emotionless. All it took was one look at her white, closed face and she had divided him in two again. One half was doing and saying cool and rational things while the other slid about on thin ice like the boy he was when they first met. And she was so lovely now she took his breath away. He felt his inner boy grieve for the light-hearted girl she had once been, but a beautiful face could never make up for a fickle heart and shallow nature. Yet there was something about her now that even made cynical, grown-up Ash wonder how best to describe her. She was pared down—that was as close as he could get.
Her old sidelong looks of girlish uncertainty and a puppy-like need for approval were gone. She was the woman she had not yet found room to be when he fell in love with her and he wanted her so urgently it hurt. He refused to brood over the lovers she had no doubt enjoyed, told himself he didn’t care who had enjoyed her richer curves and the privilege of exploring the sweeter, tighter hollows of her silky skin with the slavish attention of a lover. Except he did; he envied them like the devil. Temper at the thought of another man exploring her secrets would hand her victory in this battle of wills and that would never do. He had come here to do business with his wife, it was just a shame he could not remember what it was right now.
Remember, Ash, he cautioned himself and tried to see the little changes that would make him feel repelled by her shop-soiled charm.
There was a faint trail of freckles across her high cheekbones and she had the slightly gilded skin of a woman careless about wearing a hat on unladylike tramps around the countryside, but that was all.
You would have thought time would write ‘liar’ across her purely beautiful face, wouldn’t you?
No sign of it that he could see. Well, his mother could act the innocent so beautifully a saint might be taken in and he was no saint. He still eyed the high neck of Rosalind’s disreputable stuff gown and simple cotton collar and caught himself longing to trace the line of sun-exposed skin where it met whiter, even softer, Rosalind with passionate kisses. Devil take the woman; he had come here to make sure he could finally be rid of her, not to fall under her witchy spell again. His body wanted to lead him about by an organ far more wilful and troublesome than his nose and if he wasn’t careful his sex would betray him. He had come for his freedom and didn’t want his heart mangled by his confounded wife again.
‘Why are you dressed like a dowd?’ he heard himself ask even so.
‘Because I am one?’ she said cautiously, as if she didn’t understand why he was asking either.
And he had never been able to accuse her of vanity, had he? ‘Not if you wrapped yourself up in chainmail and put on a suit of armour to try and snuff out your sex altogether,’ he scoffed.
There, young Ash was even speaking for him now. He wanted to kick the immature fool where it hurt and ride away, but since that was impossible he watched her muffle her thoughts with a bland, blue stare and wondered what was going on in her head. Maybe he had put that curb on her passions when he left, but he could not afford a conscience about it now. He needed his new Duchess and his heirs and her sceptical gaze said she would rather have the poor life she lived now than bend the knee to any man and what a humbling thought that was. He eyed her rough clothing and recalled the little life his lawyer reported when he had finally found her after months of false leads and well-hidden tracks.
It really had been high time he rid himself of the man, despite that clever feat of detection. The lawyer had made little or no effort to find Mrs Asher Hartfield after Ash left for India, so the income from the tiny fortune Ash inherited at one and twenty had not gone to his wife as he had intended but into the fat lawyer’s pockets. At least news his client was the next Duke of Cherwell stirred the man into tracking Rosalind down, despite all those false leads and dead ends she scattered in his path. Ash had never meant his wife to earn her own bread and eke out a spartan existence in a cottage. When he was an angry boy he had not wanted to use the law firm his family had always employed though, because he hadn’t wanted his grandfather to find out he had eloped with Ros, then run away. That would have been the final nail in the coffin of any love they had had as grandson and grandfather and he could not have endured the old man thinking so badly of him when he was on the other side of the world. Coward, he accused that boy now. He should have known better than to have trusted an obscure lawyer he had found more or less at random with all the money he had had at the time. Given the wild races he used to ride over any terrain Ash knew he was a challenge for his grandfather to love. Little wonder Grandfather had sent him abroad with a flea in his ear and said he might as well risk death doing something useful instead of wasting his life on aimless adventures. Just one day of marriage before he had given up on Mr and Mrs Hartfield would have added contempt to Grandfather’s despair at his least important grandson’s wildness. Ash was far too cowardly to admit to the old man that he had married and deserted the Earl of Lackbourne’s stepdaughter because she had told him a lie and he thought she might grow like his mother. The thought of his grandfather’s contempt made him feel uneasy even now the man had been dead five years, but he had been right to go, hadn’t he? Once a liar, always a liar. Rosalind could never have loved him if she thought it was all right to marry him without telling the truth about her lover first.
Right; that was the past back in its rightful place then, now where was he? Ah, yes, the lawyer. Ash had dismissed the man as soon as he had told him Rosalind’s new name and humble address. Then he made himself come here himself to make sure the Mrs Meadows the man had come across living so obscurely really was the former Rosalind Feldon. A dishonest lawyer could always lay his hands on a dishonest woman, so Ash had to see for himself before he believed the man. If not for that, Ash would have been happy to do as the impudent letter she sent to his family lawyers after Charlie died suggested and divorce her in absentia.
* * *
Rosalind shifted under Ash’s coldly critical scrutiny. When he jumped down from his horse to confront her on level ground it still seemed impossible this was really was him. Standing on the same earth as he was an assault on her senses and she didn’t trust a single one as he calmly held the mighty grey’s reins and studied her like a portrait. By summoning all the strength and self-reliance the last eight years taught her, she just about managed not to flinch under his stony scrutiny.
‘You look like a duchess in disguise,’ he mocked, but there was something in his eyes that reminded her how it felt to truly be his wife, for one passionate and largely sleepless night.
‘Nonsense, I am a simple countrywoman,’ she argued. She tugged the watch from her pocket to avoid his puzzling stare. ‘One who must hurry home or be very late for an engagement,’ she lied, closing the case with a snap. There was a flicker of feeling in his eyes at the sight of the watch she had once spent all her pin money on, so he could count the hours until they were together again. He had left it behind so it could not really mean anything to him.
‘You kept it, then?’ he asked huskily.
‘I needed a timepiece and it cost nothing.’
‘A laudably practical attitude,’ he said with a frown that disagreed.
‘I am a prosaic creature.’
‘I very much doubt it,’ he argued, looked about to smile, then changed his mind.
‘Country widows need to be,’ she insisted.
‘Not when they are not widows at all they don’t.’
‘Since you must have come about a divorce I suppose the whole world will soon know I am still wed,’ she said gloomily and now he had tracked her down that was probably true, one way or another.
‘They don’t have to.’
‘The
