“If it’s such a good idea, why don’t you have all your calves in the autumn?”
She wanted to say the bulls would go into a decline if limited to a single breeding season, but Amery would get that pained look on his face, an expression between bewilderment and disappointment.
“We have two primary calving seasons to spread the risks.”
“Can you clarify that? Spread the risk how, Miss Hollister?”
Please elucidate further, Miss Hollister. Can you give me an example, Miss Hollister? Why is it done thus, Miss Hollister? His lordship was a sponge for knowledge, but if he hadn’t patted his horse from time to time, Gwen would have feared she was riding out with an automaton.
“With the land, there is always risk,” Gwen said, though she far preferred those risks to the ones she’d face if she ventured back into the view of Polite Society. “You risk drought in the summer and try to manage that risk with irrigation. You risk severe cold in the winter and try to manage that with good fodder and shelter. You hope for a good hay crop but manage that risk by leaving some land in pasture and planting corn in addition. You dodge what nature throws at you if you can’t turn it to your advantage, and you pray constantly as you try to predict the weather.”
Not that different from the challenges of parenting.
Amery went silent, though Gwen was getting used to this aspect of his companionship. His silences were mentally industrious. He sorted, tagged, cataloged, and prioritized all incoming information in those silences, and Gwen was happy to leave him to it. Wherever they went—the dairy, the home farm, the kitchen gardens, the home wood, the fields and cottages—he had questions, and she answered until he fell silent again.
“You are attached to this place,” he observed as they rode into the stable yard at midday.
Such was the caliber of the viscount’s conversational gambits. “Lord Amery, this is my home.”
He’d dismounted while Gwen remained on her gelding, answering the groom’s question about a lame plow horse. When she unhooked her knee from the horn of her sidesaddle, Amery stood beside her horse, as if they’d just ridden in for the hunt breakfast.
She could shoo him off, though she sensed she’d offend him if she refused his assistance, or worse, hurt his feelings.
Assuming he had any, beyond dignity and pride.
Gwen put her hands on his shoulders and found herself effortlessly lifted from the horse and standing in the narrow space between Lord Amery and her mount. She paused there awkwardly, unable to step back and unable to meet his gaze. In close proximity he had a beguilingly pleasant, woodsy scent, and he was appreciably taller than she.
“I believe, Miss Hollister, the customary response is ‘thank you, sir.’” He kept his hands on her waist, and she, foolishly, found her hands were still on his rather broad shoulders. He stepped back and dropped his hands just as Gwen murmured, “Thank you, my lord.”
“You are welcome,” he replied, offering her his arm. His gesture was a reflex born of bone-deep manners and habit, but still she hesitated long enough that he could not have failed to notice. He solved the issue by reaching for her hand and placing it in the crook of his elbow.
“Miss Hollister,” he began in patient tones as he matched his steps to hers, “it would save us both much confusion were you to recall I am a gentleman. I might growl, but I do not bite; I do not press my attentions on reluctant young ladies; and being titled, I do not suffer a lack of females who welcome my interest.”
He was strolling them up to the house while Gwen was torn between outrage at his lecturing and a real desire simply to run from him.
Except she had given this man her word that she would assist him, and it couldn’t be any harder for her to leave her hand on his arm than it had been for him to climb into a tree full of angry hornets.
“I beg your lordship’s pardon. I am out of the habit of enduring a man’s polite company. I do not mean to give offense.” She was also out of the habit of justifying her reactions, must less apologizing for them—rather like an old dowager, set in her ways and hard of hearing.
When had that happened?
“Do you think I mean to give offense?” Amery asked, though his question was rhetorical. “When I commit the unpardonable affronts of assisting you from your horse? Offering escort? Holding a door for you?”
“I will ring for luncheon,” Gwen said, dropping his arm as they reached the house, lest answering his questions try her manners beyond tolerance. “If you would like to freshen up, you may use the first bedroom on the right at the top of the stairs. I will join you in the breakfast room shortly, my lord.”
She gave a nominal curtsy, which he returned with a nominal bow, and then they went their separate ways, like pugilists retiring to neutral corners at the end of a hard fought round.
***
The breakfast parlor was along the southern side of the house, and when Amery arrived, Gwen was standing near a window, her back toward him. She knew the instant he’d crossed the threshold to the room, but didn’t turn until he scraped his boot on the floor—deliberately?
He was that attentive to his infernal manners. He stood in the doorway, unwilling even to enter the room without her permission, a punctilio that struck Gwen as more stubborn than considerate.
“My lord, shall we be seated?”
Amery held her chair for her, blast him, and waited for Gwen to serve him.
Something in her expression must have betrayed her feelings, for Amery sighed as he spread his serviette on his lap. “Madam, you cannot be bristling and cringing every time I am in the same room. If it’s that difficult for you to be in my company, I will withdraw my request for your assistance.”
Gwen considered him and considered his point. She had spent the entire morning mentally castigating him for a lack of warmth, but perhaps she was guilty in some regard of a lack of… hospitality.
A lack of nerve.
“Please help yourself, my lord,” she said, indicating a towering plate of sandwiches. “I decided informal fare would better suit a productive luncheon conversation.”
He plucked a sandwich at random from the tray. “I appreciate that I have raised an awkward topic, Miss Hollister, but you are prevaricating.”
She was. Where to begin?
He tore into his sandwich—no prevarication there.
“I am out of the habit of allowing men into my… into proximity with me. My cousin Andrew is the only fellow who does not respect my wishes in this regard, and I must tolerate him.”
Amery reached for the teapot and poured for them both. “In that case,” he said, adding sugar to his tea, “you must simply add me to the appallingly short list of men you tolerate. Sugar?”
She took the sugar bowl from him. “I can fix my own tea, thank you very much.”
“And you can learn to tolerate me,” he said, sipping his tea.
Gwen stirred cream and sugar into her favorite cup rather vigorously. “Why can’t you learn to keep your distance from me?”
He sipped his tea again, and yet Gwen had the sense all his monumental calm hid a volcano of impatience, waiting to erupt and spew masculine indignation all over her.
“I could learn to keep my distance from you, of course, Miss Hollister. My proximity to you is a function of courtesy and expedience, it being inconvenient to learn husbandry of the land from you exclusively by post, and I having been raised with the manners of a gentleman. Why can’t you use me as an opportunity to reacquaint yourself with the harmless exponents of my gender?”
Gwen snorted. “Your gender has no harmless exponents, yourself included.” She chose a sandwich from the opposite side of the tray from where he’d taken his.
His lordship put down his teacup and regarded her with an intensity that made Gwen wish she could bolt out of her chair and hide in the attics as Rose did when she’d misb
ehaved.
“What?” she asked, not liking his silence or his perusal.
“Whoever he was,” Amery said at length, “I believe I must stand in line behind your cousins should an opportunity arise to shoot the bastard—pardon my language. Eat your sandwich,” he added. “You must be famished after the morning we put in.”
She was. She was also too unsettled to eat, and Amery was too perceptive.
Gwen put her sandwich on her plate and addressed herself to it. “This simply isn’t going to work.”
Amery, who was halfway through his second sandwich, returned that unnerving blue-eyed regard to her.
“We have to make it work, Miss Hollister. Here.” He took her hand in his, lacing their fingers. Because they were at table, neither wore gloves. Gwen just had time to be shocked at his boldness—and to notice that he had a warm, steady grip—when he extricated his hand from hers. “Now what was so terrible about that? Eat your sandwich.”
Gwen couldn’t imagine consuming anything while this man was, was… touching her. Bothering her. His hands were warm, elegant, strong, and… too strong.
“It wasn’t terrible,” she said, though if she’d been asked, she might have admitted to fearing it could be. “A simple clasping of the hands can lead to other things, and those things can be terrible.”
Amery regarded her as if she were speaking Mandarin, then his expression changed, becoming frigid rather than his standard cool.
“I will not impose myself on you, nor will I suffer any man to impose himself on you, nor to visit harm upon your person. Eat your sandwich, please.”
He looked like he might say more, but his infernal decorum prevented him from whatever lectures were boiling up from his manly indignation. Abruptly, Gwen felt an absurd temptation to laugh—at herself. Amery shifted from casually demolishing her sandwich tray to offering her shocking assurances, and went about both pursuits with an intensity of focus Gwen could relate to easily.
“Do you believe me?” Amery asked, glaring at her over his plate.
She’d known him little more than twenty-four hours. He had been polite, if brusque and impatient. But his shocking assurances were something she had needed to hear, and because he was brusque and impatient, she also found she could trust him, at least a little.
Then too, Amery seemed incapable of flirtatious innuendo or deceit.
“I believe you,” she said, taking a bite of her meal. “Until I have evidence to the contrary.”
“That’s a start, I suppose. You are the despair of your cousins, you know.”
“What?” She couldn’t hide her consternation at that sally, so she took another nibble of her sandwich to safely occupy her mouth.
“You are,” he said, looking like he might consider yet another sandwich. Did nobody feed this man? “Heathgate, Greymoor—and I suppose we must add Fairly to the list—are quite protective of you. When you pull this sniffing and silence on them, it hurts their feelings.”
“It hurts their feelings because I’m reserved in their company?”
“Of course.” Amery put a second sandwich on her plate, though she wasn’t done with her first. “They are chivalrous men, and you insult them when you act as if they could have less than your best interests at heart. Or perhaps”—he paused and set the mustard nearer her elbow—“you bewilder them.”
“They are good men,” Gwen conceded, studying the crust of her sandwich. Why had the kitchen not trimmed the crusts on the rare occasion of company at Gwen’s table? “I do not mean…”
“Yes?” He’d moved on to the tray of tea cakes now, selecting the four largest pieces to add to his plate.
“I do not mean to be unwelcoming, your lordship. Reserve has become a habit.” She was using that word too frequently: habit, when refuge or crutch might have been more honest.
“Habits,” he replied, refilling his teacup yet again, “can be retrained. More tea?”
“Please.” She reached for a tea cake, then realized his perishing, bottomless lordship had appropriated all of the chocolate ones. Seeing her scowl, Amery held his plate out to her.
“My apologies,” he said gravely.
Gwen watched his eyes as she removed a chocolate cake from his plate.
“There. You see? You did it again.”
She set her cake aside untasted. “Did what?”
“You watched me as if at any second I were going to drop that plate and vault over the table to ravish you.”
“Nonsense. You’re not the ravishing kind, my lord.”
“Miss Hollister, if I am not the ravishing kind—which characterization I might find slightly offensive, by the way, did I fancy myself as a dashing swain—then why do you regard me so warily?”
She opened her mouth, prepared to put him firmly in his place, but nothing came out, so she took a bite of cake instead.
“Well?”
“I suppose, my lord,” she said when his stare had ruined her first bite of chocolate cake, “that having been betrayed by my judgment egregiously in the past, I am hesitant to rely on it now. Surely you can understand this.” She tried for another bite of her cake, hoping his lordship choked on the boldness of her implied admission.
“Miss Hollister,” his lordship rejoined so dratted gently, “it wasn’t your judgment that betrayed you, but a flesh-and-blood man who should be called to account for his sins.”
This topic—her lapse from propriety and its results—usually lurked beneath a conversation, whether she spoke with her tenants, her cousins, or the Enfield staff. That Amery would face it directly—and regard her as a wronged party—was a disconcerting relief.
“Perhaps he should,” she replied, “but that man is long gone, while my judgment remains on hand.” She took the final bite of her cake, pleased to have had the last word, though in truth, “long gone” was a stretch when Rose’s father spent much of the year in nearby London.
“Have you finished your meal, madam?”
“I apparently have.”
“Then I thank you for a very filling repast and will await you in the stables.” He rose, bowed, and withdrew without another word.
***
When Douglas gained the peace and quiet of the stables, he first checked on Regis, who was swishing flies in a shady paddock. The horse had grass and water and seemed content to nap in the afternoon sun.
While Douglas beheld his somnolent steed, he tried to quell his own internal tumult.
What in the name of Jesus and the Apostles had got into him that he would challenge Miss Hollister as if she were some close associate of long standing? He had made a thinly veiled reference to the word rape in the presence of a woman connected to his family, and he’d done it purposely.
And she had looked so… dumbstruck, so innocent.
That exchange with her over lunch had told him things, things a man didn’t ask a lady outright regardless of her shadowed past.
Her shock suggested she was sexually inexperienced, for all that she was the mother of a bastard child.
And he’d learned other things, too: Her skin, when he’d taken her hand, was kissably soft. As close as he’d stood to her at several points in the day, he’d learned that if he were to take her in his arms, she’d fit him. She was tall and well formed and curved generously in the right places. And he’d learned something else, something that made him oddly… happy: he could desire her.
This insight had come to him when he’d stood, his hand on the door, blocking her exit the previous day, and he’d known the surprising impulse to press closer to her, to breathe her in and let her feel the evidence of a man’s desire right up against her feminine curves. A momentary impulse, but he was honest with himself, and it had been an honest impulse.
Within that impulse was nothing less than a revelation.
Douglas had felt the need for sex before, but a
lways in the nonspecific sense that he’d simply wanted to spend. In the past few years, it had become the less complicated option to spend in his hand rather than into the body of a willing female stranger.
He had desired this woman, specifically: Guinevere Hollister. She was pretty enough, but Douglas was drawn to her not because of her looks but because she utterly eschewed the flirtation and simpering of many of her peers. Her lapse from propriety had, if anything, imbued her with more dignity, not less, for which he had to like—to admire—her.
That she did not acknowledge any reciprocity was immaterial, and whether he ever fornicated with the object of his attraction was equally irrelevant. He was relieved simply to experience normal adult male longing for a woman.
One of the grooms approached and interrupted Douglas’s peculiar reverie. “My lord?”
Douglas shifted away from the fence. “Yes?”
“Mistress says you may use one of our mounts for the afternoon. She’s up at the barn, awaiting yer pleasure.”
Fascinating notion. Douglas walked back to the barn, half-curious regarding what Miss Hollister’s mood might be.
“My lord.” She was leading out the same rawboned chestnut she’d ridden in the morning.
“Miss Hollister.” Douglas followed her into the stable yard as she gave the girth a final tug.
She looked at him askance. “Sir?”
“I will assist you to mount,” Douglas informed her, reasoning that if she could tolerate his fingers laced with hers, she could tolerate his hand on the ankle of her boot, because when all a man had to offer was good manners, by God, he would offer same.
And something about their exchange at lunch had made it imperative that he offer them to Miss Hollister, will she, nil she.
“That would be most kind,” she replied. “On three,” she said, bending her left knee so Douglas could grasp the ankle of her boot and hoist her aboard her gelding. “Thank you, my lord.”
“Most welcome,” he replied—sincerely—before going to his horse, checking the girth and fit of the bridle, then swinging up. “What is our agenda for the afternoon, Miss Hollister? I confess, when you offered me the use of a guest room at luncheon, I was tempted to catch a nap.”
Douglas: Lord of Heartache (The Lonely Lords) Page 3