“Very long. Very torrid. In the interim, let’s have a truce and work on the question that we struggle with, friendship. Let me be your friend, Jemina. I don’t want you to ever question it again.”
“I’d like to be your friend, Daniel.”
“Excellent.” Like at the Old Bailey, he turned his back to her as if she were one of the jurymen.
He paced and put together a good plan to cement their friendship. “Next week, you should be feeling better and you should come to court. Your colleague, Widow Cultony, has her hearing then. My colleague, a fellow barrister, is still in the dark about her knowing his strategy. I assume by now Aunt has amassed countering witness statements.”
“That sir, I cannot disclose. See, I can be discreet.”
He laughed and shook his head. “You are unusual.”
“And you are out of ambrosia. If you are going to be up watching me and Hope, the least you can do is make more.”
He leaned close, peering down at the empty bowl. “You’re not the type of girl who would leave me nothing?”
Her palm went to his jaw. It was rough, a little calloused. Probably too much rope climbing. “You look so serious, Daniel, fretting over a little ambrosia between friends.”
Retrieving the spoon, he dropped it with a clang into the empty bowl. “I’ll see what can be arranged.”
If she kept touching him and stuck to the present, he’d give her the world. He’d give her forever too, merely for the way Hope clung to her.
He kissed his daughter’s brow, then Jemina’s too. “I’ll return with another bowl.”
He headed to the kitchen. An odd comfort filled him. That sweet picture of Jemina and Hope turned in his head.
If she could trust him and leave the past behind, then Daniel would know he’d found the woman for him and his daughter.
Gaining her trust fully was going to be difficult when danger and Jemina seemed entwined.
CHAPTER 30
JEMINA—OLDBAILEYFRIENDS
My nerves seemed tight, stretched like a canvas readying to pop as I stood at the entry of the prestigious Old Bailey. The curved marble of the bricked facade looked daunting, so aloof and strong.
When I walked inside, a little boy waving nosegay went past me. The sweet herbs of whatever was in his pot ushered in peace, which lasted until I saw Daniel.
He came from a room up ahead. With a slight dip of his chin, his perfectly trimmed beard looking elegant, he turned but not before I saw the look in his shiny jet eyes. The seriousness in his face, like a man possessed, it made him look older, almost haunted. With a coarse silver wig and the white frills about his neck, he looked like the world was upon his shoulders.
This image was at odds with the gentle man who fed me mash and laughed with his whole soul.
“Woman, look where you’re going.”
I’d bumped into a lady wearing a feather turban. She had that look of old money or the appearance of it with her shiny satin blue pelisse.
“Sorry.”
An arm looped about mine. “Don’t mind her, Buckles.”
Lady Lavinia, spry with her brunette curls coiffed and bouncing under a bonnet that pointed to the side like a pirate’s, spun me around. “Come for the show or the earl?”
“Maybe a little of both. I hear court can be quite dramatic.”
“Not as dramatic as the little fight I heard you and our Daniel had. He seemed quite inconsolable through Lady Shrewsbury’s dinner. I had to work extra hard to cheer him up. Don’t go twisting him up now because you want him back.”
Lady Lavinia thought me stupid or that I hadn’t been recovering at Finchely. I had no doubts about how Daniel chose to spend his time.
The femme fatale definitely didn’t know this girl had been hand-fed by the earl. I grinned at her. “Keep up the good work. We need him happy.”
