Chapter 26
Chapter
Twenty-Six
A Dip in the Lake
Ishould not have suggested the lake.
The thought arrived with perfect clarity as I led Rosalynd down the path through the oaks, the sound of water growing louder with each step.
I had made the suggestion because she was suffering in the heat—her face flushed, her breathing shallow, her movements losing the crisp efficiency that characterized everything she did.
The practical response was cold water. The practical response was also, I now recognized, profoundly unwise.
The lake appeared through the trees—a broad, still expanse fed by a spring at the northern end.
The water was dark and clear, reflecting the oaks and the cloudless sky with the precision of a mirror.
Willows trailed their branches along the eastern bank.
A wooden dock extended a dozen feet from the shore, old but sound, the boards bleached pale by years of sun.
At the water’s edge, Rosalynd looked at the lake with a great deal of longing.
“Turn around,” she said. “I’m going swimming.”
I turned. Behind me, I heard the rustle of cotton, the small metallic sounds of hooks being unfastened, and the soft impact of clothing being set on the dock. Each sound was distinct and specific. I catalogued every one of them with a precision I would have preferred not to possess.
A splash. Then a gasp—sharp, involuntary, and followed by a laugh of such unguarded delight that it undid something in my chest.
“Oh,” she said. “This is wonderful.”
I allowed myself to turn.
She was in the water to her shoulders, her copper hair darkened and heavy against her neck, her chemise billowing around her in the current from the spring.
Her face—flushed and strained ten minutes ago—had transformed.
Her eyes were bright. Her cheeks had regained their color.
She looked, in the dappled light filtering through the willows, entirely and devastatingly alive.
I stood on the dock in my shirtsleeves, waistcoat, and trousers, the sun bearing down on my back, and watched her swim.
She moved through the water with competence. Not the tentative paddling of a woman who had been taught to bathe but not to swim—real strokes, confident and strong. She had learned somewhere. I would ask her about it later, when my capacity for conversation had returned.
“The water is fed by a spring?” she called.
“From the chalk aquifer. It stays cold year-round.”
“I can tell.” She turned onto her back and floated, her arms spread, her face tilted toward the sky.
The chemise, wet, clung to the lines of her body—her collarbone, the curve of her waist, the length of her legs beneath the water.
I looked away. Then I glanced back. The first impulse was propriety. The second was honesty.
“Steele.” She had righted herself and was treading water, watching me with an expression that mixed amusement and concern. “You are standing in direct sunlight in a waistcoat and shirtsleeves. You must be roasting.”
“I am comfortable.”
“You are lying. Your collar is soaked through, and your face is the color of a guardsman’s coat.”
“I do not own a bathing costume.”
“Neither do I. That did not stop me.” She pushed wet hair from her forehead. “Get in the water before you collapse. I refuse to drag an unconscious duke across half a mile of parkland.”
There were several sound reasons not to enter the lake.
The impropriety alone was sufficient to end the discussion.
A man and a woman, unaccompanied, undressed to varying degrees, swimming together in a private lake—the scenario belonged in the sort of novel that respectable women denied reading and gentlemen kept in locked desk drawers.
I removed my coat. My waistcoat. My boots. After a moment's consideration, my shirt as well—folded and laid across the dock with the others, because if I was going to do this thing, I would not do it half-measure.
The water hit my legs first—a shock of cold that drove the heat from my skin and cleared my head instantly. I waded in to my waist, then my chest, the lake bed firm and graveled beneath my feet.
Rosalynd watched me with an expression I could not entirely read. Satisfaction, certainly—she had won the argument. But something else underneath.
“Better?” she asked.
“Considerably.”
We swam in silence for a few minutes—or rather, she swam, and I stood in chest-deep water and permitted the cold to restore my capacity for rational thought. The lake was quiet. No sound but the birds in the willows and the faint trickle of the spring at the far end.
“Steele.” Her voice had changed. The amusement was gone.
I turned. She was six feet away, treading water, her eyes wide.
“Something touched my leg.”
“It was likely a—”
“Something large touched my leg.” Her composure, which had withstood a murder at the opera, a masked villain at her masquerade, and the Queen of England issuing commands, was cracking. “Something with fins, Steele. I felt fins.”
“The lake has carp. They are large but entirely harmless.”
“How large?”
“Some of them approach three feet in length. They are old fish. This lake has not been netted in—”
She did not wait for the rest of the sentence. She covered the six feet between us in approximately two seconds, seized my shoulders, and pulled herself against me with a grip that suggested she intended never to let go.
“Three feet,” she said, her face very close to mine. “You have three-foot fish in your lake, and you failed to mention this before I got in the water.”
“They are carp. They eat pond weed.”
“I do not care what they eat.” Her arms were locked around my neck.
Her legs had wrapped around my waist beneath the water—an instinctive act of self-preservation that she had not, I suspected, thought through.
Her body was pressed against mine, the thin wet cotton of her chemise the only barrier between her skin and my bare chest.
I stopped breathing.
Not deliberately. My body simply ceased to perform the function.
Every nerve I possessed had redirected its attention to the woman in my arms—the weight of her, the warmth of her despite the cold water, the scent of her skin beneath the lake water, the copper hair dark and heavy against her shoulders.
Her eyes—those extraordinary eyes—were fixed on mine with an intensity that had nothing to do with fish.
And everything to do with surrender.
“Rosalynd.” My voice came out rough.
She did not move. Did not release her grip. Did not look away.
The water shifted around us as she slowly slid one hand from the back of my neck into my hair. The motion was unhurried. Deliberate. Her fingers tightened slightly, and the breath left my lungs in a sharp, helpless exhale.
“Steele,” she whispered again, and this time my name sounded perilously close to a plea.
That was the end of restraint.
I kissed her.
Or perhaps she kissed me. God knew. One of us moved first, and the other met the movement with enough force to make the distinction irrelevant.
Her mouth was warm and hungry beneath mine. She tasted faintly of lake water and something sweeter underneath. My hands slid down her back, pulling her harder against me until there was not an inch of space left between our bodies.
She made a soft sound against my mouth that nearly undid me.
The kiss deepened with shocking speed. There was nothing tentative in it. Nothing careful. Rosalynd kissed me as though she had denied herself this for too long.
My control snapped.
I caught her mouth again, slower this time, deeper.
Her body moved instinctively against mine beneath the water.
The cold lake no longer existed. The world no longer existed.
There was only the woman wrapped around me and the realization that I was rapidly losing control over the situation.
Over her. And, God help me, over myself.
“Your Grace!”
The voice came from the bank. Distant but approaching. A man’s voice, formal, carrying an unmistakable urgency.
Rosalynd released me and dropped back into the water, her face flushed, her breathing uneven. I turned toward the bank, positioning myself between her and whoever was approaching, the water at my chest, my body in a state that the cold lake was doing absolutely nothing to remedy.
A footman appeared at the edge of the trees. Young, mortified, his eyes fixed on a point approximately six feet above my head.
“Your Grace. I beg your pardon. A telegram has arrived from Windsor. It is marked urgent.”
Windsor. The Queen.
I glanced back at Rosalynd. She was treading water behind me, her hair streaming, her chemise floating around her, her expression caught between the kiss we had just shared and the summons that had interrupted it.
Her eyes met mine, and in them I saw the same reluctant recognition I felt.
The world we had briefly escaped had followed us here, as it always did.
“Remain in the water,” I said to her, quietly. “I will deal with this.”
I walked out of the lake and up the bank, water streaming from me. The footman, to his considerable credit, handed me a folded telegram form without once looking at me.
I opened it. The wording was terse, as the medium required—a summons to Windsor at my earliest convenience, which meant immediately in the vocabulary of the Crown. The royal cipher at the top of the form removed any doubt as to its origin or weight.
Behind me, the lake was still. The willows trailed their branches in the water. And Rosalynd—Rosalynd, whom I had just kissed—waited in the cold spring water.
I folded the telegram and put it in my wet pocket.
Our idyll was at an end.