The Unexpected Marriage of Gabriel Stone (Lords of Disgrace 4)

He gathered up her scattered clothing, heaped it on a chair close by her, still without looking, and went to the fire.

‘I do not regard it,’ she said. She dragged on her clothes, fingers fumbling with laces and hooks.

‘You are good to forgive it. Now it is better forgotten.’

What was there to say to that? But that was the start of something wonderful? Please come back to me? Presumably he thought verbal cold water worked as well as the real thing for quenching desire.

The silence seemed to fill the room like fog. Someone had to find a way through it. Be practical.

‘Gabriel, where is there to hide here? The first thing Father is going to do is search all the buildings on the estate.’

He took a breath as though she had jerked him back from far away, but his voice was perfectly normal when he spoke. ‘When I arrived here I looked for a cache for the things I brought with me that would have revealed my identity.’ He had stopped frowning, no doubt because he could now stop thinking about what had just happened. ‘You might say I’ve discovered a priest’s hole. It is certainly large enough to hide you in.’

He bent over the hearth, raked the embers into a heap at the back and ducked under the piece of timber that had been nailed across the opening to make a shelf. ‘Come and see.’

There was just room to stand beside him on the hot stone. Gabriel took the candle, put his foot into a crack in the masonry and began to climb. She saw the light dim as he seemed to thrust the candle into the wall, then with a heave he vanished, too. ‘Can you follow me?’ His head emerged, apparently out of solid stone.

‘I’ll try.’ Caroline tucked up her skirts and got her toe into the first foothold.

It was a scramble, but with Gabriel’s strong arm to haul on she found herself level with a hole that opened into a small chamber. ‘What is this?’ It smelled, not unpleasantly, of wood smoke.

‘They built the tower as a hollow sham. Then your father wanted the place made habitable and told the builders to make a hearth. They created a shaft inside the tower with the chimney poking out below the crenulations, roofed over the top and sealed the opening at ground level. They could have filled in the tower completely, but that would have wasted stone and taken time, so they simply put in this intermediate level, I assume for support.

‘I worked out what they had done, moved a stone or two to see if there was a possible hiding place and found this space. You can’t see it from below and I doubt your father even realises it is here. I only found it because I was expecting makeshift construction—the whole place is no more than a stage set.’

Caroline looked around. There was a pair of valises stacked in the corner and when she lifted the candle she could see the roof high above her head. ‘There’s room to lie down and sleep.’

‘I’ll bring you up blankets.’

‘Not yet. We have to talk.’

‘In the morning.’ Gabriel backed out of the hole and vanished. She heard him moving around below, then he reappeared with two blankets and her valise, went down again and brought up a jug. ‘Drinking water.’

‘I am coming down for a minute.’ Caroline clambered down, which was considerably less easy than climbing up. ‘I’ll

be back shortly,’ she said as she went outside and headed for the edge of the clearing. There was a nice non-brambly clump of bushes just there, she recalled, and there were limits to how long she could be expected to sit in a tower trying not to think about running water. Although that was less uncomfortable than thinking about facing the man who had just brought her that shattering pleasure and almost relieved her of her maidenhood.

When she came back Gabriel was remaking the fire at the front edge of the hearth. ‘I’ll light it when you are up and keep it in all night, I’ve checked and the draw on the chimney is so good the smoke hardly gets into the chamber at all. When your father turns up I want the hearth to look as normal as possible.’

‘You think of everything.’ She paused beside him, laid her hand on his arm. ‘Thank you so much. No one else would help me like this.’

‘You have nothing to thank me for. I have nothing to lose by it and I was bored.’

She tried to disregard the cynicism which she suspected masked a very real anger over their almost-lovemaking. ‘But if he discovers you helped me, my father might call you out.’ Under her fingers she could feel the strength of his forearm, a swordsman’s arm.

‘And I would refuse to fight a man old enough to be my father, a perfectly honourable course.’

‘Lucas, then!’

‘I’d put him on his back with a neat rapier hole in his shoulder. Much less dangerous to his health than pistols.’

‘You are exasperatingly calm about all this.’ Caroline sat down on the simple wooden chair, her legs refusing to tolerate any more.

‘I’m sorry.’ Gabriel hitched one hip on the table and folded his arms. He had an edge to him that was new to her, the sense that he was operating at a different level of concentration and awareness than anyone else. Perhaps this was what made him the successful gambler that he was. Or perhaps that was what a frustrating, almost sexual encounter did to a man.

‘Would you rather we had high drama?’ he asked. ‘I find that sort of thing distracting. Tomorrow I will send a letter and arrange a rendezvous. The hermit will vanish and your father has no means of finding him because every step of the process in London was under false names. My eminently sensible and well-connected friends will put their heads together with us and we will decide on how you can vanish and begin a new life.’

‘I have been incredibly lucky, haven’t I? And hopelessly naive.’ The awareness swept through her along with the weariness. ‘I was so worried about Anthony’s lands that I came up with a quite shocking solution and I did not deserve your forbearance. And now you rescue me again at the risk of scandal.’