‘If her grandfather lets her loose before he’s had them shaken out of her, perhaps you’re right. But I know his Grace’s methods. He’ll have chaperons and tutors and lord knows what else lined up to turn her into a pattern-book young lady within a Season, mark my words.’
The sun moved behind a cloud, the dolphins gave a few last heart-stopping leaps and vanished and Quin felt a sudden wave of depression. Cleo was unique and to turn her into just another well-bred female on display in the Marriage Mart seemed as great an act of vandalism as taking a Greek statue and recarving it into some sentimentally pretty garden ornament.
And I will have contributed to that. I will have made it possible. He struggled for the hundredth time with the sense that he was betraying her by keeping quiet about her grandfather. But she had no understanding of how things should be, he told himself, again for the hundredth time. She would probably try to bolt or do something foolish, but once she was safely with her grandfather she would soon discover the advantages of the situation.
But it wasn’t enough, he knew it. Cleo dreamt of freedom, of the power to make her own decisions, to be her own woman. The fact that this simply was not a possibility for a well-bred lady was no answer to that dream, to that passion.
And yet he had given his word he would bring her back to England. His word, his honour and, plainly, his duty, argued for seeing he achieved it without risk of Cleo taking off and putting herself in danger or creating a scandal before he could retrieve her.
It was the first time his inclinations, his personal feelings, had been opposed to his duty, he realised. He had worked hard to secure his place on the ladder of his new career, to be accepted as himself, a man forging his own name and his own destiny, not in the shadow of the Malvern escutcheon.
Brace up, he told himself. You gave your word and you will do your duty to your country or you aren’t fit to hold the aspirations that you do. And it is the right thing for Cleo, whether she likes it or not. To tell her that he was taking her to her grandfather might ease his conscience for a while, but then he would have to deal with the consequences when she rebelled, as she surely would.
‘Brooding, Lord Quintus? Or seasick?’ Cleo’s voice right behind him brought him swinging round before he could get his expression under control. ‘Oh! I am sorry, you really are upset about something, aren’t you?’ Her tone shifted instantly from the lightly sarcastic edge she always seemed to use to him now to something genuine and kind. Its softness hit him like a punch in the gut.
She held her broad-brimmed hat on her head with one hand, the other catching at the flying ends of the scarf that should have secured it. The breeze and the sea air had brought the colour up in her cheeks and the relief from the daily grind of her previous life was already beginning to show in the graceful, relaxed way she moved now.
‘Upset? No, just thinking about...work. Various obligations.’ He shrugged and managed a smile. The obligation to continue to deceive you. The obligation not to touch you. The obligation not to kiss you. The obligation not to get to know you very, very well indeed, Augusta Cleopatra Agrippina Woodward Valsac, you infuriatingly unique woman.
‘How troublesome, I do hope it is not keeping you awake at night.’
The edge was back and with it something else, an undertone that had him wondering if she was kept awake by something herself. Fear of the unknown, no doubt.
Quin wrestled again with the temptation to tell her the truth in the hope it would quell that fear if she knew what her fate was to be. He could tell her that she need not concern herself about making a new life in a strange homeland, that she would be pitch-forked into a gilded cage of privilege and wealth. But that was what temptation did, gave you justification for doing the wrong thing, and he had to resist.
‘Yes, it keeps me awake,’ Quin admitted, adopting the neutral smile that was virtually the first thing that a budding diplomat learned. I lie awake thinking of you, of that generous mouth against mine, making sweetness not sarcasm. I remember the soft curves of your body and the length of those lovely gazelle’s legs and imagine them naked, twining with mine. I imagine that austere oval of your face transformed by your passion as you come beneath me, over and over again, crying out my name as I bury myself in you and the flame burns through my blood...
‘It is really very trying,’ he added as he held her gaze and willed her not to look down to where his thoughts would not permit the slightest diplomatic cover-up. ‘After the tranquillity of the desert a ship under full sail does not make a quiet or easy bed.’ Not when I am lying on the thistles of desire and the stones of an uneasy conscience. His muddle of mixed metaphors made him smile a little and he saw her relax.