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‘Then you were as mistaken as I was.’ And what a flat rebuttal that was; it robbed Marie-Claude of all speech for a moment. ‘A word of advice, Madame Mermaid. You’re far too innocent for your own good.’ The edge in his voice was as keen as hammered steel. ‘You should beware of believing what rakes and libertines in inn parlours tell you. They prey on the innocent and you were the perfect peach, ripe to fall into my hand. You were fortunate not to be further compromised.’
How unfair! How appallingly unfair! ‘I did not choose to be in the inn parlour with you. You took me there, if you recall. And as for innocent! If you know anything of my past, as you seem to do, you would know that I am far from innocent and inexperienced in my knowledge of the evil that can drive some men. I didn’t think you were a man without honour.’
‘Then you lack judgement. You have no idea what sort of man I am.’
Marie-Claude’s eyes flashed fire, her brows rose. It was impossible to believe that he could be so insulting, so deliberately wounding. Something had driven him into this fast retreat, this deliberate attack. Seeing a possible advantage, she pressed on to make the most of it. ‘You didn’t answer my question. Why should I not tell Meggie?’
Zan sneered. ‘I wouldn’t want to ruin your impeccable reputation, would I? If you value your good name, you’ll keep your tongue between your pretty teeth.’
He had already turned back to his mare, gathering the reins. Marie-Claude made a last attempt to restore some normality to this situation, clutching at a final hope. ‘Zan…I don’t know why you would deny what was between us. Or lash at me with temper. Let me thank you—’
‘No! I’ll let you do nothing of the sort. Have you not been listening to me? Just forget the whole incident. It will be better for you if you do. As for my denial, put it down to indifference. You entertained me for a bare hour—nothing more.’ His mouth twisted.
As Marie-Claude’s eyes widened at this final unbridled, unforgivable slight, with one long stride, Zan dropped the reins and was back to swoop and pinion her. Hands firmly cupping her shoulders, he pulled her hard against him. ‘Or perhaps, in honesty, a little longer than an hour. No man could overlook or forget the sweetness of your kisses.’ His mouth devoured hers, his tongue owned, a scrape of teeth along her soft lips. Yet even as she resisted the assault, the sheer insolence of him, her senses absorbed the thrill.
Zan thrust her away.
‘Farewell, Madame Mermaid.’
Without a backwards look he swung up, let the mare quicken and stretch into a full gallop across the parkland, out of her line of sight.
Zan concentrated on putting as much distance between himself and Lydyard’s Pride in the shortest possible time. As if he could erase the memory of the woman who still stood on the steps and looked after him. He knew exactly who his mermaid was.
Marie-Claude de la Roche—he’d forgotten her name, if he ever knew it. He supposed he’d never heard it mentioned in his hearing. There was no reason why it should have been in the circumstances. He had become persona non grata in the Hallaston household after that night. He’d heard later of her existence, of course, from George Gadie, who knew all the Hallaston affairs. French, married to Captain Marcus Hallaston and widowed, cast adrift in Spain with a child, taken under the unscrupulous wing of some French rogue—called Jean-Jacques Noir, was it?—who had held her to ransom to bleed Luke Hallaston, the Earl of Venmore, dry in return for her safety. Threatened to use her as a whore in one of the military towns if the tale ran true. And she had been rescued by Venmore and Harriette in that eventful run to the French coast, bringing her back along with the barrels and bales of contraband.
Oh, yes. He recalled that night, right enough. The night that had brought an unmendable rift with his cousin Harriette. The night when he had been accused and found guilty, albeit without trial, of treachery, wrecking and attempted murder.
He knew the widow had been rescued, but had never met her, nor she him. She did not even recognise his name. Obviously no one had ever spoken the name Zan Ellerdine in the Hallaston household from that day to this. He tightened his hands on the reins to bring the mare back into a more controlled canter. Alexander Ellerdine no longer existed in that august circle.
In the circumstances, he could hardly blame the noble Earl and his family, could he?
Well, he had delivered the pretty widow home and that was that. He had not compromised her sensibilities too greatly, nor damaged her spotless reputation. He set the mare to a low hedge, pushing her on into a stylish leap. And then another as he increased the distance between himself and the Pride. But the speed and exhilaration did not take his attention as he might hope. Clear blue eyes with no hint of shyness. Soft lips that parted beneath his. Smooth fingers that touched his cheek. Desire curled in his gut, tightened into urgency in his groin.
Forget about her. Forget how for those few short minutes she turned your blood to fire. Forget how she made you think that life could have been different. Forget how she called you Zan and wound her fingers into your hair as she wound them into your heart…
When Marie-Claude smiled at him in his mind, Zan ruthlessly banished the image. An unfortunate dose of lust, that’s all. Easily remedied. He’d been right all along. Love did not exist. Not for men like him. And certainly not with one of the Hallastons, a family who hated him with every breath it took.
Marie-Claude stood on the steps, ignoring the cold striking up through her bare feet, her boots and stockings clutched to her bosom. She stared after Zan Ellerdine in disbelief.
What had happened? What had she done?
Surely she had not imagined that intense closeness. And surely he had felt it too. Some of the things she had said to him…She blushed to recall them. And he had kissed her. He had actually kissed her on the lips. Raising one hand so that she dropped the boots—not that she noticed—she pressed her fingers to her mouth, reliving that moment when her pulse had rioted and desire had flooded her veins. He had kissed her and she had kissed him back. She could still feel him there. Taste him there. Even the scent of him, a purely male blend of sun and sweat and salt-water, still filled her head.
And then what had happened? It was as if a curtain of icy rain had cascaded down between them, separating them so there was no connection, no sense of oneness between them at all.
What had he said about the Hallastons and Lydyards? Once I knew them. No longer. What was that about? Some mystery here. And he knew about Meggie and her association with the family.
He had been so kind, so considerate. He had taken off her shoes, ordered her tea, kissed her hand, a burning brand that had been anything but a formal caress. Had he not told her she was beautiful? He had rolled down her stockings and dried her feet. She swore she could still imagine the gentle impression of his fingers. And then when he had kissed her she had abandoned all modesty and offered herself.
And what had happened? The enchantment had been smashed, destroyed.
It was her name. As soon as she had mentioned Lydyard’s Pride. The Hallaston connection had caused the rift.
Well, she would not tell Meggie—for some reason she did not want to talk about this meeting with Zan Ellerdine—but she would find out who he was.
‘Meggie…’ Once servant and confidante to Harriette Lydyard, now Harriette Hallaston, at present with Marie-Claude at the Pride, as stout and buxom and forthright as she had ever been, was the obvious source. Ask her, Zan had advised with no pleasant anticipation. So she would.
‘Miss Marie-Claude! Just look at you…What have you been doing?’
Well, she would ask eventually. First she must soothe Meggie’s eagle eye.
‘Oh…I was caught by the tide. Silly of me. I’ll learn.’ She cast her bonnet on to the scrubbed wooden table in the kitchen where she had run Meggie to ground, and prepared to deflect the flood of concern.
‘It’s dangerous. One minute out of my sight and just look at the state of your clothes…’
‘The only things to suffer are my shoes and my gown. Both beyond redemption…although my feet are cold and damp.’
It did the trick. Meggie bustled her out of the kitchen, insisting on ordering up the tub and heated water to Marie-Claude’s bedchamber. Nor was Marie-Claude sorry. All things considered it had been an exhausting day.
She sank back into the soothing water with a sigh. Here was the chance as Meggie fretted and fussed around her.
‘Meggie—who is Alexander Ellerdine?’
A short expectant hiatus. Meggie angled her a glance.
‘Who?’
‘Alexander Ellerdine.’ Marie-Claude fixed her with an innocent expression.
‘Now why would you want to know that?’
‘I heard his name mentioned in the village, that’s all.’
A pause. The glance became even sharper as Meggie folded a pile of linen. ‘Did you meet him?’
‘No.’ Marie-Claude hoped the flush of colour would be put down to the heat of the water.
‘He owns Ellerdine Manor.’
‘Oh.’ This was not getting very far. ‘Is there a—a problem about him? Some scandal, perhaps?’
‘Yes.’ Meggie folded a linen shift with a sharp snap of the cloth.
‘Will you tell me?’
‘No.’
Marie-Claude could not help the frown. ‘Then I shall have to ask elsewhere.’
‘No need to do that. And Miss Harriette wouldn’t wish it.’
‘Well, if that’s so, there must be a good reason.’
Meggie pursed her lips as if coming to an unpleasant but necessary decision. ‘Well, if you must know…he’s a smuggler—amongst other things.’
‘Is that very bad?’
‘Isn’t that enough, miss? It’s not a reputable occupation for a gentleman, is it?’
Marie-Claude read the disapproving expression on Meggie’s face and gave up the hunt. ‘No. I suppose not. That must be it then.’
‘All I’ll say is—no woman of taste or discrimination would seek his company, however handsome his face. Handsome is as handsome does…He’s a dangerous man.’
‘Is he? Why?’
‘He just is! Take my word for it.’
It was clear that she wasn’t going to get any further with Meggie. She tipped back her head and closed her eyes, letting her impressions form and solidify. The fact that Zan might be a smuggler couldn’t be the only reason. As she understood it, almost everyone in Old Wincomlee had a finger in the smuggling pie. As she knew, from personal experience, Harriette herself had been one of the Brotherhood of Free Traders. Captain Harry, sailing her cutter Lydyard’s Ghost, swaggering in boots and breeches.
So what was the issue with Mr Alexander Ellerdine? One moment he had looked at her as if he saw her as a glittering prize to be owned and savoured. And the next—he had fixed her with a stare cold enough to freeze the air in her lungs and informed her she had been as mistaken as he. She had accused him of being capricious. But that was not it either. Capricious was too mild a word for his apparent disgust with her. He had dared—he had had the effrontery—to swat her aside as if she were an autumn wasp!
Was she prepared to leave it like this and pretend they had never met?
No. She was not.
What’s more, she would not. Within her, bright anger warred with intrigue, and a little frisson of excitement such as she barely recalled curled its way into her belly as she ran her tongue over her lips. She would discover the mystery of Mr Ellerdine, for it was her chief desire that he should kiss her again. Then with a little laugh she rubbed at her lips with the scented water. No daughter of the de la Roche family would bow weakly before the whim of fate, but would seize it, shake it.
Alexander Ellerdine had better beware.
Chapter Three
Mr Alexander Ellerdine—Zan, as she had called him—had told her, before his bewildering volte-face and his descent into disgraceful bad manners, that he would come the next day to the Pride to ask after her safe recovery. Marie-Claude waited, finding an excuse from her previous day’s exertions to remain within the house and gardens. She was feeling just a little weary, she informed Meggie—quite understandable. She would stroll and sit in the rose garden and read perhaps. So she did with increasing difficulty. She had never felt so full of energy in her whole life. And of course he did not materialise—and she was not in the least surprised, in the circumstances. He had warned her off, well and truly, with no attempt to soften his words. She paced the rose garden with increasing impatience.
And waited two more full days.
Zan Ellerdine did not come.
Marie-Claude decided to seize the initiative. Events played beautifully into her hands. Meggie’s ageing mother demanded her daughter’s attendance at her side when a flare of the rheumatics kept her to her bed. With no one to notice her comings and goings, and certainly not to question them, on the third morning Marie-Claude ordered up the cob and trap as soon as Wiggins had cleared the breakfast cups and saucers and asked directions from a stable lad. She dressed with care.
She would wager the pearl bracelet that she clasped about her wrist against his being overjoyed, that she was the last visitor he would wish to see uninvited on his doorstep. Tant pis. Too bad. He had made her feel alive again, restored to her a vivacity that she had somehow lost over the years since her coming to England. And the connection between them had been so strong, so undeniable, like knots in a skein of embroidery silk. Until, that is, the unfortunate mention of her name. She must discover what it was about the Hallastons and Lydyard’s Pride that had turned his tongue from lover to viper. It was quite beyond her understanding, and it was not in her nature to let it lie.
Marie-Claude considered her imminent conversation with Zan Ellerdine. How to conduct it, she had as yet no idea, but must wait to see whether he would smile or snarl at her. Then she allowed her mind to assess her own personal situation as the cob picked its sedentary way towards Ellerdine Manor. It was a line of thought that had occupied her frequently of late.
The Hallastons were not her family, of course, the only one of them who had given her that connection being dead now for—unbelievable as it might seem—almost six years. And her future as a Hallaston widow? She could not imagine what it would hold that would bring her true happiness and heal her heart that had recently acquired a hollow emptiness. Perhaps that was the problem, she mused. She no longer had any roots, not in France, the country of her birth that she had fled those five years ago, not here in her adopted country. Her future, cushioned as it was by Hallaston money and consequence, seemed increasingly solitary and just a little lonely.
Until, that was, she had met Zan Ellerdine. It was as if he had opened a window to allow sunshine into a darkened room. Or opened an unread page in a book, promising any number of new possibilities. Only to slam them both shut again! Marie-Claude swiped her whip at a bothersome fly. She did not think she could allow him to do that.
She would never forget Marcus, of course. Marcus Hallaston, the vivid young man who had awoken her to the delights of first love when their paths had crossed in the battle-torn campaign of the Peninsula War. Rescuing her, he had wooed and wed her before she could collect her thoughts, loved her extravagantly, and then died at Salamanca, leaving her destitute in Spain with a new-born child. She would always remember him, always love him. What a whirlwind romance that had been. A regretful little smile curved her lips. But she had known him so little time. And her memories were growing pale with the passage of the years. Sometimes fear gripped her when she could no longer bring Marcus’s face to mind, yet it seemed that her heart was frozen in time, when she was still nothing more than a young girl who had fallen in love with the handsome officer in Wellington’s army.
Until Zan Ellerdine had pulled her into his arms and kissed her. With a delicious warmth, the ice around her heart had melted. And then what had he done? Thrown all her reawakened emotions back in her face.
It was not that she was unloved of course. Marie-Claude denied any such self-pity. There was Raoul, her five-year-old son, spending a few weeks with Harriette and Luke, Marcus’s brother, at The Venmore. Raoul had been her whole life since Marcus’s untimely death. They had not always been safe. She narrowed her eyes at the cob’s ears as the horrors of the past pressed close. Abducted by that villainous individual Jean-Jacques Noir as objects of blackmail to wring money from Luke, it had demanded a midnight run to France by Luke, and Harriette in her old guise as Captain Harry the smuggler, to rescue them and bring them home safe. What an adventure that had been when the Preventives had almost caught them on the beach and Harriette had been shot. Marie-Claude’s recall of the details was vague—it had been a time of danger and extravagant emotions with the future of Harriette and Luke’s marriage on the line—but she had been accepted and welcomed at last, and her son had reclaimed his rightful place in the Hallaston family.
But now Raoul was growing up and showing a streak of Hallaston independence. Of course he would rather spend time with Luke, in the stables, riding round the estate at The Venmore on a new pony, running wild in the woods, than with his mother. Of course he would. It was to be expected. But what would she do with the rest of her life?
Spend it with Zan Ellerdine…
Ridiculous! He did not want her. She should not be demeaning herself by going to meet this man. But Marie-Claude’s newly melted heart began to throb with some strange elation. She would not step back from him and whatever it was between them that had been ignited in that dingy little room. If he did not want her in his home—then he would just have to send her away.
She would not make it easy for him. She shook up the reins and prompted her somnolent cob into a more sprightly gait.
Ellerdine Manor. Not so very far away. First impressions—not good as she steered the cob into the drive. An old mellow stone house, long and low, stood at the end of the drive. Substantial, attractive it must once have been, but now with an air of dilapidation. The drive was choked with weeds and overgrown shrubs that had not seen a gardener for a decade. It was plain to see as she drew closer that the stonework needed attention. The chimneys were crumbling. So this was where her mystery rescuer lived. She wrinkled her nose. It could have been lovely with time and inclination. With money.
This, Marie-Claude thought, was the point of no return, and her courage nearly gave out. Fearing it would if she hesitated longer, she directed the cob at a shambling trot into the stable courtyard to the rear. Stepping down from the little carriage, she headed for the sound of activity in the range of stalls occupying one side of the outbuildings.
It amused her a little. This area looked as if someone had taken it in hand. Someone was more interested in the stables and their occupants than the house itself. She stepped through the open doorway into shadows, bars of sunlight angling across to form strips across the floor. It smelt of dust and hay and horses, in no manner unpleasant. Dust motes danced and glinted gold in the light. Somewhere in the far depths of the building someone whistled tunelessly.
The first stalls were closed. But the third was not.
Marie-Claude approached quietly.
And there he was. Coatless, in shirt and boots and breeches, he was grooming a dark bay stallion. Long smooth strokes of the brush from shoulder to knee. It was no difficulty for her to simply stand and stare, to watch the stretch and bend of his body. The flex of sinew in his powerful thighs. The fluid, agile play of muscle in his back and shoulders under the linen shirt. He reached and stretched with an elegant grace that set off a silent hum of pleasure in her throat. Turned away from her as he was, she could not see his face, but his dark hair shone in the soft light. Once more she experienced the urge to run her fingers through the dishevelled mass.
Here was her future. She was sure of it. Here was the man who could make her body sing again, even without touching her. And when he did—well, she really had no point of comparison. It was as if all the sparkle and bubbles from a glass of French champagne had erupted in her blood. This was the man who could wake her from the trance in which she had lived and slept since Marcus had died. Like Sleeping Beauty roused from a hundred years of enchanted sleep with one kiss from the Prince.
Marie-Claude was transfixed. Until Zan Ellerdine stood to his full height, half-turned and shook back his hair from his face as he reached up to a curry comb on a shelf above his head. As the light gleamed on the sweat at throat and chest she felt a need to touch her tongue to her dry lips. He was magnificent. And how intriguing. He applied himself again to the animal’s quarters, his expression distinctly moody, the lines between nose and mouth heavily drawn, his eyes dark and brooding, snapping with temper. There was no softness in that beautiful face, only a cold ruthlessness, a driving force that would be indifferent to all but the ultimate goal.
But, oh, he was beautiful.
Cold logic immediately took hold. She should run for her life. This was not a man any well-bred woman should seek out. Zan Ellerdine was a man who had no thought of her, of any woman, but only of his own needs, who would take her and use her to his own ends.
A faint noise. She must have moved, scraped her foot against the cobbled floor. Marie-Claude held her breath.
Zan straightened to run his fingers through the stallion’s mane. ‘How’s the mare, Tom?’ He raised his voice to the far whistler. ‘Just a sprain, I thought…’
He glanced back over his shoulder. And stilled, every muscle controlled, the words drying on his lips.
There, just as she had known. Those dark eyes, dark as indigo, looked into her, knew every secret of her heart, she was sure of it. For a brief moment his features softened as he saw her. The lines that had bracketed his mouth smoothed out. The fierce emotion in his eyes faded. She thought he would smile at her. Hoped he would.
His mouth firming into a hard line, Zan Ellerdine tossed the brush he was holding on to the bed of straw and faced her, hands fisted on hips.
‘Go away. There’s no place for you here. You shouldn’t be here.’
It was like a blade to her heart, a tearing pain. Marie-Claude took a moment to wonder why it should matter so much, if a man she barely knew felt no desire to spend even a moment in her company. And after all, wasn’t this what she had feared would happen? If she’d had any sense, any sense at all, even one ounce of dignity and pride, she would never have set foot on Ellerdine property in the first place. Instead she had laid herself open to this.
And she would open herself to more. She simply did not believe that his insolent denial of her reflected that initial response in his face. She summoned all her sang-froid, straightened her spine and raised her chin.
‘I have come to pay a morning call, Zan.’ There! She had called him by his name. ‘Did you not expect me?’
