David handed Westhaven the second flask. “You will heed my advice regarding your father?”
“I will talk to Her Grace first, but I will be blunt. And as for the other topic…” He paused and studied the silver flask before slipping it into a pocket of David’s borrowed cape. “The word I was searching for was gentility, gentility deserving of far more than this.”
Westhaven might be overly impressed with himself, a dull stick, and duty bound to the exclusion of anything resembling fun, but the blasted man wasn’t wrong.
“No argument there,” David said. “Watkins, see their lordships to the porte cochere.”
Lest one of them come sneaking back to make calf eyes at David’s… madam.
David closed the door and turned to the lady. “Mrs. Banks, I am stranded here for the nonce. Have you dined?”
And have you missed me as much as I’ve missed you?
“I have not had supper,” Letty said, smiling at him pleasantly. And how David hated that smile, for she used it on every patron to cross the threshold. “It is good to see you again.”
“And you.” Good and awful. “You look tired, Letty. Have things here been that busy?”
And so they dined together, talking about the business, about ledgers that didn’t balance, about how the suspicious expenditures came from the kitchen, which made the matter complicated. David spoke of his visit with his sisters and their families, about the never-ending rain that had replaced the never-ending snow, and finally about nothing at all.
“The coach should be returning shortly.” David crossed his utensils over his plate. “I’ll see how things go in the parlors, then be on my way.”
Letty folded her serviette in tidy quarters by her plate. “You are welcome to stay here tonight.”
He’d never slept at this establishment, hadn’t felt he had the right. “Is that what you want, Letty?”
Now her wineglass had to be lined up two inches from her plate and serviette, both. “It is who I want.”
“And you’re who I want, but this is not how I want you.”
She clutched the serviette in a tight ball. “David…”
“Pax, Letty.” He smoothed his fingers over her knuckles, needing any touch he could have from her. “I apologize. I will stay with you and be glad of your company.”
Before David permitted himself what Letty offered, he made the rounds in the front rooms, pausing to chat with almost every patron and flirt with most of the ladies. He found his way back to Letty’s office after midnight, coming upon her curled on the fainting couch, fast asleep. Silently, he removed his coat, cravat, and cuff links, regarding Letty critically as he did.
She had lost flesh, and she had been too slender to begin with. Faint bruises shadowed her eyes, and when he’d joined her earlier, she’d held his hand almost desperately. While visiting his sisters, David had tried to reason through his situation with Letty, to no avail. Quite simply, he could not force her to marry him.
And yet their brief separation had been hard on her, if her appearance was any indication. He’d sent her several notes, to which she’d replied, though the contents had been business related. The only personal aspect to them had been that Letty signed hers with an E, something only David would have understood.
“Sweetheart?” He sat at Letty’s hip and kissed her forehead, but she didn’t stir. “Letty?”
Still no response.
David crossed into the bedroom, turned down the covers, stoked and screened the fire, ran the warmer over every corner of the sheets and pillows, then returned to his sleeping beauty.
“Up you go, love,” he whispered as he lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bed. She stirred, but didn’t even open her eyes until David sat her on the bed and bent her forward so he could unhook her dress.
“You stayed,” she murmured. “I thought you’d left.”
Had she wanted him to go?
“Hush. Let’s get you into bed.” It was scant effort to pull off her dress and stays and untie her chemise. When she was naked and curled under the covers, David took off his clothes, locked the door, and climbed in beside her.
He wrapped himself around her, which provoked a soft sigh as Letty linked her fingers through his. Otherwise, she didn’t move.
As Letty slipped back into slumber, David felt… bereft rather than sexually frustrated. He’d gone about his evening anticipating intimacies with Letty, and now…
Aroused as he was, it didn’t seem right to impose on her. He’d tried to stay away from her, to get his thoughts in order, to see if he even could stay away from her, and ten days later, his thoughts were not in order, and he’d proven nothing.
As he was drifting off, Letty shifted, and then he was gently pushed onto his back. She settled herself on top of him, her breasts pressed to his chest, her sex caressing his cock with a slow, rocking glide of her hips. She brought him patiently back to full arousal, and then slipped her body over him, shallowly at first, then to a deeper penetration.
“I have missed you so,” Letty murmured against his throat.
For David, almost lost to sleep, the loving was dreamlike, a languid, sweet joining in the warm, silent darkness. On and on, Letty loved him, stroked him with her body, kissed him, and let her hands wander over his chest, neck, face, and arms. Pleasure stole upon him in delicate, shimmering increments, and then a trickle turned into a quiet, relentless torrent of erotic satisfaction.
As the pleasure ebbed, David held Letty close, his hands tracing patterns on her back.
She was crying again, her tears wetting his chest. He had been cruel to create a separation without discussing it with her, and she was obviously close to exhaustion.
“It it’s any comfort,” he murmured, “I haven’t been sleeping either, and I’ve started at least a dozen letters to you each day. I make art of your name on my blotter, and wonder what you’re doing at each moment of the day and night. I long for you when we’re apart, and when we’re together, Letty…”
She kissed him to silence.
“When we’re together,” she said, “I am so full of feelings that I don’t know where to start should I try to express them, and I want to touch you and touch you and touch you…”
“And touch you,” David concluded. “Letty, it can’t go on like this.”
“I know. David, I know.”
He let her drift back to sleep, their limbs entwined, still no closer to a solution than they had been weeks ago, but more heartsore than he could ever recall being.
And yet he suspected his suffering was nothing compared to Letty’s.
***
“I’ve become pathetic,” David said, offering the short version of events.
“You?” Douglas Allen, Viscount Amery, countered. “My role model for all matters involving savoir faire and grace under fire?”
“I’ve asked Letty Banks to marry me, Douglas. If you tell my sisters or their spouses, I will denounce you in public.” They were in the stables at Douglas’s new property, saddling up for a ride about the grounds, so Douglas might show off his land.
“And how does proposing make you pathetic?” Douglas asked, patting the shoulder of a sturdy bay gelding.
“She turned me down.” David rested an arm across his mare’s broad rump, though it would mean a crop of gray horse hairs adorned his fine wool riding jacket. “More than once.”
The sturdy bay investigated his master’s left breeches pocket. “It’s a lady’s prerogative.” Douglas produced a bit of carrot for his horse. “We ask, they decide. If they say yes, they legally become our property. It behooves a woman to be choosy, I should think.”
A lady. Douglas knew Letty was a lady; no one had had to tell him. “Spoken like the father of a six-year-old daughter.” Also like an honest friend.
“Which daughter, thank God, is not in love wit
h anybody other than Sir George,” Douglas said, referring to the pony Rose’s ducal grandfather had given her. “But you, I think, are in love with Mrs. Banks—need I say, I told you so?—which means we must ask if she is in love with you.”
Yes, we must, at least a hundred times a day, and more often at night.
“She doesn’t say,” David replied, hefting a saddle onto his horse. “But Douglas—”
“Sometimes,” Douglas interrupted, which was fortunate for David’s tattered dignity, “a woman expresses herself without using words.”
“Letty can be very articulate without saying a thing. She cares for me, and I almost think if she didn’t, she’d have married me.”
“You are not going to accept that she simply doesn’t love you,” Douglas concluded, feeding his horse a second treat. “Your instincts, which are legendarily canny, tell you otherwise. While my own are nowhere near so reliable, I note that you seem to be in much the same position I was with Guinevere.”
“How so?” David asked as he fastened the girth.
A third bite of carrot was crunched out of existence. “I proposed to her, knowing we cared for each other, and she turned me down. Her refusal did not comport with her expressed sentiments regarding me; ergo, it wasn’t that she wouldn’t marry me, it was that she could not.”
Ergo? A syllogism of some sort. David’s heart was breaking, and Douglas was spouting logic. “Mrs. Banks, despite her title, is not married.”
“Do you know that for a certainty?” Douglas snugged up the girth on his gelding and ran the stirrup irons down the leathers.
“I have only Letty’s word regarding her unwed state.”
“How much do you know about her?” Douglas asked as he slipped a bit into his horse’s mouth.
I know I love her, which ought to be all that matters. “Not nearly enough. I know her real name is Elizabeth Temperance Banks, she was raised as the daughter of a dogmatic, humorless vicar, and her mother died before she came of age. She came to London after a curate dishonored her. When she refused him further favors, he confessed their sins to her father, making her situation at home intolerable.”
“Came to London from where?” Douglas asked, fastening the bridle straps. “Raised the daughter of whom, whose living was provided how, and to what extent was she truly dishonored, or was she guilty of breach of promise? Or promiscuity? And where is the evil curate now? Wasn’t it you who told me good decisions are based on good information? How can you decide your next steps when you have so few facts to predicate your future upon?”
David petted his mare when he wanted to launch himself fists first at his best friend. “How does Gwen tolerate being married to a man who has an abacus where his heart should be?”
“She loves me,” Douglas said without a hint of arrogance, “and that abacus is part of what will make this property prosperous, eventually. Guinevere claims I’m also quite the passionate fellow under appropriate circumstances, though the woman is given to occasional flights on certain topics.”
“Of course you are, and Gwen is a very appropriate circumstance, which is why a blessed event is in the offing, less than nine months after the wedding.”
Douglas didn’t exactly smile, but the humor in his eyes was smug as he swung up onto his horse.
As they rode out through the muddy, greening fields, Douglas’s words stuck with David. What did he know of Letty? Douglas prattled on about the land, about Gwen’s plans to run it jointly with the adjacent property, Enfield, which was owned by Greymoor.
“What do we hear about Rose’s grandpapa?” David asked as they turned back toward the stables.
“That His Grace was damned lucky,” Douglas replied. “Moreland is tough, but from what Lord Valentine told Guinevere, the duke had been bled nearly dry by those quacks attending him. He’s still recovering, albeit slowly. The duchess is insistent that he give up riding to hounds, and he’s adamant that he won’t.”
Oh, to be able to insist on anything with Letty. “If Westhaven sells the hunting box, then the question is all but moot.”
“The duke has any number of cronies owing him favors, in Parliament and otherwise. He can cadge a mount for a week in the shires,” Douglas replied. “And I almost wish he would. Guinevere purely hates him for trying to keep us apart. I can’t say I blame her.”
“How did you manage it, Douglas? When you thought there was no hope at all—what sustained you?”
Douglas leaned low over his horse’s neck to duck beneath a branch of oak just leafing out. “What sustained me when I feared losing the love of my life? I struggle to answer you. I suppose on one level it’s a kind of religious conviction, a sense that a just God would not permit any other outcome than the one I felt myself born for. Guinevere was meant for me, and I for her. I could not accept any other reality, and would not even try.”
“So it was stubbornness?”
“In part,” Douglas allowed, pausing while David ducked the same sturdy branch. “A stubborn belief that we were meant to be together, not so much because that was the easy option, but because I would not survive any other. I suppose one might term it sheer animal desperation.”
And how typical of Douglas, that he could discuss such a notion calmly.
“That concept has the ring of authenticity. When Letty turns me down, citing the need for my viscountess to have a spotless reputation, then what I feel is sheer animal desperation to convince her otherwise.”
Douglas halted his horse outside the stable and remained in the saddle rather than dismount.
“You have finally fallen, my friend,” he said gently, “and as Guinevere has predicted, you have fallen very hard indeed. So it might interest you to know that the housekeeper we hired from Mrs. Banks’s household has received at least three letters while in our employ, and every one has been posted from a place called Little Weldon, Oxfordshire.”
Had they not been mounted, David would have hugged his friend. “Douglas, you are a prince among abacuses. Now, shall we go up to the house so that I might flirt with Rose, annoy Gwen, and admire her great, gravid dimensions?”
Douglas swung off his horse. “My wife is a sylph, Fairly. A wraith, a delicate creature whose husband will blacken your eyes if you so much as mention words like gravid in her presence.”
David slung an arm across Douglas’s shoulders. “Getting cranky, is she? Can’t stand to lie on her back for even five minutes? Ducking out to use the chamber pot every time you turn around?”
“And sending me murderous glares all the while,” Douglas said. “Heathgate claims it will all settle down in the last month, but we have a way to go yet before I can test his theory.”
Douglas was not one to worry needlessly, and yet, he was worried. “Honestly, Douglas, how is Gwen? Are her feet or ankles swollen? Can she eat and drink normally? Is she inordinately vertiginous, has she fainted?”
Douglas’s steps slowed, as if what awaited him at the house was not entirely a cheering prospect. “Physically, Guinevere seems hale, but she is frightened, and while the fellows you recommended are reassuring and competent, they are two hours away, and they are not you.”
“I deserved that,” David said as they gained the back terrace. Pots of daffodils lent a note of cheer, though they thrived only because the location was sheltered.
Douglas snapped off a single bloom, then a second, very likely one for Rose and one for Gwen. “Guinevere trusts me, you, Greymoor, and Heathgate, but the idea of having some strange fellow attend her has no appeal. She dreads the thought of giving birth.” Douglas stopped outside the back door. “I would do it for her if I could.”
This was Douglas’s version of love, of being in love, and to David, who’d brought children into the world—and seen some of them leave shortly thereafter—it was true love, indeed. “Wait to make that offer until you see what the ordeal consists of.”
“I remember my mother,” Douglas said, looking haunted, “screaming for hours when Henry was born. My father went to his club, and Herbert and I were left in the nursery to manage as best we could.”
“I’ll talk to Gwen,” David said slowly. “I’m not promising anything, but I will talk to her. You and Gwen and Rose are…”
And abruptly, he couldn’t form words as a lump rose in his throat and the wind got in his eyes.
“I know,” Douglas said, opening the door and leading the way through. “To us, you are too, and if we have Letty Banks to thank for your willingness to consider using your medical knowledge again, then she is too.”
***
Letty spotted Fanny Newcomb wending her way up the walk toward their favorite tea shop off The Strand. If a new walking dress and a cheery smile were any indication, Fanny was enjoying her position as housekeeper for Viscount Amery’s little-used town residence.
“Oh, my dear.” Fanny took both of Letty’s hands in hers. “How I have missed you this age. You are entirely too thin, Letty, and you have no color at all.”
“I’m a bit tired, but it’s good to see you. I can’t stay long, though. A war was brewing among the chefs in the kitchen when I left.”
“Men,” Fanny scoffed as they were led to a table. “They must make everything a battle. What a body was thinking to hire not one but three men for the same kitchen is beyond me. You be careful, my dear, lest you be caught up in the affray.”
“I am careful. I have no authority regarding the business of the kitchen. I am merely a diplomatic presence.” And that was thanks only to a vicarage upbringing, oddly enough.
Fanny tugged off a pair of crocheted gloves—also new—the same shade as her green walking dress. “Your viscount should be the one knocking heads and enforcing order, though he doesn’t seem the kind to get his hands dirty.”
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