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Chapter One
The things one does to soothe one’s conscience.
With that rueful thought, Benedict Tawny led his horse stealthily along the grassy verge of the drive curving through a pretty wood to Dornton Manor, early-morning October sunlight just beginning to dapple the few leaves overhead. A gust of wind tugged loose his hat and he jumped to catch it.
If his fellow Hellions could see him now! he thought with a grin, jamming the cap back on his head. Not that he was the delight of his tailor, but in his worn jacket, serviceable breeches and scuffed boots, he hardly looked like a respectable Member of Parliament, one of the leaders of the Reform movement and a rising force in government. Surprising how easily he’d fallen back into the role of intelligence-gatherer he’d performed for the army in India.
All to safeguard the virtue of a female he’d never even met.
But with the Parliamentary session over until Grey could convene a new one later in the year and the other Hellions out of London, he had time on his hands.
He might as well use it to perform a good deed.
A flicker of light in the woods up ahead caught his eye. Through the slender tree trunks, he could just make out the figure of a young female. Shifting his position to get a better view, he saw that she was short, her dark hair thrust up under a sadly out-of-date straw bonnet—and that her entire attention was focused on the sketch pad balanced on her knee.
Though the gown was as outdated as the bonnet, the cut and cloth were of good quality—the garment too unfashionable a cast-off to tempt a lady’s maid and too fine to be passed on to a housemaid—so she must be Quality. And only a lady of quality passionate about her art would be out sketching this early in the morning.
Petite, unfashionable, avid artist—the description fit to perfection the lady he sought. Delighted to have been handed the solution to the problem of how an unrelated male would find a way to speak alone with a gently bred virgin, Ben approached quietly, not wanting to alarm her.
But even as he reached the clearing where she sat on a felled log, she remained so absorbed in her drawing that she didn’t seem to notice him. Finally, clearing his throat loudly, he said, ‘Lady Alyssa Lambornne, I presume?’
Gasping, the maiden nearly dropped her sketchbook and the box containing her pastels did go flying. Ben jumped to nip them up before they fell to the forest floor. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,’ he said.
Straightening, he reached out to hand back the box, met the gaze she’d focused on him—and froze. Shock zinged through him, as if he’d walked across the library carpet on a crisp winter day and touched the metal latch.
Her eyes were magnificent—large, fawn-brown, with an intelligence in their golden depths that drew him in and invited him to linger. There was a fierceness and intensity there, too. Not just in her eyes, he thought dazedly, but in the whole set of her body, as if she were poised to flee—or attack.
Indeed, in her drab gown, a wisp of dark hair escaping from under the shabby bonnet, the shawl slipping off her shoulders, she seemed almost…feral, as if she were as untamed as the woodland she sketched.
Something primal and passionate and powerfully female about her called to everything male in him. Desire thickened his tongue, thrummed in his blood, sent arousal rushing to every part of his body.
Drawn to capture those lips, he reached out for her, rattling the pastels in the box he’d been about to return.
That small noise, loud in the stillness, broke the spell. He shook his head, searching for his vanished wits.
Pull yourself together, Tawny. This is not a passionate Diana, ready for a frolic in the woods, but a modest, virginal girl.
No matter what his erratic senses were telling him.
The response that so unsettled him seemed to have suspended time, but it must have lasted only an instant, for Lady Alyssa was still studying him, frowning as she evidently struggled to place him.
It was not a girl who sat before him, but a woman, he realised as he returned her scrutiny, still fighting the lingering effects of that sensual firestorm. Her face a perfect oval, the cheeks and nose dotted with freckles that were probably the bane of a mama trying to make her fashionably pale, she had a pert little nose shadowing full rose-petal lips.
A ‘little dab of a thing’ she might be, being of shorter-than-average height, and her hair was an unremarkable brown, but that was the only part of the description he’d been given that seemed accurate.
Drab…long on the shelf…a spinster past her last prayers? He’d have rather called her a ‘pocket Venus.’ The unfashionable high-waisted gown emphasised an attractively full bosom and the worn fabric clung in all the right places to some very pleasing curves.
And how could any man meet that fiery gaze and not be swamped with the need to possess her?
Anger stirred anew that Denbry would sacrifice this lovely creature to achieve some petty revenge against her brother.
Since the lady had yet to speak—perhaps she was shy—Ben finally mastered himself enough to give her a pleasant smile. ‘It being such a lovely day, I was walking my mount—' he gestured towards his horse ‘—when I saw a female in the woods. Thinking some lady might have got lost, I came to offer assistance. I see now that you were sketching and apologise for interrupting you.’
Leaning over to hand her the box of pastels, he caught a glimpse of the scene on her sketch pad. ‘Your drawing is excellent, by the way,’ he added in surprise, craning his head to study it. Every young woman sketched; this one was actually skilled. ‘How cleverly you’ve caught the form of the bird, as if he were about to take flight.’
‘Thank you,’ she said at last. ‘But you have the advantage, sir; you know who I am, while I still cannot place you. I am sure we are not acquainted, for had we been introduced, I would certainly have remembered you.’ She scanned him again from head to toe, as if noting every detail. ‘Are you Lord Fulton’s secretary, perhaps?’
She was observant! She’d drawn just the conclusion he’d been aiming for when he donned this disguise: his cultivated tone of voice indicating he wasn’t a farm worker or a labourer; his clothing well made, but too worn and unremarkable to proclaim him the sort of fashionable peer Lady Fulton would have invited to her house party.
