The cottage was surprisingly comfortable, just one room dominated by a blackened fireplace on one wall and on the other a large wooden bedstead heaped high with warm-looking quilts and blankets. Casting a quick glance toward the door, I stripped off my soaked clothes and wrapped myself in one of the blankets, trying to stem my shivering.
When John stamped in, he went straight to the fire and coaxed it into life, patiently adding logs and stirring with a large poker until flames leaped into the darkness, warm and alluring. I edged as close to the fire as I dared. For the first time, John looked at me. “You are quite a good rider,” he said.
“I know,” I replied.
He smiled slightly. “Will it offend you if I disrobe, too?” he inquired.
“For heaven’s sake,” I exclaimed. “Get out of those wet clothes before you freeze to death!” I turned my back and stared out the grimy, rain-streaked window into the heaving darkness beyond.
“I’m decent now,” John said. “You can turn around.”
I turned back to him; he, too, was wrapped in a warm blanket.
“We seem to have stepped onto the set of a Cary Grant movie,” he suggested. “Beautiful woman and virile man caught together in a rainstorm . . .”
I couldn’t help smiling; the firelight danced in his eyes and he looked so absurd in his tasseled bedspread. “So you’re Cary Grant now?”
“And virile, don’t forget.” He moved a little closer to me, and my body, so recently cold and shivering, felt suddenly heated with the warmth of his gaze.
“Who am I?” I breathed, unsteady now.
He slipped a hand out of his makeshift robe and tipped my chin up to his. “You’re the beautiful heroine.” His fingers traced the line of my upturned face and came to rest at the back of my neck. “Jordy,” he murmured.
“John,” I murmured back. And then I kissed him.
— – — – —
“This should be convenient,” said John. He stretched a long arm over the side of the bed, rifling through his pants pockets for a lighter. “I apologize for the triteness of a postcoital cigarette, but I must confess that I—”
“Shut up,” I murmured. My own postcoital glow was fading very rapidly. Convenient? What had I done?
He leaned back against the old wooden bedstead, drawing in a long, luxurious breath of nicotine and slanting an amused smile down at me. “Did I do something wrong?” he inquired. “This was certainly pleasurable for me, and I was sure that you shared the—”
“Shut up. I need to— Oh, Christ. I need to get dressed!” How had I gotten myself into this mess? I barely knew the man. This was a disaster.
John waved an expansive arm at the lacy bra, camisole, and panties that festooned the floor of our shabby shelter. “Be my guest,” he invited. “You don’t mind if I watch, do you?”
I sank back against the thin pillows and pulled the sheet to my chin. “You are— I don’t even like you!” I threw at him, trying not to enjoy the feel of his legs against mine as he reached down to pull the duvet over us. His body was lean and hard, more muscled than I would have thought. Not that I ever thought about it, of course. “And put out that cigarette,” I added. “I hate the smell.”
“Ah, yes, you Americans and your antismoking mania,” he murmured, his public school English accent even more pronounced than usual. He drew deeply on the cigarette and leaned over to stub it out. I glanced at the rain-streaked windows. We were clearly going to be here for a while. “John, words fail me.”
“Don’t say anything,” he suggested. “Conversation is so overrated at moments like this.”
“Oh, stop doing a bad Cary Grant imitation,” I snapped, and he laughed.
“We are going to have so much fun together now that you’re living in the main house,” he predicted.
“We are going to do no such thing. This was a one-off. It’ll never happen again.”
He drew me back into his arms. “Then let’s just finish off in style.”
Chapter 15
UNBELIEVABLY, WE STILL hadn’t discussed Pamela or the children. I had ridden back ahead of him, untacked my horse in silence, and bolted to my room; I didn’t know what he’d done. All I wanted was to escape to my little cottage and never see Lord bloody Grey or his bloody children again.
But John slipped into my bedroom as I lay awake that night, staring at the dark ceiling. He wore an old, faded shirt unbuttoned over his well-worn jeans, and his feet were bare. I sat up with a start.
“Pamela offered to take the children after my wife, Aline, died,” he said without any preamble, sitting down on the side of my bed. “She said I couldn’t possibly raise three motherless girls, especially when I have to be in London so often.”
“Oh?”
“Pamela is wonderful at some things—getting rich men to propose to her and organizing massive parties—but I could never let her care for the children. Or, more precisely, hire nannies for the children until they’re ready to go away to school.”
“Why not?” Though I already knew, I was curious to hear what he’d say.
“Henry and Mary are afraid of her, and Jane hates her. And she’s the worst possible influence on Katherine.”
I was a little surprised that he knew his children so well. It seemed that he was an absent and overworked father rather than a cold or unfeeling father. It made me like him a little more.
“Please, Jordy,” he said quietly. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes with my children—you saw Deirdre—and I don’t want to make another one.”
“Oh, all right,” I said ungraciously, dropping back against the pillow.
John smiled. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way . . .” He reached out for me.
“No!” I said, though my treacherous body already tingled at his nearness. His shirt hung open to reveal the curly blond hairs on his hard-muscled chest, and I fought the temptation to run my fingers up and down his body.
His smile deepened, and he leaned over me. “No?”
“No,” I said uncertainly.
“All right, then.” He stood up and I looked at him in disbelief. He was leaving?
“John—” I said.
“Jordy,” he replied.
The silence hung between us, heavy and sensuous. I felt my nipples getting hard.
“Are you inviting me to stay?” he asked.
I couldn’t form the words in my mouth, so instead I reached up to him. He fit into my arms as if we had been doing this forever.
— – — – —
“No smoking in my room,” I ordered. “I absolutely forbid it.”
“Oh, you forbid it, do you?” There was a smile in his voice.
“If you smoke in here, the children will know you’ve been in my room.”
“Hmm. I see your point. I suppose you won’t let me sleep here, either.” John rolled onto his side and pushed the tangled hair back from my face.
“Of course not.”
“All right, from now on you’ll have to come to my room. Speaking of children, what form of birth control do you use?”
I started. “What?”
“You told me I didn’t need a condom. Remember?”
“Oh, right. Isn’t it a little late for you to be asking me this?” I teased.
“Well, you told me—”
His muscles were tensing, so I decided to let him off the hook. “I’m sterile,” I explained. “I had a botched fibroid operation when I was in my twenties, so I can’t have babies.”
He didn’t say anything.
“That’s convenient, too, right?” I asked him.
“Perhaps for me,” he answered.
Now my entire body was feeling tense, and I pushed away from him. “You’d better go. Anyway, don’t you want to know if I’m HIV-negative?”
“Good God,” he sai
d. “Of course you’re HIV-negative. You got a long-term visa.”
“And how do I know you’re clean?” I retorted, wanting to rattle him.
He said stiffly, “I have four young children whom I’d rather not leave orphaned, so I’m quite careful.”
“As you were just now?”
He stretched and sat up to pull on his jeans again. “This conversation,” he said, “has ceased to be enjoyable. This has been lovely otherwise, Jordy. Good night.”
The next morning I avoided John’s cool, knowing eyes over breakfast. Katherine was prattling away; Jane and Mary were silent; and Henry was deeply engrossed in his handheld game. Just a normal Sunday morning in the happy Grey family. John certainly loved his children—I saw genuine flashes of emotion when Mary looked ill, for instance, or when Henry’s hero worship of his father was particularly evident—but for the most part, he seemed to view them with an air of either amused detachment or muddled helplessness. I supposed that having a father who lived with a girl “around Jane’s age in Majorca” had left him singularly unprepared for fatherhood, much as my mother had left me utterly devoid of maternal urges.
These children needed a mother, but not me. And certainly not Pamela.
I asked Katherine to pass the toast. She gave me a baleful look and asked her father, “Will Aunt Pamela be looking after us from now on?”
Henry looked stricken. Jane and Mary were stony-faced.
John cleared his throat. “Well, there’s a slight problem with that. Apparently, Pamela forgot that she has urgent appointments in London this week.”
Now Katherine looked stricken.
“And the week after that,” he added.
I wondered what John had said to make his sister remember these urgent appointments.
“And four children seemed to be a substantial challenge as well.”
I couldn’t agree more.
“Children?” John said. “Won’t you enjoy having Jordy take care of you for a while longer?”
Jane shrugged. Katherine protested, “But she’s so old! I loved that nanny from France, what was her name again? She knew so much about makeup and clothes!”
“Monique,” John said. “Yes, she was”—he glanced at me—“quite a precocious young woman. But most unsuitable.”
“Oh?” I asked. Precocious?
“Yes, Pamela found her unsuitable and dismissed her. Pamela had the absurd notion that Monique was setting her cap for me.”
“Oh, she was!” cried Katherine. “She told me that you were an au pair’s dream come true! She said that—”
“Most unsuitable,” John cut in. For the first time that morning, our eyes met and held. A rush of heat spiraled from my head to my toes, and I felt almost breathless for a moment.
“Then why can’t Aunt Pamela take care of us?” Katherine persisted.
John looked back at Katherine. “As I explained, the duchess has urgent appointments in London.”
“Is she really a duchess?” I asked.
Katherine said reproachfully, “Daddy, you know you shouldn’t call her that. It makes her quite cross.”
John smiled. “No, she isn’t really, but it’s the family nickname for her. She’s only the daughter of an earl, not a duchess. But she’s been imperious from the cradle onward. At any rate, there simply isn’t another candidate for nanny anywhere in the Cotswolds at the moment. I’m afraid that Jordy is stuck with us.”
Katherine’s face fell. Jane shrugged again, Mary looked as if she couldn’t quite recall who Jordy was, and Henry took no notice at all.
It was a good thing I didn’t care what they thought of me.
Chapter 16
OVER THE NEXT few weeks, the children and I coexisted in reasonable amity, and I continued to sleep with their father when he came down for weekends. I did manage to solve one small mystery: When John seemed relaxed and vulnerable (i.e., after sex), I asked him why on earth it was so difficult for a wealthy, well-connected widower to find a suitable nanny. An embarrassed-looking John confessed that he had been blacklisted by the leading nanny agencies in London after Pamela chased off two nannies and the children frightened off four more. I decided not to ask what the children had done, recalling the snakes that the von Trapp children put in their nanny’s bed in The Sound of Music. Sometimes ignorance was best.
I also returned my New York attorney’s phone call.
“Jordy, even though you fired me last month, I’m still your friend. So I have to warn you that while no indictments have come down yet, it remains quite possible that you will be charged. The bank attorneys are talking about subpoenas and extradition; perhaps we should do this the right way and offer you up as a witness.”
I shuddered, twisting my hair around my finger and biting my lip. “So you expect me to testify against Lucian Fellowes?”
He groaned. One of my Columbia classmates, Sam Rosenheim was the youngest partner at one of New York’s old and respected law firms, and we both knew that I needed to follow his advice. “I don’t expect you to testify against anyone, I just expect you to tell the truth.”
“I don’t even know what the truth is anymore!” I cried. Had Lucian really engaged in those false trades and then put my name on the accounts so I would be the scapegoat if all else failed? I pictured him now, his thin, tense body and snapping black eyes, the wiry black hair always wild from his fingers constantly combing through it. Lucian was perpetually in motion, even in bed: Our “romps” were fast and furious, and he was out of bed and on the computer again before I had even opened my eyes. So different from John’s lazy, lounging coolness.
I hadn’t even really been attracted to Lucian. I found him too fine-boned and kinetic, his energy too tense and frantic. His chest was smooth and hairless, like a young boy’s. So I had never considered him romantically until one night when we were working late together on a series of trades with Japan, and the rates moved in our favor, and by three A.M. we had netted almost $30 million in pure profits and . . . Well, drunk with the excitement of the hyper-speed trades and the money, so much money just raining down from the skies . . . Lucian grabbed me and was fumbling with his belt before I could even react.
I could have said no. But I, too, was drunk on the high of the moment—better than crack cocaine, Lucian always said—and thrilled to be with the legendary Lucian Fellowes, executive vice president of AmCan Bank. It happened so fast, just like a millisecond shift in the markets that could make or break a fortune. And then it was over, and Lucian was racing back to the computer terminals with his shirt hanging out of his trousers—he hadn’t even bothered to undress—and I was zipping up my skirt in a confusion of shame and pride and utter exhaustion.
The part of me that knew an alliance with him could restore my career after the merger, meningitis, and Mistake—I refused to acknowledge that part of me.
So now I asked my lawyer, “Sam, you know I had an affair with Lucian, right?”
“I assumed that you did. It doesn’t matter.”
Perhaps it did to me. I wasn’t sure. “I’ll have to think about it,” I said aloud.
“Don’t think too long, Jordy. The bank’s lawyers are very persistent.” He paused, then became my friend again. “How is life in the Cotswolds anyway? Are you enjoying your vacation?”
Some vacation, I thought. “Well,” I said, “I’m having a loveless but very satisfying affair with a British milord.”
He laughed. “And I’m sleeping with Hillary Clinton. Goodbye, Jordy, and remember, don’t think too long.”
— – — – —
Still unable to write one coherent paragraph of my hedge fund memoirs and still unwilling to think too deeply about the mess I’d left behind in New York, I dove back into the Lady Jane Grey research instead. My Jane’s birthday, October 12, was approaching, and I was hoping to present her with some information that would make
her namesake less unappetizing. It was very eerie that the two Janes shared a birthday, and I could understand some of my Jane’s queasiness on the topic. Really, how many young girls would like to be forever linked with an ancestress who had been an insufferable prig in life, lasted only nine days as queen, and then had her head cut off at age sixteen?
One day I happened upon a new website, www.somegreymatter.com, and was astonished by the first paragraph:
Lady Jane Grey Dudley remains one of the more popular figures from the Tudor period in English history. The exact date and month of Jane’s birth are not known; however, the year was certainly 1537. She is usually thought to have been born in the late summer or early autumn of that year, with tradition placing the date close to that of the birth of Prince Edward on 12 October 1537. Neither is the exact location known, though again tradition has it that she was born at or near the Grey family seat at Bradgate near the ancient village of Newton Linford, Leicestershire. The evidence presented below suggests that she was born much earlier than Edward, perhaps as early as May or June 1537.
I stopped, thunderstruck, and read the paragraph again. Everyone had been so certain that the Janes shared the birthday of October 12; that my Jane had been born exactly 466 years after the first Jane. Precisely, to the day.
Furiously, I tapped at my computer and revisited the other websites. Yes, here it was in a journal from the most august Oxford University: Lady Jane Grey’s exact birthdate was unknown but almost certainly not October 12.
I started taking notes.
I was early to pick up Jane from school that day. As soon as she climbed into the car, I said excitedly, “You’re never going to believe what I found out today! You’re so going to owe me that riding lesson!”
She looked out the window.
“I have two questions for you,” I said, ignoring her show of disinterest. “First of all, how long was Lady Jane Grey the queen?”
“Nine days,” Jane said flatly. “Everyone knows that.”
“But did you know that she was actually queen for two weeks, not nine days?”
Jane was silent.
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