But on the way back from town, he’d deposited her at a girls’ school, a very refined place with four tutors for every pupil. “I had no idea you were running so wild,” he’d told her. “You are a Trent. You cannot mix with riffraff. I’ve neglected you, I fear.”
The boarding school had not suited her. Moreover, she’d inherited her father’s stubbornness. She’d run away twice before figuring out the train schedules. When she’d finally made it back to Brisbon Hall, the Lyalls had been gone. Her father had dismissed them for the temerity of not knowing their place.
“He thought he was protecting me,” Georgie said. “But his protection . . . it always feels like a punishment.”
Cook’s hand slid to hers, tightened over her knuckles. “He does his best, Miss Georgie. He only ever wanted what’s right for you.”
Georgie’s laugh felt rough. “That’s what he tells himself, no doubt.”
Cook sighed. “It’s hard, in his shoes. To be a father, and a grand man like him, besides. What’s got you thinking on all this?”
Georgie looked up, letting Cook see her fight not to weep. “Because I’ve just discovered that he ‘protected’ me once again. And this time, I don’t think I can forgive him for it.”
Cook blew out a breath. “That gent that went walking?”
Georgie nodded.
“Well.” Cook studied her with rheumy eyes. “You’re a grown girl,” she said gruffly. “Seems to me that your father doesn’t realize how grown you are. Perhaps you should tell him so.”
“I mean to,” Georgie said.
Cook opened her arms, and Georgie threw herself into them. Gone were the days when Cook’s great belly had made such embraces smothering; the decades had shrunk and wizened her. But she still smelled of bread and cinnamon and soap, and Georgie breathed deeply, taking comfort, as she always did, from the care of one who knew her truly.
Cook cleared her throat and eased away. “Visitor,” she said briefly, and rose.
Georgie twisted on the bench. Mr. Godwin stood in the arched doorway that led to the kitchen garden, a curious expression on his face. He lowered his lamp to the floor. “I thought to return this,” he said quietly.
“Leave it there for the night,” Cook said. As she untied her apron, she fixed Georgie with a solemn look. “Don’t be up too late now,” she said, and then turned and took herself out.
Georgie felt curiously frozen. As Mr. Godwin approached, he glanced over her figure, and a slight, rueful smile curved his mouth.
As simply as that, her heart bolted into a gallop. She was wearing a nightdress, shapeless and heavy, tied beneath her chin. Nothing flattering. But she could not mistake the appreciation on his face.
He had wanted to court her. To marry her.
“I like seeing you so,” he said as he came to stand by the bench. “Curled up like a cat. Thoroughly at your ease. I had . . . imagined you sitting thus. Many times. But I’ve never seen it till now.”
She felt a flush rise, but she did not look away from him. “One can’t sit so, in a corset.”
He lifted a dark brow. Bold of her, naturally, to acknowledge her dishabille—that she sat before him stripped of her layers and lacings, the complicated armor by which a woman’s body was trussed up and locked away from touch.
But she held his gaze as he settled onto the bench beside her, until it was he who looked away, toward the fire. “I wonder,” he said, “that you will trust me with such intimacies. What would Sir Augustus say?”
She flushed to her roots. “There is no Augustus Brumkin,” she said haltingly. “As I think—I think you guessed.”
He exhaled. “Ah. I had taken a look today through the Debrett’s in your father’s library. The Brumkins were not in evidence, but I feared . . .”
“I can’t believe I made up such a ridiculous name,” she whispered.
He offered her a sideways smile. “And I am rather grateful for it.”
She felt herself relax. He made it so easy to have this conversation. “Anyway,” she said, “I could never mistrust you in that way.”
“Don’t be so certain of that. You make quite a temptation, in the firelight. And . . .” He loosed a slow breath. “A man does not spend five hundred nights dreaming of a woman and find himself unmoved by the reality.” He shook his head once. “Unmoved: a very pale word for it.”
As simply as that, she felt acutely aware of her own body: how, within the voluminous folds of her wool nightdress, her breasts hung loose and heavy; her legs sprawled freely; her toes curled.
They had kissed only chastely, in Munich. Kisses on the cheek, in the continental style. But in her dreams, she had tasted his tongue. She had felt the hard planes of his belly, the brawn of his thighs. He had lain with her in dreams countless times by now—but never vividly enough to satisfy her. She had always woken aching and unsatisfied, jolted abruptly into recrimination. How could you still hunger for a man who never wanted you at all?
But he had wanted her. He still did. His steady, heated gaze told her so now.
“Two years,” she whispered. So much time wasted.
“Your father,” he growled—and then fell silent, his mouth twisting. He clawed a hand through his night-dark hair, shaking his head. His fingers trembled.
Lucas Godwin, trembling for her. Two years. Two years, and these lies, and if not for them, then . . .
He took a deep breath, lowered his hand, and said, “What did he tell you? That I had abandoned you?”
“My father said very little about you.” She pushed these words from her dry mouth, though the syllables barely captured what she felt. She felt native to no tongue that could translate that. “He said . . . you’d been offered a promotion. A better post. That I mustn’t be surprised you hadn’t made time to write me. He said that was your way—to charm ladies, without intending anything by it.”
But . . . God above, Lucas had intended something by it. And her father had told a lie to destroy them.
Pain lanced through her—sudden and breathtaking. “And what he told you. That I found you distasteful. How could you believe him?”
For he had let her go so easily. A few words, and he had abandoned her to rush toward new possibilities—Paris, his career. Meanwhile, what had remained to her? Her father’s disappointment. Munich’s titillated whispers at her heartbreak.
“Georgie.” He made her nickname sound like a melody, low and sweet. “Your father was very convincing. And . . . God save me, but I never thought to doubt him. My superior—my mentor. The man who had championed my rise through the service—saying you found me repellent! Forgive me, Georgie—forgive me; it never occurred to me that he might lie.”
As she weighed those words, she felt her mouth twist. “Then you don’t know him.” Her father had made a career of meddling. He had manipulated kings, designed the downfall of nations. Beside that, his daughter’s hopes were no challenge at all.
His hand closed on her arm. He stared into her eyes, his voice hushed and fierce: “Listen to me. Leaving was the greatest mistake of my life.”
She closed her eyes to trap her tears. His forehead came to rest against hers. The smell of him—clean, male, the spice of bergamot rising from his clothing—snared her, held her immobile, so close to him that she could feel his breath against her mouth, his warmth all around her, this man she had adored . . .
“I would have fought for you,” she said raggedly as she pulled back to wipe her nose. “Had it been me—I would have demanded to hear it from your lips.”
The sight of her tears made him flinch. He leaned forward as though to touch her again—but she made a noise, and after a stubborn moment, he heeded the warning. Fisting his hands, he sat back, but his eyes remained fastened on hers.
To break the hushed tension, she reached over and plucked a leaf off the holly mounded by the hearth. She cast the leaf into the fire, where it popped loudly, then sputtered and hissed into ashes.
His laugh sounded raw. “My mother always lo
athed that sound,” he said. “I drove her half mad at Yuletide, setting holly on fire.”
The affection in his voice struck her. He had never shared any tales of his childhood with her. Why was that? In Munich, she had imagined she knew him better than anyone in the world—but all at once, her own ignorance was made plain to her.
They had been friends in Munich. He’d asked so many questions, listened with such rapt interest, as she’d told him about growing up at Brisbon Hall. But perhaps she’d not been so fine a friend in return. The heady thrill of his attention had made her selfish. She’d never thought to ask after his childhood.
All at once, their history looked different to her—full of gaps, mysteries yet to be bridged. There had been so much more left to learn when they’d been parted.
“What was your mother like?” she asked. “You never spoke much of her.”
“Didn’t I?” He hesitated, a shadow coming into his face. Then, with a curiously formal air, he faced her. “I didn’t,” he said evenly—an agreement, solemn. “My restraint was deliberate, if I’m to be honest.”
She frowned. “But why? You sound so fond of her.” She envied that fondness. Her own mother had died before her seventh birthday; what memories she retained were more impressions than facts: a soft touch; the fragrance of roses; the feeling of being safe, cherished.
“She was a wonderful woman,” he said steadily. “I miss her still, every day. Tonight, while I was walking, I thought . . .” His lips moved, not quite a smile. “I thought that had she lived, this whole debacle would never have happened. She would have counseled me to put aside my pride and go to you; to ask for an accounting and apologize for any wrong I might have done you. Pride, she always warned me, was as much a weakness as a strength. Pride is nothing compared to happiness, she said.”
“That sounds very wise.” Georgie spoke softly, over the ache in her throat. What a might-have-been! Lucas coming to her in those early days, when the fresh wound had not yet festered. It would have gone differently indeed.
“Of course,” he added flatly, “my father would have counseled the opposite. Pride was his mainstay. And that, Georgie, is the reason I never spoke of her. You’ll know something of my parents, I think. How . . . ill-suited their marriage was considered.”
Hesitantly she nodded. In Munich, people had spoken of Lucas’s charm, his talents and great promise, in the same breath that they had bemoaned his breeding. Such a bright star, to come from such a stew! And her father—consoling her so deceitfully, in the wake of Lucas’s departure—had laid it bare: the second son of an earl did not elope with the coachman’s daughter from motives as pure as love. Some rottenness must characterize a line that would produce such a bizarre mésalliance—and, her father had added, this same rotten streak no doubt explained why Lucas made a habit of abandoning his friends, including those who were his better in every regard.
But he had been wrong there as well. She was no better than Lucas. For they had both made the mistake of believing her father—abandoning their faith in one another without a fight.
Why, she wasn’t simply angry at her father. Her anger also encompassed herself.
She swallowed down the bitterness. It had no place in this discussion. Not when Lucas was watching her so gravely. I still know him, she thought—such a seductive notion. She saw the pain hidden in his face, the anxiety so expertly concealed beneath his easy, lounging posture. But he was running his thumb across his fingertips, a seemingly idle, absentminded gesture, which she recalled being a habit of his during deeply felt discussions.
He did not find it easy to discuss his parents’ marriage. But he would do so, for her sake, if she wished it.
And she did. Suddenly, it seemed absurd, unimaginable, that they had not talked about this in Munich. How could she have imagined she loved him, without asking him about this wound at the heart of him? “It must have been very hard,” she said, “enduring the gossip.”
He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I never minded it for my own sake. But for their sake—for my mother’s—I resented it tremendously.” He took a deep breath. “I knew I was fortunate in my birth, you see. No child has ever been better cherished. Yet . . . there was never a moment, in the world outside my parents’ home, when the shadow of that scandal did not hang over me. At Eton—well, the scholarship did not cover everything. My parents had to scrimp and save so I might enjoy a perk—coal in the winter, a ticket home at the holidays. Everyone knew it. Moreover, they knew why. At Field Day, mine were the only parents not in attendance—and it did not go unnoticed. They could not afford the fare to come, the missed wages from a holiday. But even if they had managed it, they would not have been welcomed. Their very presence would have been counted a breach of etiquette; the very fact of their marriage an imposition on polite sensibilities. And so, too, with me—a gross offense, in others’ eyes, by the mere fact of my existence.”
She shook her head in mute denial. “You had friends at Eton. You spoke of them to me. You spoke very fondly of those days.”
“Certainly,” he said. “I have a skill for winning people over. But it’s a skill, Georgie—not some inborn talent. My parents were frank with me: I would always have to work harder than the others. Prove myself, give others no reason by which to discount me. But topping the exams, taking a first in the tripos, winning entrance to the service—that was only the start. Far more important was to ingratiate myself to those in power—not simply in the service, but even, at ten or eleven, with the classmates who might one day advance my career. That was the only way I would ever succeed. And never for a moment did I forget it. I was never allowed to forget it—that my fortunes depended on other men’s indulgence. Their gracious decision to forgive me my birth, even if I had the best parents a man ever knew.”
A trace of bitterness colored his words—a very old bitterness, she sensed, dulled now like a disused blade. She swallowed the urge to apologize to him for the injustice of strangers, to speak words of comfort about their bigotry. For he would not want her pity. She knew that as intuitively as she knew that he was fighting a great battle to bare his soul to her like this.
“You’ve certainly succeeded,” she said softly. “The chance at becoming secretary of legation by thirty!”
“Yes,” he said, with a faint, fleeting smile. “I play the game better than anyone. But it hasn’t been for my own sake, you know, so much as for my parents’. They put all their hopes on me. Worked themselves to the bone to give me a chance. For their sake, I learned to charm and pander. But never for a moment have I felt easy in doing so. Nor have I taken my gains for granted. It would only take one mistake for my colleagues to say, ‘Blood tells, after all.’ Some of them are still waiting for the chance.” He paused. “Someone will always be waiting for it, Georgie. That is what success means, to a man like me—forever to be balanced at the edge of a great fall.”
“Lucas.” Her hand was atop his. When had that happened? She was leaning forward, hurting for him. “That sounds . . . exhausting.”
He huffed out a breath, not quite a laugh. “Coal mining, that’s exhausting. Learning to lick the right boots—it’s merely a career.”
Frowning, she shook her head. “That is not at all how people see you.”
“No. But at times, it was certainly how I saw myself.” He turned his hand in hers, their fingers twining; such a simple touch, but her breath caught and her pulse began to trip. He rubbed his thumb slowly over her palm. “You’ll understand, I hope, that it also wasn’t an image I wished to place in the head of the woman I hoped to marry.” He glanced up from their linked hands, his deep blue eyes meeting hers. “So I made no mention of my mother, in Munich. And when your father told me that you had only just discovered my parentage . . . well, it seemed possible. Because certainly I hadn’t told you.”
Her mouth went dry. They were back on dangerous ground now. “I always knew.”
“I had supposed so,” he said levelly. “But when he said otherwise—
when he said you were repelled by how grossly I had deceived you—by my presumption in thinking myself worthy of your hand . . .” He sighed. “Well, it felt as though my worst nightmare were coming true. For I could not disown my parents, even for you. But I also could not deny that you were right to be mortified. This shadow world I live in is no comfortable place for me. How much less pleasant it would feel for a woman whose birth entitles her to better.”
She jerked her hand free, stung. “It never would have mattered to me.”
“I see that now.” He hesitated. “The woman who was comforting you, earlier . . .”
Color rushed into her face. “That was Mrs. Nichol,” she said. “Our cook.”
“I see.” His voice was oddly gentle. Why, could it be that he mistook her blush for embarrassment? After all, the same polite world that slighted him for his birth would also disapprove strongly of such intimacies between a mistress and her servant.
But that was not the cause of her discomfort. She had never credited the niceties of rank. Lifting her chin, she said forcefully, “Cook is more a parent to me than my father ever was. If I blush to say that—if I am embarrassed to admit it—then I am embarrassed for his sake, not mine. Nor would I ever have asked you to disown your mother, Lucas—or felt mortified for a moment by her birth.”
He slowly nodded. “I realize that, Georgie. And you’re right—your father should never have managed to make me doubt you.”
“He is a very clever liar.”
“No.” His head tipped; he studied her solemnly. “It wasn’t all his doing. My own fears blinded me to the truth. They drove me to believe his lies. I think I must take the blame, after all—even the share you might wish to grant to him.”
What Happens Under the Mistletoe Page 31