“War hero. Expert sportsman. Political tour de force. Yes. And I… Well, I was his son. For whatever that was worth.”
He had caught her interest. “I remember meeting him once, when I was very young. He frightened me a little.”
Malcolm grinned, despite the bitterness of the memories. “Perhaps you and I had more in common in our youth than we first thought.”
“Was he a hard father?”
“He had high expectations of me. The older I get, the more I suspect I could never have met them. I certainly did not manage it before he died.”
“You really didn’t love him? Your own father?”
“Love was not something the Old Lion encouraged. But perhaps I did love him, after all, though not in a way you’d recognise. I lived and died for his approval. Isn’t that a sort of love?” He was glad the sky had darkened. He wasn’t sure he wanted Selina to see his face, to see the anger that had haunted him since his childhood, the bitterness. The way he was hard and cold in the ways that he knew she could be soft. “That desperation for him to notice me was fatal, in the end. For him, anyway.”
Selina did not speak. She pushed Percy from her lap, eliciting a soft yelp of discontent, and slid her arm through Malcolm’s. Her head lowered, knocking gently against his, companionable and sweetly simple.
“It was a riding accident,” said Malcolm. “He was a brilliant rider, in his youth, but I was growing up as he was growing older, and I thought – like the boastful boy I was – that I could outstrip him. There was a certain jump I used to make over a riverbed on the Caversham estate. Easy enough, when the ground was hard, and the weather was good. But on that day, when we rode out together, it started to rain. The river had swollen, the banks were muddy and slippery. And I thought it a wonderful opportunity to show him I was not afraid of anything.”
“You didn’t make it?”
“I did. Just. My horse stumbled but found its footing again. And then…” He stopped, finding that he did not know how to tell the story any longer.
Selina put her hand on his cheek and turned his face to hers. “This is it, isn’t it? Your secret. My collateral.”
“Yes.”
“Your father tried to make the jump, and failed?”
Malcolm swallowed. Nodded. Searched her eyes for a hint of shock, or disapprobation. They were twin pools of liquid darkness, and they told him nothing. “His horse landed on top of him. Broke its legs. He made me shoot it with my pistol to put it out of its misery. And I was such a fool that I forgot to tie my own horse up when I dismounted to do it, and it ran away in fright.
“So. I was left with my father, wounded and trapped beneath a dead horse at the edge of a rising river. And the rain was falling. He ordered me to go and fetch help. I’d lost my hat, somehow, in the confusion. It took me an hour to walk home. An hour in which I knew that even if I found help – even when I returned –”
“And the rain kept falling,” said Selina, when he did not finish his sentence. Malcolm shivered. Unmanly, perhaps, but if she challenged him, he could always blame the cold.
Selina’s arm tightened around him in response.
“They called me Your Grace for the first time that day. I had never hated anything more.”
“Do you hate it now?”
He lifted a shoulder, half-shrugging. “I’ve become Caversham completely in the intervening years. The title feels like my own. But I know that I have never fully claimed it from my father. I’m not the Lion Duke.”
“Do you need to be?”
He stared at her. “Of course. What else is there to be?”
“I wouldn’t kiss a Lion Duke,” said Selina, her eyes locked on his. “But I might kiss Malcolm Locke, if such a man exists.”
He doesn’t. That was what he should have told her. What was he, if not the Duke of Caversham? What did he desire, if not power and privilege and position?
There was no Malcolm without Caversham, no man without the duke. He should have told her that.
But he wanted to kiss her more than he wanted to preserve his honour, or hers. So he took her face in his hands and pressed his lips to her mouth before either of them could realise what a foolish idea it was.
It was a simple kiss, unhurried, a careful exploration of the contours of her perfect, wilful lips. Didn’t she deserve his respect, after all? His restraint?
But then their eyes fluttered open both together, and he saw his own longing mirrored in her face, and he heard the sigh that escaped her lips, and he could not stop himself from kissing her in a different way entirely. Ruinously. Rapturously. His hands clasped her to him the way a drowning man might clutch at a rock, and his mouth began its passionate, inexorable conquest.
He learned quickly. The way she responded when he caressed her here, or when his lips found purchase there. The way she gasped when he lightly bit her lower lip. It was all new, urgent, overpowering, and by the time they broke apart, their chests were both heaving.
Selina stared at him with her hand pressed to her reddened lips. “Malcolm,” she said.
That was all. But his name, his first name, the one he so rarely heard, had never held such meaning.
“Selina.”
She pushed herself to her feet. “It’s dark. I should go. We should –”
“Don’t tell me we shouldn’t speak of this again.” He rose to his feet too, Percy waking from his doze and nuzzling Malcolm’s ankle with sleepy confusion. He let out a puzzled bark, which broke through Selina’s sudden horror like a charm. She let out a laugh, low and musical.
“Very well. We can speak of it tomorrow. When you take me out
