Without a smile, he looked intently at her. ‘Do you need to tuck your hair up before I take you home?’
There was something alarmingly conspiratorial about the question in that deep gravelly voice that implied his awareness of her parents’ censure if they were to see her wind-blown state. Once more, she found herself wondering whether he had said similar things to the women he had known. With her shawl, she made a hood to cover her hair, wrapping the ends around her neck, tucking her feet neatly into one spot, pressing her knees together, sitting primly to await his approval.
Leaning his whip against his thigh, he pulled off one kid glove with his teeth and held it in his lips while brushing a speck of dust off her nose with his thumb, catching her eyes with the merest hint of amusement.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, shocked by the tenderness of his skin, by the contact she had allowed, as if she’d taken a first step without moving.
Replacing his glove, he took up the whip and moved off at a walk down the hill. ‘That was more or less the route your brother and I took yesterday,’ he said. ‘But then it was muddy.’
Caterina frowned at him. ‘Four-in-hand against his pair?’
‘No! Of course not. We both had a pair, but we drove them in tandem.’
‘But Harry’s never driven tandem before. And how could he ever have passed you on that narrow track?’
‘He could if he’d been a better whip and if his team had been as good as mine. But he isn’t, and it wasn’t.’
‘I still don’t think you should have accepted his wager.’
‘And how do you think that would have been interpreted?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It does to me. Look what I’d have missed by refusing it.’
It would have been easy enough to pursue that line, to be told how her brother’s stupidity had been turned to Sir Chase’s advantage in two ways, by money and association. But she preferred not to hear anything from him except regret for his relentless pursual of the debt, which she was quite sure he would never give up.
The drive had not only blown away her cobwebs, but it had also given her a glimpse of the fearlessness and sheer proficiency that had earned him his reputation for heroics. Yet she had felt something more significant than blind courage or audacity, more than daredevil antics or the masculine urge to impress a woman. She had felt completely safe and understood, and there had been moments when her dislike and resentment of him had dissolved in their silences, intensifying her awareness of him as a companion quite unlike any other man. She could never like him, of course, but nor could she suppress the regret that they could never truly be friends. She would tell those who had seen her driving his curricle and four that he was just an acquaintance. A friend of her father’s.
Stephen Chester was understandably taken aback to hear that Sir Chase Boston had already driven his daughter around Richmond without actually abducting her. Naturally, he did not expect to see her return full of smiles and approval; she certainly did not do that. But nor did she have much to say, either good or bad, about the experience, only about the means her father had used to pay back the debt.
Closing the study door quietly behind her, she took her father by the hand and sat him beside her on the window-seat in view of the garden. ‘He told me to ask you,’ she said, ‘obviously not thinking you’d tell me. But I think you should, because I know what the debt amounts to and any demand for that kind of money is going to affect us all, not only you. We shall all have to share in any hardships it’s going to cause. Is it the house, Father? Have you decided to sell it? The other one, too?’
‘I’d like a little brandy, my dear, if you wouldn’t mind.’
‘You’ve already had one, Father. You know Hannah doesn’t like it.’
Father had had three, to be precise, and what Hannah didn’t know would hardly concern her. ‘Yes, dear, I know. Just a small one.’
Caterina obliged, sure that this would loosen his tongue, but dreading what she was about to hear. She had developed a love for this house on Paradise Road as great as that for their much larger home in Derbyshire, and the thought of losing them would be like losing two beloved friends. Gently, she removed the glass from his grasp and replaced it on the table. ‘Now, tell me the worst,’ she said. ‘I can bear it. We’re all in this together, remember, and we shall all have to do whatever is necessary to help. Harry will have to be recalled from Liverpool to start earning some money, and I shall go and see the manager at Covent Garden. He’s told me more than once that there’s a place for me with the company whenever—’
‘Caterina…stop! That’s not it. It’s not the house.’
‘Not the house?’ she said, blinking. ‘Well, what else is there?’
‘We…Sir Chase and I agreed not to say anything until your return from wherever you’re going this weekend.’
‘From Sevrington Hall? Why ever not? You mean, before you know how much you can raise…Father…what is it? What have you agreed to? What is it you don’t want me to hear immediately?’
His hand had retaken hers upon his thigh where his nervous fingers were dragging at her skin with an ungentle caress, too unfamiliar to be soothing. She drew her hand away, full of sudden misgivings and an awareness that the matter concerned her personally more than all of them, that her offers of help were about to fall with a thud at her feet. And as her father struggled to find a way of explaining, her own realisation grew that his long talk with Sir Chase, the latter’s air of satisfaction and his flippant ‘ask him,’ his interest in her reasons not to marry, his questions about dowries, his assurance that the debt had been settled ‘very amicably’ were all to do with her. Only her.
‘What have you done, Father?’ she said, breathless with foreboding. ‘This concerns me, doesn’t it? Tell me?’
‘Such a lot of money,’ he whispered. ‘I could never repay it, but it was not my suggestion, my dear, it came from—’
‘Tell me, Father,’ she snapped. ‘This agreement. What is it?’
‘You, Caterina. He wants you. He’s made me an offer for you.’
Like a sudden mountain mist, cold anger swirled around her, prickling every hair with a freezing, numbing indignation. ‘No, tell me the truth. It was a wager…a wager, wasn’t it? That’s not quite the same thing as a straightforward offer, is it, Father? He’s agreed to release you from Harry’s debt in return for Harry’s sister, hasn’t he? And if he doesn’t manage to get Harry’s sister, you’re going to have to pay up, aren’t you? That’s the top and bottom of it, and that’s not an offer, but a wager. You see, I’m not the green girl I used to be; I do understand these things. But what you don’t appear to understand is that I shall not be marrying anybody, and if I ever changed my mind, that hell-rake of a man would be the very last person I would consider.’ Panting with fury and the torrent of words, she felt his betrayal as keenly as a sword wound. ‘How could you do this, Father?’ she said, standing upright before him. ‘Will you never see that I am a woman, not a thing to be bargained with? I can go out any day and earn a good living whenever I choose. In fact, when I return from Wiltshire next week,
