use trying to pretend any longer she was essentially cold and passionless when she wasn’t even deceiving herself. The leap of hot and vigorous fire at the heart of her, the quickening of what felt like every inch of the body, made this new Freya feel very different from the old one. Not sure she approved of the change, she laid down the wide-toothed comb and took up the brush with the vague idea soothing her abused hair into shining smoothness might somehow turn her back into the safe and certain Freya she had been before she found Dukes didn’t obligingly fall into her lap like apples from a tree.
She had never felt this hot burn of curiosity towards the tall and strikingly handsome Duke of Dettingham, of course, but had assured herself during that June when he’d set up a house party at Ashburton New Place to choose his Duchess that she was born and bred for marriage to the highest in the land. He was well enough and so was she and she assumed that would make their marriage bed a bearable place to beget a tribe of little lords and ladies.
Some determined remnant of the old Freya whispered she was right, but the idea of such a marriage with Jack Seaborne now seemed icy cold as she sat on the lowly bed of a lowly man and fought not to think about sharing it with him. Shorn of the stubble of the day before, his face had been sharply defined in the soft north light of the shadowy scullery. It wasn’t as if he was starkly handsome like Jack Seaborne, she told herself crossly, or romantically dashing like the Earl of Calvercombe, who had married Jack’s lovely cousin Persephone so soon after the ducal wedding that rumours of a dashing scandal had flown delightedly about the ton for weeks. Even young Telemachus Seaborne, known as Marcus, would outshine Orlando if he had cared to shine in anyone but his stormy-looking young wife’s eyes, and everyone knew theirs was another love match.
Why on earth she was sitting here dwelling on the family who had begun her descent into the ranks of the unmarriageable she had no idea. Perhaps it was because Orlando struck her as a man of suppressed power, she suddenly realised, and her instincts were probably better than she’d realised back when so much was done for her she had never needed to test them. Or at least she hoped they were, because if he wasn’t an honourable man she could still be in deep trouble. It was obvious he had deliberately marooned himself in the heart of this forest where nobody would find him except by the purest chance, but he didn’t strike her as a man who would run from trouble. She could imagine him meeting it with guile and reckless courage, but not hiding where he could do no good except to his family and there, she decided with a triumphant sense of those instincts leading her well, was the key to the whole mystery.
For the wife she sensed had been more dearly loved by her Orlando than Lady Freya Buckle had ever dared dream of being loved by a man, he would have crossed oceans and fought every battle it took to keep her safe. The reason he was still here now had to mean there was some sort of threat to his children as well and she shook her head and frowned, dubious at the idea anyone would harm such bright and hopeful little mysteries in miniature. Had he eloped with Mrs Orlando in the teeth of powerful opposition? she wondered. He was clearly raised a gentleman, so maybe he had been tutor to a noble family and run off with some great lord’s daughter? Or, worse still, could it have been the man’s own lady he stole away from him? She would have been the man’s legal chattel and he couldn’t raise a bill to divorce her in the House of Lords, or drag her home by her hair to fulfil her duty and bear him a boy instead, if he couldn’t actually find her in the first place.
Freya tried to be shocked by the very idea of such scandalous goings on, but found she couldn’t blame the woodsman’s wife if she had decided she preferred him to some fat old noble her family had forced her to marry. She had nearly been the victim of such a conspiracy herself, although she lacked the gallant rescuer who would make that marriage to the fat politician irrelevant. Finding herself guilty of the most shocking immorality as she wondered why the woman couldn’t have taken a handsome and vigorous young lover to make up for the lack of both in her marriage bed, Freya reminded herself this was all speculation and even the prospect of a one-day lover could not have reconciled her to marriage with Bowland’s latest repellent protégé.
Maybe Orlando was a follower of Rousseau, or a romantic philosopher-poet who preferred a simple life wrenched from the forest by his own hand? Yet the picture of him, austere and intent as he stood and watched her for one long moment with hot green eyes telling of unimagined delights in his bed, argued he had once been a more rash and hedonistic adventurer than any idealistic poet or shrinking recluse could ever be. For a quick and wickedly exciting minute she knew how it felt to be urgently wanted by a compelling rake. Then he doused the lust and longing and promise sparking between them before it could become a blaze and walked away as if she was dressed from head to toe in propriety.
Dropping the brush on the rumpled bedclothes as if it had become red hot, Freya fought off the most ridiculous jealousy of the woman who once owned it. Her now wildly flying imagination invited her to visualise Orlando brushing her hair for her with long, sensual strokes as he played with the heavy locks and arranged them over her naked body to his satisfaction, before satisfying her as royally as a woman had ever been satisfied by her man. Except she had no idea how it felt to be sensually seduced and satiated, she reminded herself sternly.
Nor did she want to know, if her lover had to be this penniless ex-pirate who hid in the woods from his own kind. A burn of curiosity tightened her suddenly very sensitive nipples under the bedcover toga and made her squirm against the surprisingly comfortable mattress under her, as she sought to douse the inquisitive fire at her feminine core. She told herself she didn’t want a rustic lover with two bold and enterprising children dependent on him as both father and mother, who were likely to resent even the smallest sharing of his attention with her. As soon as she could put her foot to the floor with any degree of comfort she would walk out of here and not look back, ever.
So why did it feel as if she was on sabbatical from her duty once she’d plaited her hair a little clumsily and tried to put her foot to the floor once more? Pain shot through her as sharp and almost sickening as it had been last night when she first injured herself. Fool, she castigated herself as she tottered across the room in search of the next necessity of life and peered out of the door for a privy or conveniently secluded bush to relieve herself behind, since the problem was becoming urgent. Spotting a rustic shelter some yards upwind of the house, she blessed the fact she hadn’t tumbled into his cesspit last night and told herself Lady Freya Buckle could not afford to expect comfort in this most basic form of country life. She hopped towards the honeysuckle-covered shelter with her flapping bedcover grasped to her body with one hand, while she used the other to prop herself upright with a stout stick left leaning by the back door for her with a consideration she refused to find disarming.
It didn’t matter if he had been sensitive enough to her needs to let her get on with learning to do as much for herself as she could. Yet Lady Freya seemed to be fading into a stiff caricature of herself as she embraced being Perdita instead. She reflected on William Shakespeare’s story of a foundling princess left to be brought up by peasants. How would she have been now if she had been taken from Bowland Castle in some fanciful start of her father’s that her mother had been unfaithful and his despised daughter was not his child? A nagging suspicion she might be relieved not to be Lady Freya Buckle seemed unthinkable, considering her mother brought her up so proud of the ancient name she bore.
Luckily the privy turned out to be surprisingly clean and smelt of tarred wood and earth as much as it did of humanity. Observing the strange device her host had rigged up for his family, she shovelled what looked like dried earth into the hole after herself and hoped that would cover everything, then limped back towards the cottage feeling considerably better, if now left with one less distraction from being very hungry indeed.
‘We’re having Percy for breakfast,’ the boy popped out of the trees at the other side of the clearing to inform her mysteriously and the little girl doggedly caught up with a squeal of triumph, as if she spent most of her life following her big brother about just in time to watch him disappear again.
‘Who
