Joyful mortification, if such a thing were possible.
“Have you come for your horse?” she asked, taking two steps into the family parlor.
Worth walked right past her and pulled the door shut with a definitive bang. The next thing she knew, he was kissing her like they’d been parted for years, not mere weeks.
Though weeks could be eternities when a woman was in love.
“So give me the words,” he growled. “Don’t make me drag them from you, because I haven’t come for the damned horse. I’ve come to retrieve my heart.”
“Your h-heart?”
“Say the words, Jacaranda, and then, by God, it’s my turn.”
“I’ve missed you,” she said, searching his face, for his mood was not that of a man glad to hear a lady’s declaration. His mood was like nothing she’d observed in him before.
He dropped his hands from her arms. “I’ve brought you a bank draft.”
“Thank you.” Because he could have resorted to the mails or to a messenger. He hadn’t, and Jacaranda’s heart rejoiced simply to see him.
“Don’t you want to know the amount of the draft?”
“You don’t owe me interest, Worth, not for a few weeks’ loan of such a paltry amount.”
Still his expression gave away nothing.
“I wanted you to have your cottage, Lady Jacaranda. I can go home again to Grampion in part because of you, and I wanted you to be able to buy your cottage, though that’s not all I want.”
He passed her an official-looking paper. Jacaranda couldn’t spare it a glance.
“You mean Complaisance Cottage?”
“If it’s ever for sale, you can afford it now.”
She glanced at the document and saw a sum many times what she’d lent him. “Worth, there’s a mistake. I know you are a conscientious solicitor, but this—”
“Thank the captain of the Drummond. My ship came in, so to speak.”
“Yolanda told me about the Drummond. She was very worried for you.” Jacaranda had worried for him, too, but not about his finances. Never that. “What did you do?”
“May we sit?”
Sitting meant he wasn’t leaving, and Jacaranda would get her turn to speak. “Of course. Shall I ring for tea?”
“Hang the damned tea.”
Hang the damned tea?
“Don’t look at me like I’ve sprouted horns, a tail and cloven feet.” He patted the place beside him. “Sit where my nose at least can plunder your charms.”
That sounded more promising, more like her Mr. Kettering. “Worth, you aren’t making sense.”
“No, I suppose I’m not.” He didn’t say another word until she’d dutifully taken her place exactly where she wanted to be, right against his side. “Better,” he said. “I invested your funds in shares in a ship thought lost at sea. The shares were available for a pittance, the cargo was very valuable, and here you are.”
Here you are, a small fortune, simple as that. “But why?”
“Because when you take your morning tea at your cottage, tossing the crumbs to the sea birds, I wanted you to think of me and the pleasures we shared. I wanted to make you happy, though you’ve said things that lead me to hope I might see this cottage.”
A pure, piercing joy curled up from Jacaranda’s middle. She’d been determined to fight to regain his esteem, but Worth was so generous, so kind, and his actions spoke so very, wonderfully loudly.
“The cottage is leased. Grey has to lease it out when he can, but I’d love to show it to you.”
Worth pushed her hair behind her ear. “Buy out the rest of the leasehold. You can afford it easily, my dear. Put a new steeple on the local church if it suits your whim. You’re modestly wealthy, Jacaranda, and you can do as you please.”
“I have a much better sense now of what will please me.”
“About time you had a care for your own happiness,” he said, glaring at her. “Which brings me to the next negotiating point.”
“You look very stern, Worth, but I am grateful for the money.”
“I care that”—he snapped his fingers before her nose—“for the money. You had ten shares, Jacaranda. I had two hundred, Prinny had two hundred, my brother had fifty, and the other forty were owned by other small investors.”
“Two hundred?”
“I did not think it wise to earn more than my sovereign.”
“Angels abide.” Two hundred? She gave up trying to do the math.
“You are stalling, Lady Jacaranda.” Worth still looked ferociously stern. “I overheard your charming diatribe to your brother and must disabuse you of an odd misperception.”
She did not say a word lest the hope beating in her chest find some foolish admission with which to mortify her.
“In some matters, a lady is not allowed to go first. I love you. Does that put your house in order? I want you for my wife and for my lady—I’m to suffer a damned barony for this summer’s folly. A knighthood simply won’t do when Prinny’s in a magnanimous mood. I want to wake up beside you every morning until I’m so old, I know you’re there only because your fragrance assures me it’s so. If I’d known you were willing, I would have brought a special license with me, for God’s sake. I love you, I will always love you. Is that clear enough?”
“You’re quite sure?” How she would love teasing him, and managing his households, and his babies, and his—
“I said…” He was winding up for a shouting match, and then he fell silent. He slid to his knee, and not in any romantically debonair posture. He laid his cheek against her thigh and circled her waist with his arms.
“I love you,” he said, quietly but clearly. “I did not feel it fair to inflict my sentiments on you when all you wanted was a frolic or some comfort when far from home. Then, I did not feel it fair to inflict my sentiments on you when your family needed you so. After that, I did not think it fair to make you choose between my importuning and setting things to rights with your siblings. I finally get up my courage to come here and pluck you from your fairy cottage, and I find you telling your damned idiot brother—”
She stroked her fingers over his hair.
“You didn’t let me have my turn, Worth. I’m slow at this business of setting things to rights. I must have a turn, too.”
“I’m a solicitor. We’re long-winded, and I’m not finished.” He subsided against her knees. “I love you, you make my house a home, you brought my family together. I have my brother back, a sister…” He fell silent again, holding her as if his every dream and wish hung on her next utterance, though he had to know how she felt.
Jacaranda took a moment to let wonder and joy flood through her while she tried to organize words that would equal the ones he’d given her. She slid to her knees, too, holding on to him as if he was her every happy memory, including those yet unborn.
“I love you, Worth Reverence Kettering. I love the physical strength and competence of you, the way you sit that great black beast as if you were born on his back—and he misses you, too, by the way. I love your mind, it’s as quick and brilliant as lightning, and I love your kindness to the opera dancers, and to me, and your family, and I love your generosity, for I know of no other who would share a fortune with both the Regent and the small investors, I love your body—”
He smothered the rest of her litany with his kisses, and right there on the floor behind the locked door to the Dorning family parlor, Lord and Lady Trysting conceived the first of their many lovely daughters.
They turned out to be great strapping beauties, with their father’s head for money and their mother’s ability to manage anything—and anybody—they took a fancy to.
And they all, all of them, with their cousins and uncles and eventually with some brave aunties as well, lived happily ever after.
THE END
Continue reading for an excerpt from The Captive, by Grace Burrowes (July 2014), first book in The Captive Hearts trilogy
“Your Grace, you have a cal
ler.”
Christian had been at his London town house for three days and nights, and still his entire household, from butler to boot boy, seemed helpless not to beam at him.
He’d been tortured, repeatedly, for months, and they were grinning like dolts. To see them happy, to feel the weight of the entire household smiling at him around every turn made him furious, and that—his unabating, irrational reaction—made him anxious.
Even Carlton House had sent an invitation, and Christian’s court attire would hang on him like some ridiculous shroud.
The butler cleared his throat.
Right. A caller. “This late?”
“She says her business is urgent.”
By the standards of London in springtime, nine in the evening was one of the more pleasant hours, but by no means did one receive calls at such an hour.
“Who is she?”
Meems crossed the study, a silver tray in his hand bearing a single card on cream vellum.
“I do not recall a Lady Greendale.” Though a Greendale estate lay several hours ride from Severn. Lord Greendale was a pompous old curmudgeon forever going on in the Lords about proper respect and decent society. An embossed black band crossed one corner of the card, indicating the woman was a widow, perhaps still in mourning.
“I’m seeing no callers, Meems. You know that.”
“Yes, quite, Your Grace, as you’re recovering. Quite. She says she’s family.” Behind the smile Meems barely contained lurked a worse offense yet: hope. The old fellow hoped His Grace might admit somebody past the threshold of Mercia House besides a man of business or running footman.
Christian ran his fingertip over the crisp edge of the card. Gillian, Countess of Greendale, begged the favor of a call. Some elderly cousin of his departed parents, perhaps. His memory was not to be relied upon in any case.
Duty came in strange doses. Like the need to sign dozens of papers simply so the coin earned by the duchy could be used to pay the expenses incurred by the duchy. Learning to sign his name with his right hand had been a frustrating exercise in duty. Christian had limited himself to balling up papers and tossing them into the grate rather than pitching the ink pot.
“Show her into the family parlor.”
“There will be no need for that.” A small blond woman brushed past Meems and marched up to Christian’s desk. “Good evening, Your Grace. Gillian, Lady Greendale.”
She bobbed a miniscule curtsy suggesting a miniscule grasp of the deference due his rank, much less of Meems’s responsibility for announcing guests. “We have family business to discuss.”
No, Christian silently amended, she had no grasp whatsoever, and based on her widow’s weeds, no husband to correct the lack.
And yet, this lady was in mourning, and around her mouth were brackets of fatigue. She was not in any sense smiling, and looked as if she might have forgotten how.
A welcome divergence from the servants’ expressions.
“Meems, a tray, and please close the door as you leave.”
Christian rose from his desk, intent on shifting to stand near the fire, but the lady twitched a jacket from her shoulders and handed it to him. Her garment was a gorgeous black silk business, embroidered with aubergine thread along its hems. The feel of the material was sumptuous in Christian’s hands, soft, sleek, luxurious, and warm from her body heat. He wanted to hold it—simply to hold it—and to bring it to his nose, for it bore the soft floral scent of not a woman, but a lady.
The reminders he suffered of his recent deprivations increased rather than decreased with time.
“Now, then,” she said, sweeping the room with her gaze.
He was curious enough at her presumption that he folded her jacket, draped it over a chair, and let a silence build for several slow ticks of the mantel clock.
“Now, then,” he said, more quietly than she, “if you’d care to have a seat, Lady Greendale?”
She had to be a May-December confection gobbled up in Lord Greendale’s dotage. The woman wasn’t thirty years old, and she had a curvy little figure that caught a man’s eye. Or it would catch a man’s eye, had he not been more preoccupied with how he’d deal with tea-tray inanities when he couldn’t stomach tea.
She took a seat on the sofa facing the fire, which was fortunate, because it allowed Christian his desired proximity to the heat. He propped an elbow on the mantel and wished, once again, that he’d tarried at Severn.
“My lady, you have me at a loss. You claim a family connection, and yet memory doesn’t reveal it to me.”
“That’s certainly to the point.” By the firelight, her hair looked like antique gold, not merely blond. Her tidy bun held coppery highlights, and her eyebrows looked even more reddish. Still, her appearance did not tickle a memory, and he preferred willowy blonds in any case.
Had preferred them.
“I thought we’d chitchat until the help is done eavesdropping, Your Grace. Perhaps exchange condolences. You have mine, by the way. Very sincerely.”
Her piquant features softened with her words, her sympathy clear in her blue eyes, though it took Christian a moment to puzzle out for what.
Ah. The loss of his wife and son. That.
She pattered on, like shallow water rippling over smooth stones, sparing him the need to make any reply. Christian eventually figured out that this torrent of speech was a sign of nerves.
Had Girard blathered like this, philosophizing, sermonizing, and threatening as a function of nerves? Christian rejected the very notion rather than attribute to his tormenter even a single human quality.
“Helene was my cousin,” the lady said, recapturing Christian’s attention, because nobody had referred to the late duchess by name in his presence. “The family was planning to offer you me, but then Greendale started sniffing around me, and Helene was by far the prettier, so she went for a duchess while I am merely a countess. Shouldn’t the tea be here by now?”
Now he did remember, the way the first few lines of a poem will reveal the entire stanza. He’d met this Lady Greendale. She had a prosaic, solidly English name he could not recall—perhaps she’d just told him what it was, perhaps he’d seen it somewhere—but she’d been an attendant at his wedding, his and Helene’s. Greendale’s gaze had followed his young wife with a kind of porcine possessiveness, and the wife had scurried about like a whipped dog.
Christian had pitied her at the time. He didn’t pity her now.
But then, he didn’t feel much of anything when his day was going well.
“Here’s the thing—” She was mercifully interrupted by the arrival of the tea tray. Except it wasn’t simply a tray, as Christian had ordered. The trolley bore a silver tea service, a plate of cakes, a plate of finger sandwiches, and a bowl of oranges, because his smiling, hopeful, attentive staff was determined to put flesh on him.
His digestion was determined to make it a slow process.
“Shall I pour?” She had her gloves off and was rearranging the tray before Christian could respond. “One wonders what ladies do in countries not obsessed with their tea. Do they make such a ritual out of coffee? You take yours plain, I believe. Helene told me that.”
What odd conversations women must have, comparing how their husbands took tea. “I no longer drink tea. I drink…nursery tea.”
A man whose every bodily function had been observed for months should not be embarrassed to admit such a thing, and Christian wasn’t. He was, rather, humiliated and enraged out of all proportion to the moment.
“Hence the hot water,” she said, peering at the silver pot that held same. “Do you intend to loom over me up there, or will you come down here beside me for some tea?”
He did not want to move a single inch.
She chattered, and her hands fluttered over the tea service like mating songbirds, making visual noise to go with her blathering. She cut up his peace, such as it was, and he already knew she would put demands on him he didn’t care to meet.
And yet, she hadn’
t smiled, hadn’t pretended grown dukes drank nursery tea every night. Whatever else was true about the lady, she had an honesty about her Christian approved of.
He sat on the sofa, several feet away from her.
She made no remark on his choice of seat.
“I suppose you’ve heard about that dreadful business involving Greendale. Had Mr. Stoneleigh not thought to produce the bottle of belladonna drops for the magistrate—the full, unopened bottle, still in its seal—you might have been spared my presence permanently. I can’t help but think old Greendale did it apurpose, gave me the drops just to put poison in my hands. Easterbrook probably sent them from the Continent all unsuspecting. Greendale wanted me buried with him, like some old pharaoh’s wife. Your tea.”
She’d made him a cup of hot water, sugar, and cream—nursery tea, served to small children to spare them tea’s stimulant effects.
“I’ll fix you a plate too, shall I?” A sandwich, then two, as well as two cakes were piled onto a plate by her busy, noisy hands.
“An orange will do.”
She looked at the full plate as if surprised to find all that food there, shrugged, and set it aside. “I’ll peel it for you, then. A lady has fingernails suited for the purpose.”
She set about stripping the peel from the hapless orange as effectively as she was stripping Christian’s nerves, though in truth, she wasn’t gawking, she wasn’t simpering, she wasn’t smiling. The lady had business to transact, and she’d dispatch it as efficiently as she dispatched the peel from the orange.
Those busy hands were graceful. Christian wanted to watch them work, wanted to watch them be feminine, competent, and pretty, because this too—the simple pleasure of a lady’s hands—had been denied him.
He took a sip of his nursery tea, finding it hot, sweet, soothing, and somehow unsatisfying. “Perhaps you’d be good enough to state the reason for your call, Lady Greendale?”
“We’re not to chat over tea, even? One forgets you’ve spent the last few years among soldiers, Your Grace, but then the officers on leave are usually such gallant fellows.” She focused on the orange, which was half-naked on the plate in her lap. “This is just perfectly ripe, and the scent is divine.”
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