The sound of John’s laugh merging with her own made her happier than she could ever remember being.
Alison had no idea how long she stayed in that fountain, she and Bonnie squealing as John chased them round and round, all of them splashing as they went.
She hoped the children were allowed to play in it but reasoned that they must be.
Everything here seemed so well thought out, so child-centred, that it would be foolish to have it so accessible if it weren’t intended for them to enjoy.
Besides, even if she got into trouble, it would be worth it to see the siblings laugh and play.
Eventually, Bonnie’s teeth began to chatter, and Alison wondered aloud if they should end their game.
The sound of a bell, however, drowned out her question.
“It’s dinner time!” Bonnie exclaimed and jumped out of the fountain and toward her shoes.
They hadn’t thought about drying off, so Alison used a dry patch of her gown to dry their feet as best she could before helping Bonnie with her shoes.
Finally, the children had shoes on, and she sent them in ahead of her, afraid that they’d get into trouble if she kept them late.
She didn’t know how strict this Mrs. Cafferty they told her of was. Though Bonnie, at least, sounded as though she liked the woman well enough.
Alison bent to pick up her stockings and boots, knowing there was no way she could put them back on, being as wet and bedraggled as she was.
Shrugging her shoulders in defeat, Alison turned around, and straight into a rock solid something.
Gasping in surprise, she looked up.
Right into the face of Nicholas Fyfe.
And he did not look happy.
If Nic lived to be a hundred years old, nothing would ever surprise him as much as watching Alison Langton destroy her clothes and play in a fountain with two orphans from the streets of St. Giles.
He reached his arms out to steady her as she stumbled back.
She gazed up at him, her eyes the colour of cornflowers in the summer sun, her hair wet and plastered to her face.
He’d sent Mrs. Cafferty inside with Bonnie and John, being careful not to show how pleased he’d been to see John join in the game.
How had Alison done it?
In one short afternoon she’d engaged John in a way nobody else had been able to.
It would appear Nicholas wasn’t the only one susceptible to the little enchantress.
There was so much he wanted to say to her.
So much about today. About how dangerous, risky, and downright foolish it had been for her to follow him here.
About last night. How kissing her had awoken something in him that he’d thought was lost forever. How it terrified him, and shamed him, because it was stronger than anything he’d ever felt before. Ever.
And he had questions.
Questions like: how had she managed to get John to engage with her and actually act like a child for a brief time?
Why wasn’t she crying and fainting about the horrors she’d travelled through to get here?
What was this hold she had over him?
Why couldn’t he even imagine letting her go without a sharp, visceral pain shooting through his chest?
He opened his mouth, not even sure where to start.
And then, she smiled up at him.
And he didn’t say a word.
He simply bent his head and kissed her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Alison had been growing cold as the afternoon sun moved away from her wet skin, but the second Nic touched his lips to her own, she was in flames once more.
She hadn’t been sure what to expect from him.
Anger, concern, disappointment?
When he’d merely stood and stared at her, she’d risked a smile, hoping to get one in return.
But, oh, this was so much better.
She dropped her boots and stockings and twined her arms around his neck, allowing herself to be swept away in the tide of feeling he had once again evoked in her.
Nic wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. She pulled her mouth away, whilst she still had a tiny semblance of sense about her.
“My dress,” she gasped. “Your clothes.”
Nic pressed his lips to hers once more.
“I don’t care about your dress,” he growled against her mouth. “I don’t care about my clothes.”
His tongue delved inside her mouth, and she was lost.
Desire, tumultuous and molten, crashed inside her, and she was caught in the maelstrom, unable and unwilling to escape.
She shuddered with need, desperate for something she couldn’t name. Something only he could give her.
Suddenly, Nic pulled away from her.
“Christ, Alison,” he croaked, pressing his brow against her own. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” She pulled back from him. “Why?”
He choked out a laugh.
“Because you’re shivering with cold. Because I shouldn’t keep manhandling you. Because I’m nowhere near as sorry as I should be.”
“I am not shivering with cold,” she argued, her need for him, her love for him loosening her tongue. “I am shivering from –”
She stopped herself just in time but felt her cheeks flush, and given the sudden unholy gleam in his eye, they gave her away.
He reached out a hand, grazing his knuckles along one cheek.
“Why you little wanton.” He grinned.
Alison couldn’t get enough of this playful, flirtatious side of Nic. Though he showed it but rarely, she knew it was there underneath the stern exterior.
“You’re one to talk, your grace.” She sniffed with faux haughtiness. “Yours is hardly the behaviour of a saint.”
His smile became positively wolfish.
“Believe me, sweetheart. Around you, I feel like anything but a saint.”
Her blood heated all over again at his words, and he suddenly stepped away from her, inhaling shakily.
“We need to get you inside and –” His eyes raked over her and he gulped. “And dry,” he said hoarsely.
She looked down self-consciously, seeing the grass stains on her dress, the damp material clinging to her skin.
“Oh dear.” She bit her lip. “I look a mess, don’t I?”
“You look irresistible,” he answered frankly. “Which is why we need to get you away from me and try to make you presentable for your brother-in-law.”
It was Alison’s turn to gulp.
Robert would definitely lock her in a tower when he saw her like this.
She nodded meekly and went to step around him.
He reached out and caught her arm, stopping her.
“And then,” he said softly. “We are going to talk about how you came to be here, and what you were doing in St. Giles alone.”
Nic pressed his fingers to his temples.
The girl was infuriating.
He sighed and dropped his hands to the desk in the small office he’d assigned himself when building the children’s home.
“Alison,” he said through gritted teeth, his jovial mood of earlier quite forgotten.
He’d sat and listened as best he could while she’d confessed that curiosity had sent her scurrying after him.
He must have aged a decade during her tale of hiring a bloody hack by herself and then stepping out alone into the streets outside his sanctuary.
She could have been killed. Genuinely killed.
“Do you have any idea of the danger you put yourself in?” he asked now, willing the images peppering his mind, tormenting him, to go away.
Images of the type of men outside these walls, more animal than human, and what they would do to a woman like Alison.
It made him sick just thinking of it.
She sighed and flipped her hair over her shoulder.
He really wished she wouldn’t.
It was bad enough that he had to sit there keeping himself in check whils
t it was flowing down her back like a waterfall of golden silk.
She’d been drying by the fire in his office, and he’d had to walk out and fetch a tray of tea like a damned maidservant to prevent himself from kissing her again.
Now, he was back.
She had her tea, her hair had dried into soft, golden curls around her face and down her back, and he was trying to talk some bloody sense into her.
“I already told you, Nicholas,” she said, an edge of impatience to her voice now.
And damned if even that didn’t cause a stirring of desire.
You’re not a green lad, he told himself sternly. Stop acting like one.
“I didn’t know quite what to expect. And I certainly shan’t come alone next time. I’ll take a maid, and –”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘next time’?” he growled.
She blinked innocently, her eyes wide.
He didn’t buy it for a second.
“Why next time I visit, of course. I’ve already told Bonnie I would come, and I should like to see John again, too. And I haven’t even met the other children yet. I’m sure Mrs. Cafferty could find something for me to do to help.”
He was speechless.
Could only stare at her as she chipped away at the wall of defence he had built, keeping her out.
She was absolutely sincere in what she was saying, he could tell.
She meant it. She was going to come back here. Here, where women of Quality didn’t even like to think about, and spend time with these uneducated, unpolished children.
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
She was supposed to be spoilt and frivolous, charming and untouched by the underbelly of the world around her.
Yet she would jump in fountains with motherless little girls, and coax volatile young boys into having some innocent fun.
She would come back here and not only spend time with these children willingly, but also seek out work to do for them.
In short, she was incredible, and unlike anyone he’d ever met.
But that was neither here nor there.
He would let her come back to this place over his dead body.
“Let me be very clear,” he answered, enunciating every word so it got through that stubborn, lovely head of hers. “You will not be coming back here. Not with a maid. Not with an army.”
Her eyes narrowed, and he sensed trouble.
“And who’s going to stop me?” she asked, brow raised, light of challenge in her distracting eyes.
“Alison, it’s not safe,” he repeated. “You don’t know these streets. This place. You don’t know what can befall a young girl here.”
“I know that you come here,” she answered stubbornly. “I know that you help all of these people. Not just the children, but the people who work here. And I know that you have built hospitals and homes for people all around – oh, where was it?”
“Little Ireland,” he answered woodenly, giving her the moniker of the slum, which housed thousands of Irish people who’d found themselves here for whatever unfortunate reason.
“Yes, Little Ireland. I thought it an odd name.”
“So named because of the amount of Irish souls who find themselves there,” he said wearily.
His grief, his guilt was starting to weigh heavily on his shoulders.
Never before had Nic felt the urge to talk about Ciara or his baby.
Yet with Alison happily chattering about being there, in that place, her goodness being sullied by the horrors to be found there, it was getting harder and harder to keep it inside.
“I suppose that’s why it’s so important to you?” she asked softly.
Nic’s eyes snapped to Alison.
Surely, she didn’t know.
She couldn’t.
“I –” He wasn’t sure what to say, but she didn’t appear to be listening in any case.
“Abigail said your duchy is in Ireland. I should like to see Ireland.” She smiled shyly, and his heart stopped dead in his chest.
His mind was whirling, his past and what he dearly wished could be his future merging so that he couldn’t think straight.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, he climbed to his feet.
“Alison,” he tried to drag the conversation and his emotions, back under his rigid control.
Why was it so damned difficult?
“You’re not going near any of those places, or this place, again.”
She frowned up at him.
“But I told Bonnie and John I would visit,” she said. “And Lizzie mentioned that they don’t have anyone to play for the children, so I thought that perhaps if there was a pianoforte, I could –”
“Damn it, I said no!” he yelled.
She looked shocked and hurt, and he felt like a monster.
“I could come with you.”
God, but she was persistent.
“I wouldn’t come to any harm with you. And –”
“Alison,” he interrupted her, his exasperation clear in his voice. “I don’t want you here. I don’t want you in this place. I don’t want you in the Rookery. I want you to say away.”
She jumped to her feet.
“Why?” she demanded. “I want to help. I would have helped this whole time if I’d known about it.”
Her statement sounded like an accusation.
Panic began to claw at him. Memories of Ciara. Of her body white and still. Of being told there had been no saving the babe.
“But you didn’t tell me. You didn’t tell anyone. Why on earth would you keep this wonderful part of your life from your friends? Why won’t you let me in, Nic?”
“Because this is where the woman I was supposed to marry died,” he shouted, finally, mercifully silencing her. “This is where I found out that my baby was dead. And I can’t have you around it. I just can’t.”
He stormed out.
Like a coward, he strode out, leaving her with the poison of his words.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Alison didn’t know how long she stood there, the silence after Nic’s departure deafening.
Her whole body felt frozen with shock.
He’d been engaged? He’d lost a child?
She shook her head in confusion.
Why would nobody tell her that? Not James, not Robert. Not even Abigail.
She ran over countless conversations in her head, trying to remember if anyone had ever mentioned anything about it.
Nic is a private person.
Nic doesn’t share much about his life.
Nic keeps his cards close to his chest.
Robert said he came back a different person. One day he just…changed.
They didn’t know!
Alison gasped aloud as the truth hit her.
Good lord. None of them knew!
And that meant this awful, horrible thing was a cross he bore alone.
Her breath hitched as she imagined the pain the proud, steady, dependable duke had been secretly carrying all these years.
Of their group of four, Nicholas was, she knew, the calm one. The one to whom they all turned.
He’d kept Robert from plunging into true madness in the years immediately following Gina’s death.
He’d offered advice and a listening ear when Senna had turned James’s world upside down with the news that his brother had been killed in cold blood.
And he’d always taken care of Simon, quietly and unassumingly. A voice of reason and a steady hand that stopped his friend from descending to depths of depravity from which there was no return.
But all the while, who was taking care of him?
Alison felt useless tears fill her eyes, and she impatiently blinked them away.
Tears were no good to him.
She sensed that he needed to talk about this.
Rushing out the door to try to find him, Alison ignored her own pain at his confession.
It was selfish of her to even think about it.
But the small,
persistent voice couldn’t be silenced.
All this time, she had thought Nic’s honour and rigid control was keeping him from really letting her in, really opening himself up to her.
But in reality, he’d been grieving his lost love.
And though she was desperate to try to help him, later on she would have to face the truth.
Nic was still in love with his deceased betrothed.
And Alison couldn’t compete with a ghost.
After he’d left Alison sitting in his office, he’d gone to hide himself away in the gardens. His emotions had been in chaos, his thoughts tumultuous. And Nic knew he wouldn’t have been able to face anyone in that state. Wouldn’t have wanted to. He never showed a lack of control to anyone, ever. Except Alison.
After a while, he’d come back in to seek out Mrs. Cafftery, hoping to find solace in discussing business and taking his mind well and truly off Alison Langton. But Mrs. Cafferty, like the rest of the home, was besotted with Miss Langton and couldn’t sing her praises enough.
John had even joined the other children at dinner, Mrs. Cafferty had said, and told them all about playing in the fountain with the young Miss.
It was more than Nic could bear.
He’d told Alison something that he’d sworn to himself he would take to the grave.
Then he’d run from her.
Now, he had to sit and listen to how wonderful she was, as though he didn’t already know.
He’d called for his carriage and asked Mrs. Cafferty to send for Alison.
And then he’d waited outside for her. And waited. And waited.
He knew she approached because he’d been attuned to her for so long now, without even realising it, that he knew when she was near.
His heart knew. His very soul knew.
Nic took a fortifying breath and turned to face her.
She was pale and drawn.
And that was his fault.
Without a word, he offered a hand to help her, ignoring the fission of awareness that even now skittered along his nerves.
“I’m sorry I took so long,” she muttered when Nic had taken the seat across from her and closed the carriage door, banging on the ceiling to instruct the driver to move. “But I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye to John and Bonnie. And then there were the rest of the children to meet.”
The Saint of St. Giles Page 14