Chapter Seven
The moment he entered the outskirts of London, Henry’s mood lifted. He took deeper breaths and marveled at the simple satisfaction of filling his lungs with what actually felt like air and not smog.
The city’s chimney stacks pumping out coal smoke over the winter months had thickened the air to a toxic brume in some places, but he knew the real reason he breathed easier now that he was departing. With the congested press of the city behind him, Henry no longer felt penned in. Even riding in a near-empty Hyde Park that morning, with lawns, ponds, trees, and gravel footpaths stretching for miles, Henry had felt the constant need to check over his shoulder, to know who was behind him, how far away, and how fast they were riding.
An instinctive and constant awareness was the one thing that had kept him alive all these years. Although, it made what should have been a leisurely ride into a mission to keep a safe distance from any approaching riders. He had not even liked to have Françoise on his horse’s heels.
Why the horse and rider currently trotting just behind him on the post road north did not make him feel like a trapped animal, Henry was not certain. For years, ever since he’d set foot back on English soil, bruised and broken, he’d avoided having people walk or ride closely behind him whenever possible.
Something about Irina made things different.
He sat straight in his saddle, hands light on the reins, and listened to the steady clicking of her mount’s hooves. His mother’s barouche rolled along just ahead, trunks and boxes and valises lashed to the roof. Another, smaller carriage had set out earlier that morning carrying more luggage, a few maids, and Henry’s own valet.
However, Irina had appeared in the foyer of the Devon Place wearing naught but a pair of tall boots, riding breeches, a feminine waistcoat, and a long, swan-tailed riding coat. He’d had the instant thought that the odd ensemble suited her willowy frame to perfection. Then again, she could have made a burlap sack look fashionable.
“Does your backside ache yet?” he asked her now.
“It is not gentlemanly to inquire about the state of a woman’s backside, my lord,” came Irina’s tart reply.
He twisted around to meet her eyes. They flitted away from him, pretending to be interested in the trees off the side of the road.
“You should be inside the carriage,” he said.
“As you’ve already stated numerous times.”
He faced forward again with a sigh. “It is a six-hour ride.”
“As you’ve also already stated. Lord Langlevit, please, I prefer to ride in the open, aching backside or not, rather than to be closed up inside that box for hours on end.”
Something in her voice made him glance back again. Her expression had hardened, and the space between her full, dark-brown brows was pinched, as if the mere idea was disagreeable. His eyes narrowed. It was a curious look, one that drew his attention. It wavered between fear, revulsion, and reluctance.
“That box is a conveyance suitable for a king,” he said, watching for her answering expression. Her lips thinned but not in annoyance. She was agitated. Truly bothered, it seemed, at the thought of riding in the carriage. Henry had been trained to read the truth behind even the faintest of facial expressions. The twitch of a nose, the shifting of eyes. Licking lips, blinking too rapidly. They were all tells.
“It is a beautiful conveyance, but I…simply don’t care for long carriage rides.”
Irina continued to gaze into the trees.
“That’s the second thing we have in common,” he said, succeeding in drawing her attention back to him.
“What is the first?” she asked.
“Resorting to chocolate when upset.”
Her lips twitched, a warm blush rising into her cheeks. “Chocolate solves everything.”
So far, neither of them had spoken about what had happened in the pantry the evening before, though every time he let his eyes rest on her, he felt warm and slightly panicked. How could he have given in to his base desires? He’d kissed her. He’d acted first. Rejecting her kiss on the balcony at Hadley Gardens had sapped him of his willpower, it seemed. Of all moral decency.
Because there was nothing remotely moral or decent in the way he wanted Princess Irina Volkonsky.
He’d gone to Françoise after leaving Devon Place. He wasn’t proud of slaking his lust with what most people would consider a high-ranking courtesan, but it had served to remind him what he was, and what he could never be, especially for a woman as young and untouched as Irina.
She was wild, yes, and passionate, but the frantic, needful press of her mouth, the unskilled but torturously perfect fumbling of her hands as she’d tried to push past the barrier of their clothing, had assured him of her innocence. Henry might have considered taking any other woman’s virtue if offered to him so willingly—but this was Irina. A changed and grown and beautifully surprising Irina, but Irina just the same.
“Do you like to go fast?” she asked, and Henry realized he was still staring at her, the awkward twist of his back beginning to ache near the ruined skin and muscle of his shoulder blades.
“Excuse me?” he asked, his mind leaping into dangerous territory.
“Upon a horse,” she clarified, her pinched brows smoothing out with humor. “Do you like to race?”
He cleared his throat and faced forward. “Not upon a horse.”
“Then how?” she asked, trotting forward and entering his line of vision.
“On foot,” he replied, fighting the urge to look at her. Instead, he scanned the tree line to the left and right of the road. An old habit he couldn’t seem to break.
“You race on foot? Against whom?” She sounded a cross between amused and confused. He didn’t blame her. Earls did not usually participate in foot races.
“Against myself,” he replied, his attention catching on a strange darkness within the tree line to the right. He watched it another moment before realizing it was a large boulder shrouded in shade. Relaxing slightly, he spared a glimpse to the woman riding beside him. She arched a questioning eyebrow, her violet eyes alight with curiosity.
“I have a course at Hartstone,” he went on, his longing for the three-mile obstacle course he’d lain out and built over the last handful of years growing.
“A path?” she asked.
“A challenging path,” he replied, smiling inwardly.
Rock walls, pole bridges, rope swings, and netted canopies strung between treetops were only a few of the dangerous obstacles he’d implemented. Running the course, always aiming to improve his time, helped him focus. It was a different kind of physical exertion that released his pent-up tension, and oddly enough, it was better than anything Françoise or any girl from The Cock and the Crown could manage.
“What’s it like?” Irina asked, and from the inflection of her voice he could tell she was truly interested.
That was another thing that hadn’t changed over the years—that insatiable curiosity and bright intelligence of hers. Whenever he had visited the estate in Cumbria, Irina had always asked insightful questions about his travels with genuine enthusiasm. He supposed it was why he’d always enjoyed conversing with her, and perhaps that was why he felt so at ease with her now. There were no games, no artifice, no trickery. Henry exhaled, his eyes scanning the area once more. It’d been so long since he had trusted anyone, especially a woman.
“It’s fashioned after a military training area,” he said. “With walls and hurdles and ditches. I like to exert myself,” he added with a tight shrug.
“Ah,” she sighed. “Now I see.”
“See what?”
Her teasing smile caught him by surprise. “How you stay so physically fit if indeed you do eat your sorrows as you’ve confessed to doing.”
To his even greater surprise, Henry found himself smiling and bantering back. “And what is your secret, then?”
“Why dancing, of course.” She flung her head back, staring to the sky. “And riding. Though neither of those sound as exciting as this course of yours. Will you show it to me?”
He was about to say yes when reason latched onto the heels of his impulse.
“Perhaps,” he replied stiffly. Taking a woman on the course would be dangerous. He could not be responsible for broken bones or anyone’s death. Before his best friend, John’s, passing two years prior, he’d broken his arm on the first half mile of the course, narrowly missing breaking his neck instead. No, it would not be a place for anyone bar him, especially not any gently bred young woman, not even one as adventurous as the lady beside him.
Irina stayed quiet a moment, and when she spoke again, her tone had turned playful. “Do you see the curve in the road ahead? If I beat you to it, you will agree to show me the course.”
Henry couldn’t help smiling at her tenacity. And her competitive spirit. The curve was a good four hundred yards or more in the distance, the canopy overhead tangled with what appeared to be bare tree branches.
“And if you lose?” Henry asked, eyeing her sideways.
“Name the forfeit,” she said, meeting his glance and raising one brow in challenge.
He shifted in his saddle, trying not to sink to new depths while imagining all manner of things he might take from her. Her offering was innocent, but his thoughts were decidedly not.
“You’ll show me your skill with a sword,” he said, recalling her offer on the balcony moments before she’d kissed him. “Do you require a head start, my lady?”
Her full lips broke into a wide grin. It tugged at him, hard. Henry’s mouth was still slowly forming his return grin when Irina slapped her reins and took off in a lurch. “Head starts are for amateurs!”
Henry’s reflexes sprang into gear, and he dug his heels in, urging his mount forward. He shot past the barouche, the shades of which were drawn, his mother hopefully ignorant to their race, and quickly caught up with Irina’s horse. She was laughing, and when she saw him, gave a little squeal of delight before speeding up. She had skill on her side and the youth and speed of one of the finest riding horses from his stables, but he had the steady grace and strength of his trusted six-year-old Arabian—and an objective. He wanted to see her swinging a sword, and he most certainly did not want to share his dangerous obstacle course with her. Knowing her propensity for danger, she’d likely try to run it.
“I cannot wait to see your secret course,” she shouted breathlessly to him, leaning low over her mount’s neck, her thighs gripping the saddle.
He was distracted for an instant at the sight of her trim legs encased in those buckskin breeches as she rose in the stirrups, catching a healthy eyeful of the shapely backside he’d worried over earlier. Lucky horse, he thought and felt an immediate stirring of lust in his groin. Henry shook his head, uttering a growl of laughter. He’d lose the race and his dignity if he lost his concentration because of an ill-timed erection. Still, the sight of her braced on that horse was nothing short of spectacular.
His horse nosed past hers, the curve in the road fast approaching as their mounts rode hard toward it. Irina’s hat remained pinned to her head, though from the corner of his eye, he saw her hair streaming behind her in long, undulating waves. He’d lost his own hat somewhere, though he was certain Billings, his carriage driver, would stop to retrieve it.
Movement along the branches that crisscrossed above the curve in the road drew Henry’s eyes away from Irina’s flowing hair. Blurred streaks of reddish gray fur were scurrying along the branches—a pair of squirrels. They screeched violently in their mating chase, causing the bare, withered-looking branches to sway. A third squirrel dropped from a higher branch, landing upon the other two.
Henry heard the deep crack of wood above the panting horses and their pounding hooves. Somehow, it was louder than Irina’s laughter and the slap of her swallowtail riding coat in the wind. Time slowed as he saw the squirrels scattering fast, leaping upon a safe branch as the one they’d been on began to fall. The branch itself, so much larger now that he really saw it, seemed to fall at an impossibly slow speed. Henry’s eyes and mind quickly worked in tandem to calculate where he and Irina would be when the thick tree limb landed in the middle of the road.
The answer slammed into him: they would be directly below it.
“Stop!” he shouted, but knew the rushing wind coursing past her ears had muffled his shout.
There wasn’t time to reach for her reins and pull her to a stop. He pushed his mount forward just enough to come alongside hers as they crested the bend. And then he threw himself to the side, falling off his horse and into Irina’s. She screamed as he hooked her with his arm and pulled her from her saddle. He fell, back first, toward the hard-packed road and braced himself for the collision, cradling Irina best he could with his arms and chest. They hit, the ground pummeling the air from Henry’s lungs.
His head knocked off the dirt, and his ears started to ring. The world went dark and silent. The pain lancing through Henry’s back and ribs, along his arms and legs, cut through the high-pitched bells in his ears and became a horrendous cry of anguish.
The screaming continued, the caterwauling unbearable. Mean laughter, men shouting in his ear. Words he didn’t understand, and some he did. Threats he knew would be fulfilled. A gunshot. A bullet striking the cold, damp stone wall Henry was chained to. A piece of rock exploding and burrowing into his cheek. He couldn’t move. His hands were chained, his bare feet in pure agony from where they were weighted down in a bucket of ice and freezing water.
The images rushed at him, piling on top of him, drowning him. He’d never get away. He’d die here. He’d die a prisoner.
“Henry?”
A voice reached for him in the dark, dank cell where he lay, caught in the monstrous pit of his memories.
“Henry, open your eyes. It’s me.”
The voice grew louder, and he grasped for it. He heaved for air, and the rotten stink of excrement and blood was becoming the sweet scent of tea roses.
“Please, Henry, look at me.”
He cracked open his eyelids to blaring sunshine and a pained, beautiful face hovering above his. Silence thundered in his ears. Was he dead? An angel such as she did not belong in his world. Such beauty would not suffer to be surrounded by such filth. Henry struggled to breathe as reality returned in fractured swatches, dissolving the nightmare that had gripped him. His angel remained, staring at him, her hat gone, and he remembered who she was. Where he was. The road. A tree branch falling. “Irina.”
“Oh thank God,” she gasped, her hands cradling his cheeks.
“Branch,” he ground out, the back of his head blaring with pain. Like waking after one of the night terrors he used to have almost every night, the memories of that foul French prison cell throbbed with stark clarity. His stomach was tight, his heart racing.
“I know, I saw it just as you dove for me,” she said, her thumbs still gently caressing his cheeks and jaw. “You saved my head, but I’m worried about yours. You took the brunt of the fall.”
“I’m fine,” he said, trying to sit up. Irina leaned on his chest and pushed him back down onto the ground.
“You are not,” she insisted. “You were shouting. You were in pain.”
“I’m in pain now, with those pointy elbows of yours in my ribs,” he grumbled. She ignored him.
“What happened? Henry?”
His name like that, so soft and concerned on her lips, with her hands stroking his jaw…a wall fissured inside of him.
“A memory,” he whispered, closing his eyes again. “Nothing more.”
One of her thumbs swept closer to his lower lip. “A memory of what happened to you in France?” she asked with caution.
He stiffened under her hands. “What do you know of that?”
He did not discuss it. With anyone. The only people who knew about his time as a prisoner were his mother, Rose, War Office officials, and the Prince Regent himself. He was certain of rumors and whispers, too, but nothing true or substantial.
“Only that it haunts you,” she answered. Irina’s thumb touched the curve of his bottom lip. Her eyes bored into his, the balm of her compassion like a salve on his ragged emotions. Inexplicably, his breathing slowed and calmed.
His heart, too, had lessened its gallop, and the pulsing images of the prison had slipped into the closed-up room in his mind where he preferred they stay. Usually they persisted for hours, and he was forced to run or call for a woman to distract him. But they were gone now, swept away by only the gentle press of Irina’s fingers and her sweet concern.
Irina levered her hands to her side and adjusted her position over him so that her breasts lay flat against his chest instead of her elbows. Her dark curls spilled over her shoulders, and Henry had the indescribable urge to bury his face in them. She was staring at him now, a look of unhidden yearning in those magnetic eyes, and the space between them shifted into something charged.
Her chest rose and fell above his in shallow pants. With a soft inhalation, Irina drew a bare fingertip across the parted seam of his lips. The dull throb in his skull was replaced by a throb in another region of his body. She’d removed her riding gloves, he realized, and he could taste the salt on her skin. Henry wanted to suck that teasing finger into his mouth and then replace it with her tongue. Hell, he wanted her to straddle where he ached, right here in the middle of the post road, and grind herself against him, finding her pleasure even through the friction of their breeches. He wanted it with a kind of need he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Reason returned with the sound of the carriage nearing the blind curve of the bend.
“I should attempt to get up before my mother sees us and has heart failure,” he said softly, and with a groan of effort, pushed her body gently from his ribs and sat up.
Irina kneeled beside him, dirt smudging her breeches and riding coat. She tried to secure the tangled mess of her hair, and Henry wanted to tell her to leave it. She looked like a beautiful and wild forest sprite. He said nothing, however, watching as she pinned the heavy mass in place. He had no claim on her hair…or any part of her, for that matter.
A few paces away, a massive branch lay in the center of the road. It had splintered in places, the wood having been old and dry. Just beyond that, their horses waited, luckily also unharmed.
“Thank you,” Irina said as the loud rattling of carriage tack came up behind them. Billings wouldn’t have seen what had happened even from his driver’s perch given the sharp curve, which meant the countess would also be none the wiser. Henry was grateful for small mercies. He did not want her unduly worried, and apart from a bruised shoulder and head, he was fine. He got to his feet, his back smarting with pain from the fall and extended his hand to help Irina stand, as well. “For saving my life. Again,” she finished.
Henry held onto her fingers, reveling in the difference in size from his own. His hand dwarfed hers, and he was struck with the urge to do it all again. To protect and to keep her safe. He didn’t make a reply but released her hand as the door to the barouche opened and his mother called out.
“What in the name of the king is going on out here? Henry? Irina, dear, are you injured?”
“No,” they both replied quickly, to set his mother at ease. They grinned at one another, though only briefly.
“A fallen branch,” Henry explained, choosing to leave out the rest as Billings hopped down to help clear it from the road.
“Thank goodness,” she replied, a bit too dryly. “What a mess that branch made. We are lucky it did not fall right on top of us. Come now, we should be off.”
Henry went for the horses. “Will you ride in the barouche now?” he asked Irina. She took her horse’s reins and climbed into the saddle. He shook his head and grimaced at the spear of pain. “Fine. Have it your way, princess. But no more racing.”
After a few minutes, she turned to him with an impish look. “I have it on good authority that I was in the lead when that branch fell.”
“Whose authority?”
“Mine, of course,” she quipped. “Which means I won.”
Henry favored her with a benevolent nod. “Since I do not wish to call your honor into question, I shall offer a tie. Otherwise I will be forced to call you out at dawn, and I hope to keep my present body intact given your boasts of your consummate skill.” He shot her an arch stare. “Which by the way still needs to be demonstrated.”
“A tie?” Irina snorted. “That means no one wins.”
“Or it means we both win.”
Her animated eyes met his, and once more Henry fought the stirrings of lust. There was another, far more pleasurable race he envisioned in which they would both be victors. Irina, riding him as she had the horse, with nothing but abandon and enthusiasm spurring her on. The tantalizing mental image of Irina caught in the throes of passion atop his body nearly unseated him. Henry growled low in his throat and adjusted his suddenly uncomfortable position on the horse. If he wasn’t careful, the rest of this journey would be the bloody death of him.
He cleared his too-tight throat. “Why did you learn to fight?”
“I wanted to be able to defend myself,” she replied after a prolonged moment, her humor fading rapidly. Henry almost regretted the question and the swift change in her demeanor, but his interest was piqued. Irina carried her father’s penknife on her person at all times for protection, she’d told him. Did she truly believe she was in any danger? Henry frowned. Her vicious uncle, tried and convicted of treason against the Russian Tsar and the murder of her parents, and summarily executed, could not hurt her.
“For what reason?” Henry probed gently.
The muscles in her throat worked compulsively as if it were a fight to expel the answer. “After what happened, I don’t ever wish to feel defenseless again. If I’d known what I do now, those men who kidnapped me would be dead.” She grew quiet. “I was the reason my sister nearly died. Because I was weak.” Her voice broke on the last word, her fists tightening on the reins. Frustrated anger streaked across her face. She’d confided something she hadn’t meant to say.
“You’re not weak.”
“I’m not now.”
Irina’s stare was fierce, her gaze probing his as if daring him to contradict her. In delayed understanding, Henry realized that her past, much like his, tormented her daily. He understood the sway of those inner demons more than she knew, the ones she tried to keep tightly reined, and the residual fears that plagued her. Her uncle could no longer hurt her, but she’d done all she could to ensure that no one else would. Pity and admiration for her courage surged in equal measure in his chest.
“I can see that,” he said softly.
Her eyes flashed. “Don’t you dare feel sorry for me,” she whispered, her voice shaking with suppressed fury, which seemed to be directed more at herself than at him. A mask of shadows descended across her face as she slowed her mount and stopped. She would not look at him. “I think I will ride with the countess for a spell after all if that suits you, Lord Langlevit.”
Henry bowed and signaled to Billings. “Of course.”
His frown was thoughtful as they resumed their pace once she was ensconced in the carriage. Though clearly Irina loathed it, she preferred the confines to whatever she’d seen in his face or heard in his voice after her whispered confession.
It was yet another thing they shared in common—she didn’t like being vulnerable.