by Eloisa James
“If Jonas continues to improve, I won’t summon him. But if Jonas grows more ill, even suddenly, how long would it take to fetch him?”
“A day,” she said relieved. “He would be back here the next morning if I sent a note along. Especially . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Especially because said uncle is probably looking desperately for you under every hedge and hillock,” Wick stated.
There was a moment of silence between them.
Philippa decided that she’d rather not answer. She’d read somewhere that prisoners couldn’t be forced to incriminate themselves. So she took another bite of roast beef.
“You’ll rue the day you were caught in the parson’s mousetrap,” Princess Sophonisba said to Prince Gabriel. “Children are women’s work. Your father would be ashamed of you.”
“Ah, but the cheese in that mousetrap was irresistible,” the prince said politely. “If you’ll excuse me, dear aunt. Miss Damson, Wick. I believe my turn has come.” With that, he left.
“You’d better stop looking at that wiggle-eyed gal,” Princess Sophonisba said, waving another chicken bone at Wick. She didn’t seem to expect an answer because she turned about and started haranguing a footman.
“Wiggle-eyed?” Philippa asked.
“She means velvet,” Wick said. His smile was—well—it should be outlawed. It made her insides feel hot and yielding.
“Velvet eyes?” Philippa said, pulling herself together. “I think I prefer wiggle.”
“Smoky,” he offered.
She wrinkled her nose. “I sound like a brothel, all velvet and smoke.”
“And what do you know of brothels?” he asked. His smile made her heart pound.
“Nothing,” she admitted.
“Well, I can tell you this,” he said, leaning toward her. “There are no doxies with smoky sea-green eyes nor hair the color of pearls.”
“Not bad,” Sophonisba barked from across the table.
Philippa jumped. Caught by the sultry tone in Wick’s voice, she’d forgotten all about the princess.
“You’d better look out,” Sophonisba said to her, using a half-eaten chicken leg as a pointer. “The man’s a devil, of course. His brother was the same. Do you think the princess had a chance once Gabriel had her in his sights? Not a chance!” She snorted. “I almost had to give up my brandy, but he ended up marrying her.”
“Brandy?” Philippa repeated, completely bewildered.
“Don’t ask,” Wick murmured.
Sophonisba had apparently reminded herself of the drink; she was now demanding some to accompany her chicken.
“You seem remarkably unscandalized by the knowledge of unseemly circumstances of my birth,” Wick said. “I’m still waiting for you to shudder and avert your eyes.”
“Have people shuddered in the past?” she inquired.
“Ladies have.” There was something uncompromising in his voice. A little bleak.
“I am no longer a lady,” she said, shrugging. “Though of course, one must distinguish among bastards.”
“Must one?” Wick asked.
“Absolutely,” she said firmly. “There are those who earn the appellation, by their behavior, and those who are merely given it by circumstance. Besides, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what it means to be a lady.”
“I suppose your altered circumstances lead to such philosophical thoughts,” he asked, his eyes laughing again. “Because true ladies never contemplate the question. So what qualities did you conclude were necessary? Elegance, culture, discernment? Or perhaps the ability to live in luxury is enough?”
“Sacrifice,” she said flatly. “And sometimes, it just isn’t worth it.”
She thought his eyes . . . what she saw in his eyes couldn’t be respectable, or true, so she devoted herself to her roast beef.
Chapter Five
In the next weeks, Philippa’s life took on a rhythm. Every time Kate nursed Jonas, he would cry bitterly for hours. Philippa and Kate took turns walking him, rocking him, massaging him . . . none of it really seemed to help his aching stomach.
But, as Philippa pointed out with somewhat immodest pride, he was growing plumper, without the castor oil and emetics the doctor had prescribed. In fact, when she reached the end of her second week in the castle, Jonas’s improvement was undeniable. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Philippa crooned to him in the middle of the night after Kate had fed the baby and handed him over to her now-indispensable nursemaid. Jonas blinked up at her. His eyes fluttered, and he almost, almost went to sleep, but then another pang must have caught him because his face twisted in anguish, and he pulled up his legs and cried out.
“Poor baby,” Philippa said, kissing his cheek. then popping him up on and over her shoulder in his favorite position. It meant that he hung gracelessly down her back, rather like a sack of beans, but it worked. Unless she stopped walking, of course.
She decided to take him to the portrait gallery because she had walked around and around the nursery earlier in the evening, and she felt that one more turn around that well-worn path would drive her mad.
The castle was warm and dark. She descended a level and made her way to the portrait gallery to find that moonlight was streaming in the windows there, its color as pale and chilly as the white gooseberries she used to gather as a child. She didn’t stop for long before the portraits, just paused to examine how moonlight made the be-ruffed gallants look like faded copies of their daily selves.
She knew the moment Mr. Berwick—or Wick, as he’d insisted she call him—entered the room. It was as though the air changed somehow. He always found her in the middle of the night. He’d look for her in the nursery, or the gallery, and walk with her. When they encountered each other during the day, usually at dinner, they talked courteously enough of Jonas, of the castle, of whatever . . . but never of their nocturnal rendezvous.
All of that polite daylight conversation and observance of convention melted away in the soft glimmer of moon and candle. It was as though the obscurity of the night gave them sanction to be their true selves. The way he looked at her was nothing like the way Rodney used to look at her. Oh, Wick desired her. She could see a demand in his eyes, a hunger that he couldn’t mask.
But more than that . . . he liked her. He thought she was funny. He actually enjoyed listening to her. It was intoxicating, it was bewitching, it was everything Rodney had never demonstrated and never could.
Philippa turned around to see Wick walking toward her, his step unhurried. He was smiling, that lopsided grin that made her feel warm all over.
“How do you manage to always look so impeccable?” she asked, when he was near. “Do you never sleep?” She wore a nightdress and a wrapper, and her hair tumbled down her back every which way. After the first night or two, when the baby had cried all night long, she’d stopped worrying about what she looked like at night.
“I don’t sleep in my livery, if that’s what you mean,” Wick said. “How is our princeling tonight?” He peered at the baby’s little head. Seeing that he had a new audience, Jonas let out a howl but quieted again.
“I think he’s better,” Philippa said, rubbing the baby’s back. “He won’t let me sit down, though, or even stop walking.”
In the last nights, they had talked about everything from Shakespeare (she liked Romeo and Juliet; he thought Romeo was a tiresome melancholic) to lawyers (she thought they ought to donate their time to poor widows; he thought that was unlikely) to dissections (she found the idea disturbing; he was of the opinion that it was the only way to really identify the kind of illness a patient had suffered from).
Now he picked up their conversation directly where they’d left it the night before.
“I thought of another reason that dissection is important. How else are we to learn of the body’s systems if we don’t investigate them thoroughly?”
“I wouldn’t want to learn about the body if it required cutting one open,” she said with a shudder.
“Why not? I think it would be fascinating. I wouldn’t want to be a surgeon; I don’t like causing pain. But if the person has already left his body, why not try to find out how he died, and why?”
“All those blood and guts,” she said. “Obviously.”
“Entrails,” he said, almost dreamily. “Back when I was at university, I read that there are enough entrails in the human body to stretch all the way down an average street. I can’t imagine.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Philippa told Jonas, who had woken. “You’ll feel queasy and start crying again.”
Jonas burped and closed his eyes once more.
“I’m going to stop walking and sit down, Jonas,” she told him. “Just for a little while.” Then she sank carefully into the sofa that Wick had ordered placed in the portrait gallery after it became clear it was prime walking-Jonas territory.
“Why don’t you go and dissect some dead bodies, then?” she asked, trying to ignore the fact—and utterly failing to do so—that Wick had sat down beside her. Her pulse instantly quickened. For one thing, his leg was touching hers. For another, as soon as they sat down, it felt as if the world drew in and became as small as the three of them. As if she and Wick and sleeping Jonas were utterly alone in the whole castle.
“Me?” He seemed startled for a moment. “Nonsense.”
“Why nonsense? My uncle told me that there’s a terrible shortage of doctors in England. You told me the other night that you’d been at Oxford; did you take a degree?”
“Of course.”
“A good degree?” she persisted.
“A double first. Is that good enough for you?”
“Goodness. Well, then, all you have to do is attend the university in Edinburgh for a year,” she said. “I suppose it would be better to go a little longer, but my uncle told me that many doctors attend for only a year.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“Why?”
“Well, because Gabriel and I—because I’m here.”
“I can see that it’s quite nice for your brother to have you as his majordomo,” she acknowledged, “but if you wish to heal people, I think every sick person would feel that you should forfeit the butler’s pantry.” She heard her own voice and winced with embarrassment. It was something about him. He made her feel joyful and slightly cracked.
“My father—”
“Your father isn’t here,” she said, cutting him off. “I know you’re a grand duke’s son, Wick, but it doesn’t seem to have done you much good. Why not just forget about that and do what you wish?”
“As I wish . . .” There was a tinge of wistfulness in his voice. “I would wish that my father had never seduced my mother although that would have had unfortunate consequences for myself.”
“I meant realistic wishes,” Kate said, sitting up straighter so she could rock back and forth in her place, in hopes of keeping Jonas asleep.
His reply came with a rueful smile. “I cannot believe that it would surprise you to know how many doors are closed to bastards.” Kate met his eyes, and the pain in them was unmistakable.
“Those doors hold only fools,” she said softly but fiercely. “You should be judged for the man you’ve become not by the circumstances of your birth.”
He was silent for a moment, his eyes still on hers. The expression in them changed somehow, and suddenly her heart was beating in her throat.
“At any rate,” she said quickly, taking refuge in words, “no one here in England would have the faintest idea whether your birth was irregular or not.”
“I have a responsibility to my brother,” Wick said. But that expression was still there. It was almost . . . tender.
Philippa started rubbing Jonas’s back again. “If I understood the conversation at dinner last night properly, Gabriel assumed responsibility for this castle along with some members of his brother’s court even though he would have preferred to be an archaeologist off somewhere . . . Tunis, was it? Looking for a city called Carthage? That seems to suggest that a sense of familial responsibility does not reside only in the lower echelons.”
Wick laughed at that. “I did my best to persuade him to go to Tunis, but he refused, thinking that he had to provide an income for the castle. Then he wrote a book—not to mention married—an heiress and now he is free to go where he wishes.”
“I expect you tried very hard to convince him. I can tell that you are extremely close.”
“He was so miserable before meeting Kate,” Wick explained.
“Yet he can’t manage without you? Would he not wish the same happiness for you?”
There was another moment of silence. Then he smiled down at her. Philippa suddenly thought she would love to kiss him. She would give him a scandalous kiss, the kind that Rodney had demanded and she hadn’t allowed.
As if he’d read her mind, he said, “I want to hear more about Rodney.” She should never—never—have told Wick about Rodney. Somehow, during these nocturnal tête-à-têtes, it was hard to keep secrets, and Wick had already guessed she was running from someone.
“Well . . . he has a tendency to start braying when he’s nervous,” she offered, feeling a wicked delight in betraying her former betrothed.
Wick nodded. “I know the type. I think it goes along with the English ancestry. I expect he hunts, and delights in shouting absurdities like tallyho.”
“I expect so,” she said. She could not help but conjure a mental picture of Rodney sitting on his horse in that red hunting coat that made his buttocks look four times wider than they actually were. Involuntarily, her eyes dropped to Wick’s legs.
They were all muscle, as different from Rodney’s as night from day.
“Are you comparing us?” His voice had gone low and husky.
Her nerves jolted again, but she nodded. She couldn’t lie to Wick any longer, now they were so close. Friends, or perhaps even something more. “You are very different.”
“Perhaps because he’s a baronet’s son.” He didn’t say it bitterly.
“He’s always had everything he wanted, but that doesn’t excuse his fat bottom,” she observed.
“Was he really seven when he fell in love with you?”
“He was nine. I was seven.”
“Astounding,” Wick said, staring at her as if she were some sort of exhibit in a traveling show.
Philippa caught back a smile and tossed her head. “Are you saying, Mr. Berwick, that I was not desirable at age seven?”
“You are as pretty as a fairy-tale princess,” he said, his voice suddenly husky. “I’m quite certain that you were just as enchanting at age seven.”
“I actually used to dream of being in a fairy story,” she admitted.
“Vanity, thy name is woman!” Wick said, pulling a strand of her hair.
“Not from vanity. I always pictured a prince who would ride up on a white horse. I’d be there, in the village square, and he would sweep across and wrap his arm around me and pull me before him in the saddle.”
Wick’s eyebrow was up. “That would take quite a bit of skill. The story would be so disappointing if you took a hoof to the head. Was the prince wearing shining armor, by any chance?”
“Naturally,” Philippa confirmed.
“Near impossible,” Wick said. “Scoop a girl”—he pulled back and gave her a quick inspection from head to toe—“who’s no lightweight onto a horse while wearing armor?”
“My prince,” she said loftily, “would have had no problem with the feat. He considered me as light as a feather.” She gave him a look akin to the one he had given her. “That was thanks to his physique, you understand.”
Wick burst out laughing and then stopped suddenly when Jonas fluttered his eyelashes.
“You have no romance in your soul,” Philippa said. She leaned back against the sofa and sighed. “It was only very recently that I realized the fairy story had more to do with escaping Rodney than being carried off by an acrobatic prince.”
Wick leaned over and peered at Jonas. “Fast asleep.”
“I should bring him back to the nursery. I think he sleeps better in his cradle.”
“No, he sleeps better in your lap.” There was a note in his voice that transformed a simple comment into something altogether different.
She could feel her cheeks turning pink. Maybe he would lean over . . . maybe he would kiss her. She could almost feel his lips on hers.
But not quite.
So she stood up, and together, in the darkness, they made their way back to the nursery. Wick stood next to her, watching silently, as she gently tucked Jonas back into his cradle.
When she straightened and turned around, he was there, just before her. His head bent, slowly, and his lips slipped along her cheek. She stayed still, her heart beating in her throat, willing his lips to touch hers.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” he said, low and sweet.
He was looking down at her with velvet dark eyes. He was too beautiful for her, too sophisticated, too princely . . .
“Yes, you should,” she said.
Chapter Six
From her first night spent in Pomeroy Castle, Philippa had lain awake in bed and imagined Wick’s kisses. They wouldn’t be like Rodney’s slavering invasions, she had decided. And yet—she couldn’t imagine what they would be like. What if he thrust his tongue into her mouth, the way Rodney had? Any tongue in her mouth, other than her own, would be disgusting. She knew it.
But now Wick kissed her lightly, just a brush of his lips. A jerk of fire went straight down her body, through her middle. She raised her arms and wound them around his neck. His lips were firm and not at all wet—so how on earth could such a simple motion make her feel so hot and needy?
For a few moments, she couldn’t help wondering when he was going to push his tongue between her lips, and what she would feel if he did. But instead, he simply stood there in the dark nursery, his head bent to hers, his mouth brushing hers, over and over. Gradually she forgot her worries; besides, her attention was caught by his hands, roaming over her back, sliding lower, shaping her. Soon enough she could think of nothing but the mesmerizing sensation of his touch; it made her feel quite odd. She shivered and tried to move closer to his warmth.