Before he could respond, she had left the room, the door banging closed on the whirl of her skirts. He stared at the closed door. Where had it come from? Why had she attacked him like that? Perhaps he had been a bit harsh about her parents, but the personal edge to her attack had come from nowhere. This talk of love. What business was it of hers whom and how he loved?
But there had been tears in her voice beneath the bitterness. Hurt in her eyes beneath the liquid anger, and he knew he'd crossed some invisible line. He'd had no right to attack her parents.
He ran a hand through his hair, understanding now that he'd reacted from fear, the fear of his own weakness when he was with her. He wouldn't be able to resist her, even with his sister in the house.
He caught a glimpse of Tamsyn through the window running across the lawns toward the cove. She was barefoot, holding up her skirt to keep from tripping on it. Her hair glittered in the sunlight. He'd never meet another woman like her. Not if he lived to be as old as Methuselah. There couldn't be another woman like her. Not anywhere in the four corners of the globe.
Tamsyn plunged down the flower-banked slope toward the cove. She felt she was running from something, something she didn't want to acknowledge, but as she reached the small sandy shore and her toes curled into the smooth white sand and there was nowhere else to run, she drew breath and walked slowly into the rippling shallows at the edge of the beach. The tide-ridged sand rubbed the soles of her feet, and the water was sunwarm.
She let her skirt fall, and the little wavelets soaked the hem as she walked along the shore. What happened? The words had poured from her as if a lid had been lifted from a bubbling cauldron. She had defended her parents. That was not strange. That was inevitable. But all that about love? Why did it matter to her, the daughter of Cecile and El Baron, that a stuffy, prideful English lord could only see a future with a woman of his own kind?
She was going back to Spain as soon as Cedric Penhallan was ruined. Julian, Lord St. Simon was useful to her. She needed him. And when it was all over, and he realized how she'd used him, he'd probably want to tear her limb from limb. And she wouldn't blame him one bit.
Gloomily, she stopped paddling in the shallows and looked around her, trying to cheer herself with the beauty of the gently curving bay, the sweep of the sea and the headland, the brilliant blue sky. She glanced up at the cliff top, and her stomach lurched. The two horsemen she'd seen the other morning were there again, outlined against the sky.
They were watching her. The strangest sense of menace crept up her back, and her scalp contracted. She turned, splashed out of the water, and headed back toward the house, the hem of her skirt and her bare feet now coated with damp sand.
Gabriel came around the side of the house as she trudged across the lawn. He raised his eyebrows at her grubby appearance, saying with a laugh, “Och, little girl, it's to be hoped no visitors turn up to see you like that.”
Her confused unhappiness resurfaced. “I'm going in to change,” she said listlessly.
Gabriel looked at her sharply. “What is it, bairn?”
He put a large arm around her.
“Nothing really,” she said, smiling effortfully. “I was thinking of Cecile and the baron.” Which was perfectly true, although only half the story.
“Ah.” He nodded, for the moment satisfied. He hugged her tightly, then said briskly, “Well, I've some information that might interest you. Heard a story down at the quay from a couple of crabbers.”
“About the Penhallans?” She was immediately diverted as he'd known she would be, and her eyes quickened with interest.
He nodded. “Those nephews… your cousins.
Twins they are, apparently. Let's take a walk.”
They strolled into the orchard on the far side of the house. Tamsyn had been intrigued by the traditional seventeenth-century design that dictated the fruit trees be planted in a pattern that offered a straight line to the eye from whichever angle one looked. It struck her as an amusing quirk for something as functional as an orchard.
“So?” she said eagerly, when they were deep among the trees. Gabriel's information related to the issue that had brought her to this place. A simple and straightforward issue, with no confusing emotions to muddy the waters. She would focus only on that, and these nonsensical and irrelevant feelings she was harbouring for Julian St. Simon would fade into insignificance.
“It seems that a couple of years ago your cousins did a bit of trespassing… on rather more than the colonel's land.”
Tamsyn listened as Gabriel told her the story. She kicked her feet through the grass, rubbing the sand off, her stomach churning at the thought that she shared close kinship with such gutter sweepings.
Gabriel reached up to an overhead branch and tested a pear between finger and thumb. “They've a few weeks to go yet,” he observed dispassionately, as if he were completely unaffected by the story he was telling. But Tamsyn knew better.
“Nearly killed the girl, I gather,” he continued in his leisurely fashion.
Tamsyn plucked a crab apple. She bit into it, relishing its puckering sourness; it took her mind off the thought of some innocent little girl in the vicious, defiling hands of these as yet unknown cousins.
“You'll get the bellyache if you eat too many of those,” Gabriel observed. “Anyway, from that day the colonel banned the Penhallans from his land. He's on speaking terms with the viscount, I gather. But only in public. They can't help but meet occasionally around the neighbourhood. But the twins keep out of his way.”
“What do they say in the countryside about my cou-about the twins?”
“No one has any truck with 'em. They're cowards; they think they can do whatever they like. They're Penhallans and that's all that counts.”
“Cecile said that was exactly what Cedric believed,” Tamsyn said thoughtfully. “No one could touch a Penhallan except himself”
“Well, we'll be changing that, little girl,” Gabriel said, deceptively mild.
Tamsyn looked up at him and her eyes were almost black. “Yes,” she said. “We'll bring them down, Gabriel. For Cecile, and for that girl.”
She shivered suddenly, despite the sultry warmth in the orchard, as she thought of the two horsemen on the cliff. Two horsemen. Twins? Cousins? Watching her?
Cedric had seen her once. Had that one brief glimpse been sufficient to arouse his curiosity?
Chapter Eighteen
“I DO HOPE JULIAN WON'T CONSIDER OUR VISIT AN imposition,” Lucy said, unable to hide her renewed agitation as the chaise turned into the gates of Tregarthan.
“Why should he?” Gareth asked with a touch of impatience. “Tregarthan is big enough to house a regiment.” He shifted his long legs in the cramped space. “By God, I'll be glad to be done with this infernal coach travel. I should have brought my riding horse.”
Before they'd left, he'd said that as he didn't have a horse in his string to match anyone of his brother law's, he'd let Julian mount him during their stay. But Lucy didn't remind him of this. She let down the window, closed to keep the dust from filling the coach, and leaned out, ready to catch her first glimpse of her beloved Tregarthan as they bowled around the corner at the head of the drive.
“Good God! What an incredible animal!” Gareth exclaimed, looking out of his own window. He banged on the roof and the coachman drew rein. Gareth leaned out of the window, mouth agape, at the two riders emerging from the trees onto the drive just ahead of them.
Tamsyn shaded her eyes from the sun as she examined the coach standing in the middle of the driveway. “It must be the colonel's sister,” she declared after a brief and puzzled contemplation. “I wonder why they've stopped.” Leaving Gabriel on the drive, she cantered back toward the coach. “Good afternoon. Is something the matter?”