“Such as?”
“Whoever finds us will have quite a valuable story to sell to the gossip rags.” She hugged her arms tight across her body. “Perhaps she will be a housemaid who would like a new frock. Perhaps she’s never owned a single new thing in her life. Perhaps one must forgive such a girl for selling our tawdry little tale.” She stopped and pivoted around on one heel to face him. “Well, here we are, my lord”—Her hands lifted in a gesture of surrender—“a housemaid’s chance at a shiny new dress.”
“I’ll consider raises for my staff in the near future.”
A wry chuckle scraped across her throat, and a few drams of tension drained from his body. A feeling of ease, a natural ease that existed between them when they allowed it, settled over him.
She took a step back, holding eye contact, before spinning around to continue along the path, her again ahead of him, silently taking in the beauty of the garden on this rare, clear night. They happened upon a pair of reclining chairs, and she settled herself onto one, again hugging her arms across her body.
“Are you chilled?”
“A bit.”
He extended his overcoat toward her. Her eyes, wide and watchful, considered him for one, two, three heartbeats before she reached out and draped the woolen mass across her supine body.
“Consider it yours for the night,” he said, settling into the chair beside hers. “Who knows how long we shall be up here.” A deep contentment settled over him as they gazed side by side into the infinite sky spread above them like a blanket. “At least it isn’t raining.”
“There is that.”
“Mina knows every star and constellation up there by heart.”
“Oh?”
He liked the enchanted quality in her voice as they shared this wondrous night sky together. “She was quite taken by the ceiling at your soirée.”
“You must install the stars on her bedroom ceiling. Mayhap for her name day.”
“I wouldn’t know which one to give her: the one of her birth, or the one of her childhood, as she was born in Japan, but raised in Singapore.”
“The one she misses most, I think.”
“Her mother loved the stars.” Before Olivia could reply with the requisite platitude that Mina must take after her mother, he continued, “She spoke to me once of her childhood sky. How she wanted to see it again.”
“How so?”
“She claimed the sky was different in the Orient, but in Japan it was mostly the same sky.”
“I don’t understand”—Olivia sat upright and cocked her head—“differenthow?”
His brain sounded the alarm. He’d become too comfortable with her and slipped up.
A decision stood before him: continue the lie or speak the truth. A truth known only by him, Mina, and one other man in London. A truth that he suddenly, and instinctively, knew he could entrust this woman to keep secret.
There would be no turning back from here. Before his head could convince him otherwise, he met her questioning blue gaze and followed his heart. “Mina’s mother was Dutch.”
Olivia’s brows creased as if she was trying to add one and one together and kept coming up with three. “How can that be?”
“Mina isn’t my daughter by blood.”
Chapter 20
“Isn’t your daughter by blood?” Olivia asked, her voice little more than a stunned whisper. “How is that possible?”
“I’d just reached my twenty-first year when I saw Clemence on the trading island of Dejima. Her father was Dr. Oelrichs, the island’s resident doctor. I fell for her instantly in the way only a young man can fall in love with a woman.”
“Yes, well,” Olivia said, “young women aren’t immune to the feeling, either.”
A wry smile of acknowledgement crossed Jake’s lips. “I found a dozen reasons a day to pass her house. Sometimes I could make her smile, even laugh, but she was an utterly serious girl. I did little more than muddle through the entire courtship process.”
