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“Oh, you poor thing. One game of pully-hawly, and you’ve gone and tumbled head over heels in love. I thought you were more worldly than that, Your Grace.”
Her companion laughed, the sound humorless. “I would never be caught in such a noose.”
The reply left her oddly bereft, not that she was looking for love either. Maybe one day, and most definitely not with a man like the Duke of Thornbury, who would probably welcome a wife with the same frigid disdain he had for everything else.
He wasn’t frigid half an hour ago.
No, he’d been hotter than a brush fire. Her cheeks heated anew and Bronwyn pressed her chilled fingers to them. A bone-deep shiver ran through her, and she was hard pressed to say whether it was due to the memory of what they’d done or the fact that her body felt numb from the night air. She wished she hadn’t discarded her topmost layer in her haste to escape.
Suddenly, a warmth engulfed her. Thornbury’s coat, she realized, cozy from the heat of his body, though the outside was still damp. She pulled the lapels closed, her frozen skin soaking up the warmth. Had he been watching her and seen her shiver from the cold?
“Won’t you freeze?” she said with a slight chatter to her teeth.
“I should have offered it to you earlier,” he replied gruffly, his arm moving over her shoulders and drawing her against him. “I have endured much worse with much less.”
It made her think of what he’d done for the sake of his job. She knew his travels had taken him all over the world in service to the British Crown. Had he been in situations like this before? Running for his life? Escaping death? Seeking a passionate outlet? Her thoughts flicked to the gorgeous woman who’d been married to him, and Bronwyn’s stomach soured. Had the two of them ever shared that kind of near-violent, frantic intimacy? Had the former countess known the lithe thrust of those strong hips, the feel of those hands, the wicked, erotic taste of him?
Bronwyn’s stomach wound into ugly jealous knots.
Of course she had. She’d been hiswife.
A vision of them coiled naked together in the throes of sexual congress assaulted her. Bronwyn pinned her lips, bitterness surging into her throat, its fingers clawing upward and making it hard to breathe. She had zero claim on him. What they had shared had been sex, nothing more. She needed to get her head out of her arse, especially where this man was concerned.
“What is wrong?” Thornbury asked.
“Nothing. Why?”
“You made a strange, angry sort of noise,” he said.
She bit down on her lip. “My ankle hurts.”
“It’s not far, I don’t think,” he said and tugged her closer. “Here, if you won’t let me carry you, lean on me a bit more.”
He was right. It wasn’t much further until a dark structure came into view. It did resemble a pile of old, gothic ruins, with what looked to be a square base with a cylindrical tower looming above them. Follies on estates in England were built to be admired, depending on the tastes of the gentlemen who owned them. Gentlemen who had returned from travel abroad took creative liberty on their estates. There was a folly at her family’s country seat in Kettering that resembled an ancient temple and another that was a dovecote.
This one, however, looked like it was in danger of crumbling apart, as if it had been forgotten and left to its own devices. Bronwyn wrinkled her nose, though the promise of shelter made her giddy.
“Stay here for a moment,” Thornbury said. “Let me check that it’s safe and empty of vermin.”
The duke might be hard and unfeeling most of the time, but he was a born-and-bred gentleman. If he wasn’t such a horse’s arse, he might have made a good husband. Bronwyn frowned, remembering the lady’s comments at dinner. Why had he and the former countess petitioned Parliament for a divorce and been granted one? It wasn’t any of her business, but suddenly, she wanted to know.
“Why did you and Lisbeth get a divorce?” she blurted out, softly, but she knew he had heard because the rustling a few feet away had stopped. When the silence stretched out, she thought he wasn’t going to answer and wanted to kick herself for prying or making it seem like she cared to know.
“We wanted different things,” he replied after a while. “I suppose that everything eventually runs its course and our marriage did.”
“That’s cold even for you.”
A bark of laughter flew on the air. “What offends you more, my lady? That we didn’t stick it out and take other lovers like everyone else in the aristocracy, exchanging one or two words over dinner and sleeping in different rooms once we produced an heir and a spare? Or that we decided to go separate ways because our paths diverged and it was the most sensible option?”
He had a point. Most marriages in their circles were arranged in the interests of fortune and power. It was rare that couples got along. Her own father had preferred captaining his fleet of ships to his marchioness’s bed, though he had doted on his children until his death. Her brother and Ravenna had been lucky. They were a love match. Envy bled through her and she banished it in the same breath. Yearning for something well out of her reach was not only impractical, but also useless.
“Was your former wife like you?”
The silence grew until it felt heavy and sticky. Bronwyn couldn’t see his face from where he stood near the entrance to the folly, but suddenly she had the feeling that he was watching her from wherever he stood in the shadows. “Like me?”
She swallowed. “A spy.”
Eight
