When You Wish Read online

  “For God’s sake, how can you possibly find them when you can’t see?” He grabbed her again, lifting her clear of the mud. “Sit in the boat where you can’t stumble into another hole, and I’ll find your glasses.” He dumped her unceremoniously over the side of the dinghy.

  Rosie gathered herself together as best she could. Her nearsightedness was hardly helped by the thick coating of black mud clinging to her face. She looked vainly for a clean patch of skirt to wipe her eyes clear but her dress was as thickly mired as her face. She gave up and knelt, peering over the side of the boat.

  “Can you see them?”

  “Not yet. Oh, wait a minute … what’s that? Ah. Success!” He held up the precious spectacles. “They’re not much good to you like this.” He dipped them into the narrow channel of clear water, washing them clean with his thumb before drying them on his handkerchief. Then he regarded their mud-bespattered owner in the dinghy with a quizzical smile. “What a mess.”

  Rosie ignored this truth. “What was it you found?” When he didn’t reply, she said with enraged comprehension, “It wasn’t anything, was it? It was a trick.”

  “You were so studiously ignoring me it was the only way I could think of to get your attention,” he said coolly, soaking his handkerchief in the stream. Rosie blinked furiously at his blurred shape as he came close.

  “Hold still.” He clasped her chin firmly and scrubbed at the mud on her face. Rosie spluttered.

  “A little better,” he said finally.

  “Give me my glasses.” She held out her hand crossly. Rosie was rarely at a disadvantage and her present situation was a most unpleasant novelty.

  “In a minute.” Charles regarded her still with his quizzical smile, although Rosie couldn’t see his expression. “You look quite different without them.”

  “Less ugly!” she snapped, suddenly close to tears. “Give them to me.”

  “My dear girl, don’t be absurd!” he exclaimed softly. “You are really quite lovely, both with them and without them. And even smothered in mud.”

  “It’s unkind to tease.” She bit her lip hard. ‘Give them to me, please” Her distress was clearly genuine.

  Charles swung himself up into the dinghy beside her. “I’m not teasing, Rosie. I find you absolutely delicious.”

  Rosie was still trying to decide whether he could possibly mean it when she found herself gathered against him, her muddy face upturned to the sun, his own a soft, smiling blur above her.

  Charles felt the surprising strength in the slight, tensile frame. He ran his hands down her narrow back, spanned her waist, encircled her throat, stroked the pad of his thumb across her mouth.

  Rosie was suddenly rendered dumb as well as blind. She held her breath as his touch moved over her. Her body was alive again with those indescribable stirrings in the pit of her belly, her skin prickling, her lips tingling in anticipation of the kiss she knew was coming. And when his mouth took hers she burned from head to toe. She turned fully toward him so she could kneel up, her arms encircling him, her body pressed hard against his. A wild hunger swirled in her veins, her nipples pressed hard against her bodice, and a liquid warmth filled her loins.

  Charles tasted the salt marsh on her lips; her skin smelled of the fresh air and the rich loam of the river mud; her hair was warm and fragrant with the hot morning sun. He felt the burgeoning passion in every lithe contour of her body beneath his hands. It was she who drew him down to the deck of the dinghy, her legs twining with his. The tall reeds closed over them and the deck planking was sun-dappled and warm.

  “Rosie, Rosie,” he whispered, unsure whether he was protesting this passion or expressing it. He palmed her face, smoothed over her eyelids with his fingertips. She put her own fingers in his mouth, her hips lifting without volition, pressing against his jutting hardness.

  And then suddenly she was pushing him away, writhing to free herself, rolling sideways and up into a sitting position as he moved his weight from her. She stared at him, her weakened eyes even more vulnerable, expressing her inner turmoil.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head in confusion. “No.”

  He sat back, leaning against the mast, drawing his knees up to his chest. Tilting his head to the sun, he closed his eyes, feeling the heat beating against his lids as his breathing slowed and he took charge of himself again.

  “My glasses?” Rosie asked.

  He opened his eyes and, leaning over, gently put them on for her. “Now what do you see?”

  Rosie shook her head, adjusting the spectacles. “I don’t know.” She slipped over the side of the dinghy. “Good-bye.”

  “Rosie?”

  “Yes.” She stopped, her body turned from him in the attitude of a fleeing fawn.

  “I have all the time in the world,” he said softly. “I can wait all summer if necessary for Mr. Balmain to return.”

  Rosie made no reply. She leaped off down the gradually widening channel, careful to step only where she could see the riverbed.

  Charles swung himself off the dinghy. Rosie had abandoned her collecting equipment and he picked it up with his own. How was he to get her to tell him the truth? Because until she did, she would always run from him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  YOU LOOK AS if you’ve been having a mud bath Rosie!” Clarissa exclaimed as Rosie came across the lawn, flushed from running up the hill. Perspiration ran down her face, streaking the mud that remained after Charles’s perfunctory scrubbing.

  “I tripped in the mud.” Rosie flung herself down on the grass. Resting on her elbows, she glared ferociously up at the rich copper leaves of the beech tree.

  “And?” Theo prompted.

  “What am I going to do?” Rosie wailed suddenly, falling onto her back, flinging a muddy arm across her eyes. “It’s all the most dreadful muddle.”

  “Mr. Larchmont, I suppose.” Emily plied her needle in her tambour frame, smiling sympathetically at the prone figure stretched on the grass. “More kisses, love?”

  Rosie groaned. “More than that.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” Emily and Clarissa, shocked, spoke in unison. “What more?”

  “Oh, come on, you know,” Theo said with a lazy grin. “Chaste kisses are never really enough, are they?”

  “Theo, you are outrageous!” Emily declared.

  “I know,” she said. “I always have been. But at least I’m honest. Don’t tell me you and Edward didn’t indulge in a little more excitement than mere kisses before your wedding night. Or you and Jonathan, Clarry?”

  Both sisters said nothing, but the pink tinge to their cheekbones told its own story. “Belmonts are very susceptible to passion, Rosie,” Theo continued, still grinning. “So you’ve nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “I’m not ashamed of anything,” Rosie said, sitting up. “It was wonderful and I didn’t want it to stop.”

  “But it did stop, didn’t it?” Emily asked, leaning forward with sudden urgency. “It’s all very well for Theo to joke, love, but if things are carried too far, then … well … things—”

  “Emily, I’m a biologist, I know all about the consequences of mating,” Rosie interrupted before her eldest sister could get farther into the swamp. “But don’t you understand? If I tell Charles who I am, then I’ll never be elected to the Royal Society. And if I don’t tell him, then I couldn’t ever…” She paused, sucked in her lower lip, then said with resolution, “I couldn’t ever see him again.”

  “And that would matter?” Emily asked.

  “Yes, dreadfully,” Rosie replied miserably. “I want to be with him all the time. I want to talk to him all the time. I want to kiss him and love with him.”

  “That’s a bit sudden,” Theo remarked. “But it does happen. Clarry knew the minute she laid eyes on Jonathan that he was her only possible husband.”

  “True,” Clarissa agreed with a somewhat complacent chuckle.

  “The issue seems to be whether you would rather be a member of the Royal Society, o
r married to Charles Larchmont,” Theo stated.

  “I didn’t say anything about marrying.” Rosie sat up abruptly.

  “No, but when you feel so strongly for someone, one thing tends to lead to another,” Clarry pointed out.

  Rosie contemplated this for a minute. Charles Larchmont for a husband? She could find nothing wrong with the idea at all. Finally she shook her head. “I don’t know what I want. If I did know, it wouldn’t be a problem. Why, why can’t I have both. Just because I’m a woman!”

  “There has to be a way,” Theo said. “Why don’t you take a bath before nuncheon while we put our heads together.”

  Rosie agreed with a shrug and trailed off across the lawn into the house.

  “There isn’t a way around it,” Emily said. “I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, but there isn’t. Once Charles Larchmont knows that Rosie is Ross Balmain he couldn’t recommend her to the Royal Society even if he wanted to, and she could hardly be a member of the Royal Society in secret while married to him.”

  Rosie was preoccupied throughout nuncheon, leaving the conversation to her sisters and godmother. Elizabeth knew the Belmont girls well enough to know when something was concerning them, but she showed no signs of her curiosity. They would confide in her when they were ready.

  A messenger arrived from the Ship inn as they were concluding the meal. He brought Rosie’s abandoned pail and rake with the compliments of Charles Larchmont, together with an invitation for Mrs. Grantley and her goddaughter to take tea with him the following day.

  “How very civil of him,” Elizabeth said. “But I didn’t realize you were becoming acquainted with the gentleman, Rosie. I thought you were at outs with him.”

  “I no longer believe he stole my research,” Rosie said, always unable to speak less than truth. “But I do believe that if he hadn’t already been a member of the Royal Society they would have given as much weight to my paper as to his.”

  “Ah.” Elizabeth nodded. “So should we accept this invitation?”

  “Not for me,” Rosie said. “I beg you will decline the invitation, ma’am. I don’t ever wish to see Mr. Larchmont again if I can help it.”

  Her sisters looked at her and she met their eyes with a little defiant tilt of her head, a what-would-you-do shrug. She had made up her mind. The green glass bottle had made up her mind. While she had been lying in the hip bath soaking off the mud, the bottle had glowed on the windowsill, the outline of the leather scroll dark at the neck.

  To thine own wish be true. Do not follow the moth to the star.

  Of her two wishes, she could have only one. To pursue both would risk seeing both devoured in the fire of impossible ambition. So she would become a member of the Royal Society, an accredited scientist. She would accept the life of a recluse, living a double life in exchange for the excitements of science. And she would give up the pursuit of ordinary happiness. After all, only yesterday, she could not imagine a more wonderful existence than that centered on the cloistered intellectual satisfactions of a highly regarded scientist. A fleeting attraction for a personable man had jolted her into a moment of self-doubt, causing her to question what she had always held to be the only possible future for herself. But she had put the moment behind her now, and was all the stronger for it.

  No one questioned her decision until after nuncheon, when Theo said, “How will it help not to see Charles Larchmont again?”

  “I don’t know,” Rosie said. “But I do know it won’t help to see him, so I’ll just have to stay a prisoner in the house until he leaves Lymington. Oh…” She looked aghast. “I forgot. He said he had all the time in the world and he was quite happy to stay here until Mr. Balmain returns.”

  “He can’t stay here forever,” Clarry said comfortingly.

  “He could stay here all summer doing my research on the salterns and preventing me from collecting specimens.”

  “Then we’ll have to get rid of him,” Theo declared casually. Nothing in her demeanor indicated that she didn’t accept her sister’s decision.

  “But how?” Emily regarded Theo a trifle warily. She recognized the light in Lady Stoneridge’s pansy-blue eyes.

  Theo grinned. “Rosie shall be Ross Balmain.”

  “What?” They all three stared at her.

  “You’ll have to meet him after dark in some gloomy, secluded spot,” Theo continued blithely. “If the light’s really bad, and you wear a cloak and take off your glasses and practice a different voice—”

  “But why would Ross wish to meet in the dark?” Rosie was intrigued. Theo could always be counted on to produce a plan, however wild and unlikely. “It would have to be something very convincing.”

  Theo frowned, then snapped her fingers. “Creditors,” she said triumphantly.

  “Oh, I see it all.” Rosie pranced up from her chair. “He had to leave Lymington in a hurry because he was being dunned by creditors. Then he crept back to collect something, but he had to come secretly so he wouldn’t be dunned again … then we told him about Charles, and he devised this way of meeting him that would still keep his presence here a secret to save him from unpleasantness. Theo, you are the most particularly satisfactory sister.” She embraced Theo in a bear hug. “And once he’s met him, then he’ll have to do what he promised and put my … I mean Ross’s name up for election to the society.” And I won’t have lost quite everything out of this encounter. But that addendum she kept to herself.

  “That’s all very well,” Clarissa protested. “I know Emily and I aren’t given to such flights of ingenuity, but how is Rosie to look remotely like a man, even in the dark?”

  “She doesn’t have to look like a man, but like a stripling. A youth,” Theo said, frowning as she thought this through. “Presumably Mr. Larchmont doesn’t know Ross’s age, Rosie?”

  Rosie, bright-eyed, shook her head. “He doesn’t know anything about him. All my letters were about how particularly dastardly it was to steal someone else’s research …. Where will we get the right clothes … and shouldn’t I cut off all my hair—”

  “No, Rosie!” Emily cried. “It was bad enough when Theo did it, but at least she was already married.”

  “Since I intend to be a bride of science, I can’t see that losing my virgin locks matters in the least,” Rosie said tartly, sweeping her plaits forward over her shoulder to examine them more closely. “I could just cut them off at my neck, couldn’t I?”

  “No, you could not!” Clarissa jumped in. “If you’re going to cut it, then have it done properly, like Theo did.”

  “But there aren’t any French coiffeurs in Lymington.”

  “Maggie will do it,” Theo said, referring to Elizabeth’s abigail. “She’s skilled enough with scissors and tongs and curling papers.”

  “Good, so that’s settled. Now, what about clothes?” Rosie was striding about the room, ticking items off on her fingers.

  “Emily can buy those. She has a perfect eye for size and for what’s appropriate,” Theo said. “You can go to Hubbard’s on High Street, Emily. They’ll have something for a young lad. It doesn’t have to be very smart, particularly since he’s supposed to be incognito.”

  “I think this is a very bad idea,” Emily stated. “But I know that won’t stop either of you.”

  “No,” Rosie agreed. “And you are all the most particularly satisfactory sisters anyone could possibly ever have.”

  CHARLES RECEIVED a message at breakfast the following morning. It was in a very feminine hand, a far cry from the indignant black scrawl of Ross Balmain. It informed him, however, that that gentleman had returned unexpectedly for a very brief visit. For compelling private reasons he wished his presence in Lymington to be kept a secret. He would meet with Mr. Larchmont in the gazebo at the bottom of the garden of Grantley House at eleven o’clock that evening. Mr. Larchmont would find the side gate unlatched. The message was signed Clarissa Lacey.

  Charles reread the message, a deep frown corrugating his brow, his coffee cooling bes
ide him. This he had not expected. Could he be wrong? Was there a Ross Balmain after all? Or were the sisters trying to foist an impostor on him? But they would be aware that no impostor would be able to stand up to the meticulous questioning of a member of the Royal Society.

  Well, he would learn the answer soon enough. He put aside the message and sliced into a joint of sirloin, reflecting that he would have expected Rosie rather than Clarissa to have written to him. He had barely spoken to the other sisters.

  He could still see Rosie’s face as she’d run from him the previous day. Perplexed, even frightened, as if something was happening over which she had no control. And he would guess from what he’d observed about Rosie Belmont that she would find uncontrollable confusions most particularly threatening. And people tended to run from what threatened them. Presumably she was still running, and delegating the letter writing to her sister was one way of keeping her distance.

  She didn’t appear at the river that day, which, while it didn’t surprise him, threw a blight over the sunny morning. He had never met a woman like Rosie; in fact, until his visit to Lymington, he would have denied such a creature could exist. A passionate, learned scientist with a brilliant mind contained in an utterly appealing frame. She was as unusual in her looks as she was in her personality. As uncompromising as her spectacles. But he knew that a deep current of warmth and humor ran beneath the blunt exterior.

  What a wonderful partner she would make. He caught himself on the mental observation with a swift indrawn breath. Mud sucked at his waders as he stood in the marsh, gazing without seeing at a flock of dabbling mallards. A partner in science? Certainly. A partner in life?

  Good God, why not? He laughed aloud and a seagull screeched in response. He had never entertained the possibility of marriage because he had never met a woman remotely interested in his own passions. In London society, bluestockings were anathema, and even if a woman was interested in intellectual pursuits she would never admit it. He enjoyed mild flirtations and retreated thankfully to the seclusion of his library and laboratory the minute the spun sugar became too cloying.