“One shouldn’t find daughters of English marquesses in such condition,” Lady Joan said, trying for humor and failing.
While Dante was trying for manners and not exactly succeeding.
He pushed the plate of scones at her then nudged the butter to her side of the tray, because he wanted to give her something to ease her distress. His bare knee bumped the same portion of her velvet-clad anatomy under the table, because she was no more built to fairy proportions than he was.
“You’re trying to concoct a falsehood, my lady.” Perhaps that was what creased her brow so she resembled Charlie on the verge of a bouncer. “You needn’t bother. Have something to eat.”
While she remained perched on the edge of the seat, teacup in her hands, Dante split a scone, slapped some butter on both halves, set it on a plate, and passed it to her.
“Many have nothing to put in their bellies this winter. You aren’t among them today. Eat and be grateful.”
He’d sounded like his papa—he sounded like his papa more often the older the children grew, and this was not a happy realization.
And yet, Papa hadn’t been entirely wrong, either. The parlor car boasted a small Christmas tree on the table in the corner, complete with tiny paper snowflakes and a pinchbeck star. The cost of the tree and its trimmings would likely have bought some child a pair of boots.
“This scone is very good,” Lady Joan said, tearing off a bite, studying it, and putting it in her mouth. “Your hospitality is much appreciated, Mr. Hartwell. Your discretion would be appreciated even more.”
The silver service rattled as the train lurched forward then eased into a smooth acceleration away from the station.
While Lady Joan made deft references to Dante’s discretion.
“You’re not trying to insult me.” Dante didn’t feel insulted, exactly, more like excluded—again. Excluded from the ranks of gentlemen, whose faultless discretion would be evident somehow in their very tailoring and diction.
“I mean no insult,” Lady Joan replied, munching another bite of scone and looking…bewildered. “I’m trying to trust you.”
“Try harder. I don’t gossip, and I don’t take advantage of women who find themselves in precarious circumstances. I’ve a daughter, and a sister, and I employ—”
She peered at him, as if perhaps he might have sprouted an extra head or two in the past minute.
“The rumors in Edinburgh were that you were looking for a wife, Mr. Hartwell. Nobody mentioned that you had children, though.”
He recalled something then, about their passing interactions among the Edinburgh elite: he’d seen her dancing most often with Edward Valmonte, a mincing, smiling, nasty bugger of a baron—or possibly a viscount.
Pretty fellow, though, all blond grace and heavy scents. Lord Valmonte had done a lot to queer Dante’s chances of finding a wife among the titled and moneyed set Valmonte called his family and friends.
“Keep your secrets then,” Dante said, buttering another scone for her. “You’re safe here, Lady Joan Flynn, and while I cannot call myself a gentleman, I can be discreet.” He rose, though in the presence of a lady, some damned protocol probably applied to that too. “I’ll send Margs to you. The sofa there is a decent place to nap, and we’ll not make Aberdeen for two hours at least.”
He headed for the door that would lead him across the platform to the other car.
“My maid fell ill,” Lady Joan informed the bite of scone she’d accepted. “She had to turn back for Edinburgh, but I wanted to push on. My family is gathering in anticipation of the holidays, and I wanted—I have to be with them.”
She wasn’t lying; she also wasn’t allowing him to aid her any more than was necessary.
“To be with family for the holidays is a fine thing,” was all he could think to say. “Margs will be along directly.”
But not immediately, because as Dante well knew, sometimes the only kindness a person in difficulties could accept was solitude in which to contemplate their troubles.
***
“We’re going visiting,” Charlie informed Joan, scrambling into the banquette flanking the table. “We have to be on our best manners, or Father Christmas will only give us lumps of coal.”
“Coal costs money,” Phillip added from across the parlor car. He sat on the sofa, his booted feet dangling above the floor, a storybook open in his lap.
“Papa has lots of money,” Charlie assured Joan earnestly. “Does your papa have lots of money?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.” Papa and Tye were both quite well set up.
“Our papa does.” The child buttered herself a scone and inspected both Joan’s teacup and the one Mr. Hartwell had used. “Papa owns tex-tile mills. Tex-tiles are like my dress.”
“Textiles are fabrics,” Phillip added. “Everybody needs textiles.”
“Or”—Charlie’s eyes danced as the door to the platform opened—“we’d be naked!”
“Charlene Beatrice Hartwell,” Margaret said, advancing into the car. “Mind your tongue.”
Charlie scrambled down, her scone in her hand. “Well, we would be. That’s what Papa says, and you say we must mind Papa.”
Papa, who had disappeared into the next car just as Joan had been about to ask him what, exactly, he’d heard about her in all the smoking rooms and gentlemen’s retiring rooms of Edinburgh’s best houses.
Mr. Hartwell would have told her, too, honestly and without judging her for what the gossip implied. How she knew this had something to do with his magnificent nose and with the manner in which his kilt flapped about his knees. His steadfast demeanor was also evident in the way he cursed in Gaelic and tossed full-sized trunks around as if they were so many hatboxes.
Even as he handled his daughter with much gentler strength.
“Charlie, perhaps you’d like to finish that scone sitting here next to me,” Joan suggested. “If the train should lurch while you’re larking about, you could choke.”
Though he’d fled to the other car, any distress to Charlie would likely distress her papa greatly too.
When Charlie shot a curious look at Phillip and his storybook, Joan stroked the velvet cushion next to her seat.
“I thought I might pour you a spot of tea, and you too, Miss Hartwell. The tea will soon grow cold, and Mr. Hartwell said we’re a good two hours from Aberdeen.”
“I like tea!” Charlie skipped over to the table, leaving a few crumbs on the carpet. “Phillip doesn’t, not unless it has heaps and heaps of sugar.”
Phillip did not deign to reply, his little nose being quite glued to his book.
“I prefer some sugar in my tea as well,” Joan said.
Now, Phillip raised his face from his stories long enough to stick his tongue out at his sister, but only that long. Charlie returned fire, grinning, then resumed her seat across from Joan.
“You two,” Miss Hartwell muttered, sliding in next to Charlie. “They aren’t bad children, exactly. Dante says they’re high-spirited.”
“Papa says we’re right terrors,” Charlie supplied, taking another bite of scone. “I like being a terror.”
While Miss Hartwell looked as if she’d expire of mortification.
“Even a terror must know how to serve tea,” Joan said, passing the girl a plate. “And even a terror knows that somebody must clean up all the crumbs strewn about, and cleaning up isn’t much fun, is it?”
Charlie looked at her last bite of scone as if she’d no idea how the food had arrived into her hand. Her shoulders sank as she studied the carpet. “I made a mess. I should clean it up, or Papa will be disappointed in me.”
“Only a few crumbs’ worth of disappointment,” Joan said, because she knew well the weight a papa’s disappointment might add to a daughter’s heart, and would soon know it even better. “We’ll tidy up when you’ve had some tea.”
How to serve tea was a lesson a lady absorbed in the nursery, her nanny guiding, her dolls in attendance. Joan’s own mama had joined i
n those earliest tea parties and turned the entire undertaking into a game, eventually adding real tea and—Mama had a genius for raising little girls—real tea cakes.
“What’s the most important thing about serving tea?” Charlie asked, and the ring of the question suggested Papa, in addition to the other pearls of wisdom he showered upon his adoring daughter, tended to prose on about Most Important Things.
“The most important thing,” Joan said, “is to make your guests feel welcome, otherwise, they won’t enjoy their tea, or even their tea cakes.”
“It’s not to avoid spills?” Miss Hartwell asked.
Interesting question, and Miss Hartwell offered it hesitantly.
“Spills are inevitable.” Spills on the tea tray, and in life too, apparently. “That’s why we have trays and saucers and extra serviettes. If the hostess spills a drop or two, then a guest who makes a similar slip won’t feel so ill at ease.”
Joan poured out for Miss Hartwell, though to do so was presumptuous when Miss Hartwell’s brother owned the parlor car—and everything in it.
***
As a younger man, Dante had ended up in bed with any number of strangers. The cheaper inns were like that—a man might share a room, even a mattress, with some fellow he’d never met, share a table with a family he’d never see again. The locomotive had conferred that same quality upon the traveling compartment, where impromptu picnics, shared reading, and gossip turned the cheaper cars of each train into a series of temporary traveling neighborhoods.
Dante hadn’t expected that his private car would fall prey to such informality, but there Lady Joan lay, cast away with exhaustion on the settee bolted to the wall.
She did not fit on her makeshift bed.
Her ladyship was tall for a female. Had she been male, Dante would have called her “lanky,” but because she was not male, the applicable term was probably “willowy.” The luminous dark purple cloak swaddled her to the chin, but one half boot dangled free of her frothy lavender hems, an escapee from warmth and decorum both.
The question that dogged his very existence of late loomed once again: What would a gentleman do? He’d probably retreat to the other car, where Charlie was busy making enough noise for three little girls, a pair of small boys, and a barking hound.
If the gentleman were very pressed for time, would he ignore his guest, sit at the fussy little tea table, and plow through Hector’s stack of figures? Would he close his eyes for a moment and snatch a badly needed nap when nobody was looking?
That way lay two wasted hours, and yet, Hector’s reports were a daunting prospect.
Lady Joan looked daunted. Her eyes were shadowed with fatigue, and on this rocking, noisy, stinking train car, she was fast asleep.
In addition to her half boot and frilly hems, a slender, pale hand now emerged from under the purple velvet. A row of small nacre buttons started at the wrist of that hand—more subtle luster—marching right up the underside of her forearm to disappear under her cloak.
The poor woman would take forever to get dressed.
Or undressed.
Trying not to make a sound, Dante sorted through the half-inch-thick packet of documents he’d taken from the top of his traveling valise when he’d fled the other car.
Five minutes later, he was studying the rise and fall of Lady Joan’s chest beneath her velvet swags. Her stays did not confine her much, was his guess, and maybe that accounted for the freedom she exuded in her movement and in her smiles.
“You’ve caught me,” she said, opening her eyes. She started to stretch, her boot hit the end of the settee, and she subsided beneath her cloak. “Not well done of me, falling asleep where any might chance upon me.”
“I meant only to retrieve my reports. I’ll go back to the other car,” Dante said, shuffling the reports into a stack but making no move to rise.
“No need,” her ladyship said, pushing halfway to sitting and then stopping, awkwardly, half reclining, half sitting. “Gracious. I seem to have become entangled.”
She could not lift her hand to peer at the difficulty, because her lacy cuff was caught on one of the buttons fastening the upholstery to the settee’s frame.
“Hold still.” Dante extracted his folding knife from his coat pocket. He was across the parlor car in two short strides and on his knees before the settee. “I’ll have you free in a moment.”
Dante still wore his reading glasses, so he could see that three of those tiny, fetching buttons—that would inspire a man to stare at her slender wrists by the hour—were now twisted up in the lacy cuff. He flipped open his knife, prepared to deal summarily with troublesome fashions, when Lady Joan’s free hand landed on his shoulder.
“Please, do not.”
“You’re trapped, my lady. A quick slice, and you’ll be free. You can stitch up the lace by the time we’re halfway to Aberdeen.”
Her contretemps put them in close proximity, Dante kneeling before the settee, the lady’s cloak and skirts brushing his knees. What he felt crouched beside her semi-recumbent form was not a temptation to sniff at her spicy fragrance, not a desire to unbind all that fiery hair, but rather, an itch to divest her of the velvet covering her from neck to toes.
“But that’s a knife, Mr. Hartwell.”
“Aye, and I keep my blades honed.”
“One doesn’t…velvet and lace should not be…a knife is…oh, bother. Give me a moment.”
He knelt before her, feeling helpless and stupid, while she tried to use her free hand to worry the buttons from the lace. She was doomed to fail—one hand wouldn’t serve for this task—and Dante had every intention of allowing her to struggle while he returned to the boring safety of Hector’s reports.
Except, when she bent forward to work at the trap she’d fallen into, Lady Joan shifted so her décolletage was a foot from Dante’s face. The spicy scent of her concentrated, nutmeg emerging from undertones of cedar, clove, and even black pepper.
The lace of her fichu was a cross between pink and purple—she could doubtless tell him the name for that shade in French and English both—and the cleft between her breasts was a shadowy promise between two modest, female curves.
“I can’t get it,” she muttered. “Drat this day. I can’t even properly sneak a nap or occupy a settee.”
She occupied a settee quite nicely, but one didn’t argue with a lady. Dante knew that much.
“Let me have a try.” He scooted two inches closer and covered her hand with his own. “You’re at the wrong angle.”
She slid her hand out from under his. “Please do. At some point I must leave this train, and dragging furniture behind me will make that a difficult undertaking.”
“You could always take the dress off,” Dante said, studying the problem. Because of the way she’d twisted things up, the trick would be to free the buttons in sequence, top, middle, bottom. He carefully spread the lace around the top button, making an opening for the button to slip through.
The quality of her ladyship’s silence distracted him from the buttons.
What had he said? Something about taking the dress—
She stared at him, her brows drawn down, her mouth a flat, considering line. Then, the corners up her lips turned up, hesitantly. “Taking off the dress would extricate me from the settee’s clutches, though it might be a bit chilly, too.”
She was not chilly. When Dante considered the picture she’d make, all lace, silk, and pale garters—probably embroidered with lavender flowers—he wasn’t chilly either.
“I’ll have you out in a moment,” he said, focusing on the two remaining buttons.
The third button was not, in fact, the charm. Number two obeyed Dante’s fingers as he created another temporary buttonhole for it, but the last button was tightly caught, and Dante’s efforts to rearrange the lace resulted in a small tearing sound.
“Oh, no,” Lady Joan moaned, trying to still Dante’s fingers by covering his hand with hers. Her palm was cold, her grip stronger than he
would have thought.
“Ach, now, my knife—”
“No. No knives, not on my cuffs, not on my sleeves, not on my buttons.” Her tone was pleading rather than imperious, but she’d covered the junction of button and lace with her hand so Dante could not have freed her if he’d wanted to.
The moment turned awkward, with the lady trapping his hand against her wrist, as if she’d protect a bit of cloth from the infidel’s knife.
A single hot tear splashed onto the back of Dante’s hand, and the moment became more awkward still.
Two
Joan did not have a favorite fabric, a favorite color, a favorite style of dress. She loved them all—right down to the smallest lacy cuff—with a dangerous, undisciplined passion.
Her passion for fabric would soon cost her everything she held dear.
“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to straighten, but even this small attempt at dignity was thwarted by the perishing sofa. “I’m fatigued, and the day has been t-trying, and no matter what I—”
“There we go,” Mr. Hartwell said, lifting Joan’s wrist from the arm of the sofa. “You’re free.” He dug in his sporran for a handkerchief, which Joan accepted. Her white silk handkerchief was for show, and these tears were all too real.
“My thanks, Mr. Hartwell. I do apologize. I’m not normally so easily—”
A large, blunt finger touched her lips. “You’re about to spew a falsehood, another falsehood. In case it has escaped your notice, we are alone in this train car, and nobody’s on hand to whom you need lie.”
Lie was a blunt word, and Mr. Hartwell’s touch was far from soft, but the kindness in his eyes was real. Rather than fall into that kindness, Joan smoothed her fingertips over the corner of the plain cotton handkerchief.
“Who embroidered this?”
“Margs.”
“She does lovely work.” The small square was monogrammed in green with exquisite precision. “She must have excellent eyesight.”
What A Lady Needs For Christmas Page 2