The Swordmaster's Mistress: Dangerous Deceptions Book Two(81)

‘I’ll do what I can for them,’ Theo said. He was restricted to tea on doctor’s orders after the blow to the head and was not happy about it. ‘Until I have children of my own, their father is my heir. We have to get this back to being a normal relationship, somehow.’

‘Are we sure he didn’t know?’ Jared queried.

‘He is trying to blame himself,’ Sir Andrew answered. ‘I had a few words before the sedative took effect. He forbade Lettie sending any more money to her brother – that had been one of the contributing factors in the Quentens’ financial crisis – and he did his best to stop her writing to him. He says he made her desperate. I genuinely believe he had no notion of what she was doing.’

‘At least that solves the mystery of why Francis thought he would find his sister at Allerton Grange,’ Guinevere said. ‘He was not receiving letters from Elizabeth.’

They talked on, unwinding from the tension and danger. Jared realised Guinevere had fallen silent. He wanted to go and take her in his arms, carry her off to bed, but that wasn’t what either of them really needed now.

She was looking from face to face, a slight smile on her lips, quite clearly thinking about something more pleasant than what had just happened. I almost lost her. If she hadn’t been strong and brave and determined, he might have done. Wherever you go, I go, she had whispered and she had meant it. Lord, but he’d been a fool, proposing marriage because it was the honourable thing, because she was a lady. That wasn’t what Guinevere needed to hear, it wasn’t the truth that had finally bludgeoned its way into his thick skull. Tomorrow, he promised himself.



Guinevere woke with the dawn and lay there watching the thin, cool light gather and strengthen until the shadows began to fade and the colours of the hangings in her bed chamber became clear.

Somehow she had slept last night, what remained of it. Now she was awake again, however much her body protested that it really would like another six hours, at least.

She climbed out of bed, her bruises complaining, and went to the window. Jared was down below, half-sitting on the wall that edged the steepest drop, looking out over the landscape as the sun rose, shaping and colouring the hills. That was what had woken her, she realised, his presence out there, calling to her. She had reached a decision last night, now she had to discover whether his thoughts had changed also. As she watched him he looked round, up, and saw her. Strange how a look can be a touch. I feel it too, when he watches me.

Jared lifted a hand and she nodded. Wait for me.

Guin picked her way through the wreckage of the little sitting room and out into the terrace, slippers on her bare feet, a warm cloak over her nightgown, her hair loose down her back. Quite shocking, she thought, smiling as she saw Jared’s expression.

‘Are you well?’ he asked. Being Jared he was dressed, his rapier at his side, no sign that his left arm was stitched and bandaged.

‘Stiff, shocked still. Almost empty inside now all that suspicion and fear has gone. You?’

‘The same, I suppose.’ He flexed his left hand. ‘And feeling a fool.’

‘A – No, that is ridiculous. What do you have to feel foolish about?’

‘The way I kept proposing marriage to you.’ The rising sun caught the right side of his face, gilding it, sparking amber lights in his eyes, in his hair. The other side of his face was shadowed. It made it hard to read his expression.

Oh. Well. That answers the question I was asking myself. She kept her chin up, her lips firm. I am not going to weep about it.

‘What I should have said was that I love you,’ Jared said as though she was not standing in front of him as speechless and responsive as a gatepost.

‘You – ’ He was speaking English, why couldn’t she understand him?

‘I love you,’ Jared repeated patiently. ‘You do not seem very happy about that.’

‘You never said it before.’ Guin picked her way through the words that were tumbling into her mouth, clogging her tongue.

‘I told you I was a fool. I didn’t realise. I haven’t been in love before, you see. It takes some getting used to.’ This was not a joke. He was perfectly serious and, she realised, nervous. The tension ran through him, shivering under his skin, sending the pulse at his throat beating hard where his shirt lay open. ‘Will you marry me, Guinevere? Not because you should, not because I think it is honourable to ask you, but because I cannot imagine living without you now.’

‘Yes,’ she said and reached out to put her hands on his, feeling the beat of his pulse, feeling the moment of stillness, of shock, before his fingers closed around hers. ‘Yes. I love you. Yes, I want to marry you, Jared.’

‘Before, you said no.’

‘Before I thought it would be an unequal match, that you were proposing out of duty because you thought it was right, that what had been between us had somehow changed when you became the heir to an earldom. Last night I looked around that room and I saw not an earl and his heir but two men. One I loved, both I liked.

‘I looked in the mirror over the fireplace and I saw a woman who had thought she was not worthy of a title, on whom Society had looked down for marrying a nobleman for protection,’ she said, the words coming easily now. ‘And she looked back at me and I saw someone else, a woman who had fought back, a woman who had stood up with you. I saw a woman who loved you and I remembered your voice when you held me and called me my heart. And I resolved to say yes when you asked me again.’