by Mary Balogh
“Ricky was a child?” she asked.
“He is a few years younger than I am,” he said. “But his mind is that of a child. When I went to Wes’s house to get work, it was Ricky who invited me inside for a bowl of Hilda’s soup to make me feel better. Then he showed me his loft and decided it was large enough for the two of us. Hilda put up a curtain to divide the space in two.”
“And that is where you lived for four years,” she said.
“And for a couple of months each year even now,” he said. “The Earl of Brandon becomes Juss Wiley, stone hewer, twice a year and is happy again.”
He gazed at her, his eyes and his whole face deliberately blank. He had not told anyone else these things.
“You love them,” she said.
“Yes,” he said curtly. “There were no deductions from my wages, by the way, for room and board.”
“And I suppose,” she said, “you did not charge for the reading and writing lessons or for the use of your horse.”
“It did not occur to me,” he said. “Perhaps I ought to send a bill.”
She had a way of looking. It was not exactly a smile. It was a … warmth. As though she smiled inside but chose to keep most of it to herself. But some spilled over into her eyes and onto her face nonetheless. She was looking that way at him now.
“What?” he said.
“I bet his bill would be larger,” she said.
“Undoubtedly,” he said. “Wes is as hard as nails. Or as a boulder. But yes, I love him.”
“And this,” she said, “is why you are so … large?” She seemed to have taken herself by surprise with her question. Even in the shadowed light of the cave he could see that color had flooded her cheeks.
He opened his hands and looked at his palms. There were still calluses at the base of each finger. His badges of honor. And the hands themselves were larger than they had once been. No longer the hands of a gentleman. He closed his fingers into his palms.
“I am sorry,” she said. “It was not intended as an insult. You looked very … frightening the first time I saw you. It did not help, I suppose, that I was sitting on the riverbank and you were on horseback and Captain looked as though he was coming for my throat.”
Captain woofed.
“You ought not to have been there alone,” Justin said.
“Now you sound like my aunt,” she told him.
“Not your brother?” he asked her. “Did he not scold you?”
“I did not tell him,” she said. “He would have scolded, and I would have been forced to quarrel with him and accuse him of sounding like our aunt.”
“The one who raised you,” he said. “What is she like? Apart from the fact that she did not approve of dogs as pets.”
“She was very strict,” she said. “Very proper. Very pious. Very a lot of upright, moral things. She has a strong sense of what is right and how a house should be run and how all the people in it ought to behave, both family and servants. She ruled my uncle and my two cousins and Bertrand and me. Bert was brought up to be a gentleman. I was raised to be a lady. We were raised to value church and prayer and morality. We were never told that our father was a rake and a ne’er-do-well. We were taught to respect him. But whenever he came to visit, he felt his sister-in-law’s disapproval and agreed with her unspoken condemnation. He has told us so since then. He thought we were in the best possible place with the best possible people, and he never stayed for longer than a few days at a time. He did not want to contaminate us with his presence. It did not help that we were taught to be quiet except when spoken to. We stayed quiet when we were with him, waiting for him to speak with us, but he never spoke except to ask a few stilted questions that could be answered with a monosyllable. Our father believed we hated him and wanted him to go away. So he went.”
“I am sorry,” he said.
“You need not be,” she told him. “We did have an excellent upbringing. And we were loved, as I believe I told you before. Strict discipline does not necessarily preclude love, you know.”
“But you longed for your father,” he said. It had shrieked through every word of her account of her childhood. Or perhaps more through the look on her face and the tone of her voice than through her actual words. She and her brother had been reconciled with him, but much damage had been done them anyway.
“I am so thankful,” she said, “that he did not die before we had a chance to get to know him properly, to understand him and why he behaved as he did, to be fully … restored to him.”
He patted his dog’s head and gazed at her. Captain turned his head to pant in his face. His breath was not exactly sweet.
He watched Lady Estelle swallow. “I ought not to have said that,” she said. “It was insensitive. You were not as fortunate as we were.”
“My father was ailing for several months before his death,” he said. “I do not believe he ever asked for me or tried to send word to me.”
“Would there have been any way for him to contact you?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“How did you hear of his passing, then?” she asked.
“My aunt and uncle knew where to send letters,” he said. “Though it was often weeks or months before I got them.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Sharpe?” she said.
He nodded. “They wrote me of his death.”
She clasped her arms about her legs and lowered her head until her forehead touched her knees. “Is that where the worst of your pain is?” she asked him.
It was not perfectly clear what she meant by that. But he understood her to mean the fact that his father had apparently stuck by the decision he had made that day when he banished his only son. Even when he was dying he had stuck by it. There had been no olive branch, no offer of reconciliation.
It was a pain so deep that he never, ever thought of it. It would, he knew, be unbearable if he allowed it to intrude upon his conscious mind and take up residence there.
“You are mistaken, Lady Estelle,” he said. “That was all a very long time ago. There is no pain.” He set his head back against the stone wall. The sound of the waterfall somehow sealed them in here as though the rest of the world no longer existed. “I suppose I am neglecting my guests. Is it teatime? Past teatime?”
“I have no idea,” she said, lifting her head. “But I believe everyone can fend for themselves. And Maria is probably back at the house to see to it that no one starves.”
He got to his feet anyway, careful not to straighten up and bang his head on the low rocks above it. He held out both hands to help her up. She looked at them before setting her own in them. Hers were slim, long-fingered, smooth-skinned. A lady’s hands, half lost in his own. Hands that aroused his masculine protective instincts, though she did not strike him as the sort of woman who craved or even welcomed male protection. She was no one’s typical image of a helpless female. Generalizations were useless things anyway. Not many people fit into them once one scratched the outer surface they presented to the world and took a good look at the person within.
She raised her eyes to his, her eyebrows slightly arched upward, as though to ask him why he was holding her hands if he was not intending to help her get to her feet. Why indeed? But their faces were suddenly uncomfortably close.
“You did not tell me if I was forgiven,” he said. “For kissing you,” he added when her brows rose a little higher.
“Did I not?” she said. “You were. You are.”
“I regret,” he said, “that I was so gauche. And so impetuous. Such a blockhead. I went about it all wrong.”
“The kiss?” Her voice was almost a whisper.
“That too,” he said. “But I was referring to my proposal of marriage. I have always despised bended knee and rosebuds and poetic speeches and hand over heart. But there is surely a large range of possible behaviors between that and ‘I wish you would marry me.’ I believe those were my very words, or something similar. I am glad you had the good sense to refuse me.”
/>
“Are you?” she said. “Then we are in perfect agreement.” But there was a thread of amusement in her voice.
“Watch your head.” He drew her to her feet and released his hold on her hands. Captain was on his feet too, eager to return to the outdoors.
“The blanket and cushions?” she said as he stepped out and turned to offer her a hand back down to the level bank beside the bridge.
“I will put them away later,” he told her.
“Why not now?” she asked, and bent to pick up two cushions after tying the ribbons of her bonnet and linking them over her arm.
They put everything away neatly inside the boathouse. After Justin shut the door securely behind them, he turned and saw Estelle standing a few feet away, between him and the bridge, in full sunlight. Her pale blue dress was the exact color of the sky. She was looking directly at him, that inner smile lighting her face. And … oh, God.
He took a step closer.
“I want you,” he said.
Fourteen
She ought to have turned and run without stopping— over the bridge and all the way back to the house. There she ought to have grabbed Bertrand, dragged him up to the east wing to pack their bags, and then dashed down to the stables with him, retrieved their carriage, and sprung the horses all the way home to Elm Court.
That is what she ought to have done.
Instead she stood her ground. And swallowed. And frowned. And dropped her bonnet to the grass.
For she wanted him too. Though she did not say so out loud.
He was searching her eyes with his own. “Is it possible to pretend the summerhouse debacle did not happen?” he asked her.
“The proposal with all your very sensible reasons for making it?” she said. “My refusal in all its starkness? The kiss that followed despite it all?”
“No,” he said. “I did not suppose it could be done.”
“But perhaps it is possible to put it behind us,” she said. “To dismiss it for the idiocy it was.”
“It was idiotic,” he said. “That proposal.”
“It was,” she agreed. “So was my response.”
“You could not think of anything whatsoever that would induce you even to consider marrying me?” he said.
“I believe those were my exact words, or close enough,” she said.
“It was idiocy?” He raised his eyebrows.
“Yes,” she said.
“And the kiss?” he said. “Idiocy?”
Idiocy under the circumstances, yes. She shrugged.
And he took one more step closer, set his large hands on either side of her waist, and drew her forward until she was pressed to him all the way from her bosom to her knees. She looked into his eyes the whole time and saw depth there, not just the usual hard blankness. There was uncertainty too, perhaps. Yearning, maybe. Desire, definitely. She raised her hands and set them on his shoulders. And was shot through with such a charge of lust that she almost lost control of her knees. At least, she assumed it was lust. She had never before felt anything quite like it. It was more than just desire.
And he kissed her.
His lips were parted, and soon hers were too, and he ravaged her mouth with his tongue. She was no idle spectator while he did it. She sucked his tongue deeper, made inarticulate noises when he stroked the tip of it over the roof of her mouth, pressed herself closer to him, twined one arm about his neck, and pushed the fingers of the other hand into his hair. One of his hands spread over her upper back while the other went lower and pressed her to him. She could feel the hardness of his desire through the layers of their clothing, and it half frightened, half excited her.
He was so terribly large. The whole of him. All breadth of shoulders and chest, all hard muscles and masculinity. Powerful arms, large hands, firm thighs. And he smelled enticingly musky with a cologne her brother did not use, or any other man she had ever been close to.
Both hands were now below her waist and pressing her to him. His head had moved back from hers and they were gazing into each other’s eyes again.
“Estelle,” he murmured.
“Lord Brandon, I—”
“Say my name,” he said softly. “Let me hear you say it.”
“Justin,” she said, and watched him inhale slowly.
“You agreed to come here for two weeks,” he said. “A little more than a week remains. At the end of your stay I will make a new offer. In quite different words. Unless, that is, you stop me before I can even launch into speech. It is my hope that by then your answer will have changed.”
“You intend to court me?” she said.
“One of the genteel arts,” he said. “I never learned how it is done. But I hope to change your mind … Estelle. How that will happen, I do not know. I must think of a way.”
“Why?” she asked. He was still holding her to him. She still had her arms twined about his neck. A thick, powerful neck. He had the body— and the hands— of a laborer, she realized. And she lusted after him. She would not even pretend to herself that she did not.
“I want you,” he said again, returning his hands to either side of her waist. “But I know I cannot have you outside of matrimony. And there. I have opened my mouth and stuck a large foot inside it again. I have given the impression that I would marry you for sex alone— which, by the way, I did not even mention in the summerhouse. I do indeed want you. But I also want you. And there is a difference, the one purely physical, the other more … But I am stuck for a sentence ender.”
“Emotional?” she suggested.
He considered. “Is that what I mean?” he asked her.
In her case the wanting was entirely physical. It could not possibly be anything else. She had believed him when he denied stealing his stepmother’s jewelry. But he had done something. And it had been so dreadful that his father, who had loved him dearly and with whom he had always been close, had banished him for life. There was, surely, only one possibility. And it was just as bad as theft. No, it was worse.
She could not want such a man in any but the most base physical way. She certainly could not marry him.
He had spent four years living and working with people he loved as dearly as he loved his own family members. He still spent time each year with them. That cottage by the stone quarry and the coarse laborer with his woman and his simpleminded brother were from a world that was alien to her. Not inferior, just … different. That made him different. How could she ever be close to him when half his life was lived in a world so different from her own that it might as well be a distant planet?
He kept vast swaths of himself to himself and presented a granite exterior to the world— at least to her part of the world. When she married, it would have to be to a man who welcomed her with open warmth into the very depths of his being, just as she would welcome him into the depths of hers. That could never happen with this man. His years away from home and the reason he had been sent away had deeply damaged him. She could neither mend nor heal him. No one could. His father had died and stranded him in a life of guilt and probable regret. She could not, would not, take that on.
She slid her hands down to his shoulders.
“I believe it would be best for you, Lord Brandon,” she said, “if you abandoned your … courtship now. For my answer at the end of next week if you asked the question again would surely be the same as it was the last time. I want a happy, light-filled marriage when the time comes. I— Ah, pardon me. That sounded like an insult and that is not what I intended. But … I feel no joy at the prospect of being your countess.”
“Then it is a good thing you are not being asked to be my countess,” he said, releasing his hold on her and bending to pick up her bonnet and hand it to her after brushing off a few blades of grass. “Not yet, anyway. Perhaps over the next week I can cause you to feel a little more joyful at the thought. No. A little would not suffice, would it? I shall see if I can fill you to the brim with light and joy at the idea of marrying me.”
; And suddenly she wanted to weep. The light had gone from his life when his mother died, he had once told her, but he had remained close to his father, who sounded like a kind, honorable man from what she had heard of him. He had been planning a summer holiday in Cornwall with his son just before he had married his second wife instead. Had joy deserted Justin forever after he had committed some heinous sin at the age of twenty-two and broken his father’s heart? Was he grasping for a return of it now— with her?
It could not be done.
She put on her bonnet and tied the ribbons beneath her chin before turning without another word. Captain was lying at the bend in the middle of the bridge, his head up, watching them. He scrambled to his feet, waited for her to come up to him and run a hand over his huge head, and then went trotting off ahead of her.
Estelle made her way back to the house. The Earl of Brandon fell into step at her side but did not offer his arm. Or any conversation. They walked beside the river in silence, and she wondered if despite herself she was in love with him.
Justin settled Captain in the stables and paused to have a chat with a few of the cousins who had returned from a ride half an hour or so before and were gathered at the rail of the paddock, watching one of the grooms put a new horse through its paces. On his return to the house he went to the library to check the day’s mail.
The library, normally a quiet haven, had been invaded. His uncle Rowan was in there facing one of the bookcases, his nose in a book he had drawn from one of the shelves. Nigel Dickson was standing not far from him, a sheet of paper in his hand. Viscount Watley was sitting in one of the leather chairs by the fireplace, reading. Angela Ormsbury, Aunt Felicity’s daughter, sat on the companion chair at the other side of the fireplace, frowning down at the book she held, though it was not clear if she frowned because she was deeply absorbed or because she disapproved of what she was reading.