“No,” Rosalinde whispered.
“How when you came, I had best control you so you wouldn’t ruin this engagement. That and how I better not let any romantic notions of a happy and loving marriage keep me from doing as I’d promised. He holds me responsible for both our behavior and now you do this. Do you know what he’ll do if he finds out?”
“He won’t find out.”
“Why? Because you fully trust this man who would destroy all my hopes with a wave of his hand if he could?” Celia asked, her tone flat and sarcastic.
Rosalinde flinched. She deserved her sister’s censure, but it cut her nonetheless.
“What can I do to earn your forgiveness?”
Celia stared at her, her face filled with disappointment and betrayal, but also love. Her sister still loved her, and Rosalinde clung to that.
“You said this man can be reasonable,” Celia whispered. “I’ve seen no evidence of that.”
Rosalinde thought of him. There were times when he could be so tender. Times when she could believe…
Well, she didn’t know what to believe.
“I think he could be.”
Celia didn’t look convinced, but she said, “Then perhaps that can be used to help us. I don’t want my future husband’s brother to despise me, to poison his family against me. See if you can talk to him, see if you can convince him that I am not so bad as he wants to believe. Perhaps you can even convince him to discuss his problems with me directly.”
Rosalinde nodded. “I can try, but…but that might mean I have to trust the man a little more. Give a little more.”
Celia stiffened, her aversion to that plan clear on her face. But she finally jerked her head up and down. “All right. If you believe that is best, I’ll agree to it.”
Rosalinde reached for her again, and this time Celia allowed her touch. She squeezed her sister’s fingers as she said, “I let you down. I know I did. But I vow to you, Celia, I will be sure never to do it again.”
Celia held her stare, but it was clear she didn’t fully believe Rosalinde. And that hurt the most. Her sister thought she was willing to sacrifice her for her own pleasure.
And Rosalinde was going to have to be certain she never did that again.
Chapter Twelve
Gray entered the parlor, intent on grabbing a few cakes leftover from tea and then heading to his chamber to prepare for the night. But as he moved to the sideboard, someone cleared their throat from the corner of the room.
He turned to find Rosalinde and Celia’s grandfather, Mr. Fitzgilbert, sitting in a chair, the paper he’d been reading now draped over his lap.
Gray stiffened. He liked this man even less than he liked Celia. And yet his conversation earlier with Rosalinde in the stable, when she’d said she and her sister were women under the rule of men…well, it rang in his ears.
This was an opportunity to find out more not only about Celia, but also about Rosalinde. To understand what she meant when she whispered those bitter, painful words.
“Good afternoon,” he said, bringing his plate to the chair opposite Fitzgilbert. “I seem to have missed tea with the others, but would you mind if I joined you?”
Fitzgilbert shrugged one shoulder as he folded his paper and set it aside. “Of course not. I admit I have been very interested in speaking to you, Mr. Danford.”
Gray met the older man’s stare evenly. “Have you now?”
“Indeed, I hear so many interesting stories about you from both gossip and your own family. I wonder if they can all be true.” Fitzgilbert smiled, but there was little realness to it. He was pandering.
“I am eager to hear what tales are being told,” Gray drawled.
Fitzgilbert crossed his legs. “They say that though you were raised a gentleman, you have become a man of business.”
“I have.”
He waited for the other man’s reaction. There were only two responses most in their sphere displayed when hearing Gray had decided not to sit on his ass and watch his inheritance dwindle to nothing, all while he pretended to still be rich.
Disgust…or interest.
Fitzgilbert was hard to read as he steepled his fingers and examined Gray. “An interesting thing, though I suppose you had little choice what with your family’s…issues.”
Gray stiffened. “Issues?” he repeated.
Fitzgilbert shrugged. “Come, we can be honest, can’t we? Discuss things plainly.”
“I’m not sure what it is you wish to discuss.”
“It’s no secret that your brother needs my granddaughter’s dowry.” Fitzgilbert reached out to grab his teacup from the table beside him. He took a slow sip before he said, “Some of the best marriages start that way.”
Gray nodded slowly. His dislike for this man was growing by the moment and yet he didn’t pull away. Fitzgilbert had opened a door that led to the answers Gray wanted.
“Some men wouldn’t see it that way. It seems to be in vogue at present to encourage love matches.”
Fitzgilbert wrinkled his nose in disgust. “What use is it to have children or grandchildren if one cannot increase one’s value through them? Encourage a love match? That is pure poppycock.”
“How did you further yourself through Rosalinde’s first marriage?” Gray prodded, trying to remain nonchalant.
Fitzgilbert’s eyes narrowed, his face twisting with cruelty. “That nothing she married? Laughable. Rosalinde has never brought me anything but heartache. She is an out of control, impertinent she-devil who lives to torment me when I was kind enough to take her in. I should have taken her to a foundling hospital. I’ve told her so a dozen times since I took her in.”
Gray flinched at the icy tone of his companion’s voice. At the cruelty in his eyes. This was what Rosalinde had endured her entire life. It was no wonder she was so protective of her sister.
“I can’t imagine you would say something like that to a child,” Gray said, now through clenched teeth.
“If it keeps a child in line, why wouldn’t I?” Fitzgilbert sputtered. “If I’d done the same with that mother of hers, we never—”
Gray straightened up as the other man cut himself off. He could see from the expression on his face that he’d gone too far, revealed too much.
“Your daughter?” he pushed.
Fitzgilbert sniffed. “Such as she was.”
Gray was stunned by the coldness. This man’s daughter had died, leaving him with two young children to raise, and he couldn’t even bother to look sad at that fact. He was truly a bastard.
But a bastard who had given Gray an insight. Rosalinde had run off with a man of no title or money and it had angered Fitzgilbert. More importantly, it also reminded him of his own daughter.
Gray had looked into the history of Celia’s parents in the past. It was vague, at best. Their mother had at some point gone to live with relatives, where she had married a gentleman who no one seemed to be able to identify. When she and her husband died, Fitzgilbert had come to collect his grandchildren. But it had always been curious to Gray that their grandfather had insisted they go by his last name rather than that of their father.
Who had that man been? And why did Rosalinde and Celia’s mother inspire such hatred in her own father?
More to the point, could the answers to those questions be Celia’s undoing? If the scandal was big enough, it was possible straight-laced Stenfax would shy away from it.
Gray’s investigator was already working on the answers to those exact questions, but now more than ever he felt this might be the path. He’d have the results of their investigations in a couple of days, when he expected his reports to be brought in by friends who were attending the wedding.
“It’s interesting you have so many questions about my family’s past,” Fitzgilbert said, drawing Gray’s attention back to him. “After all, you have not exactly made it a secret that you don’t approve of Celia and Stenfax’s match.”
Gray arched a brow. So now they were to the heart of it. “Celia told you this?”
“She was blubbering about it to her sister and I overheard. Though it wasn’t so hard to believe. Anyone with eyes in their heads can see how you glare at her.”
“And you think I’ve judged her too harshly?” Gray asked, preparing for a defense of Celia from this man, just as he’d received defenses of her character from Rosalinde.
Instead Fitzgilbert stared at him blankly. “I don’t give a damn how you judge her. She’s hardly worth considering, in truth. But what is worth considering is that your brother has already agreed to this union, sir. We have signed papers and arranged for monies to be exchanged. Monies that your family so desperately needs.”
Gray drew back. “This is beginning to sound like a threat, Mr. Fitzgilbert.”
“You may take it however you would like to take it.” Fitzgilbert said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “It matters little to me. What may matter on a larger scale is how your family will survive if this money was taken away.”
Gray pushed to his feet. “I think I’ve heard enough.”
“How did your family lose their money in the first place?” Fitzgilbert asked, ignoring the warning in Gray’s tone and posture. He even smiled up at him in the face of it.
“You had best watch yourself, sir,” Gray growled.
“No.” Fitzgilbert pointed a finger at him, jabbing it like it was a knife. “You best watch yourself, Mr Danford. After all, your brother has as much to lose as I do if this marriage doesn’t go through.”
“My brother would find another match, I assure you.”
“With two broken engagements in just two years? Society could be made to see that in a very unkind light.” Fitzgilbert leaned back, a smug smile across his round face. “I say this only to make you remember your place as quickly as I recall my own.”
“I know exactly what my place is,” Gray said as he turned and walked away.
He stormed out of the room with Fitzgilbert’s chuckle ringing in his ears. Rage bubbled up in him. Rage that this man would threaten his family, but also rage that he could treat his own granddaughters with such distain and disregard. It made everything Rosalinde did make so much more sense.
And it made him wish he could help her, even as he fought to destroy the one thing she wanted most. He only knew he couldn’t have both the things he wanted. At some point he’d have to choose. And someone he cared for would lose.
Gray strode down the hall from the backstairs. He hadn’t wanted to see anyone in his current mindset and so had gone the back route to the main floor. His mind still roiled with thoughts of his encounter with Fitzgilbert. The man’s cruelty and his threats were hardly to be born.
And yet they would have to be, for at least a little longer. Fitzgilbert would be at the supper table in an hour, smugly overseeing this engagement that suited his own purposes.
Which drove Gray even harder to explore the past of Rosalinde and Celia’s mother and see if he could find—
The thought in his head was cut off as he passed by the closed door to the music room. Inside, he could hear someone playing the pianoforte. It was a mournful song, but played impeccably. He was drawn to the sound and leaned toward the door to listen to it longer. But just as the notes wrapped around him, sank into him, there was a crashing, discordant sound of fingers mashing on keys.
He shoved the door open and found that the mysterious player of the music was none other than Rosalinde. And now she sat, head hung over the keys, her shoulders shaking. She obviously had not noticed his entry, his intrusion on her private heartbreak.
He had two options on how to proceed. He could quietly shut the door and never tell her that he’d seen her in such a state—or he could go inside and comfort her.
He was already moving into the room. It was too late to do anything else but whisper, “Rosalinde?”
She jumped at the sound of his voice and staggered to her feet to face him. She swiped at the tears which clung to her cheeks, and refused to meet his eyes.
“G-Gray,” she stammered, her voice thick with tears. “I didn’t hear you there.”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a handkerchief. He held it out wordlessly. She hesitated, but then took it, her fingers brushing over the monogram his sister had stitched on the cloth some Christmas years ago.
“Thank you,” Rosalinde whispered before she turned away to gather her composure and blow her nose. “I’ll have it washed and return it,” she said as she tucked the handkerchief into her pocket.
“Come for a walk with me,” Gray said, uncertain why those words had burst from his lips. “In the garden.”
Rosalinde wrinkled her brow in confusion. “At dusk, in the cold?”
He nodded. “The night air will do us both some good. As long as you won’t be bothered by the scenery.”
She let out a laugh that was pained. “The garden is brown and dead now. That rather fits my soul at present.”
He moved on her, unable to stop himself. “You are the most alive thing I’ve ever known, Rosalinde.”
She blinked at this compliment and he could see her hesitation. He supposed he’d earned that. After all, he hadn’t been trustworthy, at least not in her eyes. She had to doubt his motives now. Motives he could hardly define they were so twisted in his own mind.
“Please,” he said.
She nodded slowly. “All right.”
He took her arm, guiding her to the foyer where he called for their coats to be brought. He watched as Stenfax’s butler, Taylor, assisted her with the same hooded red cloak she’d been wearing the night she entered the inn. Once he had left them, Gray turned toward her to button her jacket slowly. In silence, she watched every movement of his hands.
Finally, he took her hand and they went down to a parlor with an exit to the terrace and the garden down the stairs below. She was silent the entire time, just watching until they stepped into the cold maze of the dead garden.
“Why are you being so kind to me, Gray?” she whispered at last. “Is this an angle to take me to your bed again?”
He flinched at her cold assessment of his intentions. “When it comes to you, I am always thinking about having you in my bed,” he admitted. “But taking you for a walk tonight has nothing to do with that.” She gave him a look, and he smiled despite himself. “Very well, it has little to do with that.”
“Then why?” she pressed.
“I heard you playing the pianoforte and it drew me in,” he admitted. “I saw you weep and it brought out a desire to comfort you.”
She pursed her lips. “And if there is no comfort to be offered?”
He frowned at the idea that she could not be helped. It made him want to rip the world apart to find a way. Instead, he said, “Then perhaps a few moments to forget.”
“And how do you suggest that I forget?”
“We’ll talk about something else,” he said, guiding them forward once more. “You can tell me which of these dead flowers is your favorite.”
She laughed, and the sound warmed him to his center. He could spend a lifetime making this woman laugh. Feeling the beauty of it wrap around him tighter and tighter until there was room for nothing else but the pleasure she brought.
He shook those feelings away. They served no purpose in heaven or on earth.
“I would rather talk about you,” she said.
He looked at her from the corner of his eye. “Me?”
“Yes. You and I have gone about our entire acquaintance backward. We made love before we knew each other’s name, we hated each other before we knew the other. It seems time now that we truly meet.”
He shifted with discomfort at the idea that she wished to know him better. Just standing next to her made him feel vulnerable. Giving her more was…it was like arming an enemy with information on how best to destroy.
“And what about what I want to know about you?�
� he asked.
She shrugged. “You know I was married before, you know my grandfather raised me and my sister after our mother’s death—you know a great deal. And all I know is that you’re Stenfax’s younger brother and you have some kind of business to the north.”
“When you put it that way, it does sound unfair,” he conceded slowly.
“You and your brother seem as close as Celia and I…” She trailed off, and there was a twisting sense of pain to her tone. She swallowed and said, “You are lucky to have such a tight-knit family.”
He let his gaze slide away as he considered her statement. The truth about his family wasn’t something he shared. Hell, he hardly spoke of it with Felicity and Lucien. And yet he found himself longing to tell Rosalinde more. He tried to tell himself it was only to lower her guard. But it was more than that.
“We look close,” he admitted. “Felicity and Lucien and I are close, indeed. But our family isn’t as intact and wonderful as perhaps you picture it.”
She stopped in the path and turned toward him slightly. “No?”
“My father was a hard man. With vices and arrogance that did nothing to help refill our coffers. Oh, there were times he could be kind, at least to others, but with his family he was more often distant. He saw little value in his children except for the one who would take his place: Lucien.”
He heard the pain in his voice, the pain he so rarely allowed and never addressed. Rosalinde took his hand and squeezed, and it was like it opened the gate to feel everything he normally repressed. The agony spread open his chest and exposed his heart to the cold air.
He clung to her hand, holding it too tightly until the emotion faded.
“You had no relationship with him?” she asked.
He shrugged, able to pretend that truth had no meaning again. “Not unless I could stand behind Lucien and wait for whatever scraps the old man had left to give. Which was little.”
An Affair in Winter (Seasons Book 1) Page 11