by Lauren Royal
Harriet met her gaze in the mirror. “Hmm,” she said again.
“How is your love life?” Rose asked to distract her.
The maid’s freckled face lit with a smile as she chose a burgundy ribbon. “Walter has said he will visit. I believe he will ask for my hand.”
It was on the tip of Rose’s tongue to protest, to tell Harriet she had no business getting married when she needed her. But she was feeling expansive this morning. “Where will you live?” she asked instead.
“We haven’t yet decided. And I don’t really care. Does it matter, so long as you’re together with the one you love?”
Rose’s ebullient mood plunged. Even Harriet was in love.
Love, love, love. All around her, people were in love. In that way, it had been easier to be at court. At least there she wasn’t constantly reminded just how lacking she was in love. At court, lust ruled the day—no one else at court seemed to be in love, either.
Except maybe Nell Gwyn. And Charles’s poor, long-suffering queen.
“Are you finished?” she asked.
“One moment.” Harriet tied the ribbon and stepped back. “You look lovely, milady.”
“Thank you.” Rose darkened her lashes with the burnt end of a cork and slicked on some lip gloss from a little pot. She considered a patch or two, but hadn’t the patience. In no time at all, she was downstairs, out the door, and hurrying through her father’s gardens.
On impulse she paused to pluck a few colorful blooms, gathering them into a makeshift bouquet. Still arranging them, she rounded the corner of the house.
And there was Kit.
Was there anything quite so masculine as a man in charge, giving orders? The greenhouse site looked chaotic, but somehow, at the same time, Kit seemed to have everything under control.
The air smelled of newly turned earth and freshly cut wood. Kit’s raven hair glinted in the sunshine, and a metal T-square flashed as he used it to point here and direct someone there. He’d spread plans on an improvised table balanced across two sawhorses, and he kept looking down at them and back up.
She positioned herself in front of the table, so the next time he looked up, he’d see her.
“Rose,” he said briskly, then looked back down.
“Kit?”
“Hmm?”
She shifted uneasily, stepping closer. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I want a kiss?” she said, trying to tease one of those glorious smiles from him.
“No.” He waved at a man pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks. “Over there,” he directed, pointing with the T-square. Once again, he consulted his plans. “And you’ve no need to worry,” he added toward the neatly inked lines. “I’m not going to ask you to marry me again, either.”
She should be relieved, but she wasn’t. Something was wrong. She held out the bouquet. “I brought these for you.”
“What for?”
“I’m hoping to celebrate you winning the Deputy Surveyor post.”
He finally met her gaze. “I lost it.”
“Oh, Kit.” The flowers fell to the ground as she moved around the table to lay a hand on his arm. “Tell me.”
“There was a problem at Hampton Court.” He glanced down at her fingers, then scanned the bustle of construction and sighed, setting down the T-square. “Wait here a moment.”
Rose watched him cross the site, looking confident as ever as he consulted with a short, hook-nosed man. Kit gestured with his competent, callused hands, and she wondered when she’d come to prefer them over the smooth, elegant hands of the aristocracy. He ran one of them through his dark hair, and she wondered when she’d come to prefer bold coloring over the pale English ideal.
When he returned, he led her around the house toward the gardens. “It was structural,” he admitted flatly. Their shoes crunched on the gravel path. “I ordered the building torn down. It was destined to eventually collapse.”
“You could have been killed!” She put her hand to her racing heart, staring at his profile as they walked, imagining her life without him and suddenly realizing it would seem empty.
When had their friendship come to mean that much to her?
But the gaze he turned on her was sad, not alarmed. “I was never personally in danger.” He stopped beneath the huge tree her father called his twenty-guinea oak. “I’ll still build it,” he said with a half-hearted shrug that didn’t fool her. He was more upset than he was willing to admit. “But I’ll do it right. And there’s no rush anymore, since I’ve no chance to make Charles’s tight deadline.”
“And that’s why you lost the appointment?”
He didn’t have to answer. His hand slipped into his pocket to grip that little piece of his first building—that tiny symbol of his past success—and in the dappled light beneath the tree, his expression said it all.
Her heart broke for him. “I know how much you wanted that post.”
“I wanted the knighthood that went with it. I was hoping…” He sighed. “Never mind.” Looking more defeated than she’d ever seen him, he dropped to sit on the grass, his back against the massive trunk. “It was my fault,” he said resolutely, and then almost in a whisper, “but it may not have been my mistake.”
She sat across from him, carefully settling her skirts. “What do you mean?”
“Do you remember me mentioning the set of plans at Hampton Court didn’t match the ones I kept with me? It could have been my error reproducing them, but—”
“Someone could have made changes,” she finished for him. “Harold Washburn?”
“Perhaps.” He slipped the chunk of brick back into his pocket. “But I should have been there, checking, double-checking—”
“You had too many projects. You couldn’t be everywhere at once.”
“Which just goes to show that Charles was right to test me, because the Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Works would have many more projects at a time than I’ve had these past weeks.” He pulled a long green blade from the ground and chewed the end, looking pensive. “But I’ve been…distracted. It could have been my error. And in any case, it was my project. My responsibility. Which was why I had to tear it down even though the problem would likely have stayed hidden for years—”
“Years?” She blinked. “Are you saying you could have finished the project and accepted the post—”
“I couldn’t.” At her frown, he tossed the green blade to the lawn. “Can’t you see, Rose? When the building collapsed—however far in the future—people might have died. It could have been the mother of Charles’s children—or his children themselves. And even if it didn’t happen until I was long gone—not only from the project, but from God’s green earth—I couldn’t have lived with myself knowing the possibility existed. Better to lose a post than my honor, my integrity, my very soul.”
And suddenly it came clear. Kit—her dear friend, her almost lover—was the most decent man she knew.
How could she not have seen it? How could she have chased after a title when a better man was waiting right here for her? A man who put others’ safety before his own cherished goals? A man who made her heart quicken with a mere glance and her knees melt with a single kiss?
A man—perhaps the only man—she could honestly talk to about anything.
“Will you marry me?” she asked.
A thundercloud swept over his face. “That is damned cruel.” He scrambled to his feet. “Do you know, Rose, I’m usually amused by the way you tend to say whatever comes into your head.” Clearly disgusted, he began to walk away. “But that was just plain cruel.”
Jumping up to run after him, she grabbed his hand and jerked him to a halt. “I meant it, Kit.”
“What?” He swung to her, glaring.
“You’re the best man I know. I want to be your wife.”
He focused hard on her, searching for the truth, perhaps finding it but unable to believe. It seemed he was also unable to talk. He opened his mouth, but a long moment passed before any words came out.
; “I’ll never be Deputy Surveyor,” he finally said slowly. “I’ll never be a knight, let alone a baron, or a viscount, or an earl—”
“You’ll be Kit Martyn, the man I love.”
His eyes cleared. The tension drained from his face. He took a step closer, and her heart raced.
“No more kissing other men?”
She might have been offended if he wasn’t suddenly looking at her in that way that made her stomach dance. “None of them were any good at it, anyway,” she said flippantly.
He threw back his head and laughed. “Do you promise to always speak your mind? I do so love that.”
“Will you kiss me, already?”
The next thing she knew she was in his arms, his lips locked on hers.
And nothing had ever felt so glorious.
SIXTY-ONE
THEY STUMBLED together toward the summerhouse, more Rose’s idea than Kit’s. “Privacy,” she murmured against his mouth, her lips nibbling his with a skill that threatened to drive him insane.
He might have been the first man she’d enjoyed kissing, but she’d taken to it quickly.
“This isn’t a good idea,” he mumbled although he kept going. “If we step through one of those doors”—there were four entrances to the round building—“you’re unlikely to come out an innocent.”
She stopped, her hands linked behind his neck. “Are you telling me you cannot control yourself?”
“I’m afraid that’s true. I am but a man.”
“Thank God,” she said enthusiastically, making him laugh.
Making him want to kiss her all over again.
When his mouth crushed down on hers, she tasted of triumph. The kiss sang through his veins. They approached the redbrick summerhouse, moving crablike along the path until they bumped up against an arched oak door.
Kit reached blindly for the latch. “Are you sure?”
“Please.” She fumbled with the knot in his cravat—and Rose was not a fumbler. “You cannot make me wait any longer.”
Though he burned for her, he felt more than a little ambivalent. He’d given his word to Lady Trentingham. “Your mother will be furious.”
“Mum will never know.” Having managed to untie the lace-edged fabric, she kissed the little hollow beneath his Adam’s apple, making his heart thump oddly in his chest. “Besides, she gave birth to Violet barely six months after her wedding day.” Her words vibrated against his throat. “She doesn’t believe in waiting for marriage.”
“Oh, I think she does. She said—”
“What?” She straightened, alarm widening her eyes. “You’ve talked to her about this?”
Kit silently cursed himself for a fool. Her mother had warned him not to tell. “Nothing. Just something I overheard her saying, at court, I believe, that made me think—”
“We’re betrothed now. Everything is different.”
“I have yet to talk to your fath—”
“It’s my own decision, remember?” Reaching around him to open the door, she eagerly pushed him inside and slammed it behind them. “Kiss me, Kit.”
It wasn’t a request he could deny.
The summerhouse was cool and dim, her mouth warm and welcoming. Her intoxicating scent seemed to wrap around him, filling his head, making his throat close almost painfully. His hands found the lacing down the back of her gown, and as he loosened it, baring the silky skin beneath, it hit him with the force of a hammer striking a nail.
Rose was going to be his…for all time.
Despondency had held him in thrall these past days, but now it simply melted away as his heart took flight. The loss of the Deputy Surveyor post seemed insignificant next to the joy of winning Rose. Perhaps he’d never be a titled man, but love, it suddenly seemed, was much more important.
Devil take it if his sister hadn’t been right all along.
Kit’s hands smoothed warm down Rose’s bared back, and she closed her eyes and leaned into him. His kiss was almost desperately tender, and she felt it in her skin, a tight tingling, in her stomach, a melting sweetness, in her heart, an erratic rhythm that sent her blood racing through her veins.
This was right—so right she couldn’t imagine what had taken her so long to realize he was meant to be hers. She should have known that from the first time they’d touched, from that first startling kiss, from the way he made her feel things no other man ever had.
He pushed her gown off one shoulder, his lips searing a path on the newly bared skin. Her knees weakened, and she threaded her fingers into his hair. “Kit,” she murmured, “I love you.”
His head shot up and his eyes bore into hers, that look he had that made her wonder if he could see right into her. She felt the answering flutter in her stomach, the gathering heat lower down.
And her mother opened the door.
Rose whirled around, hiding her bare back, jerking her gown back onto her shoulder. “Mum. I’ve asked Kit to marry me.”
“Oh my,” Chrystabel breathed, apparently not noticing her state of undress. Her eyes grew suspiciously shiny. “You’re supposed to let the man propose.”
“Question Convention,” Kit quoted with a shrug. He moved closer, trailing a finger down Rose’s spine where her mother couldn’t see it.
It took all she had not to squirm with delight. “He did ask me first, but I was stupid and refused him. After the wedding, we’re taking a trip to Italy.”
Kit’s hand stilled. “We are?”
“And France. Everywhere there are beautiful buildings. I have my inheritance—”
“I can afford to travel. Especially now,” he added dryly, “without the Deputy Surveyor post to tie me.”
She breezed over that. “But first, we’ll go to the queen’s birthday celebration at Whitehall. I wish to show the courtiers the sort of man it takes to win me.”
He laughed, a joyous sound that rippled right through her. “She’s planning my life,” he told her mother.
“Get used to it,” Mum said.
SIXTY-TWO
“SIX MONTHS,” Chrystabel said. “You’re my last daughter. This is my last chance to throw a wedding that will be talked about for years.”
Rose shook her head. “Two weeks. Violet and Lily only had to wait two weeks for their weddings.”
Her mother made a big show of sighing. “Three months.”
“I want to be married before the queen’s birthday,” Rose insisted. “One month.”
“Don’t I get a say in this?” Kit asked. “I vote for tomorrow.”
One month it was, and Rose felt victorious.
But her mouth dropped open at what Chrystabel said next. “Kit, I know you’ll be working here occasionally over the next weeks, but I think it would be best for you to go home to Windsor in the evenings. There will be no eight-month babies, understand?”
“Mum!” Rose exclaimed.
Kit just slowly turned red.
Rose recovered first. “Kit would never even think of compromising me.”
“Oh, yes?” Her mother lifted her chin. “Then perhaps the two of you aren’t meant for each other.”
With that, she turned on her elegant high heels and left. “Five minutes,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m sending for your sisters and their families—we’ll have a celebration supper.”
“Five minutes,” Rose said the moment her mother was out of earshot. “Hurry.”
“We cannot finish this in five minutes. Not if I’m to be able to face myself in the mirror afterwards.” Kit took her by the shoulders and turned her around to refasten her gown. “Your first time should be slow and special.”
“Are you sure?” Rose asked.
“I’m sure.” Laughing, he tied the laces and pressed a warm kiss to the back of her neck. “Come along, before I try anyway,” he added, taking her hand to pull her out of the summerhouse.
Holding his hand wasn’t enough. Now that she’d decided he would be hers, she wanted to touch him all over. “She cannot keep us apart for a
whole month.”
“Of course she cannot,” he assured her. “And I don’t think she’s really going to try.”
But a week later, after Kit had spent three more days working at Trentingham and Chrystabel had managed to make sure he and Rose weren’t alone together for more than ten minutes, Rose had her horse saddled and rode over to visit Violet.
“Before we were betrothed,” Violet told her, setting aside a fat philosophy book, “Mum left me alone with Ford constantly. Of course,” she added, “that was probably because she was sure he’d never want me that way at all.”
Rose had been pacing her sister’s pale turquoise drawing room. “Violet!” She stopped and turned to face her.
Her sister’s eyes looked earnest behind their spectacles. “You know it was so. Mum was certain he was wrong for me, and I wasn’t interested in men or marriage, anyway.”
“But after. After you became betrothed—”
“Those two weeks between our betrothal and marriage, we never managed to find ourselves alone. It was very strange.”
Ten days later, Kit had completed the greenhouse—but he and Rose still hadn’t found time together for much more than a kiss. When he said only half-jestingly that he was loath to return until their wedding day—still two weeks away—Rose took Harriet, a carriage, and a coachman, and drove to Oxford to visit Lily.
“Mum did the exact same thing to me and Rand!” Lily exclaimed. Swiveling on her petit point stool, she turned away from the beautiful inlaid Flemish harpsichord Rand had surprised her with after their wedding. “I couldn’t understand it. Before we became betrothed, she left us alone all the time. But after—”
“Exactly!” Rose sat in one of the drawing room’s brand-new lemon yellow chairs.
“It was torture.”
“Sheer torture, I agree.”
Lily’s cat rubbed against her skirts, and she leaned to pick it up. “Is Kit becoming bad-tempered?”
Rose nodded morosely. “Mum said she doesn’t want any eight-month babies.”
“Ridiculous.” Lily rhythmically stroked the cat’s striped fur. “Besides, at this point it would be more than eight-and-a-half. No one would dare even comment. Unless…” She eyed Rose speculatively. “You’re not already with child, are you?”