The Runaway Countess (11 page)

‘A
re you quite sure you don’t mind helping me find books, Hayden?’ Emma asked, her voice muffled from where she knelt under a haphazard pile of volumes.

Hayden smiled down at the top of her head, the straw crown of her bonnet just visible. ‘Of course I don’t mind. Why should I?’

Emma handed up two books for him to hold. ‘It just doesn’t seem like a little village bookshop would be your natural habitat.’

Hayden studied the store, the jumbled shelves jammed with volumes, the streaked windows, the old, white-haired proprietor, Mr Lorne, who obviously knew Emma very well as he had kept back a stack of books
for her. It was quiet and overly warm, smelling of lavender and book dust, its own little world. ‘It’s true I’m not much of a reader. But I fear I would have been in your sister’s way while she made the grocery order and I don’t think I should try to get in her black books any more than I already am.’

‘Hmm—not much of a reader. Nor much of a country dweller, I would say,’ Emma said. She handed him another book and rose to her feet, brushing the dust from her skirts. ‘Have you always lived in town?’

‘When I was a child I lived at Ramsay House with my parents, but I don’t go there often now,’ Hayden answered. ‘I suppose I do prefer city life.’

‘Really? Why?’

Hayden shrugged, still not quite used to his sister-in-law’s forthright, curious nature. It was so unlike anything he had ever known in his own family. He also wasn’t used to looking too closely inside himself, the dark corners and cobwebbed passages. ‘I like to keep busy, I suppose.’

‘And there isn’t enough to keep you busy at Ramsay House? Jane said it was quite vast.’

‘So it is. And I have an excellent estate manager to keep it going for me.’

‘It’s not quite the same as taking care of it yourself, is it? Not if it’s home, as Barton Park is. I missed it so much when we were gone from it.’

‘I’m not sure Ramsay House is much of a home,’ Hayden admitted, surprised to find himself saying words he had barely even thought before. But there was something about Jane’s innocent sister, about the whole intimate world of Barton and its environs, that forced him to be honest. ‘I never felt I really belonged there until Jane was there with me.’

Emma’s eyes widened. ‘But then why—?’

She was interrupted when the shop door opened with a tinkle of bells and someone called her name. As she hurried to greet her friend, Hayden moved to a quiet corner behind a bank of shelves. He pretended to examine the books, but in his mind he was suddenly back at Ramsay House. With Jane.

He had a flashing memory of carrying Jane over the threshold, the two of them laughing. Jane’s laughter as she wrapped her
arms around him and sent them both tumbling to the bed. The taste of her skin under his lips, the sound of her sighs. There, in bed, when they were alone, he could make her happy.

It was only when they left their sensual cocoon that he couldn’t decipher what she really wanted.

Hayden stared at the rows of volumes before him and wished there was a book that could tell him, finally, what to do for Jane. How to make things right.

He heard an echo of merry laughter and, for an instant, thought it was another memory of one of their too-brief moments of happiness. But then he saw that Jane stood outside the shop window, chatting with someone, laughing at some joke. She looked as she had in those days when they dashed together through the gardens at Ramsay House, her face alight with joy, young and free.

But this time he wasn’t the one to put that happiness there. Hayden had the sudden, terrible realisation that he had always let Jane down. He had swept her off her feet because he wanted her so much, then he hadn’t
known how to keep her. He hadn’t even tried and he had no one to blame but himself. His parents had taught him badly and he hadn’t even thought to escape them.

It was he alone who hadn’t been the right husband for Jane. And that thought struck him like a shotgun blast.

Jane glanced through the window and saw him watching her. Her laughter faded and a frown flickered over her face. He had to prove himself to her, that was all. But how could he do that, how could he make it up to his brave wife, when he didn’t know where to start?

‘Hayden, you are dreadful! You must be cheating,’ Emma cried as she tossed her cards down on the table. ‘That is the third hand you’ve won tonight.’

Jane had to laugh at the disgruntled look on Emma’s face. Her sister loved to play cards, but Emma was also easily distracted and often lost track of the game. She could only keep up with an experienced gamester like Hayden for a short while.

But Hayden never let Emma feel like he
was ‘letting’ her win, or like she was slow-witted for losing. The two of them seemed as if they could play for ever, something Jane would never have expected. But then Hayden wasn’t behaving at all as she would have once expected.

Hayden grinned as he gathered up the scattered cards. ‘A gentleman never cheats, Emma. Luck is with me tonight.’

‘Luck is always with you,’ Emma grumbled. She turned to Jane and added, ‘It’s most unfair, isn’t it, Jane?’

Jane plied her needle carefully through the linen she was mending. ‘Life is always most unfair, Emma dear.’

‘Indeed it is. I wish the rain would stop,’ Emma said. They could hear the drops pattering at the sitting-room window. It had started when they sat down to dinner, a slow, steady drip that would make the already muddy roads even more impassable.

So Hayden would have to stay even longer.

Jane studied him as he shuffled the cards and dealt them between him and Emma again. They hadn’t spoken much since their quarrel in the village that afternoon, but
he seemed to be in a good humour again. He’d laughed and joked over dinner, making Emma giggle with tales of London gossip. Everything was so comfortable between them all tonight, cosy almost.

Once, this had been all she longed for with Hayden. A happy family life for the two of them. It was the one thing he couldn’t give her in the end—the one thing they couldn’t give each other. To see it before her now made her heart ache at how bittersweet life could be. Emma was right—things were most unfair.

Jane had been angry at his too-quick assumptions about David Marton, that was true. Hayden had no right to say such things to her when he was no doubt engaged in all kinds of debaucheries in town! But now, wrapped up in this warm evening, she couldn’t hold on to her anger any longer.

Especially when they hadn’t needed to get out the buckets to catch the drips from the old roof, thanks to his efficient workmen.

‘One more game, Emma, then off to bed,’ Jane said, twisting the needle through the cloth.

She expected an argument. Emma was a night-owl who could happily stay up until dawn. But Emma just nodded and gave a strangely sly smile as she studied her new hand of cards.

‘Of course,’ Emma said. ‘I have some notes to make on my new plant specimens, anyway. You can take my place at cards, Jane.’

Jane shook her head. ‘I don’t play cards any longer.’

Hayden shot her a quizzical glance, but he didn’t say anything until the game ended and Emma bid them goodnight. Once she had left, Murray trotting at her heels, the room seemed deeply quiet. She could only hear the soft slide of the cards between his fingers, the fall of the rain, the rustle of the linen under her needle. But she was intensely, burningly aware that he sat just across the room from her. That he watched her.

‘You don’t play cards?’ he said suddenly, the words tossed out into the heavy silence. ‘I remember you were a wicked opponent at whist.’

Jane shook her head. ‘I even had to give
up such old-fashioned games. I hated losing far too much and Emma has become too good a player.’

‘Emma is certainly an enthusiastic opponent,’ he said. ‘But are you sure you didn’t stop because of me?’

Startled by his stark question, Jane dropped her mending to her lap and stared at him. He looked back at her, unwavering, unblinking, his blue eyes dark and solemn. ‘I—Well, yes. I didn’t like what you became when you played deep in the card rooms. So intense, so—feverish. It was as if I didn’t know you there. But then again…’

Her words stuck and she shook her head again. She was so accustomed to stuffing her true thoughts and emotions down deeper and deeper, so deep that Hayden couldn’t see them and thus hurt her even more. She didn’t know what to do with this new Hayden, this still, watchful, serious Hayden.

‘Then again—what, Jane?’ he asked.

‘Then again, I often felt like I didn’t know you at all,’ she admitted. ‘When I saw you at balls, in the card rooms, with your friends, I was sure I had only imagined the man I
thought I married. He vanished so utterly and you never seemed to know me at all.’

He nodded and stared down at the pack of cards in his hand. A straight, frowning line creased between his eyes.

‘I should have come here when you asked me to,’ he said.

‘What?’ Jane said in surprise.

‘That last night, before you left London, you asked me to come here with you and Emma for a holiday. I should have done it.’

Jane couldn’t believe he even remembered that. He’d been so foxed that night on the stairs, she’d been so sure he remembered nothing about it. And when she left the town house the next day without a word from him, she was sure she was right. That he didn’t care at all.

‘Barton is a special place, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ve never felt like a house could be this way.’

Jane knew that very well. Barton was her home. But she would never have thought he could see it. ‘What way?’

‘Like a real home,’ he said simply.

Jane’s heart pounded at those stark words.
That
was what she had tried to tell him so long ago; why she tried to get him to come here with her. Why did he see now, when it was too late?

She tried to laugh, but the sound came out all choked. ‘Perhaps it will be, now that you have fixed the roof.’

‘That was the least I could do. I owe you so much, Jane, and yet you won’t accept anything from me.’

‘You don’t owe me anything, Hayden,’ she said. She didn’t want debt between them, not any longer. She’d only wanted to leave him, leave the mistake of
them
, behind so she could find some way to move forwards. But all that effort was shattered when he showed up here.

‘Your family must have been so happy here,’ he said. ‘You never talked about them, except for Emma.’

‘You never spoke of your family, either.’

His lips twisted in a strange, bitter little smile. ‘My family isn’t really worth talking about. My parents were most typical of the aristocratic sort. Nothing worth analysing.’

Jane had to laugh. ‘My parents weren’t typical at all.’

‘Then what were they like?’

She closed her eyes and pictured them as they had once sat in this very room. Her father huddled over his books, her mother’s lips pinched tightly together as she watched him. Baby Emma playing with her blocks by the fire. Barton Park fading and crumbling around them even back then. But there was also that sense of security and belonging, that sense she wanted to bring to her own family.

‘They were—eccentric,’ she said.

‘That sounds intriguing. Eccentric in what way?’

‘Well, did I ever tell you the tale of the Barton treasure?’

Hayden laughed and, despite everything, she still revelled in that sound. ‘Treasure? Not at all. I can’t believe you kept such a thing from me. It sounds positively piratical.’

‘And if anyone likes all things piratical, it’s surely you,’ Jane said with a laugh. She told him what she knew of the Barton Park treasure and how it was lost in the mists of time.

‘But even though that was a mere legend,’
she ended, ‘it captured my father’s imagination when he was a boy. And by the time Emma and I were older, it completely took over his life. He spent days and days poring over old family papers looking for clues and maps. My mother hated his obsession, hated how it took over everything else. My father just said she would be glad once he found the treasure and we were all rich.’

She glanced up to find Hayden watching her closely, his chin propped on his palm.

‘I take it he never found it,’ Hayden said.

‘Obviously not.’ Jane waved around at the shabby room, the faded wallpaper peeling at the edges and the mended curtains. ‘He died before he could even find a real clue, while I was still a girl. My mother followed soon after, probably in a fit of rage that he had escaped her without leaving the promised treasure. That was how I came to be in London, with an aunt I hardly knew and who wasn’t best happy to be suddenly saddled with two nieces.’

‘And then you met me.’

‘Yes,’ Jane said, remembering the bright, perfect dream of that time she had found
Hayden. ‘And that is the strange, sad tale of my family at Barton Park.’

‘Sad?’ he said. ‘It’s an odd one, no doubt. Eccentric, as you said. But was it sad? Were you unhappy here?’

‘Not at all.’ Jane was surprised at the truth of those words, at realising why it was she had longed to come back to Barton. ‘Anyone with a conventional life would have thought we must be most unhappy, but Emma and I never felt so. We had a freedom most girls never know and we were always sure we belonged here. That we belonged to each other.’

‘I was always quite sure I did not belong at Ramsay House,’ Hayden said. Despite the simple sadness of those words, his tone was calm and matter of fact, as if everyone’s life was like that.

She knew so little about Hayden’s family. His parents were long dead when she met him and he never spoke about them. At Ramsay House she’d seen their portraits, but all she could glean from them was that his mother had been a beauty with her son’s blue eyes and his father was very stern and unsmiling.

When she asked Hayden about his childhood, all he would say was, ‘It was most typical.’

She knew
typical
for a young man of his station meant tutors and school. Not the slightly chaotic and shabby life she and Emma knew here at Barton. But what was it like when he was with his parents?

‘What was life like at Ramsay House?’ she asked.