‘There is a small population of goats, I believe, and a ramshackle cottage where I intend to compromise you completely and comprehensively.’
He sounded as calm as though he was discussing taking a stroll along the seafront, but there was something in the timbre of his voice that shook Alessa out of her confusion and her irritation and into belief. Slowly, not taking her eyes off him, she got to her feet and went to stand at the tiller, laying her hand over his as though to help him steer.
‘Very well, let us go to the island.’
Chance reached round and moved her until she was standing in front of him, her back against him, his left arm encircling her waist while he continued to steer with the right.
‘That’s nice,’ he murmured, resting the point of his chin on top of her head. Wordlessly Alessa snuggled back against him, feeling the long body behind her sheltering her, and abandoned herself to whatever happened.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The island was, indeed, populated by goats. They came trotting to investigate when they saw the skiff draw into the shallows and watched with their strange yellow eyes wide as Chance splashed ashore with Alessa in his arms.
‘Welcome to our first home together.’He set her on her feet on the beach.
‘Chance, I—’
‘Wait until we get to the cottage. I am damned if I am going to make a declaration of passionate love watched closely by a herd of goats.’ He took her hand and began to climb the narrow path that led around the low cliff. Alessa scrambled after him, with a fleeting sigh of regret for the pretty new gown she had put on that morning. It seemed she was about to be proposed to whilst clad in a garment that was soaked around the hem, had split under one arm while she was struggling out of the net and was regrettably fishy from the bottom of the rowing boat.
Any proper young lady would have the vapours—Alessa was only glad that she was obviously not proper. Chance will take it off in a minute anyway, she thought with a ripple of excitement.
Chance half-opened, half-lifted a rickety gate and drew her through into the overgrown remains of a paved terrace in front of a stone cottage. Whoever had once lived here—fisherman, goat farmer or hermit—had an eye for a view, she thought, gazing out through a tangle of gorse and long grass to the sea.
‘Out!’ Chance shied a pebble at the goats who took to their heels, and shut the gate.
‘Now, Kyria Alessa, I have you alone at last.’ Chance took her hands in his and stood looking down at her. Her heart was doing the oddest things. Alessa felt suddenly shy; it was an effort to hold his gaze.
‘What was it you wanted to say?’
‘That I love you. That I was not used to young women of independence and experience and I misjudged how I should behave.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I tried to dictate what you should do, and to decide, all by myself, what was best for us, when I did not understand you.’He lifted her hands to his lips and kissed her fingertips. ‘Can you forgive me?’
‘Of course.’ She had not tried to understand him, she realised, now she made the effort. ‘But can you change? It is how you have been brought up to deal with your womenfolk, is it not? And can I change enough not to scandalise those around us?’
‘We will learn together. Perhaps in society we will be more conventional than we will when we are alone. My mama and my sisters believe that I am a paragon. They would not believe it if you told them that I have had mistresses, that I have been known to gamble, that sometimes I wake up in the morning with a thick head from over-indulgence. And I believed that it was very important to keep any worry, any decision of any importance, from them.’ He pressed another kiss on to her fingertips, his eyes dark. ‘I think now that I was smug, and dictatorial and complaisant.’
‘Probably,’ Alessa agreed solemnly, sheer joy fizzing inside her. ‘But you can change, I will help. But I want to know about these mistresses.’
‘No, you do not! And I do not have one now, or ever again, I swear.’ He freed one hand and led her by the other to where a slab of stone made a bench by the door of the hut. ‘I wanted you as soon as I saw you, although why I was so aroused by an icy green-eyed witch, I have no idea.’
‘Witch?’
‘All I could think of was that you had bewitched me.’
‘And I thought the effect you had on me was witchcraft too.’ They fell silent, eyes locked, then Alessa put up a hand and touched his cheek. ‘Go on.’
‘I realised I was falling in love with you when I went to apologise for what happened at the Liston and you were gone. I could hardly believe it. I knew exactly what I wanted: a well-bred, strictly brought up young lady who I would meet during the Season, who would be vetted by my mama and who I would marry, in the fullness of time, in a fashionable London church.’
‘And you thought you were falling in love with a widow, no longer in the first blush of youth, with two children and a mysterious past.’ Alessa smiled, ‘Poor Chance. I realised I loved you when I got to the cottage at Liapades and I thought I would never see you again. And then, like a miracle, there you were in the sea.’
Chance began to toy with the few pins that remained in her hair until it fell about her shoulders like heavy silk. ‘I sailed back to the villa and I decided the thing to do was to ensure you arrived back in England under your aunt’s chaperonage. I was concerned that if I married you out here, when I got you back people would dismiss you as a Greek girl I had picked up. I wanted to protect you, marry you in circumstances that would cast no shadow of doubt over you.
‘I should have talked it through with you, not decided what was right by myself.’
‘So it was for convention?’ she asked dubiously.
‘Yes. It is a fact—we have to make sacrifices to it, make compromises if we are to live in society. I will not have you looked down on, or allow the old cats to whisper behind your back.’
‘But they will now,’ Alessa pointed out.