Chapter Seven
Christmas Eve morning.
The carriage house.
As dawn began to glow behind the heavy clouds that augured more snow, from his bedchamber window Frye watched a man approaching across the pasture toward the carriage house at a remarkable clip. Slipping only once in the knee-deep snow, he recovered swiftly. Slender, and barely protected from the cold in a thin coat and breeches, he was not one of the travelers trapped at this inn. Perhaps he had come from a nearby farm.
Then the fellow lifted his attention toward the inn, revealing beneath the brim of his cap the face Frye liked above all others.
Charlotte Ascot. Wearing men’s clothing. Returning at dawn from . . . where?
He grabbed his coat and hurried down the stairs and into the yard.
As he neared the stable he glimpsed her slipping into the carriage house. He followed.
He made no attempt at silence or stealth, but he didn’t need to. She was humming loudly enough that the carriages vibrated with the tune. Her voice, though not particularly good, was full of happiness, and his chest filled with warmth and that old awful ache that, before she’d gone off to America, he had gotten used to feeling every time he saw her.
He rounded the mail coach and was met with a sight that made him stagger to a halt: the woman of his dreams, cheeks flushed, hair curling in damp tendrils all about her face and neck, eyes alight, and lips smiling as she hummed.
And only half dressed.
The sound that came out of his mouth was more groan than gasp.
Her head snapped up, eyes flying wide open, and her fingers arrested on the laces of her shift.
There was a moment of taut silence in which Frye swiftly memorized every gorgeous curve concealed by only the thinnest layer of linen, and in which crimson rushed into her entire face and spread down her neck and over the exquisite mounds of the tops of her breasts.
She snatched up her coat and pressed it to her front.
“What are you doing here?” she said breathlessly.
“I think I’ve better reason to ask you the same.” His voice was thoroughly husky. He was a dog.
“You do not. Go away.”
Tearing his gaze from the vision, he turned his back to her.
“Do finish dressing,” he said. “I’ll wait.”
“I said, go.”
“You did not use the magic word.”
“Please go away.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“And leave you unprotected for some other man to happen by? Not on your life.” He folded his arms.
Rustling sounded behind him and he imagined her hastily pulling on the remainder of her clothes.
“You are outrageous,” she said.
“I did not just return from a walk across the pasture in two feet of snow wearing another person’s clothes. So of the two of us, really, I don’t think I am the outrageous one.”
“They aren’t another person’s clothes,” she said.
“No?”
“They are mine.”
“Interesting.”
“It is easier to move in the snow when wearing breeches.”
“Is that so?” He was enjoying this beyond reason. He would never forget the vision of her in that chemise. Ever.
“You would know that if you had ever tried running through snow wearing skirts.”
“I suppose I would. But as I am neither an Eastern prince nor a Catholic priest, I haven’t any experience wear—”
Then she was beside him and he was looking through the murky dimness into her beautiful stormy eyes.
“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” she said.
“That you enjoy dressing as a man?”
“It isn’t that I enjoy it,” she said, her brows dipping together at the bridge of her perfectly pert nose. She wore an unexceptionable wool gown that covered every inch of her arms and neck and made him wish the entire species of sheep—not to mention weavers and seamstresses—to the devil.
“It is that I . . .” She halted her own words.
He waited.
Her cheeks were still dark pink, her lips nearly red, and he needed to taste them again. Urgently. He wanted to kiss her and touch her and strip her to her undergarments and haul her onto one of these carriage seats and do things to her he’d dreamed about doing to her. With her.
“I was running,” she said.
His heartbeats stumbled. “From whom?” He would murder the villain.
“From no one. Just—I just ran.”
“You ran?”
Her shoulders seemed to settle. “I find it invigorating to run places. That is, not really to run to places, rather to run fast, any place that I can without notice.”
Memory of the footrace that she had won when she was a girl of eight came back to him.
As though she knew the direction of his thoughts, she nodded.
“I never outgrew it,” she said. “I have always enjoyed riding and, of course, walking in the park. But then I must always be with a footman or maid, moving slowly and decorously. Early in the mornings like this, when Sally is still abed and I am able to run alone, I feel . . .” Her words petered out.
“What do you feel when you run, Charlotte?”
She bit her sweet lips. “I have never spoken of this before to anybody. I don’t know why I am telling you.”
“In fact, you have told me almost nothing as yet,” he said with a slight smile.
She frowned.
“And you have done the same.” Moving around him, she took up her men’s clothing, wrapped them in a little ball, and headed for the door. “I will see you at breakfast, Your G—”
He reached for her arm. She turned in his grasp and she was so close he could see every dark lash curling from the damp, and feel the heat radiating from her body.
“You can tell me,” he said. “You can always tell me.”
“Why did you go into Mr. Sheridan’s room yesterday morning?”
He said nothing.
“Come now. You have seen me in my shift. The least you can do now is to share this mystery.”
Which was true.
“Fortier and I occasionally do odd jobs for the government. We are now on the trail of a thief who has been cozening defenseless women into giving over their money to a noble cause, and then pocketing it all instead.”
Her perfect lips fell open. He wanted them beneath his. Then the rest of her beneath the rest of him too.
“The government?” she said. “Are you spies?”
“No. I have plenty to see to at Kentwood, with my mother trying to run the place like it’s a charitable foundation and my sisters getting into endless scrapes. And Fortier is not even English, of course. We are merely helping out a bit, doing tasks it’s easy to do under cover of roguish foolery.”
“You have done this before? How many times?”
“A handful.” Dozens. “During the war it was mostly passing messages between actual spies at social gatherings. That sort of thing. Nothing spectacular.”
“Actual spies?” She was still gaping and it took every mote of self-restraint in him not to cover those lips with his. “Horace Church, you are a hero! You and Lord Fortier.”
“Nothing so grand. Only doing my duty to the kingdom.”
“I daresay you do that well enough in Parliament.” Pink was stealing into her cheeks again.
“You are blushing,” he said, his voice rumbling over Charlotte’s tingling nerves like hot chocolate slipping over one’s tongue. He smiled slightly. “I wonder why.”
“I am not,” she said, lifting her hand over a fiery cheek.
His fingers wrapped around it, his fingertips caressing her skin tenderly, decadently.
“Don’t cover it,” he said, drawing her hand downward. “This is wholly intriguing. I don’t think I have ever seen you blush before.”
He would have seen her blush if he had bothered to look at her even once that sennight of the party at Cheriot Manor, after she had found him insensible and bleeding in the wood. Only thirteen, she had already loved him, and she had been out of her mind with panic when he would not rouse to her voice. When he finally had, awakening with a start, he had said nothing to her. Nothing. Without a word, he had extracted his hand from hers, wiped the blood from his face, climbed to his knees in silence, then his feet, and, stumbling at first, walked away. He had not looked back.
And then he had not looked at her again the entire duration of the house party.
Shame over that dismissal—and terrible hurt—had kept her cheeks ruddy that whole sennight. Even her father had asked if she was ill.
Not ill. Only foolish—foolish to fall in love with a boy who never looked at her and who was promised to another girl—a girl who would never for any reason be found on her knees in the bracken in the woods, dripping with sweat from having just run miles, her hair in a tight tail to keep it away from her face, and wearing her maid’s cast-off homespun instead of delicate muslin.
Yet her infatuation had persisted, because only that once had he treated her poorly. Once in all the years they had known each other. At all other times he had been perfect: kind, generous, funny, intelligent, fair, just, and good.
It had been very easy to love him.
She extracted her hand from his now.
“You suspect Mr. Sheridan is the man cheating women out of their money?” she said.
He nodded. “Fortier and I believe Miss Mapplethorpe is his intended victim this time.”
“Oh, no! She is a darling. I will stay close to her.”
“Not too close.”
“Why not?”
“We cannot apprehend Sheridan without proof. Unfortunately, Miss Mapplethorpe must be taken in by him before we expose him.”
“I see. All right.”
“You will not confront Sheridan,” he said.
The tingling returned, this time beneath her ribs. He was not telling her to stay out of the intrigue entirely. He trusted her.
“I will not,” she said. “What shall I do if I learn anything of use?”
“Find me. Tell me.”
“You are Mr. Church,” she said, wanting to smile. “While Lady Charlotte Ascot might seek conversation with the Duke of Frye without censure under these circumstances, she cannot very well do so with a strange mister, under any circumstances, now can she?”
“Find me,” he said again, his gaze dropping to her lips.
With a nod, she hurried out of the carriage house. They had achieved a friendly armistice. But she still did not trust him. Not entirely. Not until she had spoken with her friends at Kingstag and learned the entire story of the dissolution of the eighteen-year-long betrothal between the Duke of Frye and Lady Serena Cavendish.