Page 26

“I doubt it,” she said darkly. “Your whole face is disagreeable.”

“What a thoroughly insolent thing to say, not to mention incorrect. My countenance meets with universal approbation. In any event,” he spoke more quickly, to stave off interruption. “Arthur’s departure coincided with other changes that kept us away.”

“Such as?” She was serious again, and he matched her tone.

“My Aunt Georgina, my mother’s favorite sister—she lost her husband unexpectedly.” He cleared his throat. “The grief overset her. My mother began to spend more and more time with her in Hampshire. My father took up birding and decided he’d rather hunt grouse in August than visit the isles. I don’t think either of them wanted to take our usual trip to Castle Lyon. To go there would underscore Arthur’s absence.”

“And you?” she asked.

“I didn’t want to go to Castle Lyon either.” He grated a laugh. “I wanted to go to Spain. To pick up a gun and rush the field at my brother’s side, in front of my brother. He’s scarcely more than a boy. To imagine him there, in the mud, besieged by bullets, baked by the sun, swarmed by flies, while I remained in safety—it drove me to every excess of bad behavior. But no matter what I did to prove myself unfit for civilian life, my father wouldn’t bend. The heir to a dukedom doesn’t put on regimentals and present himself to enemy fire. My duty is to ensure that the title lives on. I’d finished at Oxford, so I went to Edinburgh, to embrace dissipation and disaster.” He shook his head, which filled suddenly with broken phaeton wheels and empty bottles. “I thought you were married.”

The silence intensified.

Isobel didn’t make a sound. Perhaps she was holding her breath.

Finally, she spoke, in a voice he’d never heard. “You . . . thought of me?”

“Constantly.” He laughed again, as though it were a joke, but the laughter cut off too soon. “I can count the moments I didn’t think of you.” Now he was saying too much, too hoarsely. With effort, he smoothed his voice into a teasing drawl. “I hoped I’d return to Dearnrigg and find you quite altered by your marriage, no longer a plague to me.”

“Ah,” she said, and his heart quickened for he couldn’t mistake the disappointment in that short, gusty syllable.

“And I feared it,” he said, low. “I feared losing what we shared.”

“Animosity?” Her turn to laugh.

“Animosity,” he said. “Vexation. This wild desire to best each other. This wild desire to . . . Hell.” He didn’t bother to clear the gravel from his throat. “This wild desire. I’ve fought it and lost. I always lose with you. I used to tell myself I hated you for it. But I’m tired of lying. You provoke all of my ire, and all of my admiration.”

“James, I—” she began, and stopped. His heart stopped too.

“I don’t only despise you,” she said.

Heat bloomed inside him, more heat than he’d ever thought he’d feel again. He lifted a hand, moved it slowly, until the darkness became silk. He let his fingertips stroke down the gossamer of her hair. He heard her breath catch.

She spoke in a rush. “How do you know, about your father, and this woman?”

It was difficult to think, to retract his consciousness from his fingertips, but he managed well enough to string the necessary words together.

“Last week, I ran into Ramsdale, the earl who’d supposedly hosted this year’s Highland hunting party. He was at the club, in Edinburgh, very much not stalking grouse through the heather. My father had lied to me. Ramsdale assumed I knew he’d gone to Selchskerrie.”

“With . . .” Isobel trailed off.

“The other woman? Ramsdale had no idea of that. My father had told him my mother was already at Castle Lyon. But my mother is with Aunt Georgina. At first, I didn’t understand it. But later, in my room, I flipped through an agronomy journal, one my father had recently sent from London. And a receipt fell out. A receipt from a French modiste, for the kinds of things a man buys his mistress. Silk negligee and the like.”

He coughed. He wouldn’t list the wanton fripperies. His censure of his father would combine too awkwardly with the picture forming in his mind, of Isobel dressed in nothing but ribbons and scraps of lace.

“You were rushing to Castle Lyon, then, to defend your mother’s honor?”

He curled his fingers, the only way to curtail their meander through her hair. He pushed his fists under his arms.

“But is it so very upsetting?” Isobel continued, musingly. “Don’t dukes and duchesses sleep in separate rooms and eat at the ends of tables so long they can’t even speak? Just like kings and queens. There’s always a mistress. Everyone knows the ballads about the merry monarch and Nell Gywn.”

“There’s never a mistress, if you’re a Pemberton.” James’s throat tightened. “Pembertons keep their vows. That’s what my father taught us, me and Arthur. We’re united in my family by bonds of real affection, and loyalty, and . . .” His teeth ground together, and he had to begin again. “If my father is willing to break his oath to my mother, to disregard our family motto, then I, too, am released from my bond. That’s why I wanted to confront him posthaste. To decry his infidelity. And to announce that I leave for Spain this very day.”

“It’s not about your mother’s honor, then. It’s about you.” Her voice sounded neutral, but the words hit like a slap. “It’s about your running off to war.”

“It is about my mother’s honor. I won’t have her disrespected. And it’s about Arthur’s safety too. I’d rather protect him than the Pemberton dynasty, especially when my father proves how little that dynasty is worth.”

His volume had increased, each assertion punctuated by a tap of the prow against the cave wall. The water was flowing in more quickly now.