Her father slowly turned toward Colin and shocked him into silence with a glare so arctic it was a wonder the candles weren’t snuffed.
“This is a dinner table,” Jacob said mildly to his frozen family, after a moment’s stunned silence to allow his point to settle in. “Why should we ruin a fine meal with such talk?”
“Fair enough,” Colin said, after a moment, subdued but undaunted. “What do you say we get up a cricket match tomorrow? Run down to the Pig & Thistle in a bit, recruit a few men?”
And they were off and talking cricket, and all the forks and knives were moving again.
Olivia couldn’t take her eyes from her plate.
Hexford’s daughter. As in the Duke of Hexford. That would be Lady Arabella. Olivia knew her. Shy girl, pretty, so very, very wealthy. On the marriage mart, Arabella was the equivalent of winning the Sussex Marksmanship Trophy.
She was remembering the worried shadow between Lyon Redmond’s eyes when he thought he’d alarmed her. The little step he took toward her to protect her. The impulse to lay her head against his chest, as if she could transfer her every worry to him through her cheek.
She’d danced perhaps four waltzes in her life and countless reels and quadrilles, but not once had she noticed so acutely the fit of her hand in another’s. Not once had the heat of a touch lingered at her waist.
Such talk.
Wicked, laughing blue eyes.
His trembling hand.
A whisper of a touch that had turned her blood effervescent and hot, and ignited a craving that made her understand at once everything and nothing about the matters between men and women.
Such talk.
As if the mere idea of him or any Redmond was enough to turn the roast beef.
She had never questioned it. Children were trusting and malleable when they loved and were much loved by their parents, and Jacob and Isolde Eversea were in general bastions of kindness and wisdom and authority, in turns affectionate and strict. The Everseas had dozen of friends all over England, all of them, at least the ones she knew about, respectable. Olivia had certainly never witnessed any marked tendency toward arbitrary enmities.
So surely the objection to the Redmonds was based in some truth?
But then there was a legend, after all. The trees in the town square, the two ancient oaks entwined, said to represent the Everseas and Redmonds. Who were now so entwined they both fought for supremacy and held each other up, and could no longer live without each other.
Some called it a curse.
“May I be excused?” she said suddenly.
“Olivia, darling, are you feeling well?” Her mother was worried. Olivia usually polished her plate and then returned for more.
“She has a new pamphlet,” Genevieve explained.
“Right, right, a pamphlet, right,” everyone murmured.
She dashed up to her room. She’d given the pamphlet to Lyon. Thank God no one in her family wanted to read it.
She snatched up the book on Spain he’d shoved into her hands, eager to touch something that he’d touched. She hadn’t yet opened the book.
Oddly, she wasn’t terribly alarmed or surprised by the notion that women fell all over him. Of course they did—one need only look at the man to see why. Certainly she was beginning to truly understand the power of her own beauty, and she knew the notion of her marriage settlements bestowed her with an extra frisson of allure.
But her beauty was the least of who she was.
And she knew instinctively this was true about Lyon Redmond, too.
She turned the cover of the book over, reveling in the feel of the crisp new spine, in that little surge of pleasure that came with opening any new book, almost no matter what was inside.
A slip of foolscap promptly slipped out and tumbled into her lap.
Her heart gave a little leap and she snatched it up.
Meet me next to the double elm tree on Wednesday at three p.m. Say you’re going to visit the Duffys.
Her jaw dropped.
And then she gave a short laugh, dumbstruck by the sheer audacity of it.
He’d obviously written that message before he’d left home for Tingle’s books.
It was far too presumptuous. It assumed she was comfortable with lying, which she definitely was not, that she didn’t mind being told what to do, which anyone who knew her knew she minded immensely, and that she wanted to see him again.
Which she wanted to do more than nearly anything in the world.
She read it over again, her heart thundering so hard it was a wonder someone in her family didn’t hear it and shout a complaint up at her.
It had clearly been dashed off quickly. His letters leaned forward eagerly and his “L’s” and “D’s” made daring vertical leaps. Elegant and handsome, impatient and determined, and unequivocal, like the man himself.
It was too much. It was too fast. It was too new. She was held fast in a tangled skein of emotions and she did not know how to begin unraveling it, when heretofore her existence had been wound as neatly as the embroidery silks she and Genevieve tended carefully, and occasionally squabbled over.
She thought of her beloved family downstairs, even now probably sprawled together about the fire, reading to one another, playing chess, embroidering flowers onto samplers, a bit of quiet before her brothers ventured out to the Pig & Thistle. They all would eventually marry and have homes of their own, and this moment in time was precious.
Was it like that in Lyon’s house tonight, too?
She doubted it was quite that peaceful.
Was her appeal for him the appeal of the forbidden?
She didn’t think so.
She frowned faintly. She felt . . . pushed. Or perhaps “tugged” was a more appropriate word.
Her reflex when pushed was always to dig in her heels.
But still, she drew a finger over those letters, tracing them, and as she imagined him writing them, a surge of tenderness surprised her. He was a man, with a man’s intensity and desires; she would warrant he knew all about sensual hunger and how to get it satisfied, and that few women if any would ever say no to him. She would chew and swallow this sheet of foolscap if Lyon Redmond was a virgin.
But there was also almost an innocence to his honesty. She knew he was a bit at sea here for the first time, and she was the only other person in the world who knew how he felt.
Oh God.
How could she possibly be equal to any of this? To him?
He could be leaving for the continent.
Or marrying the daughter of a duke.
She held her breath, as if preparing to pull a splinter, and with a lurch of almost physical pain, she consigned the note to the fire.
Where it burned down to join the ashes of the sheet of foolscap she’d burned the night before.
She’d written the words “Lyon Redmond Lyon Redmond Lyon Redmond” until there was no more room to write it.
HE’D NEVER ANTICIPATED he’d actually need to wait for her, so he didn’t bring a book, not even Marcus Aurelius, which usually traveled with him everywhere.
He did bring her pamphlet, which he had already read three times, as if it were her heart in publication form. Which, in a way, he supposed it was.
His own flesh crawled at the notion of slavery. But his response was more intellectual in nature, perhaps even selfish: the idea of losing his own freedom stopped his breath.
But clearly it reverberated through Olivia’s very soul.
All he knew was that she suffered over such things, and the notion of her suffering at all made him so peculiarly uncomfortable and furious he thought he might do anything at all for her to ease it.
He admired her fiercely, and this made him restless. In part because her passions, so native, made him realize now that for years he hadn’t been so much dutiful his entire life as numb.
He leaned against the double elm tree and looked up through the leaves. He’d done this at least a dozen times in his life—he could
probably walk the whole of the town with his eyes closed and not get lost, so familiar was every landmark and texture of the town. He peered upward and tried to enjoy the contrast of the jubilant green of the spring leaves against the blue sky. It was rather like stained glass.
This required the kind of patience he no longer possessed.
He’d shaved with particular care that morning, and he was confident the man who looked back at him from the mirror was polished and regal. He’d tied and retied his cravat three times, before deciding simple was best primarily because his hands were oddly clumsy with nerves. Anyone who knew him well, Jonathan or Miles, would have laughed to see him so at the mercy of a woman, when it was generally understood that it was always the other way around.
Though perhaps it would have been less funny when they learned this particular woman was Olivia Eversea.
At half past three, he sorted through the contents of his coat pockets. Two pence, an old theater ticket, a tiny folding knife, and his gold pocket watch engraved with his initials, a gift from his father on his sixteenth birthday. He cherished that watch. It had made him feel very adult. He’d become someone who needed a watch, for he had places to be and things to attend to.
He flipped the pocket watch open, and then closed. And open, and then closed. Not feeling terribly adult. The click seemed deafening here in the quiet woods, and seemed to emphasize how very foolishly alone he was out here beneath the elm tree.
At four o’clock he walked thirty feet up the rutted dirt road and peered, and saw nothing but a squirrel, who was then joined by another squirrel. Lucky squirrels, whose assignation was a success.
He watched the shadows of everything around him lengthen, even his own.
At four-fifteen, he carved the letter “O” in the elm tree with his knife. Because he thought perhaps if he wrote it somewhere it might ease a bit of the restlessness, the fever. Because it felt as though a knife were at this moment carving it into his very soul.
It did not.
He wasn’t certain he’d ever waited two hours for any human before, let alone a woman.
He was a determined man. He stood on the road and willed her into appearing on the horizon.
She did not.
Finally, desolation sank through him, so black and weighted for a moment he couldn’t imagine moving ever again. They would find him centuries from now, planted like the tree. Pining like a fool in the direction of Eversea House.
This mordantly amused him. He had never cared enough to be desolate before, and the feeling was so new it almost did him in.
Almost.
It was the very notion of newness that revived him. Desolation was at least interesting.
Today was only one day.
And he was going to get what he wanted.
Chapter 7
That Sunday . . .
THE ENTIRE EVERSEA FAMILY crowded into their usual pew in the Pennyroyal Green church, which had been polished by centuries of other Eversea bums, to politely pretend to be interested in what the vicar had to say. They each had their own strategy for staying awake during the sermon. Olivia and Genevieve often made a game of guessing who had a new bonnet, or at least new bonnet trim.
“One day we’ll have a fascinating vicar, mark my words,” their mother told them.
“I shouldn’t hold my breath,” Jacob Eversea muttered in reply.
“Look at who’s here. I thought he was leaving for the continent.” Her brother Colin whispered this to Ian, nudging him.
Olivia followed the direction of Colin’s chin nudge.
And she froze.
The shoulders were unmistakable. And when he turned, just a little, to speak to his mother, that profile made her breathing go jagged.
Her heart shot skyward like a bird released from a cage.
It seemed insanity now that there had been a small part of her that had wished him away, because that would simply be easier. It was so very clear that everything was better when he was near.
Olivia didn’t hear a word of the sermon, but anyone watching her would have thought she found the vicar’s message transcendent, so unblinkingly rapt and aglow was she. She’d never been happier to be wearing the blue striped muslin and the bonnet with the blue ribbons, because everyone said it was the precise color of her eyes.
And that familiar sound of dozens of people at once, shaking out crushed skirts, waiting for old limbs to thaw or creak into motion, and the crowd moved en masse out of church, slowly, pausing to mill and exchange greetings.
She had just shuffled with the crowd to the edge at the churchyard fence, and she paused to look up, her heart hammering. The trees surrounding the church had leafed almost overnight in a joyous explosion of green.
Suddenly a voice was in her ear.
“Drop your prayer book.”
She instantly did just that.
She and Lyon Redmond both simultaneously then dropped to a crouch. Anyone observing would have thought he’d simply solicitously stopped to pick the book up for her. The Redmonds had exquisite breeding, after all.
“I waited two hours,” he said on a whispered rush. It was both faintly accusatory and awestruck. And a little amused.
She bit her lip. He was so handsome she literally ached. As if all of her senses were flooded with him.
“I do not like to be told what to do. Especially if I’m being told to lie. I never lie.”
“Never?” He was so genuinely astonished that she couldn’t help but smile.
“Well, I’m bad at it. And one ought to have a code, after all.”
“I agree. One ought to,” he agreed, somberly.
But his eyes were dancing.
She tried and failed not to smile.
“I do apologize, Miss Eversea. I see now that I assumed too much. For instance, I assumed you might wish to speak to me again. Do you?”
Clever, clever wicked man to demand an answer in a way she couldn’t dodge. Because she’d just self-righteously announced she never lied.
“Yes.”
“Shall I come to call?” He said this evenly. But impatiently, as they could not crouch here forever.
Their eyes locked.
God only knew how the Everseas were discussed in his household.
He’d made his point without saying another word, and furthermore, he knew she understood.
She was aware of the hum of cheerful voices, a child shrieking in what sounded like mad joy, because it had been released from the purgatory of sitting still on a hard pew while a man in a long dress droned on and on.
It was a very peculiar view she had at the moment, a word comprised only of skirt hems and boot toes and Lyon’s blue, blue eyes.
“You should know that I don’t make a habit of lying, either, Miss Eversea. I apologize if the note caused offense. I merely thought the gentlemanly thing to do would be to arrive at a plan that would allow us to see each other again, and then present it to you. Because I wanted to see you again, and my code is to get what I want.”
It was so thrillingly arrogant her heart all but keeled over in a hard swoon.
“It was very efficient of you,” she admitted. “Well done.”
He shook his head slightly, as if she were a delight, lips pressed together, eyes sparkling, and she smiled at him, grateful her bonnet disguised her flushed cheeks from the rest of the world.
What a joy it would be to speak with him endlessly, because somehow she knew that she could. To use a normal conversational voice, not a constrained hush. To laugh out loud. To savor his presence without looking over her shoulder or anywhere else but at him.
Which reminded her she really ought to look over her shoulder.
If anyone in her family had yet noticed she was missing from their milling little throng, they hadn’t thought to look down yet. Thankfully her brothers were all very tall, and the ground wouldn’t be the first place they looked for their missing sister.
She half wondered if Lyon Redmond had thought of this, too, whe
n he’d told her to drop her prayer book.
She was very clever, a quicksilver, incisive sort of clever. But she had the suspicion that Mr. Redmond was one step ahead of her.
It irritated her, even as she liked it very much.
“Mr. Redmond . . .” she said finally.
“Lyon,” he corrected on an almost irritable, impatient hush, as if he’d done it dozens of times before. As if they hadn’t enough time for two words when one could do.
“Lyon,” she repeated gently, as if he’d given her a little treasure.
He smiled at her as if she’d just knighted him.
A fraught few seconds during which they locked eyes, and the milling legs of departing churchgoers began to thin and they would be exposed crouching face to face on the ground outside the churchyard.
“I will bring a basket of food to the Duffys on Tuesday afternoon,” she whispered in a rush. “About two o’clock. I’ll be alone.”
“Wouldn’t it be a coincidence if we met on the road going south?”
“It would at that,” she agreed breathlessly, then launched herself to her feet, and whipped about and walked away from him without saying another word.
It was all she could do not to leap up and click her heels as she hurried back to her family.
“I dropped my prayer book,” she explained, though thankfully her family looked mildly puzzled by this announcement, as no one had really noticed she was gone. “It just leaped from my hands. It’s my favorite book. I should hate to lose it. By dropping it.”
“I think our Olivia just had a religious epiphany. She’s glowing like a lamp.” This came from Chase, who was studying her oddly. Though that could be because she was babbling about her prayer book.
“How could she have an epiphany after that service, when I could swear the vicar dozed off for a second or two while he was speaking? And if he can sleep during the service, why can’t I?”
Colin presented this logic to his mother, who snorted and looped her arm through his, as if this alone could rein in her irrepressible son and prevent him from climbing the trellises of married countesses.
The Legend of Lyon Redmond Page 8