to him? Other women married for property, or social advancement. In fact, the majority did. Why, then, had her admission sounded so distasteful?

She bit her lip hard, her ears attuned for the sound of his footsteps following. None. He'd stayed where she'd left him. She chanced a backward glance, saw him regarding her in puzzlement.

Had she been mistaken? Had that not been distaste and mistrust on his face? She'd never before had so much trouble divining a man's feelings. Of course, those feelings were generally obvious, because they were primal. One needed to have no more than a decent set of eyes directed at a certain part of a man's anatomy in order to ascertain them.

That being the case, 'twas obvious Thomas felt something for her. But she wanted to be something more than the object of a man's salacious fantasies. Although to be the object of Thomas's salacious fantasies … She swallowed.

Sometimes at night, she'd think of him the way men thought about her—or so they'd whispered to her often enough. Her muscles would flex, arcing toward some spectral lover. The skin of her breasts and thighs would feel too taut, and she would ache with a need that had never been satisfied—indeed, a need she'd barely been aware she owned. A need Thomas could fulfill. If only he would.

God, what was she thinking? Her thoughts, her emotions, her motives in allowing herself to be abducted, her goals here, everything was in turmoil. Nothing was as she'd planned. By all that was sacred, she was smitten with Thomas McClairen. Like the veriest girl! And she had no idea, none, what to do about it.

A touch on her shoulder brought her swinging around. Thomas stood behind her, regarding her intently.

"What?" she asked breathlessly.

"Do you love Bramble House so much? Is it that important to you?"

"Love it?" she echoed in confusion. Her world had been set atilt and was spinning madly. "I don't know. Wanton's Blush was my home, even though I knew I would never have her, I would never be able to …"

"To what?" he asked, searching her face.

"To set her to rights."

"Rights?"

"Aye. She always put me in mind of a queen in exile, forced to hide her regal nature behind a courtesan's skirts."

"Yes," he murmured. He swallowed and the contraction of his throat set a wave of longing through her. His gaze was fixed on her mouth, his own lips relaxed, almost open. What would happen if she leaned closer? What would he do? What if he did nothing?

She forced herself to break eye contact, and to pick up their conversation.

"I found pictures of the castle as she was before Carr possessed her. She had an almost magical quality. But perhaps that was due to the artist's talents." She smiled wryly. "I used to pretend I was Lizabet, first lady of the castle, waiting for Dougal to come back and make things right."

"Dougal McClairen?"

"Aye," she agreed. She wanted to touch his face again, as she had the night of the masque. He was not so smoothly shaven now; his skin would have a different texture. "But when I grew older, I knew I was not Lizabet, and Dougal would not be coming. So I found another place to call home."

"And another Dougal?" he asked.

"No," she said firmly. "I knew better by then."

"You found your home at Bramble House."

"I found a place at Bramble House," she corrected. "But it will never be Wanton's Blush."

He hesitated a moment and then said, "Would you like to see it?"

"What?"

"The castle."

"There's naught to see. Carr said it had all burned down."

"Not all of it." He took her hand. "Come with me."