“Hush. No. I’m difficult to shock. I’ve a number of rather lively brothers, you know. One becomes inured to being startled.”
“Oh yes. Everyone knows about your lively brothers, Miss Eversea. Very well. Difficult to shock, is it? Have a care, or I may consider that a challenge.”
“I personally find challenges invigorating.”
“Bold words from a woman who doesn’t want to show me whatever it is you’re holding, because she’s afraid of what I’ll say about it.”
Damn. This was precisely true and she blinked at being skewered with the truth.
He raised his eyebrows in a challenge.
“It’s true. I don’t want to show it to you,” she admitted. Quite pleased with him, perversely.
“Oh God. Is it because . . . is it because it’s a . . . poem?” he said with such crestfallen trepidation she burst out laughing and then clapped her hand over her mouth.
“If you’d told me you liked poetry I would have stayed up the entire night to write a poem about you, Miss Eversea. And I never thought I’d say that to a soul in my entire life.”
“Fear not. It’s not a poem. And I shouldn’t wish for you to endure that ordeal. Particularly because nothing rhymes with Olivia.”
“Nothing rhymes with ‘beautiful,’ either. But for you I would undertake the challenge.”
Her breath snagged in her throat.
She’d heard that sort of compliment a dozen or so times before.
But somehow the way Lyon Redmond said it made her understand precisely what he saw and felt when he looked at her, and what he saw and felt were very adult, very complex things, indeed. “Beautiful” was not a word to be taken, or delivered, lightly.
The backs of her arms heated, and she prayed it wouldn’t turn into a blush.
“You are very bold, Mr. Redmond,” she managed finally. A little subdued.
“Am I?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “I’ve never been accused of such a thing. I thought I was simply being truthful.”
“Truthful, and a bit of a rogue.”
He smiled slowly, crookedly, pleased with that assessment, apparently.
“What will you do, Mr. Redmond, if you ever succeed in genuinely scandalizing me?”
“If I do, you’ll forgive me straight away.” He said this with a little shrug that was both thrilling and irritating.
She gave him an insincere scowl.
“Come, show me what it is.” He nudged his chin in the direction of what she was holding. “I shan’t judge.”
She didn’t want to introduce a discordant note into these giddy, stolen few moments of his company.
But she remembered his own truthful bravery of the night before.
And she loathed artifice.
She drew in a bracing breath and sighed it out.
With resignation she turned it around and held it up so he could read the title.
“‘A Letter to His Excellency the Prince of Talleyrand Perigord on the Subject of the Slave Trade,’” he read aloud softly. “William Wilberforce.”
He looked up into her face again.
“It’s . . . an antislavery pamphlet.” He sounded faintly confused.
Her heart sank.
He studied her, a question in his eyes, but none of the other things she dreaded: censure or mockery or condescension or boredom or that blank, dull complacency of someone who utterly lacked intellectual curiosity.
He simply waited for her to expound.
“You see, it’s just . . .” she faltered.
And now she was abashed.
“What? What is it?” he urged softly, and stepped closer to her. She recognized it was an unconscious reflex to protect her from whatever was distressing her, to put himself between her and danger or upset.
And it was odd, but she immediately felt sheltered.
Now the back of her neck began to heat, too, and she was worried it would migrate to her face in seconds, and she would be in the throes of a full-blown scarlet blush.
She looked up at him. His eyes were so warm.
“It’s just that I cannot bear it.”
She’d never confessed this to anyone, in so many words, anyway. Her family thought Olivia was clever—too clever by half, much of the time—and vivacious and witty, occasionally cuttingly so. Everyone had a role in their family, and this was hers.
But all of these qualities also nicely disguised how much she actually viscerally suffered over the world’s injustices. How they settled into an aching knot in her stomach and made her restless, and were only eased when she did something, anything about it. She had never tried to truly explain it. It would have confused and distressed them and upset the natural order of the Eversea household, and they would have tried to soothe her out of it, for they hated her to be uncomfortable, when she knew it was a permanent condition.
“Cannot bear it?” he repeated gently.
Her cheeks were hot now. “The Triangle Trade . . . these merchants . . . this illegal practice . . . they buy and sell people. They tear them from their homes and families and sell them. Can you imagine your freedom and your home and your life stripped from you? For profit. It’s . . . really quite unbearable to contemplate, and there’s so little I can do to help. And you see . . . so I read and share pamphlets when I can, and, help out with Mrs. Sneath and . . .”
He was clearly listening intently, but his expression was difficult to decipher. A mix of thoughtfulness and schooled inscrutability. He was listening, but he was also thinking something else altogether.
Shining through all of it, like the sun rising, was a sort of blazing tenderness.
Every jagged uncertain place in her was instantly soothed. She should not have questioned him. Of course he understood. Somehow she’d known he would.
Oh, I’m afraid of him. But it was a dizzying, gorgeous sort of fear, like standing on a mountaintop and seeing infinity in every direction.
“Why didn’t you want to show me?” He was puzzled, gently.
“Well, it’s not considered ladylike, is it? Crusades and good works and the like. Or rather, it’s an activity for spinsters and bluestockings and young women who haven’t dowries, and I’m not one of those. Or for very strident women with booming voices who frighten men. Who do you think of when you think of crusades?”
“Mrs. Sneath,” Lyon said promptly. He looked fascinated.
“And she booms, doesn’t she?”
“She does boom.”
“My parents don’t precisely deplore my interest, but they’ve taken to changing the subject when I broach it. I do have other topics of conversation. And other interests. I do not always run on and on about it.”
Ironically, she felt as though she was running on and on about it. More truthfully, she was babbling. His gaze, unblinking and unabashedly admiring and very blue and intent, had sent her thoughts careening off their track.
“The slave trade is an evil practice, a blight upon all humankind. And I can’t think of a lovelier quality than compassion. Promise me you will never feel ashamed of it, Miss Eversea.”
She was speechless.
“Promise me,” he insisted fervently.
“Very well,” she said shyly, and gave a little laugh. “But truly? Doesn’t that sort of thing bore you?”
“I’m finding it difficult to conceive of a circumstance in which you would bore me. I imagine you’re simply filled with surprises.”
“Careful, Mr. Redmond, or I may consider that a challenge.”
“Even when you’re sleeping, I’m certain you’re fascinating or at least entertaining. Perhaps you snore or mutter things, like Colonel Kefauver at White’s, who talks in his sleep. About tigers eating the natives and the like.”
She ought to have laughed. But her mind’s eye was instantly flooded with an image: she was opening her eyes to the light of dawn, and turning her head on her pillow.
To finding him lying next to her, his blue eyes on her, warm and sleepy.
She dropped her eyes, a
ll of her aplomb hopelessly lost.
The silence that followed was filled with the comforting sound of the pages of books being turned, the faint merry lilt of Genevieve chattering with Mr. Tingle.
“Mr. Redmond, I think this is one of the instances in which I may need some time to forgive you for cheek,” she finally said, softly.
He was silent for the time it took her heart to beat twice.
“Was that enough time?” he whispered.
It was, indeed, but she wasn’t about to let him know. She simply looked up again through her eyelashes.
He hadn’t gotten any uglier while she was looking down.
Though now he looked faintly worried. There was a faint little shadow between his eyes. Her impulse was to take his face in her hands and smooth it away.
She’d never had that kind of impulse in her entire life.
Let alone for someone at least a foot taller than she, like Lyon Redmond.
She sensed he carried more burdens than anyone knew.
“I’m sorry if . . .” he whispered, finally. “I’m not normally so . . .” He made a helpless gesture. “It’s just that I . . .”
She shook her head sharply: Don’t be.
She knew what he meant.
And suddenly neither of them could speak again.
The initial giddy rush of words ebbed into a velvety silence. Olivia knew a temptation to close the gap between them and lay her head against his chest.
As if she’d done it dozens of times in her life.
“May I . . . may I have this pamphlet?” he asked suddenly.
“You want to read it?” She was skeptical.
He nodded somberly.
So she hesitated, then held it out to him, ceremoniously, with both hands, and he took it as gravely as if it was coated in gold leaf.
It wasn’t until their fingers were a hairsbreadth from touching that she noticed his hands were trembling, too.
And as she relinquished the pamphlet, his thumb lightly, deliberately skimmed the back of hers.
A bolt of pleasure traced her spine. Her heart flipped over in her chest.
The first touch of his skin against her skin.
Illicit and far too bold.
And not enough.
Oh, not enough.
She knew it was just the beginning.
“Take this,” he whispered urgently, and thrust the book he was holding into her hands.
“Olivia, Mr. Tingle said he’d—”
Olivia leaped backward as if Lyon was a bonfire and whirled on her sister, who had just flounced innocently around the corner.
“For heaven’s sake, Genevieve, you gave me a fright!” she snapped, and tucked the book beneath her pelisse.
Genevieve froze like her father’s pointing hunting dog, her eyes perfect saucers of astonishment. “I merely turned a corner, Olivia,” she pointed out, reasonably, because Genevieve was nearly always reasonable, except for the fact that she longed for hair that curled and hers simply wouldn’t. “It was you who jumped like a trod-upon cat. Wasn’t that the Redmond heir? Lyon?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Did he spook you?”
She said this sympathetically. As if the Redmonds were goblins out of folklore or ghostly highwaymen, like the legendary One-Eyed William, the highwayman who had once allegedly haunted Sussex roads. As if they could be stirred into mayhem, like the devil, unless they were spoken of in whispers.
Then again, Lyon had indeed vanished like a ghost.
And there might be something to the bedeviling theory. She surreptitiously skated her forefinger over her thumb. Her hand still buzzed from his touch.
As if he’d been the fuse that had set her cells permanently alight.
Olivia shrugged. “I suppose it could have been him. I was absorbed in my pamphlet.”
Genevieve studied her gravely. “Olivia, you’re somehow very, very pink and very, very white at the same time. Those are not your usual colors.”
“You’ve been looking at too many paintings, Genevieve. I’m certain everyone has begun to look like a Gainsborough to you.”
Genevieve laughed. “There is no such thing as too many paintings.”
Olivia smiled at her. Genevieve was a dear. Funny, lovely, quiet. She was suddenly tempted to reach out and hold on to her, as if she were receding out of sight. This was the first time she’d had a secret from her sister.
“Did you find a book you liked, Genevieve?”
Genevieve gestured mutely with a little stack cradled in her arms. All of them, in all likelihood, about art or artists. Stacked atop it was a broadsheet. “Do you think Papa will mind if I buy all of them? Did you find what you were looking for, Olivia?”
There was neither sight nor sound from behind the bookshelf.
“I believe I did,” she said.
Chapter 6
OLIVIA AND GENEVIEVE RACED home from Tingle’s and arrived there just in time to deposit their books in their respective bedrooms and slide into their chairs for dinner. It was a relatively informal affair most nights, with footmen creeping in and out only very occasionally. Jacob Eversea liked to preside over his table and do the carving, especially when he could saw into a good roast of beef, like tonight.
“So what gossip did you bring back from last night’s assembly?”
Their father addressed this to the table at large.
Interestingly, no one leaped to answer the question.
“Very fine music,” Olivia said a little too brightly. “Everyone looked very pretty.”
“The oldest Redmond is back in town,” Marcus said idly. “That was new.”
“Our Olivia danced a waltz,” Chase said. “I saw her sailing by as I danced.”
Et tu, Chase! She shot him a swift glare, then ducked her head lest that glare incriminate her.
She hadn’t known they were watching.
More specifically, no one else in the world had existed when she was dancing with Lyon Redmond, and if pressed, she wasn’t certain she could remember anything that came after.
“Did you now, Olivia? With whom? Practicing for your season next year?” said her father. Her poor, innocent father. He was prepared to indulge or tease her.
Olivia stared at him, robbed of speech, suddenly.
“Lyon Redmond,” Colin volunteered. “As it so happens.”
“And we saw him in Tingle’s Bookshop today, too,” Genevieve added, brightly. “Over by the history tomes. Lyon Redmond.”
That’s when everyone seemed to freeze mid-chew.
“In Tingle’s, you say?” her father finally said, idly, reaching for more roast beef.
Olivia suddenly wasn’t certain where to aim her eyes. She felt as if Lyon Redmond was imprinted on her corneas and everyone could see him.
She applied herself to her peas, which were bobbing in a little pool of sauce. They friskily eluded the tines of her fork, which gave her an occupation.
“Yes!” Genevieve continued brightly. “And Olivia spoke with—OW!”
Genevieve scowled at Olivia and reached down to rub her kicked shin.
“As Genevieve was saying before a twinge overcame her—perhaps too much beef gives you indigestion, Gen?” Olivia added with pointed sweetness, “I spoke with Mr. Tingle, who then referred me to another book and gave me a new pamphlet.”
A sort of collective, sighing groan rumbled around the table. It wasn’t that they were an uncharitable lot. It was just that the word “pamphlet” had that effect upon her family. She had waxed evangelically on the topic more than once, and they were indulgent but puzzled by what they perceived as a passion that had sprung from nowhere, and would likely be cured, like an ague, when she married.
“Pamphlet” ought to frighten them off the topic of Lyon Redmond.
Her father drizzled gravy over his meat. “A bit of a coincidence that Mr. Redmond would be in the bookshop at the same time as you two ladies were in it.”
He flicked a swift look at his older daughter.
Olivia went still.
She didn’t dare look at her mother, because her mother could read her like a bloody book.
Her father, Jacob Eversea, was usually so merry and affectionate they often forgot he was also unnervingly astute. The Everseas were wealthy for a reason. He was the reason. His instincts for investments were uncanny and occasionally, if rumors were to be believed, unorthodox.
Olivia was fairly new to both subterfuge and guilt and found both of them uncomfortable. The latter had, in fact, rendered her mute. Genevieve was still nursing hurt feelings and a smarting shin and was unblinkingly inspecting her sister’s face as if she suspected she was instead an impostor wearing an Olivia costume.
Genevieve, alas, was no imbecile.
So neither of them replied to her father.
And the silence was teetering on the brink of becoming damning.
Help came in the unlikely and oblivious form of Ian. “The diversions in Pennyroyal Green, apart from riding and shooting, begin with the pub and end with the bookshop. Where else is Redmond to go? Church?”
“I do wish you wouldn’t say ‘church’ quite so incredulously,” their mother said dryly. “We do own the living, you know.”
“A pity none of us went into the clergy.”
This elicited a scatter of uneasy chuckles that rapidly dwindled. Olivia, like her mother and her sister, wouldn’t have minded in the least if any of her brothers had gone into the clergy. Her brothers had all instead gone to war. Chase and Ian had been gravely wounded. Colin, with his talent for survival, had been relatively unscathed. All had served with honor and bravery. It was a miracle they had all returned.
She was freshly reminded that idly discussing anything around the dinner table with her entire family now, whether it was Lyon Redmond or church or cricket, was a luxury she would never again take for granted. These people, so rarely together all at once now, meant more to her than anything else in the world.
They were her world.
She was suddenly flooded with love and resentment for this very fact, and she was inclined to forgive them for anything, including tattling on her.
“I don’t know what on earth would keep Redmond in Pennyroyal Green, anyway,” Colin added. “I heard at the Pig & Thistle that he’s meant to go to the continent on Mercury Club business. Or marry Hexford’s daughter, as White’s betting book has it. After all, when a man is accustomed to throwing money about and women falling all ov—”
The Legend of Lyon Redmond Page 7