Chapter Twenty-Nine
One hour later, Bea had never been so certain of anything in her life as she was that going to Nicholas’s house alone was a terrible idea.
She was equally certain she was still going, regardless.
The hackney jolted over a rut and nearly threw her against the opposite squab.She caught herself with a hand to the cracked leather, muttering something that would have made her mother swoon.She’d chosen a hackney for the anonymity of it.And she was wearing the cape she normally wore to drop off her latest sketch.Its dank brown color covered the bright green day dress she wore underneath.
She should have written a letter.
She should have set the entire stack of B.Adroit sketches on fire and then joined a convent.
Instead, she smoothed her skirts, swallowed hard, and watched Nicholas’s town house come into view through the hack’s grimy window.Cool, pale stone, black railings, polished knocker.Respectable.Controlled.Like him.
Like the outer shell of him, she corrected.
Because beneath all that control and polish and political calculation, he was…something else.Something she had felt clearly last night with her body draped over his thighs, skirts hiked, his hands?—
Bea pressed her knees together and glared at the window as if it were to blame.
She was not here about last night, she reminded herself.She was here about the truth.Her truth.
The carriage pulled to a halt.The driver hopped down, opened the door, and offered his hand.Bea ignored it and stepped out on her own, every line of her body rigid with resolve.She slipped the hood of the cape over her head.Must be discreet.
Up the steps.
Ring the bell.
Confess.
It should be simple.So why did she feel as if she might cast up her accounts at any moment?
She tugged the bellpull before she could think better of it.
The door opened almost at once, as if someone had been waiting on the other side.Nicholas’s butler, of course—tall, calm, entirely unruffled.
“Good afternoon, miss,” he said with a bow.He obviously didn’t know who she was.Good.
Bea stepped inside swiftly.It was egregious enough to be visiting a bachelor’s house alone.She didn’t want to be visible from the front stoop.
“Is Lord Vanover home?”Her voice came out thinner than she liked.“Please tell him Lady Beatrix— Er, tell him Bea is here to see him.”No need to spread her name about.What if Nicholas’s servants were gossips?
The butler’s face did not hide the confusion he clearly felt over seeing a woman who had initially called herself a lady wearing a simple cloak.
“Very well, er…madam.If you would wait in the cream drawing room, I shall inform him at once.”
The cream drawing room.That sounded safe.Mostly.She could sit on an upright chair with her spine straight and her hands folded and announce, like a sensible person, that she was the scandalous cartoonist Nicholas had been plagued by for years, ask him to forgive her and not tell her father, and return home before tea.
If only it could be that simple.
She followed the butler down the hall.He opened the door to a pleasant, tasteful room dressed in shades of vanilla before he bowed and withdrew, closing the door behind her.
Bea paced.She removed her brown cloak and tossed it across the back of a chair.
She crossed to the mantel and stared at the clock.She walked to the window and stared at the street.She ran a fingertip along the spine of a book that had been left on a side table—Tacitus, naturally; Nicholas would read political philosophy for pleasure—and told herself she could do this.
If she could sketch her father with a beak and Hargrave with toad eyes, she could tell one man the truth.
The door opened.
