“More mysterious doings?” he asked. “What matters require your attendance?”
“The normal woman things.”
“What sort of woman things? You do not make many calls now, and you are not buying an extensive wardrobe.”
“Women do not only make social calls and shop. We are often busy people. If men are unaware of that due to lack of interest, we do not mind.”
“Because men would object? That is what you are implying.”
“They might. Most women have some man who might think he can interfere. I, of course, do not.”
I answer to no one, including you. He understood she had sound reasons for refusing to marry, both emotional ones and practical ones. Only now it entered his mind that Clara might be involved in something that she feared a husband would forbid.
What could it be? Reform work that took her to dangerous areas? Radical demonstrations that might turn violent? Whatever it was, the ability to come and go at will without any interference might be why she now lived on Bedford Square.
“I hope you know that I would not try to stop you from doing something that truly mattered to you, Clara.”
She smiled sweetly, but he doubted she knew that at all.
Their meal done, they retreated to the library. “I love this chamber.” She held out her arms and made a little twirl in its center, looking up. “It was my favorite as soon as I saw it when you gave me the tour before dinner. No one would guess looking at the house’s exterior that its library had a dome.”
“At night, if you look through those windows set into it, you can see the stars on a clear night, or even the moon.”
She threw herself onto a divan beneath the dome and gazed up. “You can! How wonderful. The lamplight from down here does not reach it, so the windows are quite black.”
He strolled to a desk and retrieved a box from its drawer. “I have something for you.”
He sat beside her and handed her the box. The ruby necklace, so long in the giving, lay inside. She lifted it. The lamplight created deep sparks in the stones.
“It is beautiful. And thoughtful.” She undid the clasp and set it around her neck. “It is also too generous.”
“I do not think it generous enough. It is past time for me to express my . . . affection for you.”
She did not seem to notice the slight pause caused by that catch in his words. She looked down, admiring the jewels lying on her chest.
To express my love for you. That was what he had almost said. The word emerged on his tongue without thought or choice. He stopped because such declarations required both of those things. He did not want to sound like a man who professed love easily, without meaning it, even if he had been that man in the past sometimes.
Now he wondered how she would have reacted if he had been less careful.
She reached behind her neck to unclasp the necklace. “It is stunning. I will have a special dress made to wear with it as soon as I can flaunt jewels again. I must find an event appropriate to their richness. One that my grandmother will not attend.”
“Do you think she won’t like them?”
“She will love them. This necklace is to her taste. Add four or five more stones and she would love it all the more. I don’t want her to see it because she will question me about how I came by it.”
He set his arm around her shoulders. “Tell her your lover gave them to you.”
She laughed. “Or better yet, tell heroneof my lovers gave them to me. Oh, I can picture her now, suspicious that I goad her but wondering and worrying if I tell the truth.”
He kissed her temple. “Or even better yet, tell her that I gave them to you.”
Her mirth subdued, she fingered the gold setting of the largest ruby. “She will be relentless then in trying to force a proposal. You must promise me that you will never tell her there has been one already, insincere though it was.”
“I will not give her cause to browbeat you, but . . . we could both do much worse, darling.”
“You certainly could do much better.”
“I do not think so.” He turned her face so he could look in her eyes. “I must marry eventually. You know that. You can choose to continue as you are, but I cannot.”
