A Most Unconventional Courtship

And she would be correct! Alessa did not say it out loud, but the sudden spark in Chance’s eyes told her that his thoughts had meshed with hers.

‘A kiss for luck,’ he said huskily, and drew her into his arms. It was the first time he had kissed her properly, not under water. The sensations were the same, yet startlingly different, for now, without her senses filled with the scent and the noise and the taste of the sea, she could smell his skin, hear her own pulse thudding, savour the taste of his mouth as he explored hers.

It was extraordinary how her body knew how to fit against his, how her soft curves met the long, hard masculine lines. How did her fingers know what the crisp hair at the nape of his neck would feel like as they tangled in it? Why did her lips part under the demand of his to allow the intrusion of his tongue?

Chance thrust into the mo

istness, and she yielded to him, quivering as the dart of his tongue sent a stabbing demand into her loins. Crushed against him, her breasts felt swollen, the nipples, peaking against the tight constraint of her laced bodice, ached.

His hands slid down, cupped her buttocks, lifted her against him, while his mouth continued to plunder hers. It would have been arrogant, this mastery of her body, if she had been anything but an equally willing participant. Now, moulded against the exciting evidence of just how aroused Chance was, Alessa quivered in response, her mind cloudy with the force of her body’s responses.

The heavy strike of the big hall clock cut through the room, drowning the sound of panting breaths and rustling clothing with as much force as though it had been in there with them.

‘Hell!’ Chance freed his mouth, let her slide down the length of him until she was standing again, and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again his gaze was wide and black and his breath was coming fast and short. ‘Hell,’ he said again, stepping back and tugging his coat and neckcloth into some sort of order.

There was no time. No time to talk, to question what had just happened, and why. Alessa looked round wildly for a mirror.

‘Out here.’ There was one hanging, dust-smeared, in the passage. Her frivolous hat had tilted crazily over one eye, an earring had knotted itself up in her hair and her neckline was all awry. She had no recollection of Chance even touching it.

Frantically Alessa straightened and tidied, half-aware that behind this whirl of activity she was avoiding talking to Chance or thinking about her own wanton behaviour.

‘You’ll do.’ He opened the door and pushed her into the hallway only to come face to face with the startled butler. ‘Really, Kyria, I wish you would find something to ride other than that half-broken mule!’ he scolded. ‘I feel I have been dragged through a hedge backwards, trying to stop it just now as you hurtled into the yard.

‘Ah, Wilkins. This lady is here to see Lady Blackstone.’

Alessa felt Chance give her a little push and managed a smile for the butler. ‘Miss Meredith.’ How strange those words sounded. How long was it since she had spoken them? ‘Her ladyship is expecting me at three.’

‘I will take you straight in, Miss Meredith.’ She was aware of a skilfully concealed, all-encompassing survey of her attire, but Wilkins was too well trained to betray surprise at the combination of her costume and her name.

She glanced behind her, but Chance had gone. Well, she was used to being all alone. What was the worst that could happen? That this Lady Blackstone would refuse to acknowledge her? She would be no worse off if that were to happen, when all was said and done.

‘Miss Meredith, my lady.’ She was into the room before she could collect her thoughts. The woman who turned from her contemplation of the bay was tall, slender, with black hair streaked dramatically with silver at the temples. But it was her eyes that riveted Alessa’s attention. No wonder Chance had seen the resemblance: identical green irises and the slanting brows to those that looked back at her from her own reflection were fixed on her face.

‘Ma’am.’ She dropped a curtsy, keeping her head up and her expression calm. But inside her stomach was churning and her mouth was as dry as ashes. This was her father’s sister, she had no doubt, and it was as though his ghost had entered the room too.

‘You are Alexandra Meredith?’ Her aunt’s voice was cool, but not hostile. Alessa nodded. ‘And your parents?’

‘My father was Captain the Honourable Alexander William Langley Meredith,’ she said, hearing the pride in her own voice as she said his name. ‘He was the son of the third Earl of Hambledon. My mother was Thérèse Bonniard, the widow of a French royalist.’

Lady Blackstone turned abruptly, but not before Alessa caught a glint of moisture in her eyes. ‘Forgive me, but they were married?’

‘Yes, ma’am. I have all my papers here.’ Alessa opened the leather pouch that swung at her waist. ‘My father’s passport and army papers, the wedding certificate and my birth certificate.’

She held them out, but Lady Blackstone remained standing, apparently transfixed by the view through the open doors on to the terrace. Alessa laid the grubby, water-stained documents on a side table and stepped back. ‘When did he die?’

‘Almost six years ago. He drowned in a storm. Papa was an intelligence officer.’ Alessa waited a moment—there was no response. ‘I am very proud of him. I do not understand why his family turned their back on him.’

‘Oh, it was so long ago.’ Her aunt sounded weary. She turned, picked up the papers, one after another, and glanced through them. ‘I really do not need to see these, do I? You are Alex’s daughter—how could I mistake you? We knew about the marriage, all that time past, but my father was adamant: once the black sheep, for always the black sheep.’

‘Papa used to say he had been very wild.’ If truth be told, he was never anything else.

‘He was certainly that. If he had set out to alienate his father’s good opinion and scandalise his every value, Alexander could have not done better. ‘Lady Blackstone put down the papers and raised her eyes to Alessa’s face. ‘What do you want of your family?’

‘Acknowledgment, perhaps. Nothing that is not mine.’ She had not known what to expect; certainly not this cool, contained emotion, icing over the tears that she had surely seen welling just a moment ago. ‘I assume that Papa had some small inheritance that would come to me? If that is the case, then I would want to return to England and claim it, decide whether I could make a life there. If there is nothing…why, then I will stay here, where I can support myself.’

‘Or you could stay here and our attorneys could make financial arrangements.’So, there was to be no rush to welcome her to the bosom of the family. ‘There is a small manor in the depths of the Suffolk countryside. Perhaps a thousand pounds a year. You could live like a queen here on that, I imagine.’

Alessa did a rapid conversion into Venetian ducats and French louis. Her aunt was not exaggerating. Nor did she want her back in England. She, the daughter of the brother loved and lost, stirred up too many memories. Perhaps her aunt felt guilty that she had not stood up for her younger brother. Perhaps the French wife was still too much to swallow. Or perhaps it was simply that this stranger with the same eyes, standing in front of her with a well-bred English accent and dressed from head to foot like a Corfiot peasant at a festival, was simply too difficult to imagine in London society.