He had inquired after her welfare with his domestics more times than he cared to admit, beginning the evening before, after she had been attended by Dr. Kelly, and through this morning. He had seen to it lemonade was sent on the tray delivered to her chamber, both for breakfast and for luncheon.
He rather regretted having allowed himself to indulge in the weakness he harbored for her, now that he was faced with it. But seeing her lying motionless on the floor of the Great Western Hotel yesterday had done something to him. It had not just taken him to the same vulnerable place he had dwelled within, all those years ago, when his mother had waded into the North Sea and left her children behind. It had proven to him that, regardless of how intently he tried to refrain from caring for anyone aside from his sister Violet and Great Aunt Hortense, he was not, in fact, a fortress.
It was the same lesson he should have learned already in the wake of The Incident. But it would seem he had not, and it had taken the American firebrand across from him being attacked to force him to realize his own faults.
He was more than aware of his faults now, all of them glaring, and he could not bear to accept her gratitude for a gesture he had made to slake his own rising guilt.
He did not meet her gaze, fiddling instead with his signet ring. “I am afraid I do not know what you refer to, Miss Montgomery.”
“Come now, Arden,” she chastised lowly, her honeyed drawl making his cock twitch to life. “You are the only one I mentioned my love of lemonade to.”
Still, he had no wish to make an admission. “Perhaps you told the domestic who has been assisting you, and you merely do not recall.”
“Bunton,” she said.
He lifted his gaze to her at last, hating the way the mere sight of her sent a frisson of something decidedly unwanted straight through him. “I beg your pardon, madam?”
“The domestic assisting me,” she elaborated, “is named Bunton. You seemed uncertain of the name of your own staff member. I aided you in the recollection.”
“Bunton,” he repeated, vaguely remembering his housekeeper recommending one of the more experienced maids for the task of assisting Miss Montgomery.
“Yes.” She gave him a small smile. It was slow and secretive, beautiful and thrilling. He wanted to kiss it from her lips.
He refrained, settling for clenching his hands instead.
“Well,” he said. “Surely it was Bunton who was responsible for the tea.”
“Lemonade,” she corrected him, with a knowing look.
“Lemonade then,” he said dismissively, as if he could not be bothered to even recall the proper name of the beverage in question. In truth, he hoped the lemonade had buoyed her spirits and brought a touch of happiness back to her after all she had endured.
He glanced away from her, diverting his attention to the cityscape beyond the carriage window. London by the light of day seemed decidedly less menacing. So too the men responsible for the atrocities carried out on the railway the day before. They were mere men, all of them, and he would hunt them down and make them pay for what they had done.
“Why?” she asked.
Once more, she commanded his attention. He devoured her with his gaze. Her full, pink lips, her dark hair, those shockingly blue eyes. Those goddamn legs.
He jerked his gaze back to her lovely face. “What are you asking me, Miss Montgomery?”
“The lemonade was sent by you,” she charged, without heat. “Why pretend otherwise?”
Because he could not bear to face what the longing for her, deep inside him, meant. He did not believe in love. He did not want a wife, had vowed to never take one. His blood was tainted. Tender affections toward any female on his part were dangerous indeed. They were not to be entertained. And if he needed a lover, one could be obtained, with far fewer complications than bedding Miss Montgomery would create.
“If you wish to believe I sent the lemonade, I shall not stop you,” he said coolly, even as he wondered if she had found it to her liking. He had not a clue how a trousers-wearing Pinkerton agent, originally from Georgia, preferred her lemonade.
“It was delicious,” she said, as if reading his thoughts.
He frowned at her.
“Thank you,” she repeated, smiling at him once more, that coquette’s smile he could not seem to gird himself against.
Bloody hell.Would her stubbornness know no end? And would his susceptibility to her prove a bottomless well? It would certainly seem so, on both counts.
Perhaps a change of subject was in order.
“I read your notes,” he told her.
“All of them?”
