Chapter 25
The Earl of Shalcross called on Miss Emily Rowland every morning, afternoon, and evening for four days straight. When he was not visiting her house, he was escorting her to a small supper party hosted in his honor by a member of Hatherwood’s gentry, who seemed smitten to have a genuine nobleman in their midst.
In the eyes of the enthralled villagers, Damien’s desire for Emily’s company reinforced the image of a man desperately in love. An intense courtship was not only a means of keeping watch over Emily, but of passing the hours until Winthrop returned with the special license. Lord Ardbury had taken leave of the village a few days prior. Presumably he had set in motion the cogs of his conspiracy.
Damien wondered how much longer he could curb his impatience to resume his own duty. He had an assassination to thwart. He’d been given only a few details about Viscount Deptford. Three years ago Deptford had been a staunch supporter of the conspiracy. But apparently in the interim he had become disillusioned with the group’s leaders, Lord Ardbury among them. Deptford knew the names and connections of secret radicals all over England, some in government positions.
Damien assumed this was why the anarchists wanted the viscount dead and why the Crown had offered to protect him. But instead of rushing to Deptford’s castle to persuade him to go to London, Damien was discussing thoroughbreds at dinner with a country squire or imagining what Emily would look like when he undressed her.
In his estimation, her hair, unbound, would reach several inches below her shoulder blades. He pictured the ends curling around her breasts. He tortured himself wondering what sounds she would make when he made her his. He knew that his kisses gave her pleasure. He knew that he desired her. But he was surprised that she seemed so receptive in the moments when he simply had to touch her when nobody was looking.
After all, he was a man who had willingly assumed other identities for his country. It was no burden to feign attraction to her. But, on the contrary, he had to restrain his sensual impulses in her presence. This courtship had begun to feel so natural that it worried him. No matter that he would be her first lover and that taking her virginity was a matter that deserved consideration.
But it wasn’t until the fifth afternoon of that week, as he and Emily watched a cricket game on the village green, that he was reminded he was definitely not her first love. He would have to be obtuse to miss the quick looks she darted at one of the cricket players, a tall, rather gangly young man who seemed oblivious to everything except the game.
The party guest Damien had replaced in the queue. So this was his competition—the man Emily had dreamt about, schemed to attract.
Did Emily still have feelings for the man? Damien shook his head. This was what happened when a person forgot his manners—life would have been far less complicated if Damien had not insisted on taking someone else’s place in line. Or if the cricketer had refused to let Damien have his way. It was shocking how one small act could alter a person’s life.
“Someone you know?” he asked her quietly, noticing that she had let her bonnet slide to her nape, the blue silk ribbons at her throat fluttering in the breeze. An unconscious or openly inviting gesture? And was it directed at him . . . or at the cricketer? “Yes,” she said with a blush that gave Damien pause. Was he supposed to pretend that it didn’t matter? Did it matter?
“He is the man whose place I took inside the tent?”
She reached back to pull on her bonnet. “Don’t keep staring at him that way.”
“Then it is him.”
“What if it is?” she said, at once on the defensive. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“I’m not sure. You went to a great deal of trouble to persuade him that you belonged together.”
“Well, you changed that, and it can’t be undone.”
Perhaps not. But there were enough obstacles in Damien’s path that he didn’t need the memory of a cricket player clouding a marriage that neither he nor Emily had planned.
So, while Damien remained confident that he would be his wife’s first lover, he would have to wonder if she still had feelings for this man. How deep did her affection for him go? Damien wasn’t an expert on the subject, but even he knew this was not how he wanted to start a marriage. Aside from the conspiracy and sexual compatibility, would they come to care for each other in time? He had to admit that she wasn’t unpleasant company. Through it all, she had managed to keep her wits about her for the most part.
They walked past the cricket match, Emily not looking back. Damien realized she was not in a talkative mood. “Do you mean that you staged a fortune-telling performance for that man and now you have no feeling for him at all?”
Emily stopped to stare up at him. “Well, yes. And no.”
“What the devil does that mean?” he asked, annoyed by this fickle response, when his instincts should have appreciated how easily she had adjusted to her change of circumstances. Indeed, he wasn’t certain whether her loyalty rested with him or the young man she had previously desired. Perhaps she was that uniquely dangerous sort of woman who saw foremost to herself.
“Are you going to insist I humiliate myself by telling you everything?”
He looked around. There were other families and couples watching them, waving and doffing hats as if they had known Damien from birth. “Yes,” he said. “Tell me everything.”
She sighed, walking a few steps ahead of him to the pond. “His name is Camden Jackson, and I’ve been waiting five years for him to notice me.”
To notice her? Was the man oblivious? “Does he know that you feel this way?”
She halted in her steps to pull her skirts away from the duck that had waddled behind her from the pond. “I’ll never know whether he knows or not. I had planned to read myself into his future at the party. The cards had been arranged so that I could predict our romance.”
Another duck splashed toward them from the murky water. Damien said, “Excuse me while I wipe a tear from my eye.”
She blinked and looked up at him in such disbelief that he felt like a bastard. “Emily, I shouldn’t have said that. I—”
She started to laugh. “Don’t turn around too suddenly.”
“Why? Is your beloved approaching?”
“No. Just a mother duckling and her babies. I wouldn’t want you to step on them.”