The Black Sheep's Return. Elizabeth Beacon

be the next Duchess and the subsequent Little Season had been dogged by sniggers and snide whispers as she tried to pretend she didn’t care that the new Duchess was still on a protracted wedding journey about the Lakes with her besotted husband. The most eligible bachelors had begun to slide out of dances with her and find themselves engaged when Lady Bowland organised an elegant supper party or visit to the theatre and Freya had somehow become a laughing stock to the very people she had so wanted to impress with her ancient lineage and proud good looks when she made her début.

      It had taken Lady Bowland’s death and two years of living at Bowland, instead of comfortably ensconced in the Dower House with Mama, to finally make her realise she was not some entitled being, blessed by every god of good fortune at her christening. Being stripped of the advantages of wealth and rank had forced her into her true self: Lady Freya, the glowing hope of her mother and grandfather’s wildest dreams, was gone. Here sat a woman who must find out what she really wanted from life before it was too late to achieve it and suddenly she was determined to find out what that was as soon as possible.

      She squirmed on the disarrayed bed and tried to tell herself it was the constant nag of pain from her ankle making her so restless, even as her fingers patiently continued the task she’d set them. It wasn’t the fact she’d been seen mother-naked by Orlando, but she had to admit the sneaky idea it could be very pleasant indeed if he was entirely undressed too haunted her like a bad dream. She shifted impatiently again and had to suppress a yelp of agony as her injured foot reminded her how desperate her current situation was. Clearly it behoved her to behave like a lady for however long it took her to heal, then depart with as much of her tattered reputation and self-esteem intact as possible.

      Despite her burning cheeks and the shock she should be suffering from, she wondered how she had looked to Orlando and didn’t even notice her busy fingers had found the last knot in her nut-brown hair and she was now combing the heavy softness of it as if her life depended on it. Even allowing for the flattery her rank and fortune attracted while the ton laughed at her behind her back, she knew she was pretty enough and reasonably well formed. She was shaped like a nymph rather than a goddess and some might consider her slight and unformed, of course. Yet perhaps some men preferred subtlety to the obvious charms of more buxom women, she let herself wonder. After all, her legs were long and slender and her waist small above the long line of her hips. Feeling as guilty as if she was testing the ebb and flow of those very curves with her own hands to see if they could please a lover, she gasped at the thought of Orlando ever watching her with a lover’s eyes and told herself it was with horror at the very idea.

       Chapter Four

      No 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