Like No Other Lover

by Julie Anne Long

  She was stunned breathless. Her fingers flew to touch beneath her eyes, self-conscious.

  Of course this man would notice that she’d not been sleeping well. She turned away briefly. Was this why he’d given her a cat?

  Oh, God. What was the man doing to her?

  “I…” she stammered. She was entirely unused to someone looking out for her welfare, and it knocked the breath from her. Her equilibrium wobbled. “Did you…sleep well…last night?” she asked hesitantly.

  She did not want to care. About anything he said or did.

  She cared about every minute motion he made. His every breath and word.

  His gaze had slid elsewhere very briefly; she caught it just as he was returning it to her. And when it did, his face had gone closed.

  “No,” he said simply, finally. He looked her evenly in the eyes. There was no accusation or warmth in the word. But he presented it to her as if she’d know what to do with it, or what it meant.

  She didn’t know.

  There’s more, he’d said last night. And she’d deprived him of it.

  “I’m…I’m sorry.” She didn’t know why she’d said it. Mostly she was sorry she didn’t understand his mood. And she was sorry they both seemed to be suffering, but she could not have said why they were.

  Her eyes followed the trajectory of his glance then. Lady Georgina wasn’t on the end of it.

  It was lady Middlebough. Whose glance was now still slowly retreating from Miles, like a partner in a reel: sidelong, subtle. Meaningful. The lovely brunette matron’s expression hadn’t changed. And Lady Windermere, her partner in backgammon, didn’t seem to have noticed a thing.

  It was such a small exchange. So quickly, subtly done. One would have easily missed it.

  And she thought now of all of Lady Middlebough’s little comments. The absence of her husband, due to return in a day or so. The explicit, absurd directions to her chambers she’d announced the other night.

  Cynthia’s heart, warmed a moment earlier by Miles’s concern, closed into a cold, tight fist.

  After a silence during which he met her eyes and during which her face went hot, he motioned with his hand to his foolscap and his quill. Widened his eyes a little. Said nothing else.

  Cynthia understood she was being politely dismissed in favor of his work.

  She gave him a small social smile and offered a shallow curtsy.

  And then she drifted over to where Georgina and Violet sat across from each other, engaged in the reassuringly feminine activity of embroidery.

  Stabbing needles in and out of fabric seemed a soothing pastime at the moment.

  Creating something with measured stitches seemed meditative, too.

  Like a spider. Weaving and reweaving a web.

  All the younger people smiled and greeted her, and Argosy stood and bowed and smiled. And she chose a chair near him, which made him glow, and the glow eased her mind just a little.

  He stretched his limbs again. A form of preen she understood and appreciated. And this was reassuring, too. She exhaled. She hadn’t realized she’d gone tight in the chest until she did exhale.

  “She was a looby,” Jonathan said darkly. “Ten children! Of all the…!”

  Ah. They were still talking about the Gypsies. And Jonathan was still incensed.

  “A looby!” Cynthia leaped upon the explanation with relief. She wished to encourage it. “I really was rather frightened by her.”

  “I still can’t decide what she meant by pistols and blood.” Argosy was shrewder than that. “She called you a minx. I wasn’t pleased.”

  Cynthia was worried about the particular reason he wasn’t pleased. But then she glanced at his face and he looked very masculine and protective, and she remembered he had five sisters, and decided it was gallantry on his part.

  She smiled at this, and he gave her one of his sultry smiles in return.

  She wasn’t certain she was entirely out of the woods with regards to Argosy, however.

  “We must be charitable if she has a disease of the mind,” she said gently, while silently, mentally, apologizing to the gifted if obnoxious Gypsy girl. “How awful it must be for her.”

  “How awful, indeed!” Georgina contributed, though she hadn’t been present for the event. “To just blurt things without being able to stop yourself!”

  “I just think she is a spoiled girl who wished to cause controversy.” This was Violet’s opinion.

  “You ought to know,” Jonathan said.

  Violet wrinkled her nose at him, and then stopped herself, as she never wished to encourage wrinkles. She settled for trying to kick him again. He languidly moved out of the way.

  “She was correct about the duck,” Argosy insisted. He’d sat up more stiffly, as though reliving and reworking the episode in his mind.

  He was giving this an uncomfortable amount of thought, Cynthia noted. And the last thing she needed or wanted was for him to begin researching the matter of her.

  She wondered how much Jonathan knew. She exchanged a glance with him. There was something reassuring in it. For reasons of his own, Jonathan liked her, and there was a hint of his brother in him. His first instinct—well, his second instinct, after having a wonderful time—was to be protective.

  “I still believe it was just a coincidence,” Cynthia said. This was another thing she meant to encourage. She accompanied this reiteration with a warm smile.

  “But an empty duck?” Argosy said.

  Everyone looked confused, but he looked at Cynthia meaningfully. She was apparently the only one he’d told about the empty duck. She did feel a bit honored.

  “Perhaps she simply reads your concerns from your mind. I’ve heard of that sort of skill.”

  “Ah!” His eyes widened. He nodded sagely. “As have I. As have I. You may have a point, Cynthia.”

  She smiled at him again.

  “I wonder what it is like to travel the way they do? The Gypsies?” Violet wondered this. Her voice was dreamy. “They are forever on the move. Seeing every part of England. Seeing people everywhere. She said I would go on a long journey across the ocean. I’m not certain I would mind.”

  “You need to sleep in a tent when you’re a Gypsy,” her brother told her. “Tents can be dirty. And you would need to sit on the ground to eat around the fire.”

  “Like a picnic,” Lady Georgina contributed brightly.

  “Hardly.” Argosy was laconic.

  Georgina looked chastened.

  “But the Gypsy boys make up for that,” Cynthia said. “Such green eyes…” She sent a sidelong look at Violet.

  Argosy bristled. A little jealousy was healthy, she decided.

  Jonathan looked at Cynthia, eyes wide. Gave his head a little shake: don’t encourage her.

  It was too late. “Why shouldn’t I admire a Gypsy boy?” Violet asked. “When he was in the tropics, Miles knew any number of exotic wo—” She stopped, remembering Georgina.

  Cynthia looked over at the man who’d allegedly known any number of exotic women. He’d stopped writing altogether. He was staring out of the window, broad shoulders motionless.

  She jerked her head back to present company.

  The subject was changed when Jonathan began to discuss the horse acrobats with Argosy, and soon they were arguing, half seriously, over who might be the better acrobat based on their current riding skills.

  “The Gypsies leave tomorrow,” she whispered to Violet moments later. “As does that boy. What I wouldn’t give to run off with them just for a little while!”

  And then out of the corner of her eye, Cynthia watched Miles put down his quill and walk toward the doorway just as Lady Middlebough stood casually up from her backgammon game.

  Their paths convened in the middle of the large room. They paused to exchange a few quiet words, and the tone, at least, was disinterested, polite and almost bored.

  But Cynthia heard—because she was desperately interested, and desperately listening, and her hearing w
as good—a few words in that swift exchange.

  They were: “tomorrow” and “midnight”…“Shall I bring a dead fly?” and “I’ll find you.”

  The last was punctuated by Lady Middlebough’s low laughter.

  Then they parted, seconds later, as though it had all been happenstance, and went their separate ways.

  Chapter 15

  The following morning’s activities had been unscheduled, but a stroll in the gardens had been discussed before everyone retired the previous evening, with a gardener as a guide to explain the plants growing in the greenhouse, none of which, they’d all been informed regretfully, ate meat. Cynthia had just gotten her walking dress buttoned up and her feet into her slippers in preparation for going down to breakfast when a sharp rap sounded on her chamber door.

  The kitten darted under the bed.

  “Mr. Miles Redmond would like to have a word with you straight away, Miss Brightly,” the maid told her when Cynthia opened the door. “He’s in the library. He said you’d know where it was.”

  She certainly did know where the library was. She’d smoked a cheroot there—well, nearly—and had writhed in his arms there.

  And tonight he’d be writhing in the arms of Lady Middlebough. On the third floor, behind the fourth door from the left.

  If she had gauged that conversation correctly, that was. Her spine stiffened. She felt cold and rebellious and disinclined to obey his summons. But judging from the expression on the maid’s face, she had not been dispatched on her errand by a cheerful man. Straight away, she’d said.

  And so Cynthia went.

  It still smelled of cheroot, she noticed, sniffing. Miles, standing very still in the center of the room, turned and saw her. He didn’t bother with a greeting.

  “Violet is missing.”

  Something was very wrong. His voice was…too calm. The little hairs on the back of her neck stirred in warning. If she were a small rodent, she would have taken shelter in preparation for a storm.

  Miles’s face was peculiarly pale. He’d likely returned late from his meeting with the Sussex scientist, but this wasn’t the white of fatigue.

  “Violet is missing?” she repeated dumbly She had an uneasy suspicion why. “What do you mean by—”

  “Gone, Miss Brightly,” continued that calm, calm voice. “She has not been seen since dinner yesterday evening.”

  She studied him carefully. “You’ve looked every—”

  “It has been determined through a series of discreet inquiries made by myself and my brother Jonathon that she is nowhere on the property. We have searched. She is gone.”

  Well, then. So Violet had done it. She’d run off with the Gypsies. Violet was quite, quite mad, Cynthia thought half admiringly. Despite her increasing trepidation at the large man advancing upon her.

  And he was advancing.

  She struggled to hold her ground even as he brought his anger with him.

  “I wonder whether you might have any idea where Violet might have gone?” It came off him in waves, the anger.

  Cynthia’s throat had tightened. Her lungs had congealed. She finally, airlessly managed, “I think there is a possibility she went to the Gypsy camp…there was a boy who—”

  The look on Miles’s face was so murderous it killed the rest of her sentence completely.

  “Why,” he repeated, with a patience so weighty it might have mowed down a less stalwart soul, “do you think she returned to the Gypsy camp?”

  “We…I may have mentioned that Gypsies do a good deal of traveling…when she mentioned she might like to travel…that she often feels restless, and…the boy…I didn’t know she would…”

  “You didn’t know?” And now his voice was raised. He gave a short, unpleasant, incredulous laugh. “I don’t believe for an instant that you didn’t know precisely what you were doing. Violet acts, Miss Brightly. She’s impulsive. And you know this because you see people, you know how to play with them, you understand consequences. And yet you encouraged her anyway. What kind of friend are you?”

  By the time he’d reached the end of his sentence, his words snapped at her like sparks struck from an anvil. His fury had sucked the air from the room.

  Fury. That explained the white face. That, and fear. He was terrified for his sister.

  Oh, she hated him in that moment. Still, she wanted to go to him, lay a hand on him, take away some of his fear, if only she could. But he was right. He was right about her. In a sense, she’d known precisely what she was doing when she’d suggested Gypsies to Violet.

  Bloody man was always right.

  But in the interest of fairness, she would not take all the blame, and his own anger provided wonderful fuel for hers.

  She advanced on him.

  He took a startled step back.

  “I know you’re afraid for her, Miles. But she’s bored. She’s intelligent and energetic and spoiled and bored. She hasn’t the faintest idea what to do with herself. She does these reckless things for all of those reasons. And I think she misses her brother.”

  All at once the fury animating him was snuffed as surely as though she’d thrust a fist between his ribs.

  And now she saw pain.

  Ah, Lyon: the Achilles’ heel of this family. She had forgotten about Lyon, and about disappearing Redmonds. And how Miles could never, ever be Lyon. And how it must have felt to Miles to think that yet another Redmond had disappeared.

  Oh, God. She was a terrible, terrible person.

  She desperately looked her apology at him. And together they were silent. As if Miles was abashed to have revealed his weakness.

  When he spoke again, the snapping energy of fury was gone. But a weary implacability remained.

  “But we have a responsibility, Miss Brightly. When we know more, see more, understand more than the others we care for. We have a responsibility to look after them. Do you understand me?”

  Cynthia suddenly became aware that her fingers were cramped. They’d been gripping a fold of her skirt. She absently flexed them as she met his gaze. He willed her to understand him with those dark, endless eyes of his that could, like night, show and hide so many things all at once.

  We, he’d said.

  Including her in this alleged legion of stronger people, people who saw more, knew more. Inadvertently acknowledging, perhaps, the most powerful similarity between them: They were both strong. Stronger than everyone around them. By nature. And by necessity.

  The realization that he viewed her that way took her breath away. She stared at him.

  She had never quite viewed herself in that light: strong. She’d simply tried to survive. She looked after herself, and always had.

  But who looked after Miles?

  Yesterday she’d witnessed him arrange an assignation with a married woman. He would buy his own future as surely as she wanted to buy hers.

  She would have taken him in her arms right then, anyway, and waited until he was no longer pale with fear, and no longer tense with fury. She would have done anything in that moment to take away his pain and fear and frustration.

  They were quiet together for a moment. As if the confession had made him feel raw. He turned away. The man of fact and purpose and courage was vulnerable after all.

  Oh, how they undid each other.

  “In a way, Miles…this is…wonderful.”

  He jerked his gaze back toward her. His jaw actually dropped. “Wonder—” He nearly spluttered. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “This.” She turned her hand up almost impatiently in a gesture meant to encompass his bloody willful missing sister, his display of temper, and his scathingly honest but undeniably accurate assessment of her own character. “All of this. You care very much for Violet, don’t you?”

  He frowned blackly, impatiently. “I would do anything for her.”

  She looked at this man, a faint smile on her face, and said it gently. “Precisely.”

  She turned away from him idly just
as she said it, toward the window. So he couldn’t look at her expression just then, because she didn’t trust that he wouldn’t see regret.

  And then she squared her shoulders.

  Silence followed. Well, then. She’d struck him utterly dumb. She turned back to find him motionless, watching her.

  “I’m sorry if I had anything at all to do with this, Miles. Truly.”

  He nodded shortly, still staring at her, his face abstracted.

  “I’m sorry I lost my temper,” he said stiffly.

  She’d noticed that he didn’t apologize for saying any of the things he’d said during his outburst. He wasn’t about to insult her with such an apology, either. Everything he’d said about her was, in fact, true, and she knew it.

  “I’m not entirely certain you are sorry you lost your temper. I’m not sorry you did.” And she smiled at him.

  He looked startled, but she didn’t allow him time to ask questions. “I should visit the Gypsy encampment, Mr. Redmond,” she urged gently. “They intended to leave this morning.”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it and frowned. He bit his lip.

  Clearly he wanted to say something, but she sensed he couldn’t put it into words.

  She knew a peculiar tenderness again, and a great satisfaction that she’d robbed the clever man of speech and clarity.

  “Thank you,” was what he finally did say.

  He spun and quickly left her.

  When Miles galloped into the encampment, he saw it was being disassembled with organized alacrity. Another town would look forward to horse acrobats and fortune-tellers and healers. The Gypsies would return to their comfortable Sussex encampment in a year’s time, or a month’s time; one never knew. But they were as much a part of the scenery, the history of the town, now, as the pub, the church, and Miss Endicott’s academy on the hill.

  It was impossible to miss Violet: she was perched on a large rock in the middle of all the activity. Miles dismounted and tethered Ramsay’s reins to a low-hanging branch of an ash tree, then strode forward to confront her, relief warring with anger.

  They regarded each other for a moment in silence.