Page 26 of The Society Catch
‘You are trying to scare me for my own good,’ she retorted. ‘I don’t believe for one moment I am in any danger from you, Giles. I trust you.’
Giles stood looking at Joanna’s defiant face. Her eyes were huge in the firelight and the shadows flickered over her mouth, swollen from the pressure of his lips. Her hair fell like black silk over her breast, rising and falling with her rapid breathing and she said shetrustedhim.
He took a deep breath and said, ‘Joanna, will you please go to bed.Now.’
‘Very well.’ Anyone who did not know her would have missed the slight tremor, but Giles caught it. He did not believe now that he had frightened her, but he knew he had not been in any way restrained, that he had simply followed his instincts in a way that left him shaken by his indiscretion. He was no rake, never had been. He was no monk either, but he had never trifled withvirgins, and he had no intention of starting with this one.
‘Go on,’ he said again, making his tone light with some effort. ‘And leave me to contemplate exactly what your mama would say if she knew about this.’
Joanna, who had been making her way to the door stopped in her tracks and stared at him, her eyes wide. ‘You would not tell her.’ He realised with a shock that she was truly alarmed at the prospect, far more than she had been by the kiss itself.
‘I ought to,’ he said ruefully, ‘but I will not, unless you wish me to confess.’
‘No, certainly not. She would be so angry.’
‘At me, with full justification, not with you.’ It seemed incredible that Joanna should appear so worried at the prospect of her mother’s displeasure. Mrs Fulgrave had always seemed a most amiable and reasonable woman.
‘You do not deserve her censure for such a thing, not after you have rescued me and looked after me. You are a friend of the family, I would not want to put any barrier in the way of that continuing,’ she finished formally, apparently getting control of her feelings with an effort. ‘Good night.’
Giles stared at the fire for a long moment when the door closed behind her. Then, with a little shake, he pulled himself together and raked out the dying embers. He shut and bolted the window, snuffed out one of the candles and picking up the other in one hand and his coat in the other walked slowly upstairs to his bedchamber, trying to sort out his feelings.
He was not a man who was given to self-doubt or lengthy introspection. He knew himself to be self-confident, assured, used to being in command of himself, his emotions and those around him. He was no saint, but if he felt himself in error he had no trouble owning to it and when he confronted a problem he would apply his intellect and experience to it, asking advice when that seemed the best course of action.
He shut the chamber door behind himself and tossed his coat onto a chair, tugging off his neck cloth with an impatient jerk. There was no problem about what to do in this situation: he simply had to make sure he did not allow himself to relax to the point of carelessness when alone with Joanna and to see she got home, suitably chaperoned, at the earliest possible opportunity.
No, he thought, glaring at his reflection in the glass with as much irritation as he would if he was lecturing a subaltern caught in some indiscretion, the problem was that his normally well-regulated emotions were now decidedly disordered.
Giles sat down and began to tug off his boots. ‘Pull yourself together and apply your brain,’ he muttered, leaning back in his shirtsleeves, his stockinged feet propped on the fender.
He was feeling aroused, damnably aroused. It hardly required any intellectual effort to deduce that. Giles trampled firmly on the demands his body was sending him and did his best to ignore it.
Joanna had got under his skin in a totally unexpected way. How long had it been since he’d thought about that time in Spain, relived the sounds and smells and emotions? A long time, he realised. And when he had, there was no-one to talk to about it. His father and Alex would understand, they’d the same experiences, but it was not something you discussed with another man. And yet it had been curiously comforting to do so. How had she managed to so disarm him, to take him so far off-guard and out of himself?
He had thought her an unhappy girl, hurt by some man she would soon forget, but he had been wrong. Joanna was not a child with an infatuation. She was a young woman who had experienced two Seasons and who had devoted herself to becoming the perfect wife for some insensitive lout who had hurt her by rejecting that dedication, that love. What had she said just now? “I have never been kissed before, not properly, and I do notexpect to be again.”
At least that man had not seduced her and then cast her off. Giles winced, remembering the matter of fact way she had announced that she did not expect to experience another kiss. What was she going to do with herself now? Return home and dwindle into an unpaid companion to an elderly relative? Become the spinster support of her mother? What a waste.
Giles wearily got to his feet and began to shed the remainder of his clothes. It was as he pulled his shirt over his head that he realised that there was another element to that evening’s encounter which was fretting him like a stone in his shoe. He stood, one hand on the bedpost, trying to analyse it.
Joanna had been so trusting when he had imprudently kissed her, so calm in the face of what should, after her terrifying recent adventure, have been an alarming experience. She trusted him, she had said so. Suzy trusted him too, her “darling Giles”. Trusted him enough to kiss him and flirt with him, wheedle and flutter her eyelashes, without a thought in her pretty head that he might step over the line and take advantage of what she was so charmingly offering.
‘You’re getting middle-aged, my boy,’ Giles told himself, casting a disparaging glance down at his flat stomach. ‘That’s what it is. You’re no longer a devil with women, just a nice, reliable, safe friend to flirt with.’ With a wry grin at his own self-pity he blew out the candle.
In her bedchamber at the other end of the landing Joanna wrestled with her emotions. The memory of the kiss itself seemed to warm her whole body and to fill her with a dull yearning ache. She knew she had added a physical desire for Giles to what had always, in her inexperience, been a purely emotional longing. But how could she not have let him kiss her? How could she not have responded? The pressure of his lips onhers was still tangible. Would she feel it still when she woke in the morning or would it become like a dream?
But wonderful though that simple kiss had been, she treasured more the way Giles had let her share his memories, his recollections of ordinary life with his troopers. Not the glory or the tragedies, just the scents and smells, the music, the rough camaraderie. That was what she had always hoped for, that as his wife she would be someone to whom he could talk without reservation about whatever mattered to him, the big things and the most trivial.
Like the kiss, his voice describing the fire-lit camp was a door opening into a world of intimacy and trust. A door that she must shut again. Neither his kisses nor his trust belonged to her: they were another woman’s and she must learn to do without either.
Chapter Thirteen
If Mrs Gedding noticed that her guests were somewhat constrained the next morning she gave no sign of it and carried the burden of conversation at breakfast with her usual good humour.
Giles was trying to concentrate on what his plans should be once he had safely delivered Joanna back to her parents, but was finding the thought of escorting that disturbingly unpredictable young lady was preying on his mind. He gave himself a brisk mental shake. What possible problems could one young woman present to an experienced officer?
On one occasion he had simultaneously delivered a general’s temperamental Spanish mistress, fifty French prisoners, a wagon train of army pay and six field guns through enemy territory and had arrived with every coin, gun and prisoner intact. And he had achieved this without offending the lady, who had made it quite clear that she was offering to make the journey very pleasant indeed for him.
Something made Giles’s mouth quirk in a reminiscent smile and Joanna, watching him covertly over the rim of her coffee cup, caught her breath. Was he remembering last night? The sensual smile faded leaving her back with her circling thoughts.
