‘She is an unhappy woman who is not sitting in a cell awaiting the next assizes,’ Cris said grimly.
‘She might not be in a cell, but you as near as damn it landed yourself in a parson’s mousetrap. And don’t tell me you were about to tell the coroner it was all a ploy—you didn’t think of that until she was on her feet digging you out of the hole you’d made for yourself.’
What in Hades was I thinking? I do not need Gabe to tell me that I was risking creating a storm in London, in the diplomatic corps, at Court.
But he had simply been incapable of watching Tamsyn stand there, brave and honest and truthful, while the snare tightened around her. ‘So I should have let her be accused by the coroner’s jury, allowed her to be carted off like a felon to prison and let her languish there with prostitutes and Lord knows what scum while I worked out how to disprove that so-called solicitor’s clerk?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can always rely on you for the ruthless answer, can’t I?’
‘You can. Tamsyn would have survived a few weeks in gaol. She’s not some sheltered society miss.’ They reined in as a flock of sheep swept across their path, spooked by a circling buzzard. Gabriel pushed his mount in front of Jackdaw. ‘Cris, listen to me, I am worried about you. You are half-tempted to tell her you won’t withdraw your offer, aren’t you? You’ve slept with her and I know you when you’ve a fit of gallantry on you.
‘But think what you owe to your name, your reputation. You might not want to help out the Foreign Office again and you certainly don’t need the money, but you enjoy the work. You’d lose that—which ambassador’s wife is going to want to receive a smuggler’s widow? The Queen most certainly wouldn’t have her at Court. Let Tamsyn go now, let her calm down. Ride back slowly, take her at her word that she doesn’t want you.’
‘I know all that. Don’t think I haven’t had what is expected of me dinned into me since I was old enough to understand.’
But she didn’t say she did not want me. What if she loves me? What have I done?
The frustration and anger came down like a red mist in front of his vision. Cris urged Jackdaw forward alongside his friend’s mount, bunched his right fist and hit Gabe square on the jaw. He held his panicked horse in check for long enough to see Gabriel sit up on the heather, rubbing his chin and swearing, then kicked into a gallop after Tamsyn.
He had no time for thinking as he raced after her. She knew this country like the back of her hand, and so did Foxy, but he did not and the track was treacherous. He caught sight of her only as Jackdaw plunged skidding and sweating down Stibworthy’s cobbled street past the inn, and by then she was already vanishing down the track to Barbary Cove.
He reined in, reassured that she was going home and that nothing much could happen between there and the house. Jackdaw was tired, but game, and proved a handful to keep to a trot. On impulse, when they reached the fork that led to the clifftop where they had picnicked, he dismounted, tied the reins up and slapped Jackdaw’s rump. When the big black trotted on down to the stable Cris walked up to the summit, then made for the almost hidden path to the lookout hut.
Inside, he shut the lower half of the door, sat down on the bench and stared out at the square of blue sea, blue sky, until his anger with Gabriel subsided and his brain started working clearly again. He had done the only possible thing, he told himself. The only honourable thing. He had slept with Tamsyn and that had put him even more under an obligation to defend her. But he had no obligation to marry her now. Unless she expected it. But she had rejected him in court when she thought he was plain Mr Defoe and had been horrified to discover he was a marquess.
The crunch of feet on stone was the only warning he had before the hut door opened and someone ducked inside. For a moment there was simply a figure in silhouette against the brightness, then he recognised her at the same moment that she saw him. ‘Tamsyn.’
‘You.’ She recoiled in shock and he leapt for her, his stomach clenching in fear at the thought of the closeness of the cliff edge, the narrowness of the path. He caught her by both wrists as she teetered on the brink, yanked her back into the hut and fell with her in a tangle of limbs on the hard wooden bench.
She was quivering in his arms and he realised he was shaking with the sheer horror of that moment when he thought she was going over the edge. Then his mouth was on hers and her hands were clenched in his hair and they were kissing with a ferocity that swept everything away but the urgency to mate, there, then, on the hard wooden bench.
Tamsyn’s hands were on his falls and he twisted to give her access even as he dragged up her skirts and found the hot, wet core of her. She pressed into his hand as she freed him from the tangle of shirt tails, the constriction of breeches that had become too tight on his aroused flesh.
‘Cris.’ It was a demand, a plea, an order, and he came down over her, into her with a single thrust. She came apart on the instant and her cry, the hot, tight grasp of her, almost sent him over the edge before he could withdraw.
There was a moment’s perfect bliss as they lay in a hot, tangled, s
ticky heap, the aftershocks of his release sending spikes of pleasure through him. Then Tamsyn shoved at his shoulders, hit out, writhed beneath him.
‘Stop fighting me, damn it.’ He sprawled on top of her as she bucked against his weight and in sheer self-defence he caught her wrists above her head.
‘Let me go.’
‘The moment you promise not to scratch my eyes out or go rushing out on to that cliff edge again. You took ten years off my life, woman.’
She subsided, panting, and Cris sat up, keeping his distance as much as possible in the cramped space as he stuffed his shirt back into his breeches and fastened his falls.
Tamsyn wrenched down her skirts as she struggled up. ‘You lied to me.’
‘A moment ago you were crying out in ecstasy in my arms.’
She buried her face in her hands, then pushed back her hair impatiently. ‘I don’t know what that was.’
‘Fright, relief, sheer irrational lust. And I did not lie to you. I withheld information.’
‘Why?’