Bess couldn’t help but laugh. “And I suppose it’s only a coincidence that ginger biscuits are your favorite too!”
“The merest chance. Charlie has exquisite taste,” Lucy replied airily, then lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Please won’t you make them? I miss your cooking!”
It would take a stronger woman than Bess to ignore such an entreaty. And she had to admit to herself that as much as she’d longed for the break from her daily grind of baking bread and rolling out pie crust and mixing up cakes, she missed it.
“I don’t know that Monsieur Anatole will be very happy to have me mucking about in his kitchen, but I’ll see what I can do.”
And in the meantime, Bess thought as she followed Lucy out the door, she would try to pluck up the courage to find out more about that tavern with the fights. It seemed somehow seedier even than the Marylebone Gardens, and therefore even more of a risk for her to attempt while living under the duke’s roof.
But the Season would be over in a month. This might just be her last hope finding the perfect scoundrel to ravish her before she left London and went home for good.
Nathaniel watched from the shadows of the study doorway as the two ladies left, and considered what he’d overheard.
He’d come out of his study to offer to escort his sister on her errand of mercy today—though it sounded less like noblesse oblige and more like a book club she was leading—but he’d paused, arrested, when he heard Lucy’s plaintive outburst about marriage.
It bothered him to think of his sister feeling she had to submit to a marriage she didn’t want, because it was her only means of support. He ought to have come forward at once and told her she wouldn’t be forced into matrimony, that he would take care of her.
Instead, he’d stood still as stone, listening.
Nathaniel knew it was beneath him to eavesdrop. Yet he’d wanted to hear Bess’s answer.
If life is a forest, marriage is but one path through the woods, and it’s not one that every person can or should take.
She didn’t speak like a woman who could not wait to remarry.
There were men in the Ton, Nathaniel knew, who would consider her a prime candidate for the position of mistress. Respectable gentlemen—much more respectable than his own, sadly immoral father.
A beautiful widow who was not inclined to marry again and had no necessity to come to a second marriage with her virtue intact even if she did decide to take the plunge. A beautiful widow who knew the pleasures of the body and had the emotional maturity to see the affair for all that it could be—and all that it could not. A beautiful widow who had no intention of staying long in London and was therefore all the more precious a commodity.
No wonder those men had buzzed about Bess at that ball like dizzy bees bumbling about a rose.
But none of them knew the hammered steel under her veneer of soft serenity. None of them knew that she would fight like a lion for those she loved, with no thought to herself.
Practical, pragmatic words on the topic of marriage aside, Bess Pickford was a woman who deserved to be loved. Not for a minute, or an hour, or a span of delightfully pleasurable weeks.
Forever.
And, knowing that, Nathaniel could never approach her with an offer of anything less.
Unfortunately, love formed no part of Nathaniel’s ambitious and well-ordered plans for his own future and the future of his family’s legacy. He had things to accomplish: a bill to shepherd through the House of Lords, a proper young heiress to secure, an heir to father. There was no time for anything else.
But as the emptiness of the house settled into Nathaniel’s bones like the chill wind off the Thames in winter, Nathaniel thought perhaps he could make time to visit The Nemesis that night.
Hopefully that would be enough to knock these stupid thoughts from his head.
Chapter Eleven
Bess couldn’t sleep.
She hadn’t been able to catch Charlie alone during their visit to ask about the mysterious tavern, and truth be told, she wasn’t certain she should.
Perhaps she’d gone far enough in this depraved quest. Perhaps she ought to accept the fact that she could survive perfectly well on her own, without ever experiencing passion again, and be done with it.
Frustrated and yearning, Bess threw back her coverlet and dressed swiftly in one of her old, comfortable gowns before stealing downstairs to the kitchens.
They were empty, of course, this late at night. The temperamental French chef, Monsieur Anatole, ran his small empire like a commanding general. So the fire in the hearth was carefully banked, and when Bess passed her hand over the behemoth of a cast iron oven squatting against the far wall, she could feel the heat still emanating from it.
Lucy had requested ginger biscuits, Bess mused, catching up an apron from a peg on the wall and tying it swiftly about her waist. A familiar task was exactly what she wanted to clear the cobwebs from the corners of her mind.
