Claire studied his muscular torso, not critical of the scars of which he was so self-conscious, but considering the pleasures of licking whipped potatoes directly off his body. “That is a vision with some possibilities,” she said softly.
Max promptly dropped his dressing gown to the floor and picked up the basket of roses.
“Are those for me?” Claire asked somewhat foolishly, as there mercifully was no one else around. But Max’s answer momentarily confused her.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled away the quilt, exposing her body to the cool air. If he had any doubts she expected him, they were dispelled in an instant, for she was not wearing her nightdress or anything else between the crisp sheets and the quilt.
“They will not survive the journey to London, you know,” she pointed out.
“They are not for you, they are for me,” he said. “And when we’re in London, I will buy you a houseful of roses, if you’d like. Judging by Camille’s and your response to Jamie Cosgrove’s modest offering, I suspect you’d like them very much, indeed.”
“Well, yes,” Claire said, still unsure of what he intended to do. “But the question is, do you like them nearly as well?”
“In certain settings,” he said, and pressed her down on the mattress. “I am not certain, but I think I can imagine possibilities as well as you. Even better than you, for I think love among the dinner foods might be a messy affair.”
He placed a rose petal on her nipple. With that single deed, she thought she’d die of pleasure.
“Not yet, my darling,” he said. “Lay still. Let me consider the possibilities.”
He took his time about it, but Claire knew there was nothing indecisive about his lovemaking, and that he was fully aware he inflicted the sweetest torture on her raw nerves. One by one, each delicious petal was applied, rearranged, studied, until she was quite covered—and yet she never felt so fully exposed.
“Max, please,” Claire begged.
“I am nearly done. This flower arrangement lacks only one thing.”
Claire was so distracted, she could not guess the obvious. “Please do not tell me you have lilies and larkspur in hand, for I do not think I could bear it.”
“Nothing so beautiful and fair, dear lady. I only can offer something ugly and ill-formed,” he said, as he came over her.
Perhaps he intended to be ironic. Perhaps he only repeated what he believed for so many years. But a man capable of such poetry should not be allowed to doubt himself so grievously. She, who was already open to him, pulled away.
“Have I hurt you?” Max asked, lifting himself on one elbow, and brushing a tear from the corner of her eye. “I am not Glastonbury and you must trust me enough to tell me if I am causing you pain, or asking you to do something you do not wish.
Claire felt the coolness of the night air that rushed between their damp bodies.
“There is nothing of Glastonbury in who you are and what you do to me. But neither is there anything ugly. When you doubt yourself, you make me doubt myself as well. For in my eyes, you are a thing of beauty.”
Max responded with a grunt that had the effect of reassuring her completely. And when he again came down over her, warming her heart and body, she believed the matter was quite settled in splendid satisfaction.
***
“You are not asleep?” Claire murmured against his back. Her arm rested languidly over his ribs and her legs were entangled in his.
“I was never more awake,” he said. “Have I kept you from your dreams?”
He turned on his back and pulled her against his chest, brushing aside wrinkled rose petals. His blessed plan did not consider the little morsels getting into everything: his mouth and eyes, and goodness knows where else. Claire stretched along the length of his body and sighed.
“Not at all. You have delivered on my dreams,” she said, nodding her head against him. “But I have been thinking.”
Her simple words reinforced a conclusion he already reached about his lover, one that made her remarkable among his admittedly rather few other partners. Claire was always thinking, considering, measuring, evaluating, anticipating what would happen next. Nothing she saw or did went unexamined, and she questioned everything. He, who had all the advantages of education and a vast library, might be expected to approach life through such a filter. But Claire relied on her sharp instincts and her worldly experience to ask the right questions and draw her own conclusions.
He preferred to believe she was drawing conclusions about his intentions, but he found he did not possess the courage to ask her directly. His reticence had very much to do with the trip to London, and the friendships she already had there. He was not a fool, and he knew there must be dozens of men who wanted her, and perhaps already asked her to marry them. For all she tried to reassure him, her other lovers would be healthy young men, with unscarred bodies and reputations only notable for their worthy deeds. There might be somewhat older men, perhaps even more suitable, with reputations only scandalous enough to add some luster to their courtship.
He doubted anyone among them could be called a murderer.
It was fair enough if Lady Claire considered her sojourn in the country to be a pleasant diversion, and if she sought pleasure with the only eligible man for miles around. It was easy to win if there was no competition—as she already pointed out in the relationship between his father and John Mandeville. And so he had her now, in his home and in her bed, on the lawn and in the ruins of Brook Hall. But soon they would be in town, and she would be, once again, surrounded by unimpeachable gentlemen.
He did not think she trifled with him, for she was too kind for that. But surely she pitied him, as she did his sister, and might truly believe he was just another one of her rehabilitation projects, like the girls in the orphanage.
“Are you not curious to know what I have been thinking?” she asked, tapping on his chest to get his attention. “It is about you.”
It wasas he feared. She would tell him this night would be an end to it, and she would introduce him to ten eligible young ladies in London, after providing them with personal testimonials about his road to redemption.
“Well, I shall tell you anyway,” she said in frustration when he still said nothing. “I have been thinking about Brook Hall.”
He, too, had been thinking about Brook Hall all afternoon, until he remembered why they went there in the first place and he returned before dinner to cut the roses. Then, he found it was impossible to think about anything else.
But wandering through the ruins of his once-grand home with Claire on his arm proved both healing and hopeful. Memories long buried escaped and were retold and savored. He showed her the various rooms and described how they once looked. Remarkably, plates and tiles remained much as they had been on that night, though they now existed in a state of nature alongside grasses and saplings. There was no sign of the unwelcome visitor, but a solitary man truly did not pose the greatest threat to his well-being. Max always thought he could never face the destruction he had wrought, but his courage was manifest when Claire walked by his side.
For the first time in his life, he realized he had something to fear much greater than confronting his nightmares. He now feared he might lose her.
“Very well,” she said, turning away from him. “You are too tired to listen and I am too tired to insist upon it. We will talk in the morning.”
Max pulled her close. “I have been thinking about Brook Hall as well. I will rebuild it to its former glory, so that it will not only be a suitable monument to my parents and the other poor souls who died that night, but a home to which I can bring a wife.”
He caught himself before he rattled on about children and heirs and garden parties. He had been thinking about none of these things, and now it all was about to spring forth like water from a ravaged
sluice gate.
“Yes,” Claire said, quite as if this could have nothing to do with her. His heart sank, for his worst suspicions were now confirmed. “You surely were thinking of many things as we walked through the house today and I am not surprised that rebuilding is one of them. It is a beautiful place, even now, and has not suffered as badly as one would think. Or at least, as badly as you have made me believe.”
“It is hard to put a value on suffering,” he said pointedly.
“I know that as well as anyone else, Max, for I was married to a great brute who made me suffer every day of our lives together. I do not pretend that my grief can be anything approaching yours, but it is real enough.” He was right about her intelligence, even here. She had considered such matters already and was prepared with an answer. “But I used the word incorrectly. A house cannot suffer as people do, but it can sustain great, injurious damage.”
“Yes, of course you are right,” Max said, slowly. He did not know where she was leading him.
“And perhaps because I was not personally involved in the events of that night, my eyes saw things today that yours did not.”
“That is likely to be the case,” he said, wishing she did not wiggle so when she was excited. He wanted to hear what she had to say and she was distracting all his other senses.
“Now, tell me where the fire started,” she asked.
He wished to speak of anything but this again. In fact, he suddenly wished to speak of nothing at all.
“The fire started in the parlour, where I neglected to clean out the cinders. That is a fact,” he said dutifully.
“That is a tale, my lord, given credence by your admission that you did not do a job that was asked of you. Asked of a twelve-year-old boy by a man who was clearly taking advantage of you, I must add. And so, it became very easy to take advantage of you again.”
Now she had his interest. “No one has taken advantage of me again,” he said with greater conviction than he felt.
“The whole rumor mill has had you,” she said, emphasizing each word. “For today, while you were recounting the story of how you rode your first pony at the age of three or something of equal import, I saw with my own eyes what no one has bothered to tell you before. Did no one ever notice that the most damage to the house was in the area of the kitchen, quite on the other side of the house from the parlour?”
No one ever had. And inasmuch as he had not been up to the Hall for nearly twenty years, he had not noticed it, either.
“Perhaps there was more to burn. Grains and meats and wood for the ovens,” he said a little doubtfully.
“Lord Wentworth,” Claire began in a tone that he was becoming to know very well, “have you ever actually been in a kitchen?”
“No more than you, my lady.”
“I am perfectly capable of baking bread and poaching an egg. I often escaped belowstairs to the kitchen when my husband had too much to drink, and the cooks were happy for my company.”
“In that case, I must conclude that as a wife you would be a very good bargain, indeed. The man who would have you will be able to economize on his staff.”
“The man I would have,” she began, reversing the subject and object, “will discover I have many talents, not all expected of a gentlewoman.”
Indeed she did, and he recalled some of them with perfect clarity.
“Tell me then: What would I have realized if I knew my way about a kitchen?” he asked, refusing to be diverted.
“Why, that it is a cave of stone and iron and copper. In the very best kitchens, such as you surely had at Brook Hall, there would have been every caution taken to contain the fires that would burn there all day and all night. And even in the most modest kitchens, there would be buckets of water to tamp down flames. Surely the foodstuffs would burn, as would the wooden worktable and the chairs. But that is nothing to what one would find in a parlour or library, with wooden wainscoting, and heavy draperies, carpeting and hundreds of books. There is indeed a possibility that a cinder ignited the rug, and a fire spread from there. But I believe the fire started in or above the kitchen, where the damage is greatest.” She paused to take a breath. “And everyone knows a fire does most damage at its point of origin.”
“I am not sure everyone knows that,” Max said cautiously.
“Perhaps not. But if you combine that fact with the evidence of the damage sustained in the kitchen, the least likely place for it to occur, I believe you have an inherent contradiction in the story that has been set about.”
Max rubbed his forehead, which throbbed with a pain he never experienced before. “Why would it be set about?”
“Who examined the ruins after the fire?” Claire asked at precisely the same moment.
“I do not recall,” Max said. “I am not sure I ever knew. I believe the servants and my Aunt Adelaide tried to shield me from the truth, but I heard people whispering, even at my parents’ funeral.”
“Then we will ask your aunt when we see her in London.”
“Leave it be, Claire. There is nothing to be gained by this.”
“There is something to be gained. You deserve to know the truth. And the woman who will have you,” she said, repeating his words, “will want a man who is not carrying about the unwarranted weight of his past.”
Her words were full of promise but he reminded himself not to take them too much to heart. She gave him much to consider on this last night in Brookside Cottage and for the first time in as long as he could remember, the smallest shaft of light shone through the hitherto closed door of his life. The more he thought, the more questions he had, but the light grew brighter.
Claire’s body fell limp against his, and he heard her breaths grow deeper.
“I thought you were going to ask me about the roses,” he whispered, and kissed her tangled hair.
“I did wonder about them,” she answered, surprising him. “I was warned you were a bookish man, so I believed you better with historical characters and scientific studies than knowing how to drive a woman absolutely wild with pleasure.”
“And yet that is what bookish men think about all the time, even while reading about historical characters and scientific studies. Trust me on it. I know this even better than you know about kitchens.”
She laughed. “Oh, dear, but you have reminded me of something. We must gather the rose petals before the morning, for the maids will certainly know something is amiss.”
Max thought of Mrs. Clark, waiting for him with the scissors in hand, knowing precisely what he wished to do with them. “Nothing is amiss in this household, Lady Claire. And I am certain all the staff is already well aware of what is going on in this bed.”
“And what is that, precisely?” she asked.
“Allow me to refresh your memory,” Max said, and did.
***
Claire told herself she was happy to be back in London, but realized she had gotten quite used to the country hours they kept at Brookside Cottage, where the day began with the rising of the sun, and the engine of the household began to slow down after sunset. That she and Maxwell Brooks had extended each day several hours into the next was utterly delightful and impossibly exhausting. As a result, Claire slept on the long journey back to town, and provided very poor company for Lady Camille, who only wished to discuss their plans.
Max spent much of his time examining legal documents, and seemed to think they provided engaging information to share with his sister. She tolerated this, providing a captive audience for him, but even if Claire was able to open her eyes for more than ten minutes at a stretch, the texts he read aloud would have put her immediately to sleep.
However, Claire recovered some of her energy when they reached the outskirts of the great city, and she endeavored to describe to her friend what she saw through the window. Camille wanted to hear e
very detail, which truly was a challenging task; one busy street in London surely had more to see and do than all of the Wentworth estate in Yorkshire.
Claire was delivered to her door and waiting staff, and Marissa Ridgebury swept into her parlour not an hour later.
“You must tell me everything,” Marissa demanded. “I have been so frustrated by your cryptic letters that I was sorely tempted to travel to Middlebury and see everything for myself. My maid told me that Arista followed you there, and if I only knew, I would have joined her. Not only would I have had company, but I would have been able to learn about every single thing concerning every single person in London. Arista is such a treasure.”
“I desired her help to dress Lady Camille for an Assembly Ball.”
“And what of yourself? Did you do much fishing in Yorkshire?” Marissa asked, as she settled herself on the chaise and spread her shawl over her knees. “Were there any fish big enough to make your journey worthwhile?”
“That is not why I went to Brookside Cottage, as you may recall. I had a lovely time with Lady Camille, and we read and walked together every day.”
Marissa rolled her eyes. “It sounds absolutely fascinating.”
Claire had pity on her. “I did catch a rather attractive fish one day at the brook. I considered throwing him back, for he is not a perfect specimen by any account, but I decided to keep him after all.”
“And his taste?” Marissa leaned forward, grinning.
“His taste is rather excellent. And, indeed, he tastes excellent as well.” Claire sat down opposite her friend.
“Better and better. I can only wonder who you might have found up in that wilderness, for I know of no one who ventures so far north, unless it is to travel through to an estate in Scotland. And, of course, the murderer was safely away.” When Claire said nothing, Marissa drew her own conclusions. “Oh, no. Not him, surely? You have not decided to take on Lord Wentworth, along with his poor sister? What can you be thinking?”
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