“Yes, sir,” Fanning agreed, and if Christian thought his tone a trifle peculiar, it did not much disturb him.
Until he reached the drawing room.
Until he saw Matilda.
She sat primly on the edge of an armchair, her gloved hands in her lap. She wore a morning dress, he observed, white sprigged with violets, her feet encased in half boots and crossed neatly at the ankles.
God, she looked so—so—
She looked sopretty.And innocent and delicious and unaffected, her gaze appraising, the spray of freckles on her nose and cheeks evident in the late-morning light. There were two more freckles he could see just beneath her ear, on the pale line of her neck.
She had said something, he realized, and he had not attended. He hoped it was something likeGood morning,because he nodded dumbly and sat down across from her on the sofa.
If she had said,You are a bounder and a pervert,well, he supposed in that case his nod would also suffice.
“Lady Matilda,” he began, and then paused. All of the words in his head seemed to be crowded together at the back of his throat, with no one phrase breaking into the lead.
She arched one auburn eyebrow. “Ah, you recognize me, then?”
Oh Jesus. Was he—blushing?
It was not tenable. He was eight-and-thirty years old.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you are trying to ascertain my identity before you make advances upon my person. Yes, my lord, I am Matilda.”
“I recognize you,” he managed.
Her eyebrow was still a perfect crescent. “Are you after congratulations? My brother Spencer could distinguish us when he was three. I am not especially impressed.”
“You—no, I—”
Hell, he should have written her a letter. He should have headed off this confrontation before it could occur. He should have invented a time machine, gone back to the previous night, and knocked himself in the head with a stout tree limb before he went to any parties.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I cannot possibly excuse my behavior last night.”
“Good,” she said. “I am glad you are penitent. That will make this easier.”
Christian found that statement extremely worrisome.
“You have acted quite badly,” she said in her low, firm voice. “You have said outrageous things to my sister and forced me to divulge information to Margo that I would have preferred to keep to myself.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, as though repetition might make some difference. “If there is anything I can do to repair the damage I have done, only say so, and I will do it.”
He looked at her, at her neatly pinned hair underneath a pert straw bonnet, at the freckles on her nose. He felt about a hundred years old, and the fact that still, somehow, he could see her and imagine her naked made him want to flee the damned country.
“Repair the damage?” Her gaze rested upon his face, cool and considering. “Perhaps there is, at that.”
“I am at your disposal.”
It occurred to him much later that in the face of her calm self-possession and wide blue eyes, he had forgotten all about the Matilda who had lured him to St. James’s Park in the middle of the night.
“Are you?” she said. “I am very pleased to hear that. I would, as it turns out, like for you to agree to something.” She leaned forward in the chair. “You owe me a chance to right my own wrong. You cannot deny it.”
“What are you asking for?”
But he already knew. This time, at least, she did not take him by surprise. He knew what was coming, and he could not stop it, any more than he could stop the sun from rising on the bay in Bamburgh, the dawn as fiery as her hair.
“Take me with you,” she said, “to Northumberland. Let me tutor your sister until her debut in the spring. Let me make recompense for my errors, and you will be absolved of your own.”
