The idea of taking out one of his shirt studs a mere few feet away from her was enough to make Sydney flush with some strange combination of embarrassment and want. So he shoved up his coat sleeve and removed a cuff link. When he placed it in the center of the table, he glanced up at her and saw that her gaze was fixed on the exposed triangle of skin on his wrist. As he watched her, she licked her lips. Sydney sucked in a breath.
“And here I thought you were an honest man,” she said with mock sadness. “I said you could wager a shirt stud.” She cast a glance at his chest. “Not a cuff link. I get to pick your next wager.”
“Is that so?”
For an answer, she leaned forward to take the cuff links and slowly, deliberately dropped them into the bodice of her gown. “What would you have me wager?”
“Perhaps the ante you’ve stolen from me,” he managed, keeping his eyes resolutely on her face.
“No,” she said, shaking her head and delicately patting her bodice. “That’s now the bank.”
“You’re making these rules up.”
“These are Italian rules. You wouldn’t know them.” She said this so calmly, only a flicker of an eyebrow to let him know she was jesting.
“I’ve utterly underestimated you,” he said.
“I know,” she responded promptly. “Men do that.” She took the deck of cards and shuffled them. “It’s just like Elizabeth of York. I don’t call it underestimating to think too highly of a woman’s character to think her above murder and cheating.”
They played another hand, using farthings gathered from both their coin purses as the stakes. She won easily.
“If I didn’t already regret having lived my life in such a way that I’m no longer allowed to touch you, the way you look right now would have done the job,” he murmured. “Not only the gown,” he clarified. “But the way you look when you’re winning.”
She was silent for a few seconds, and he thought he might have gone too far. Then she fanned out her cards in front of her, facedown. “Tell me more.”
He let out a long breath, glad for a chance to properly apologize. “One of the stupider things I’ve done in my life was to assume the worst of you that first day you came to Pelham Hall. I can think of a dozen ways I could have put you at ease, and I utterly failed as a friend by not doing so. And then I compounded that by insulting you. Under the circumstances it’s remarkable that you’ll still talk to me at all. I can only assume that you do this so that Lex isn’t left with nobody but me as company, which is very admirable of you.”
She stared at him, her gray eyes wide. “I’ll disregard the second half of that, because it’s too stupid to deserve a reply. I meant tell me more about how you wish you could touch me.”
He could do that. He could do that for hours. He scrubbed a hand along the back of his neck. “When we were together,” he whispered, “I wish I had taken more time. I wish I had seen all of you, touched all of you, tasted all of you. And I didn’t, because I’m an idiot, and that’s something I’m going to be reminded of every time I see you.”
“You’re assuming you won’t get another chance,” she said, doing something with the cards and helping herself to some more of Sydney’s farthings.
Sydney dropped his cards and she tutted over his lack of dexterity, but smiled at him over the top of the cards she had fanned out in her hand.
“You were serious,” she said. “You’re truly bad at cards.” For reasons she chose not to fully examine, his total lack of competence at something as basic as vingt-et-un endeared him to her. It was like finding a three-legged dog or a cat with one ear: one had to look after it. “You have no sense of strategy.” The utter guilelessness of this man both charmed Amelia and made her want to wrap him in a blanket and keep him safe. “I dare say that’s why you find it such a trial to talk with the railway backers,” she said. “They’re trying to negotiate with you, and you’re telling them what your best cards are.” She returned the various hairpins and cuff links that had served as stakes.
He frowned. “My brother used to handle that sort of thing. And now I make do the best I can, which I’m afraid isn’t very good at all.”
She knew the way guilt and grief could tangle together. There was nothing she could do about that. “Why railways?” she asked.
It took Sydney a moment to follow her meaning. “Why do I build railways? I want to make it easier for things and people to move around. Change is coming and we need to be ready for it. If we don’t get the railways laid properly now, we’ll be in a mad rush in a few years.”
“Why?” she persisted.
“Look.” He swept the cards aside and shook his remaining coins onto the table. “Here’s Portsmouth. Here’s Liverpool. Manchester.” He dropped a farthing piece in the middle. “That’s us.” And now a crown. “There’s France.” He hesitated a moment, then took out a guinea. “Here’s New York. Right now, in order to get a round of cheese from eastern France to here, it has to travel over bad roads, good roads, and canals before being loaded on a ship that sails to Liverpool. Then it has to travel overland to Manchester, and then from there to a cheesemonger in Bakewell.”
“There are no French cheeses to be had in Bakewell,” she pointed out. “Not for love or money.”
“But there would be if the roads were good, the ships faster, and the railways ever got built.”
“Seems a lot of bother just for cheese.”
He rested his forearms on the table, his head inches from hers. “Imagine that instead of cheese, it’s people that we’re moving about.” He gestured at their makeshift map. “Where are your mother and sisters? London?” He placed a penny on London. “And you’ve mentioned a brother, I believe?”
“Two brothers. Kent and Shropshire, respectively.”
He placed coins accordingly. “Anyone else?”
“A pair of friends not far from Worksop,” she said. He placed a coin a few miles to the east of where they were, near to Weybourne Priory, where Verity and Ash lived when they weren’t in London.
They both regarded the map. She knew the minute he saw the pattern, because his eyebrows rose and he looked hard at her, his dark eyes seeing things he wasn’t meant to. “You took a house in a place that was almost on the way to two of these places. Your brother”—he indicated Shropshire—“and friend”—he indicated Worksop—“are less than a day traveling post. And the roads from here to London are serviceable. You deliberately situated yourself where you’d be far enough away to be private, but not so far as to be remote. You know the value of roads, Amelia. Your people have the money to come see you and the education to write you letters. Not everybody has that.”
“And your railways would change that?”
“One day. That’s why it matters. The better we get at moving things about, the more we bridge the gap between people. Think of it. People will travel from one end of the nation to the other without stopping at inns. Friends will think nothing of a distance of hundreds of miles. Everything you think you know will change.”
She had meant to parlay his words into something intelligent he could say to investors or parliamentarians. But instead she was dazzled by this image of a future where she could just see people when she wanted and then promptly go home when she was done. “Why does it matter to you?” she asked. “To you in particular?”
“I’ve always been a tinkerer,” he said. “My brother and I built our first engine when I was sixteen. We got work with an engineering firm and then, a few years ago, we started our own firm. That’s how we came here. We were surveying the route for a potential tramway. One afternoon, as we were quarreling over whether the grade of an incline was too steep to work with, we came across Lex’s sister. She had turned her ankle, Andrew very gallantly carried her home, and within two months they were married. They said it was love at first sight, which I thought was the silliest rubbish until—” He broke off and looked at her, startled. For an instant she thought he’d try to backtrack, try to pretend he had
n’t suggested what she thought he had. But instead he let out a chagrined laugh. “Well, I suppose that wherever he is now, he’s feeling properly smug.”
“So,” she said, her mind reeling, “you build railways because you enjoy creating things?”
He spun a coin. “I’m an engineer because I like solving problems and making things work. But I build railways—or, God help me, I’m trying to—because I, well, I suppose that if people could move about more easily then I’d be less alone.” He swallowed. “Which I suppose is very silly because people would still have to actually want to see me.”
She was not going to cry. She had too much practice masking her feelings to shed a spontaneous tear. But Sydney looked like he could do with some air. “Step outside with me?” she asked, rising to her feet.
“Are you all right?” Sydney asked as he followed her onto the terrace.
“Yes, but you aren’t. How thick is your head not to understand that you have friends? Do you not see that the duke thinks the world of you?”
“That’s not friendship. It’s just lingering fondness for a former—” He broke off, eyes wide.
Amelia had the distinct impression that Sydney was not about to finish that sentence with brother-in-law. Well, not for nothing had she been schooled in the art of putting people at their ease. “The world is filled with former acquaintances and former lovers and all manner of people one used to know. I spent a season kissing a French poetess at every opportunity, and if today she summoned me across the country I certainly wouldn’t go.” There. She had put that out in the open, established equal footing, and done it in two concise sentences. This, she felt certain, was the best use she had ever found for her mother’s teachings.
He had his back against the stone wall of the terrace. As she spoke, she walked towards him, until now they were almost standing chest-to-chest. She traced a finger down the length of his sleeve, appreciating the bulk of his arm, even beneath the wool of his coat. Just when she was wondering if she had misjudged the situation, he put a hand on her hip, letting out a sigh as if the contact came as a relief to him.
“I’ve wanted to touch you too,” she said. “It’s like my body forgot we were quarreling.”
“Can we agree that it was only a quarrel, Amelia? Not a rupture?”
Her instinct was to reassure him that everything was fine, to deny to both him and herself that she felt anything at all. “I hope so,” she answered instead. But what did it mean if they really did put the past two weeks behind them? Where did that leave them? Their time together had been almost anonymous, entirely free of cares and responsibilities, and she didn’t think they could go back to that. Now they knew one another’s weaknesses. They knew one another, full stop, and continuing would bring about something irrevocable. She closed her eyes and remembered that this was how she could expand her world from the inside.
“We’re quite in the shadows,” she said conversationally.
The corner of his mouth turned up in that lopsided smile that she was starting to regard as her favorite expression in the world. “I’m beginning to think you just like kissing strange men out of doors,” he murmured, then bent his head. He brushed his lips across hers, but even at that slight touch, she knew they had done something new and different, and there was no going back. What had come before, out on the hills and in the open, had been lovely and fine, but it hadn’t been real. Or maybe it had been real, but it had been something they could deny, something they could walk away from. They nearly had, come to that. But this, this was new. Sydney saw her now, he saw the real her. She wasn’t invisible to him, and that was terrifying.
She took a moment to relish the feel of his strong arms wrapped around her, solid and secure. Then she pressed up onto her toes and kissed him again, deeper and with intent. He groaned and hauled her even closer. This must be what it was like to dive into a lake from a great height, or to jump fences on a horse. Her heart was racing and every inch of her skin felt alive with exhilaration. One hand on his shoulder, she pressed her other palm into the stone wall behind him. Remembering the last time they had kissed, that time she with the wall at her back and Sydney at her chest, she pressed her hips into him and felt the hard length of him against her belly. His grip on her waist tightened. And then, slowly, he gentled his kiss and put a little distance between them. He eased her down from that precipice, stroking her back and whispering nonsense until the desire she felt for him wasn’t an all-consuming thing. What was left was a tenderness, a warmth, that was somehow even more forceful. And when she looked up at him, she saw him gazing down at her with a dazed and adoring expression that she knew mirrored her own.
“We could have gone upstairs,” Amelia said, leaning against the wall beside him. The only place they touched was where their hands clasped, but he could still feel the echoes of her hands, her lips. “There seem to be quite a few unoccupied bedrooms.”
Sydney snorted. “They’re filled with hedgehogs and spiders. Which you probably find very titillating, what with your mania for doing lewd things in the great outdoors.” He could not believe he was jesting about this. It was a serious matter, the fact that he was on the verge of giving his heart away to this woman, but he couldn’t stop smiling.
“You know, Sydney, I intend to collect on that deflowering you owe me. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.”
He made a noise that was definitely not a whimper, then cleared his throat. “No worries. I’m a man of my word.”
“What will you do?” she asked. “That you didn’t do already, I mean.”
He was about to explain that he’d be sure not to hurt her, instead of throwing her against walls like some kind of brute, but then he turned his head and saw the glint in her eye and understood what she was really asking. She wanted to play one of her games of make-believe. He swallowed. “First, I’d kiss you. Very softly.”
“No tongue?” she asked in a tone of academic curiosity.
“No tongue,” he affirmed somberly. “Only delicate brushes of my lips over yours.”
“Because I’d be utterly inexperienced and you wouldn’t want to shock me.”
“If you’re going to take issue with how I’d pretend to deflower you, why don’t you take the reins? If you’re such an expert at deflowerings,” he said in mock annoyance.
“Fine. You’d very tentatively touch my breasts.” She mimicked the action herself, bringing pale hands to cover the green silk of her bodice. “But I’d like it and you’d be able to tell, so you’d begin to unfasten my dress.”
“Would I? I work fast.”
“In this scenario, I’m impatient, so you’d better.” She was still caressing her breast, and he didn’t even bother to pretend that he wasn’t watching intently. She had on a corset and likely a couple layers of petticoats and a chemise, but he imagined that she was focusing her attention on her hardened nipples.
“Then what do I do?” His voice was hoarse.
“You slide my gown down my shoulders just enough to lick—”
“Stop,” he groaned. “I can’t take it.” He was hard in his trousers and if he ever wanted to go back inside he needed to get some control over himself. “Look, I’d take your gown off and, well, I’d fold it and put it someplace safe because it looks expensive.” God help him, had ever a man been less skilled at this. He tried again. “Then I’d get my mouth all over you. And I’d be ready to die from the need, but I wouldn’t try to make love to you until you were ready. I’d go slow and make sure I didn’t hurt you. I’d make sure you liked it. Because I care an awful lot about you and I can’t pretend otherwise, Amelia.” She looked up at him with an unreadable expression, probably because this was probably the least successful bedroom talk anyone had ever attempted.
“I wouldn’t undo that first time together, not for anything,” she said after staring at him for a moment. “Because it was lovely and you were lovely.” She squeezed his hand. “And we were lovely together.”
He swallowed. “What are we do
ing here, Amelia? I don’t think this is a passing fancy for either of us.”
“I don’t think you’ve had a passing fancy even once in your life, Sydney Goddard. And no, it’s not that for me either.”
Sydney ought to be pleased to hear that, surely. Instead his heart raced, his stomach turned—he was terrified. He had an insane urge to tell her that she must be mistaken, to present her with all manner of compelling arguments that she was not particularly fond of him after all. He had barely enough sense not to do so. “What does this mean?” he asked. “In any other circumstance I’d have already asked you to marry me.” Knowing her as he did, he couldn’t even consider asking her to come with him to a city that could be as disastrous to her as London had been. “But, I ought to tell you, the only reason I’ve been able to spend this much time away from Manchester is that I haven’t yet been appointed head engineer. Once construction starts, I’ll be lucky if I can get away for more than a day at a time.”
“I see,” she said slowly. “I understand if you want to keep your distance when you return. In the interest of avoiding heartbreak.”
He made a sound that was in between a cough and a laugh. “No, Amelia, that’s not what I meant. I haven’t the faintest interest in keeping my distance. As for heartbreak, I think we’ve already done that.” He lifted her knuckles to his mouth and kissed them. “At least I have. What I mean is that if we try to mend this”—oh, God help him, he was about to launch into an extended engineering metaphor—“we need to make sure it’s, um, structurally sound. Better than before. No gaps in knowledge or intent.”
“Structurally sound,” she repeated, her eyes laughing. “You want to make sure our hearts are structurally sound.”
He tried to bury his face in his hands but she kissed the corner of his mouth. “You need to know I won’t be here so often, in the future.”
A Delicate Deception Page 17