“She must have loved him,” Loris said. “She went away with him, left everybody and everything she knew to be with him. Papa expects me to do the same.”
Well, hell . “How do you know that?”
“He sent me a note. Nicholas, I don’t want to go, but Papa has nobody else.”
Nick had caught sight of Tanner in Trieshock, and had not wanted to believe the evidence of his own eyes.
He plowed on with his story, though he could not foresee the tale ending happily. “Your mother fell ill not long after you were born. When it became apparent she would not recover, she asked Tanner to take her home to her family. He was between posts, and unable to care for her and for you adequately.”
“You’re making excuses for him,” Loris said, simply stating a fact, not hurling an accusation. “Everybody does. I certainly did.”
“He made an agreement with my father,” Nick said. “We would look after your mother, Tanner would keep us informed of his whereabouts and yours at all times. We kept our part of the bargain.”
Though Loris made not a sound, Nick could tell she was crying. Far off to the west, lightning flickered against pale clouds, but immediately above, stars were coming out.
“Papa took off with me, and you heard from him when he needed money, if you heard from him at all.”
“Loris, I’m sorry. He changed his name, from Micah to Jeremiah, to Luke. From Tanner to Tanford, to Tranford.”
Loris lifted her head. “When I was little, he did, but here he’s always used his real name. His name is Micah Lucian Jeremiah Tanner. He inscribed that in the Bible.”
The Bible that Tanner had taken from her when it had suited his purposes.
“His drinking is under control,” Nick said. “As far as we know. My father’s last arrangement with Tanner was as follows: Tanner would disclose your whereabouts to us, and for two years, leave you in peace while Beckman and I kept an eye on you. If Tanner stayed sober for those two years, then we would not interfere if he still felt the need to approach you.”
A stupid bargain, though at the time, it had loomed before Nick like an answer to several different prayers—for himself and his brother. They’d believed Tanner incapable of sobriety, and he’d proved them wrong.
“Why didn’t you simply introduce yourself and invite me to the family seat?” Loris asked, dabbing at her cheeks with her sleeve. “Would I have been welcome?”
“Of course you’d be welcome. Belle Maison is enormous, and my sisters would spoil you rotten, and my father has longed to meet you again.” Though if Loris ran off with Micah Tanner, heaven knew if any of that would happen. “My father was insistent that Tanner leave you in peace, for knowledge of your papa’s whereabouts could have become problematic for you. Tanner did not want us to take you away from all that was familiar to you. On that point, he would not budge.”
Too late, Nick had realized what Micah Tanner had truly been about.
“He wanted me here to look after Linden, and he didn’t want me getting ideas,” Loris said. “The sort of ideas I might stumble across if I were the pampered relation of a doting earl. Ideas about new dresses, servants, or eligible young men.”
The sort of ideas any proper father should want his daughter to get, in other words.
“More likely, he wanted you where he knew the terrain, the dramatis personae, the routines,” Nick said. “He was not supposed to contact you until next month.”
“Papa was always doing things he wasn’t supposed to, Mrs. Pettigrew’s allegations being a case in point. Then he’d do something else nobody should have been able to do—get rye to grow in a sour field, produce more twins by changing the breed of ram put to the ewes. Papa often said the rules were for people with no imagination.”
How bitter she sounded, and how bewildered. Nick was weary too, but also relieved to have set aside at least one secret.
“Tanner claims he was nowhere near Mrs. Pettigrew,” Nick said, “and that she’d been willing enough on previous occasions, if you’ll forgive blunt speech.”
Stars were coming out in great, pretty numbers, but off to the west, thunder rumbled in counterpoint to the lightning. This entire summer had been spent waiting for a storm to break, then enduring worse heat and humidity after it had.
“I don’t know what I can and cannot forgive anymore, Nicholas,” Loris said, shifting about to put her feet on the ground. “If Papa was so innocent, why did he run off? If he cared for me so much, why did he leave me here alone, when I might have been with family? Why did he keep that family from me for years?”
Nick rose and extended a hand down to her. “You’ll soon be able to ask him those questions yourself.”
Loris stood without benefit of Nick’s assistance. Perhaps she hadn’t seen his hand in the darkness, and perhaps she’d ignored it.
“I’ll have time to ask Papa any number of questions,” she said, preceding Nick into the house. “The more pressing issue is whether I’m still interested in his answers.”
She left Nick in the darkened library and likely went above stairs to share a bed with the baron, whose household she was apparently soon to leave.
“Shite,” Nick muttered to the silent books. “This was not how two years of bucolic peace and quiet were supposed to end, with broken hearts, and quite possibly, broken heads.”
He resisted the urge to borrow a book without permission and instead went back out through the French doors to watch the thunder and lightning come closer, despite the stars winking above.
Chapter Eighteen
Thomas had meant to leave Loris a note, a few words to ensure she would not be dismayed by his absence from her bed. Over the past few nights, he’d grown accustomed to her fragrance as slumber claimed him, to the feel of her in his arms.
Today had been exhausting, and tomorrow was the assembly, so Thomas had thought to leave his lady in peace. He’d found her lap desk and rummaged among the contents.
Then he’d not known what to write, so he’d blown out most of the candles and lain down on her bed. The sultry breeze had riffled the bed hangings, and fatigue had weighted Thomas’s heart and soul.
He was still in Loris’s bed when the door opened silently—he’d had the hinges oiled the same day Loris had moved in. She disrobed by the meager moonlight and didn’t so much as glance in Thomas’s direction.
Rather than come straight to bed, Loris used the wash water, first on her face. Her movements were slowed by weariness and, Thomas suspected, by worry.
“I’ll do that,” he said, coming off the bed and plucking the flannel from her hand. “Will it rain tonight?”
Loris made no move to retrieve the flannel or to cover herself. “What an irony that would be, if tomorrow’s assembly was ruined by rain. You’re still dressed.”
Thomas drew off his shirt. He’d have no prayer of assessing her mood once her hands started wandering, so he left his breeches on.
“We’ll remedy the rest of my oversight directly,” he said, taking Loris’s hand and sweeping the damp cloth from her shoulder to her wrist.
She permitted him to tend her, from her nape, to her long limbs, to the private places that Thomas refused to hurry past. The breeze gusted strongly enough to tease at the bed skirt and goose flesh rose on Loris’s arms.
“You’re too tired to scold me,” Thomas said, lifting her against his chest. “I’ve let you take a chill.”
“The cold feels good,” she replied, scooting over when he’d set her on the bed. “I’ll miss—”
Thomas paused between undoing the left side of his falls and undoing the right.
“You’ll miss me when Theresa arrives,” Thomas suggested, though of course, that hadn’t been what Loris had nearly said. “If you think she’ll bring strictest propriety with her, that won’t happen, Loris. She might not come at all.”
When Thomas had finished undressing, Loris held up the sheet and thin quilt and patted the mattress, a wifely courtesy that made Thomas’s heart ache.
If he ever did write her a love note, he’d tell her how much such simple gestures of welcome meant to him.
“Theresa will accept your invitation.” Loris waited for Thomas to arrange himself among the pillows, then tucked herself against his side. “She’ll accept at the first opportunity.”
They fit together, Loris against Thomas’s side, his arm around her shoulders. He took the space of a breath, of a silent prayer of thanks, to purely appreciate the wonder of this woman sharing a bed with him.
“Theresa and I are estranged,” Thomas said, “in part because her grasp of propriety became tenuous. Long before most girls faced temptation, she embraced it wholly, though my cousins have something to answer for in that regard. They were older, they ought to have provided her a worthy example. Rather than guard her virtue, they assisted her to fling it into the sea.”
Nobody else knew this story, not Fairly, not anybody.
“You hold yourself responsible,” Loris said, smoothing a cool hand over Thomas’s heart. “You should have protected her good name somehow when she was careless of it herself. My father—”
While the pale curtains billowed and Loris’s skin warmed next to his, Thomas waited for whatever she’d say next.
Loris kissed his cheek and remained poised on her side, her mouth close to his.
“Your father?”
“I could not protect him, Thomas, not from the drink, not from his own stubbornness, and I worry. Nobody else worries about him, but I worry without ceasing. I can’t seem to stop, even now.”
While Thomas had been able to admit to only rage for his once-lovely sister. “What do you worry about?”
“Whose protection has Papa cast aside now? The next time he rides his horse into a church, who will plead with the magistrate not to lock him up? Who will hide his money when he’s hours past sober and intent on buying gin with the coin needed for food? Who will remind the community that Micah Tanner has saved entire crops from ruin and found work for the menfolk even in the lean years?”
Thomas knew this struggle too, to recall the good, even though it made recollection of the bad more painful. He could not resolve the hurt for Loris, but he could distract her.
“Kiss me, love.” He brushed her hair back from her brow. “Theresa will not judge me for sharing a bed with my intended, should she learn of it. I dare her to, in fact, when most engaged couples take the same liberties. Kiss me even though we’re not engaged, simply because you and I enjoy our shared kisses, and you are entitled to have what makes you happy.”
In this, though Loris had not accepted Thomas’s suit, they were apparently in agreement. Loris pulled Thomas over her, and while the earth waited in vain for relief from the heat, and the sky vented futile drama in the dark, Thomas made love to his intended.
Loris’s passion was at once languid and hot, relaxed and focused. She accepted Thomas into her arms and into her body with an eagerness that soothed his fears and fed his desire.
She found satisfaction easily, while Thomas held back, wondering if he’d ever hear words of love from her, words of commitment.
Insight hit him with the force of a sexual cataclysm: Loris could not give him words that had never been given to her, could not offer a commitment when none had ever been offered to her. Not a father, not a sibling, not the families who worked the tenant farms, no one had ever assured her of permanent loyalty.
But Thomas could. He could give her the words, and mean them.
“Loris Tanner, I love you.” He added power to his thrusts, determined that she know satisfaction again. “I have never loved another as I love you, I never will. Marry me or not, I will always love you.”
She clung to him in silence as they fell together, and clung to him still as her breathing gradually slowed.
Thomas tugged the sheets up over them both and let his lady have her dreams—or nightmares, more like.
His declaration of love had been honest, but like Loris, he’d withheld important words too. Thomas had not confessed to her that every word of her discussion with Nick on the terrace below had been audible to the man lying half-clothed among her sheets.
When Nick had asked Loris the question Thomas wrestled with moment by moment, her answer had broken his heart: She did not want to heed her father’s summons, but she did not intend to refuse it.
Thomas extricated himself from Loris’s embrace and dressed in silence. She was still his intended and would always be the woman he loved. His only consolation was that in heeding her father’s summons, she’d likely break her own heart too.
* * *
“Are you nervous?”
Thomas’s question was apparently sincere, for he posed it to Loris without a hint of levity.
“Yes, I am nervous.” Anxiety had become Loris’s constant companion. “I have never worn a dress so fine, and I expect to dance in public for the first time.”
“With me,” Thomas said, making a full circuit of her person. “You are lovely, but we must find the time to take you to London, where you will acquire finery of your own, rather than borrowed from the viscountess.”
The fact that Loris would give the lovely dress back at the end of the evening was all that allowed her to wear it. Lady Fairly had found a deep blue, high-waisted silk dress edged in dark green and purple embroidery. White gloves, lavender dancing slippers, and a lavender lace fichu completed the ensemble.
Modest, but different, and so very lovely to wear. Waltzing in this dress would be like dancing through moonbeams.
“Tell everybody you borrowed this from the viscountess as well,” Thomas said, holding out a small velvet-covered box.
Any minute, Nick or Lord Fairly, Loris’s recently self-appointed bodyguards, would come strolling through the library door. Or perhaps they were Thomas’s bodyguards—comforting thought—for he owned the stable that had been set ablaze.
“Thomas, put that box away before anybody sees it,” Loris said, turning from the cheval mirror. “You must not give me gifts.”
“You’ve given me gifts,” he said, opening the box and drawing out a strand of lavender gems set in delicate silver links. “You’ve given me an estate that’s the envy of the shire, given me your tireless hard work,”—he picked up Loris’s wrist—“your loyalty.”
Guilt kept Loris silent. She’d given Thomas her heart, but hadn’t warned him her father lurked nearby, and might well be the author of all the harm Linden had suffered.
“I will wear it,” Loris said, “but I’m giving it back at the end of the evening. A gift like this would cause talk if I admitted it came from you, and you don’t deserve that.”
He fastened the clasp, and the bracelet fit beautifully, a graceful weight around Loris’s borrowed glove.
“Consider it a loan, then, from a friend who values you greatly.”
Loris was on the point of kissing him—why must his expression be as grave as her mood?—when Lady Fairly came in with both Nicholas and the viscount.
“Miss Tanner, that dress never looked as well on me,” her ladyship said. “You will be thronged with dazzled bachelors, all of them pledging undying devotion. Fairly, Nicholas, you will beat the presuming ones away, for Thomas will be too busy tripping over his own tongue.”
Fairly kissed his wife’s cheek. “I love it when you turn up protective, my dear.”
His lordship frequently kissed his wife’s cheek or her hand, and—Loris suspected—many places in between. Lady Fairly bore it all with an amused tolerance that seemed to encourage her husband to greater excesses.
“Miss Tanner,” Thomas said, winging his arm. “You will save your waltzes for me, regardless of how pitifully young Pettigrew importunes you for them.”
Just like that, the last private moment Loris might have had with Thomas before the evening’s ordeal was over.
She took his arm and let him escort her down Linden’s front steps to the waiting coach. Beckman was up on the box, looking dapper and tidy, if a bit self-conscious.
; “Do you feel like a princess?” Thomas asked as he handed her up. “You look like one. My princess.”
Loris felt like a fraud. If she confided to Thomas that Micah Tanner was in the area, she might feel less like a fraud and more like the woman who’d sealed her own father’s doom.
Lady Fairly and her husband joined them, and the coach rocked as Nick climbed up on the box.
“Thomas, you cannot look at Miss Tanner like that in public,” Lord Fairly said. “Though I can cast adoring gazes at my wife all I please.”
He beamed, her ladyship preened, and Thomas smiled, while Loris felt sick. This was all wrong, and all so familiar.
The appearances were lovely—friendly people, pretty clothes, rural socializing in the offing; and yet, Micah Tanner, dear, dratted, and oblivious to the trouble he caused—cast a pall for Loris over every moment.
Papa might wait weeks to contact her again, he might accost her the very next time she was unaccompanied on the streets of Trieshock.
Not that she’d venture there on her own if she could help it.
“You’re worried,” Thomas said, leaning forward to brush a gloved finger between Loris’s brows. “You will dance with me, the viscount, Nick, Beckman, and Belmont. Then you’ll have the excuse of being too weary to dance with anybody else, and needing some air.”
“A fine plan,” Loris said, “though Giles Pettigrew has reminded me on at least six occasions that I also promised him a dance.”
Loris would endure Giles’s dancing, but how could she look Matthew—the magistrate himself—in the eye and make small talk when her silence abetted a possible felon?
“Don’t plead an indisposition,” her ladyship said. “People draw conclusions about indisposed women.”
Fairly’s lids lowered, and Thomas found something fascinating to study in the hedgerow beyond the coach window.
The viscount and his lady were in anticipation of a wondrous event. All of their gazes and kisses and the time spent closeted in their bedroom took on a glow of intimacy that transcended even what Loris had known with Thomas, and abruptly, she wanted to fling Thomas’s bracelet back at him.
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