He handed her into a hired carriage and spoke softly into her ear as he did.“No partnership, Georgie.I don’t make love to business partners.You have to decide what it is, this, this thing between us.”He made sure she didn’t see his smug smile when he turned away, but he couldn’t disguise his sense of triumph.She was his.He knew it.He just needed to help her admit it.
* * *
“This thing?Thing?He calls our relationship a thing?”The smug tyrant!She nursed anger almost through dinner.Dining alone, however, makes one vulnerable to disordered thoughts.Anger gave way to morose introspection.
“What would you call it then,” a voice in her head demanded.“Can you give it a name suitable for a London drawing room?I image Dunning could give it a name, but it wouldn’t be suitable.”
“We’re partners.”
“I think not.”The voice grew sardonic.
“He may not think so, but I say we are.”I don’t make love to business partners.
Internal voices, luckily, don’t make rude noises.They do conjure images of clean linen sheets, disheveled black hair, and laughing ebony eyes.
The afternoon shook her badly.Jamie knew.Richard’s eyes and ears, Jamie, knew.Worse, Dunning knew.Will he tell his grandmother?She didn’t think he was a gossip, but he was very close to Edwina Potter.How she would look to the people of Cambridge, a woman alone with her books, when rumors about her relationship with Andrew became painfully clear.
“You think he’ll stay in Cambridge after this?”Internal voices do ask uncomfortable questions.It was one thing to make a pariah of herself and another to ruin his reputation.
She slammed down her hand.Damn it.Men aren’t ruined by a discreet affair.They are congratulated!That may be so in London, in her parents’ world.She wasn’t so sure about Cambridge with its inbred social structure and middle-class values.She had already sullied his scholarly reputation.
And if Jamie runs to Richard, what then?
She looked down the length of gleaming mahogany, empty save for a grotesquely ornate silver candelabrum and her half-empty wine glass.She thought of Andrew’s house, full of his friends, his warmth, and his laughter.Soon Helsington and its splendors will be gone, sold to Colonel Warrington who brought a new bride to this place.Perhaps the Warringtons would give this silent mausoleum life.
Georgiana pushed away her dinner, half eaten.Soon she would eat her solitary meals on a smaller, rougher table.She wondered if solitude felt less oppressive when it occupied less space.Yesterday the little house on Sheep Street meant freedom.Tonight, it just sounded empty.
“Do you plan to spend the evening leaning on your chair?You can’t avoid the book that way.”The voice again.
Georgiana pretended not to notice William who pretended not to watch her.He’d be gone in a week along with the candelabrum and the mahogany table.Her maid had left for her sister’s in Surrey the day before.It didn’t matter.Her servants were too well trained to invisibility to provide any sort of human comfort.
She began to pick up her plate, but William was too quick for her.As long as he remained at Helsington, she wouldn’t carry her own dishes.
Georgiana ran out of excuses.She climbed the steps with feet of lead to the book waiting in her sitting room where she had left it the day before, her life’s work in a leather-bound package.
“What are you afraid of?Mockery?”The voice sneered at her now.“It is a book, fool.”
She wasn’t afraid.Fear was nonsensical.
Gilt letters shown up at her: “An English Lady of Scholarship.”It seemed as if her life amounted to nothing else but what could be encapsulated in that neat turn of phrase.The leather-bound volume represented her adult life.What if it is terrible?
She picked it up and caressed the smooth cover.
“The assistance of A.Mallet.”Andrew.They had done this work together; it was part of both of them.She saw with sudden clarity why she avoided reading it.
Grief terrified her, notfailure.Failure could be faced.When they had the work, Georgiana understood what lay between them.She held the finished product, their creation, in her hand.She didn’t know what they shared now that they had finished it.
Georgiana brought her solitary candle and the book to her bedchamber.She placed both on the table next to her bed and began to undress.She picked up the book and slipped between the sheets alone.
* * *
“Your intentions?”
Black eyes radiated death in the general direction of Major Lord James Phineas Heyworth.
“Honorable,” Andrew snapped.
“And?”Jamie continued.
