“So why now?” she asked him. “Just for the sheer satanic pleasure of raising hope in the man who believes he is about to become the earl and owner of Brierley and any fortune that goes with it? And in his son? And then of dashing those hopes at the last possible moment?”
“There is one person at Brierley,” he said, “who is and always has been very dear to me. She lives in a small cottage in the park that surrounds the house. She has been threatened with eviction when the new earl comes into his inheritance. He plans to have a lake created out of the land around her cottage. He plans to use the house itself as a picturesque sort of folly on an island in the middle of it. She has nothing beyond the cottage itself and the small allowance my uncle made her. That has already been stopped, though there is no one at Brierley with any legal right to have made that decision. She is about to be destitute, with no way of providing for herself. It is for Mary I returned, Lady Jessica.”
She was gazing up at him, her eyes wide, her lips slightly parted.
“She is my late aunt’s sister,” he told her. “She was born with a deformed back and foot and hand. She takes in stray cats and dogs and any troubled wild creatures that come her way. The gardeners occasionally bring her wounded birds and she mends their wings and sets them free. She has a garden that rivals this in beauty.” He gestured at the arbor around them. “I have never known anyone so contented with her life or anyone so . . .good.I love her. Not inthatway. I honor and love her and would die for her.”
Good God. Where were such words coming from? He felt suddenly foolish. But Marydeservedto be honored.
“But as it happened,” she said, “you were not called upon to die for her but simply to come home. To give up everything you held dear for her sake. A sort of death in itself.”
“For the only time since I have known her,” he said, “she asked something of me. She asked me to come. And here I am.”
He was astounded suddenly when her eyes, still riveted on his face, grew bright with unshed tears. She caught her upper lip between her teeth.
“I would rather keep my anonymity for a short while longer,” he said. “I would like to gather a little more information than I already have. Mary, it seems, is not the only one who has been made to suffer. I blame myself for not having realized the danger of that before I came here—or perhaps of refusing to consider the possibility of it. I am indeed no angel, despite my name. I believe too I would like to meet my cousin again before divulging the truth. The one who is about to be earl.”
She released her lip. “Why has Mr. Anthony Rochford not recognized you?” she asked him.
“He has never seen me before now,” he said. “He was just a young boy when I went to America. Whenever his mother and father came to Brierley, which happened quite frequently, he was left at home.”
He watched her draw a slow breath. “I will not give away your secret,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She looked down at her hands spread on her lap for a few moments and then at the fountain and then back at him. He held her eyes with his own.
“I would have to be a dreadful slowtop to waste an opportunity for a little romance in such idyllic surroundings,” he said.
He gave her time to turn her head away or get to her feet and suggest they go for tea on the terrace. She did neither. She licked her lips in what was surely not meant to be a provocative gesture, though it brought his eyes to her mouth. He moved his own closer and raised his eyes to hers again. She gazed back.
And he kissed her.
It was a mere touching of lips. A lingering touch. He had sensed from the moment she had demanded that he romance her if he wanted a chance with her that she would scorn any aggressive moves to take her heart by storm. Her heart was not easily taken, he had judged. Hence the single rose sent to her each morning and the music he had played for her last evening and the duet. And the touch of his little finger to hers, though there had been nothing deliberate or planned about that.
And hence this kiss, which was hardly a kiss at all except that it did things to his body and his heartbeat and his mind that far more lascivious embraces with other women had never done. It moved him somehow into a physical space that was neither his nor hers but something else without a name. It was shockingly, inexplicably intimate.
And he wanted more. By God, he wanted more.
He did not take more, except that he set his fingertips against her jaw, and when he drew back his head and gazed into her eyes again, he ran his thumb lightly over her slightly parted lips.
She smiled fleetingly and moved her own head back.
“You have a strange idea of romance, Mr. Thorne,” she said. But she did not say what she meant by that and he did not ask.
“If we do not go for tea soon,” he said, “the food will be carried back indoors and we will go hungry.”
“That would be a ghastly fate,” she said. “Let us go by all means. I daresay my mother is wondering where I am.”
“Especially if she has seen Rochford and you are not with him,” he said. “I gather your family is trying to promote a match between the two of you?”
“Just as they are trying to promote one between you and Estelle,” she said. “Being a member of the Westcott family can be a severe trial. And a great joy. Frequently frustrating and endlessly entertaining.”
“I look forward to becoming a part of it,” he told her, removing his fingertips from her jaw and returning his foot to the ground.
“And there you go again,” she said. “Making assumptions.” But she did not sound annoyed with him this time.
Twelve
