The Passionate One (4 page)

Rhiannon took
Edith’s hands. “You’ve already given me more than I can ever repay.”

Flustered, Edith
twitched Rhiannon’s jacket shoulders into alignment. “Go on, now! I’ll be here
waiting when you come out.” She opened the door and pushed Rhiannon inside.

A man sprawled in
Squire Fraiser’s favorite chair, one foot stretched out before him, the other
bent at the knee, his fingers laced over his flat stomach. He gazed out the
window, his face averted. All she could see of his head was a carelessly pulled
back tail of coal black hair tied with a limp ribbon.

He wore a coat of
deep burgundy velvet, a white linen shirt beneath it. Brussels lace fell
gracefully over the first knuckles of his long, lean fingers, and more lace
cascaded beneath his chin. His breeches were tight and made of tawny doeskin.
His dark leather boots climbed past his knees and were folded in cuffs over his
muscular thighs. The tip of his sword, sheathed in a leather scabbard and
hanging from his belt, touched the floor beside him.

He would have been
exquisite had he not been so disheveled. The burgundy coat was dusty and the
faded linen shirt went wide of being pristine. The lace of one sleeve, delicate
as gossamer, was ripped and soiled. His boots were stained and scarred and the
scabbard containing his sword was likewise ill-used.

He did not look
like any lawyer Rhiannon’s imagination would have conjured.

A bit of pique
flavored Rhiannon’s curiosity. A gentleman—particularly a
London
gentleman—visiting the Fraiser’s home should have stopped at The Ploughman’s Inn to repair the damage travel had caused. But then, honesty goaded her generous mouth
into a smile; a lady receiving a gentleman should have paused to repair the
damage a hunt had caused.

He turned his head
carefully, as if he were concerned to startle her and she thus knew that he’d
been allowing her time to assess him. He looked tired, worn too thin and used
too roughly. His eyes were jetty dark, the brows above slanting like black
wings, but the skin beneath them looked bruised. He sported an old-fashioned
clipped beard amidst the shadows of lean, unshaven cheeks, and his skin was
very pale and very fine and somehow fragile.

Fleeting emotion,
subtle and reserved, flickered over his aquiline features.

“Rhiannon Russell,
I presume?” His voice was baritone and suave. He didn’t bother to rise and his
pose remained preternaturally still, like a cat at a mouse hole, watchful but
not hungry—not yet.

“Yes.” She became
unaccountably aware of the hair streaming down her back, the sweat and grime
from her leather gloves embedded beneath her short nails, and the mud
splattering her bottle green skirt.

He rose. He was
tallish and slender and his shoulders were very straight and broad. His mouth
was kind but his eyes were not. His throat looked strong. The torn lace ending
his shirtsleeves tangled in the carved gold setting of a great blue stone ring
on his little finger. He flicked it away.

Even without the
cachet of being a Londoner, the ladies of Fair Badden would have found him
attractive, Rhiannon thought. Since he was from that great fabled city, they’d
find him irresistible. Indeed, she herself could have found much to recommend
in his black and white good looks... if she hadn’t already succumbed to a
golden-haired youth.

“You’re not
English.”

“I am. A quarter,”
she said. “On my father’s side.”

“I wouldn’t have
guessed.” Having spoken, he fell silent, studying her further.

She struggled to
remember the lessons in courtesy Edith had instilled but none of them applied
to meeting strange, elegantly shabby young men alone in her foster father’s library.

“I’m afraid you
have the advantage of me, sir,” she finally ventured.

“Could I only be so
fortunate as to claim as much with all my acquaintances,” he said and then,
“but didn’t Mrs. Fraiser inform you of my name?”

“No,” Rhiannon
said. “Mrs. Fraiser has no head for names, unless they’re the names of
unscrupulous tradesmen. She only said that you’d come from London to see me and
that you had news regarding my future.”

“I am Ash Merrick.” He sketched an elegant bow, his watchfulness becoming pronounced now, as if his
name should mean something to her, and when he saw that it did not, he went on.
“The name Merrick is not familiar to you?”

She cast about
cautiously in her mind and found nothing there to trigger a memory. “No,” she
said. “Should it?”

His mouth stretched
into a wide grin. It was a beautiful smile, easy and charming, but it never
quite reached his eyes. “Perhaps,” he said, “since it’s the name of your
guardian.”

Chapter Three

“I don’t have a
guardian,” Rhiannon said and then, with her usual candor, amended, “I mean, not
an official one. At least, none that I know of...”

She trailed off,
visited by an imprecise memory. She was maybe eight years old, standing on the
street of a strange city, squinting up at a door frame filled with beckoning
light. The old woman who’d brought her had cold, gnarled fingers. They twisted
round Rhiannon’s wrist like ropy grape vines. A strangely accented voice spoke
from within the warm, yellow light. “You want another Merrick, witch. Not Lord
Carr.”

She was to have
lived with an Englishman. He was supposed to have been her guardian. She
remembered the old lady saying so. She’d forgotten. But there’d been so much
about those days and all the days preceding them that she’d forgotten. Flight
and cold, fear and confusion, the days—weeks?—had bled into one long, seemingly
endless nightmare from which she’d only awakened upon arrival in Fair Badden.
Even when she tried to recall, it was insubstantial, flickers of sensation and
images, more emotions than actual memories.

Rhiannon stared at
the man arrayed in damaged elegance. Surely he was too young— “Are you Lord
Carr?”

Once more the
gorgeous smile lit his dark visage. “No. Lord Carr is my father. And you’re
perfectly correct if you’re thinking him a negligent sort of guardian. He is.”

She was unable to
read the flavor of that amused estimation. His manner, his address, were
nothing like those of Fair Badden’s young men. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, and
I thought I had,” he murmured, one brow climbing. And then, “I think Carr would
like you to believe that he has simply misplaced you these past years.”

“Did he?”

Ash Merrick’s enigmatic smile spread. “I doubt my father has ever misplaced so much as a
toothpick.”

Each of his answers
only provoked more questions, and each statement this Ash Merrick made only
increased her discomfort. She once more felt she was standing at the door
leading into that forbidden, enticing house. She was afraid to step over the
threshold. It would cost her a price she could not name and was uncertain she
could afford. And yet it beckoned.

“What is it you
want, sir?”

“I? Nothing. I’m
merely here to escort you to Wanton’s Blush because
he
wants you,
Rhiannon Russell.”

“Why?” The sleek
cat had tired of watching, he was playing with the mouse now.

“Your aunt was
cousin to his wife,” he said.

“
We’re
cousins?” she asked. Impossible to believe that this black glossy
creature and she were related.

“Oh, no. No. My
mother had the distinction of being the
first
Lady Carr. Your mother
was related to his second wife... or was it the third? Carr has an unhappy
habit of losing wives to early graves.”

“I see.” But she
didn’t. With his explanation the exhaustion had returned to his dark, mobile
face, touching her tender heart. “You’ve traveled a great distance, sir. Would
you like something to drink? To eat?”

He looked up
abruptly at the offer, his brows knit with surprise. “No,” he said. “Thank you.
We’ve business to conduct, you and I. Perhaps later.”

“I don’t
understand,” Rhiannon said. “Why now, after all these years has your father
sent you to find me?”

“Unreasonable
chit,” Ash Merrick chided comfortably. “You are not supposed to ask questions.
You are to fall into paroxysms of joy that Carr has deigned to offer you his
protection... such as it is.”

She studied him in
consternation but forbore comment.

“What?” he queried
when she did not reply. “No paroxysms? He’ll be disappointed. But to answer
your question, Miss Russell, Carr sends you the message that now that he has
found you, he is willing—
nota bene,
my dear, he did not go so far as
to declare his
eagerness,
merely his
willingness
—to accept
his responsibility for you.”

Her frown was
severe, her concentration fierce. He spoke obliquely and his manner was mocking
but impersonal, as though the jest he saw was more at his expense than hers.

“And what do you
say, Mr. Merrick?” she asked carefully.

“Miss Russell, a
lady never puts a gentleman in the onerous position of making a judgment,” he
said. There was kindness—or perhaps pity—underscoring the ironical tone.
“Particularly about his sire’s motives. I never make judgments, Miss Russell,
ergo I never misjudge. If I were following my own inclination, I would never
have come here. I am only my father’s agent. I do not question his edicts. I
follow them.”

His voice had grown
terse. It was as if he’d decided to dislike her before they’d ever met. She
could think of no reason he should do so—unless he resented his father’s
interest in her. Perhaps he was profligate and his purse light, she thought,
eyeing his shabby raiment, and feared his father would be overly generous with
his newly discovered ward.

The idea explained
Ash Merrick’s subtle antagonism and melted her earlier resentment. She could
put him at ease. She didn’t want his father’s protection or his guardianship or
his generosity. Nor did she need them.

“What did you do to
your face?”

His question caught
her off guard. He’d come closer while she’d been lost in thought. He grasped
her chin, tilting her face into the shafts of late afternoon sunlight.

“My face?” Was he,
too, going to scrub her cheek clean? She went still, embarrassed and unnerved
and not at all certain it wouldn’t be a touch thrilling to have this exotic,
masculine creature offer so intimate a ministration.

At the wayward
thought, heat climbed to her cheeks. “Forgive me, sir. We just finished hunting
and I didn’t have an oppor—”

“You received this
wound hunting?” he asked incredulously, lifting his other hand and lightly
tracing her cheek.

Warm little
tendrils of sensation danced beneath his touch. His fingertips were rough, the
knuckles large, and his wrists braceleted with old scars. No gentleman had
hands like that. Not even a London gentleman. Particularly a London gentleman.
Who
was
Ash Merrick?

Her gaze roved over
his face as he frowned at the mark on her cheek. The lashes framing his dark
eyes were as black as his hair, thick and spiky and long as a lassie’s, and
that was the only soft or feminine thing about him. This close, even his
fashionably pale London skin seemed nothing more than a comely happenstance.
The single purpose of that fine flesh was to shed water, avert wind, not to
attract. Though it did that, too.

“Did you?” He
released his clasp of her chin.

Ah, yes. He’d
asked about her wound.

“No,” she answered,
no longer concerned with the words they spoke but rather with some other
interplay occurring between them, some communication happening just beyond the
scope of her mind to facilitate.

“Then how did this
happen? One would imagine such a prize would awake the instinct to protect.”

She did not
understand. Her skin was unmarked by pox and not too browned by the sun, but no
one had ever deemed it a prize. He looked into her eyes and his facile smile
wavered and disappeared.

For the first time
since she’d entered the library, Ash Merrick did not seem completely master of
the situation. He drew away from her, looking puzzled, like the lad who has
unlocked a secret drawer and found something he’d not anticipated and wasn’t
sure he liked.

“You were about to
say?” His voice was smooth enough.

“Footpad,” she
answered faintly. “We were coming home from the neighbor’s when we were
accosted by a villain. He shot his pistols at our carriage as our driver
whipped up the team. One of his bullets grazed me. As you can see, we escaped.”

“Highwaymen? Here?”
His tone was incredulous.

“Rare enough,” she
admitted. “But it happens.”

He’d turned away
from her and was rubbing his thumb along his dark, stubbled jawline.

“It looks worse
than it ever felt,” she offered, obliged by his obvious concern. His eyes slew
back toward her, a flicker of astonishment in their dark depths.