Someone to Hold

by Mary Balogh

  “You drank your tea without milk yesterday and at luncheon earlier,” he said. “Do you prefer it that way?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I will take a little sugar, though, please.”

  He poured a few drops of milk into one of the cups and brought the sugar bowl to the table. He hesitated a moment and sat down on the chair adjacent to hers. It was going to be a while yet before the kettle boiled. He was as uncomfortable as she, Camille thought. This was very different from being at Sally Lunn’s.

  “Do people come here to have their portraits painted?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said. “It was impossible until this past week. There simply was not enough room. There is now, but my general policy will not change. My studio is my private place.”

  It was the second time he had said that. Was he warding off any request she might make to see his paintings?

  “Does anyone come here at all?” she asked.

  “The fellows on the two floors below have entertained me in the past,” he said, “as well as a few other friends of mine. I was finally able to return the compliment and invite them all here last week, the day after I moved in, for a sort of housewarming.”

  “All men?” she asked. “No women?”

  “No women,” he said.

  “I am the first, then?”

  Silence, she realized again, was not always really silent. It acted as a sort of echo chamber for unconsidered words that had just been uttered. And it had a pulse and made a dull, thudding sound. Or perhaps that was her own heartbeat she could hear.

  “You are the first, Camille,” he said with a slight and slightly crooked smile. “Because of the rain,” he added. He gave her name its proper French pronunciation—eel at the end instead of ill, as her family tended to do. She liked the sound of her name on his lips.

  Their eyes met and held, and Camille found herself wondering foolishly if other gentlemen of her acquaintance were as masculine as he was and she had just not noticed. Was Viscount Uxbury—? But no, he most certainly was not, despite a handsome face and a splendid physique. She would have noticed. Good heavens, she had been going to marry him, yet she had never felt even a frisson of . . . desire for him. Was that what she felt for Mr. Cunningham—Joel—then? Or was she merely still breathless from that run followed by the climb up the stairs?

  “I suppose,” she said, “you planned to be busy painting this afternoon. But instead you agreed to come walking with me when I might have guessed that the rain would come back.”

  “I have a portrait to finish off,” he said. “Two of them, actually. They are both near completion. But there is no particular hurry.”

  “And then it will be our turn?” she asked. “Abigail’s and mine? Do you ever run out of work? Is the possibility a bit frightening?” In the past she had never really thought of being without money.

  “It has not happened yet,” he said, “and I do try to keep a little by me for that rainy day everyone warns of. Sometimes I wish there was more time to paint for my own pleasure, though. There will probably be another commission next week, though I do not know how many portraits it will involve.”

  “Next week?” she said.

  “On Tuesday,” he said, “I have agreed to call upon a Mr. Cox-Phillips. He lives some distance outside Bath up in the hills where most of the houses are mansions. I daresay he is very wealthy and can well afford my fee.”

  “Cox-Phillips?” She frowned in thought. “Do you know him?”

  “No,” he said, “but he must know me or at least have heard of me. My fame must be spreading.” He grinned at her and got up to check the kettle, though it was clearly not boiling yet. “Do you know him?”

  “I know who he is,” she said, “or, at least, I suppose he must be the man I am thinking of. He was somebody important in the government a number of years ago, an acquaintance of my uncle, the late Duke of Netherby. I remember my aunt Louise talking about him. She used to describe him as curmudgeonly. He has some family connection to Viscount Uxbury.”

  “Curmudgeonly?” Joel said, sitting down again. “That does not bode well for me. He may not like being told he must wait for a few months until I have time to paint for him.”

  “You must play the part of temperamental artist,” she said, “and pit your will against his.”

  “Who says it would be playing a part?” he asked her, grinning again. “If he cuts up nasty, I shall just refuse whatever commission he has in mind. Perhaps I will not even go up there.”

  “The word curmudgeonly has frightened you off?” she asked him. “But your curiosity will surely outweigh your fear. I hope so, anyway. I want to hear all about your visit when you come to school on Wednesday, assuming, that is, that you survive the ordeal.”

  He gazed at her without answering, and his fingers drummed a light tattoo on the table. “I need my sketch pad,” he said. “You should do that more often, Camille.”

  “Do what?” She could feel her cheeks grow warm at the intentness of his gaze.

  “Smile,” he said. “With a certain degree of mischief in your eyes. The expression transforms you. Or perhaps it is just another facet of your character I have not seen before. I left my sketchbook at the orphanage, alas, though I do have others in the studio.”

  “Mischief?”

  “Of course you are not doing it any longer,” he said. “I ought not to have drawn your attention to it.”

  “The kettle is boiling,” she said, and she pressed both palms to her cheeks when he got up and turned his back. But the thing was that she really had been smiling and joking and rather enjoying the image of him confronting Lord Uxbury’s crotchety relative, his knees knocking with fright but his artistic temperament coming to his rescue. And now she was probably blushing. She watched him pour the boiling water into the teapot and cover it with a cozy to keep the tea hot while it steeped. She had never seen a man make tea. He did not look effeminate doing it, though, despite the fact that the cozy had daisies embroidered all over it. Quite the opposite, in fact. “Mischief is for children, Mr. Cu— Joel.”

  “And for adults who are willing to relax and simply be happy,” he said, turning to lean back against the counter, his arms crossed over his chest.

  “You think I am not willing?” she asked him.

  “Are you?”

  “Ladies are not brought up to cultivate happiness,” she said. ‘There are more important things.”

  “Are there?”

  She frowned. “What is happiness?” she asked. “How does one achieve it, Joel?”

  He did not immediately answer. Their eyes locked and neither looked away. Camille swallowed as he pushed away from the counter and came toward her. He set one hand on the table beside hers and the other on the back of her chair. He drew breath as though to say something, but then leaned over her instead and kissed her.

  Somehow she had known it was coming, yet when it happened she was so surprised, so shocked, that she sat there and did nothing to prevent it. It did not last long—probably no more than a few seconds. But during those seconds she became aware that his lips were slightly parted over her own and that there was heat in them and in his breath against her cheek. She was startlingly aware of the male smell of him and of a tingling awareness and yearning and . . . desire that were shockingly physical.

  And then he drew back his head, and his eyes, darker and more intense than usual, gazed into hers, their expression inscrutable.

  Camille spoke before he could. “That is how one achieves happiness?” she asked. Goodness, she had just been kissed. On the lips. She could not remember ever being kissed there before, not even by her mother. If she had been, it was so long ago that memory of it had faded into the dim, distant past.

  “Not necessarily happiness itself.” He straightened up. “But sometimes a kiss is at least pleasurable. Sometimes it is not.”

&n
bsp; “I am sorry I have disappointed you,” she said, all instinctive haughtiness. “But I have never been kissed before. I have no idea how to go about it.”

  “I was not saying it was not a pleasure to kiss you, Camille,” he said. “But I certainly did not intend to do it, and it ought not to have happened. I brought you in here out of the rain, but it was unconsidered and unwise. Even a man who is not a gentleman understands, you see, that he ought not to bring a virtuous woman to his rooms, and that if he does for some compelling reason—like a heavy rain—then he should not take advantage of her by kissing her.”

  “I do not feel taken advantage of,” she said. Perhaps she ought, but she did not. It had happened, and on the whole she was not sorry. It was another new experience to add to all the others of the last few months, and she knew she would relive those few seconds for days to come, perhaps longer. Was that very pathetic of her?

  He stood where he was for a few moments longer, his expression inscrutable, before turning away to pour their tea. He brought their cups and saucers to the table and set down the one without milk before her. He sat down while she stirred in a spoonful of sugar.

  “Your betrothed never kissed you?” he asked. “Was not that a bit odd?”

  Ought she to have been kissed merely because she was engaged to be married? But that was not what her betrothal had been all about. “I did not believe so,” she said.

  “Would you have gone through life unkissed?” he asked her.

  “Probably,” she said.

  “But you would surely have wanted children,” he said. “He would have wished for heirs, would he not?”

  “Of course,” she said. “And we would both have done our duty. But do we have to speak on this topic? I find it extremely uncomfortable.” She stirred her tea again.

  He was not going to let the matter drop, though. “What I find strange,” he said, “is that there is a class of people to whom marriage and marital relations are quite impersonal, devoid of real feeling or any sort of passion. Or happiness.”

  “I wanted to be perfect,” she reminded him, though there was something very arid in the word in contrast to the real feeling and the passion and the happiness of which he had spoken. She found her hand was trembling when she tried to lift her cup.

  “Camille,” he said, and she could feel his eyes very intent on her though she did not look up at him. “What happened to you must surely have been the very best thing that could possibly have happened.”

  She lurched to her feet, sending her chair clattering backward to the floor, and hurried into the living room, where she turned blindly right instead of left and came up against the living room window instead of the hallway, where she might have grabbed her pelisse and bonnet and hurried away from there, rain or no rain. She came to a stop, hugging her arms about herself and gazing out into pelting rain without really seeing it.

  “Camille.” His voice came from just behind her.

  “I suppose you disliked me even before you met me,” she said. “She wrote and told you all about me, did she—Anastasia? And you disliked me when we met—I saw it in your face when Miss Ford introduced us. And I know you resented my walking into the schoolroom and looking at your pupils’ paintings. Since then you have seen how poorly I teach and control my class, and you resent the fact that I am now living in her room at the orphanage. I have not liked you very well either, Mr. Cunningham, but I have not been cruel to you. You may have a poor opinion of the life of privilege in which I grew up, but at least I was taught decent manners.”

  “Camille,” he said, “I had no intention whatsoever of being cruel. I daresay my words were poorly chosen.”

  She laughed harshly—and heard, appalled, what sounded more like a sob than laughter. “Oh really?” she said. “And what words were those?”

  “You were headed for a life of cold propriety and duty,” he said. “You surely cannot believe now that you would have been happy with Viscount Uxbury.”

  “You do not understand, do you?” she said, looking downward and seeing the rain actually bouncing off the road. “I did not expect happiness. Or want it. I did not expect unhappiness either. My feelings were never in question or in turmoil until a few months ago. Now there is nothing but turmoil. And unhappiness. Misery. Self-pity, if you will—that is what you called it earlier this week. Is this better than what I had? Seriously, Joel? Is it better?”

  She turned as she spoke and glared at him when she realized he was so close behind her.

  “You would have married a man who publicly and maliciously insulted your name as soon as he learned something about you that offended him even though you were in no way to blame,” he said. “How would he have treated you if you had already been married?”

  She had been trying for several months not to ask herself that question. “I will never know, will I?” she said.

  “No,” he said, “but you can make an educated and doubtless accurate guess.”

  She hugged herself more tightly. “Yet you still think I deserve what happened to me,” she said.

  He frowned. “That,” he said, “is not what I said. It is certainly not what I meant. Sometimes good can come out of disaster. You had schooled yourself all your life not to feel emotion. You believed that that is what perfect ladies do. Perhaps you were right. But if it is indeed so, then perfect ladies are surely to be pitied.”

  “My mother is a perfect lady,” she said. And because he did not immediately answer, the words echoed in her head. Was that all her mother had ever been? The empty shell of a perfect lady? Camille had always wanted to emulate her unshakable poise and dignity. Her mother had never been at the mercy of emotion. She was never vividly happy or wretchedly unhappy. She had been a model of perfection to her elder daughter. Only now did Camille ask herself what had lain beneath that disciplined exterior. Only now did she wonder if it had been a misery bordering upon despair, for Mama had been married to Papa for almost a quarter of a century before she knew that she had never been married at all, and Papa must have been wretchedly hard to live with as a husband.

  “Do you miss her?” he asked softly.

  Abby did. She had said so a few days ago. Did she, Camille, miss her too? “I am not sure I know who she is any more than I know who I am,” she said, and felt dizzy at the truth of the words she spoke. Oh, how could what was happening to her be the best thing that could possibly have happened? She reached out one hand to pat his shabby jacket, just below the shoulder. “Will you hold me, please? I need someone to hold me.” She would have been appalled, surely, if she had stopped to listen to her own words of weakness. They went against everything she had always been and everything she was trying to be now.

  He took a hasty step forward, wrapped his arms tightly about her, and drew her hard against him. She turned her head to rest her cheek on his shoulder and leaned on him—in every way it was possible to lean. And it seemed to her that he was all solid strength and dependability and the perfect height—taller than she but not towering over her. He was warm and he smelled good, not of an expensive cologne, but of basic cleanliness and masculinity. He rested his head against hers and held her as she needed to be held. He did not try to kiss her again, and she did not feel any of the desire she had felt in the kitchen a short while ago. Instead she felt comforted from the topmost hair on her head to her toenails. And gradually she felt a nameless yearning, something with which she had no previous experience, though not the physical one she had felt earlier.

  “Why did Anastasia not fall in love with you?” she asked into his shoulder.

  He took his time about answering. “Foolish of her, was it not?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, and thought about the man Anastasia had married. She could not imagine asking Avery to hold her. And she certainly could not imagine his doing so like this. For one thing, he was small and slight of build and would not feel so comforting. For a
nother, there was no discernible warmth in him. Some things really were a mystery. Why had Anastasia fallen in love with him rather than with Joel? It had nothing to do with the fact that Avery was wealthy, for so had Anastasia been when she married him. Avery was a duke, of course, whereas Joel was a portrait painter who wore shabby coats and felt affluent because he could afford to rent the whole of the top floor of a house in Bath. But it was not that either. Camille was convinced of it. Much as she would like to think ill of Anastasia, she could not deny that it was very clear her half sister loved Avery with all her being.

  She drew reluctantly free of his arms. “I am sorry,” she said. “No, I mean, thank you. I was experiencing a moment of weakness. It will not happen again.”

  “I thought perhaps it was only orphans who sometimes long to be held,” he said. “It had not occurred to me that people who grew up with both parents might sometimes feel a similar craving.”

  “That baby I was holding earlier—Sarah,” she said. “Before I picked her up, she was crying with the hopeless conviction that no one was ever going to hold her again. She hurt my heart.”

  “But you held her,” he said.

  “What was I to do?” she asked rhetorically. “What was I to do, Joel?”

  He did not answer her because of course there was no answer. “Our tea will be getting cold,” he said.

  “I think I had better go home,” she said. “You were quite right earlier. This was a mistake, and I apologize for forcing you into accompanying me on my walk and then leaving you with little option but to bring me here.”

  “The rain is heavier than it was when we arrived,” he said. But he did not try to dissuade her from leaving. “I have an umbrella, a large man-sized one. We can huddle under it together.”

  “I would rather go alone,” she said.