Margaret’s hand tightened on the stem of her wineglass. Her lips compressed into a line so thin that they nearly disappeared. She looked at Josephine, and Josephine stared back, and for a moment, the two women held each other’s gazes across the remains of the second course with the focused intensity of duelists who had already chosen their weapons and were merely waiting for the count.
Margaret yielded. She did so with a stiff inclination of her head, the concession of a general who had lost a skirmish but did not intend to lose the war, and returned her attention toher plate with an expression that promised consequences at a later and more private hour. The walking stick, which had been propped against the edge of the table, shifted slightly, and the sound it made against the wood was like the cocking of a pistol.
Alistair said nothing. He lifted his wineglass and drank, and over the rim of it, he watched the young woman who had just outmaneuvered the most formidable person in the household with nothing more than courtesy and a reference to swollen joints. The anger from the library, the sense of betrayal, the bitter knowledge that she had approached him with calculation as well as feeling, all of it was still there, banked and smoldering beneath the necessary civility of a family dinner. But layered over it now was something more complicated, a grudging, unwilling admiration that he did not want and could not seem to prevent.
She had not merely survived in this house. She had positioned herself, serenely and without fanfare, as the only person standing between four young women and an old woman’s tyranny. She had done it without resources, without authority, without a carriage or a coin to her name, armed with nothing but patience and the kind of courage that does not announce itself because it cannot afford to be noticed.
Not wholly.
The words returned to him unbidden, and with them the memory of her in the library, flushed and tearful and brave, telling him that her interest in him was not entirely a stratagem. He had rejected the admission because the hurt of it had been too sharp, and because a man who has spent fifteen years being needed does not easily trust the possibility that he might also be wanted. But watching her now, this woman who had just taken on a dragon with nothing sharper than politeness, Alistair found himself considering the possibility that he had been wrong. Not about the calculation, which was real, but about the proportion.Perhaps desperation and desire were not as neatly separable as he had needed them to be. Perhaps a woman could scheme to save the people she loved and still, at the same time, mean the kiss.
He could ill afford to waste a day. London awaited. The Hollingford contract was ticking like a clock he could not slow down. But his cousins had not left their own grounds in half a decade, and his youngest had just asked to visit a bookshop with the trembling hope of a prisoner begging leave to walk in the yard.
Tomorrow, they would go to Irwyn. The contract could wait one more day. Some issues were more pressing than commerce.
CHAPTER 7
For the first time in over a year, Josephine was leaving.
The thought struck her as the carriage jolted over the rutted avenue and the stone towers of Fortunestone Hall receded behind the line of elms, growing smaller and less imposing with every turn of the wheels until they were swallowed by the mist that clung to the high ground like a reluctance to let go. Now the road was opening before her and the sky, though gray and threatening rain, felt impossibly vast.
The girls felt it too. She could see it in their relaxed postures, their shoulders dropping the moment the carriage passed the gates, as though they had collectively exhaled a breath held for years.
The twins, seated across from Josephine, had abandoned all pretense of restraint.
“A journal,” Genevieve sighed, pressing her fingertips together as though she might conjure it from the air. “With marbled endpapers, the sort a heroine would keep her secret correspondence in. And a novel with a crumbling abbey and a mystery that is not resolved until the very last page. Or anything at all that is not one of Grandmama’s improving tracts.”
“New pencils,” Juliet added, more quietly but with no less conviction. “And a commonplace book with proper ruled pages.”
Josephine listened, with an ache that was equal parts joy and grief, to these bright, buoyant girls whom the dowager had spent years pressing flat. Whom their late mother had declined to pay attention to, deserting them for London long before her death to escape this depressing estate. Whom their father had neglected in pursuit of his own selfish interests. It had taken a stranger with a notebook and the blunt pragmatism of a proprietor to accomplish in three days what she had been unable to do in over a year. She had shielded them. She had soothed them. But she had not freed them. That required authority, and authority was the one thing she had never possessed.
That authority was sitting beside her.
Alistair occupied the far end of the seat, quiet since they departed, his gaze directed at the window. They had not spoken of the library, of the kiss or the desperate proposal that had left her lips before she could weigh its cost. She had confessed to partial deception, and he had sent her away, and now here they were, pressed together while four young women chattered about pencils and marbled endpapers, and the warmth of his thigh against hers through the layers of bombazine and wool was doing things to her fortitude that no careful breathing could remedy.
She had thought herself incapable of this. Intimacy with her late husband had been an obligation endured in darkness and silence, his hands perfunctory, his attention elsewhere even when his body was not. Afterward, he would roll away and reach for the glass on the night table, and Josephine would lie very still and wonder whether this peculiar deadness was what all women felt or whether there was something wrong with her specifically.Frigid, Jerome had called her once with casual cruelty, never considering that the fault might lie with his own indifference,and the word had lodged in her like a fishhook, buried so deep that removing it would cause more damage than leaving it in place.
But Alistair’s effect on her had begun dismantling that conclusion from the moment he took hold of her elbow in the library and drew her toward him with a gentleness that had undone her more completely than force ever could have. The kiss had been a revelation. Not merely because of what he had done, the thoroughness of it, his mouth claiming hers with a hunger that was somehow both fierce and careful, but because of what it had awakened in her. She had felt it. The wanting. The heat. The desperate, climbing urgency that had made her arch against him and grip his waistcoat and forget, for the space of a few shattering minutes, that she was a woman with a plan and a secret and a child growing beneath her stays.
She was not frigid. She had simply been married to a man who could not be bothered to discover otherwise.
The carriage hit a rut, and Josephine’s shoulder knocked against Alistair’s arm. He steadied her, brief and reflexive, and then withdrew, and the point of contact burned through like a brand. She did not look at him. She looked at Genevieve, who was now describing the plot of a Gothic novel she wished to purchase with an enthusiasm that bordered on the evangelistic, and tried to quell her panic.
I am in very serious trouble.
Because she was no longer merely scheming to secure his protection. She wanted him. She wanted his hands in her hair again and his mouth on hers and the solid weight of his presence pressed against her, not because he was useful but because he washim, and the distinction between those two things was becoming harder to maintain with every hour.
She folded her hands in her lap and made herself look forward.
The road descended into the valley, and the town of Irwyn materialized through the mist like a painting emerging from varnish. Bleached stone cottages with slate roofs lined the hillside in uneven rows, and below them, the canal cut a dark ribbon through the green, a barge moving slowly along its length with bales stacked high under oilcloth. A stone market square. The spire of St. Elinor’s Church. And above it all, the dark column of the mill’s chimney rising past the roofs, trailing a banner of smoke that meant hundreds of people were at their work and the engines were turning. The air, even through the closed carriage windows, carried the faint tang of lanolin and coal smoke.
The girls pressed against the windows. Genevieve clutched Juliet’s hand. Arabella cocked her head to watch the passing scenery over their heads, and Seraphina, who had maintained her aloofness through the entire drive, leaned forward with an eagerness that made her look, for the first time, like a young woman of four-and-twenty rather than a prisoner granted a temporary reprieve.
The carriage turned onto Merchant Row and drew to a halt. Alistair descended first and handed the girls down one by one, followed by Josephine. Up close, the shops were even more inviting than they had appeared from the carriage, their bow windows displaying bolts of cloth, leather-bound books, jars of sweets, and the quiet prosperity of a town that owed its existence to wool and water.
They had barely taken a dozen steps along the pavement before Genevieve sniffed the warm air drifting from a bakery. “Spiced gingerbread,” she declared. “With black treacle and clove.”
“I shall not leave without a square of it,” Juliet said, and before Josephine could respond, all four girls had hurried through the bakery door with a tinkling of the bell, a flurry ofblack bombazine and bright eyes that made the shopkeeper look up from his counter in mild alarm.
