Cecilia Grant - [Blackshear Family 03]

by A Woman Entangled

  His palm felt damp against his stomach. His fingertips were creeping lower, into the narrow swath of hair that started at his navel and led downward. There’d been no lack of interest in her response to him tonight. That was the real problem. It was no longer a matter of spinning fancies round an unattainable porcelain princess. The air of pathos was gone. He had memories now, vivid recollections of how she’d felt and sounded and tasted. Two minutes’ work, bolstered by those memories, and he’d be able to sleep.

  He halted his fingers nevertheless. He couldn’t give in to this. The kiss had been a single spectacular lapse, he’d told her he regretted it, and now he needed to behave in whatever way would make his words true. He needn’t encourage any sentiments in himself that might make it more difficult to finally see her marry her marquess, or Lord Barclay, or Lord John Stargazing Scarecrow, or whatever man she eventually snared.

  He threw off the covers and jumped out of bed, taking his candle to the washstand. The water in the pitcher would be frigid at this hour. He poured a little into the bowl, then wrung a cloth and applied it, clutching up his nightshirt to undignified heights, gritting his teeth at the shock of cold. Serve his foolishness right if his bollocks shrunk all the way up into his groin and never came back.

  But the chilly cloth did its job. Ten seconds of its noxious company and his appetites were doused to extinction. So at least he wouldn’t have a private sin to recall, on top of the already awkward enough shared misdeed, the next time he faced Miss Westbrook.

  Not to mention facing her parents. Christ. He let his nightshirt fall and tossed the washcloth into the bowl. It hit the china with a sodden thunk. He oughtn’t to have needed the wilting effects of cold water, really. The consciousness of how he’d betrayed the Westbrooks’ trust, how he’d perpetrated on their daughter the very sort of wrong he’d promised to protect her from, should have been enough to kill his ardor.

  Well, at least they weren’t likely to find out. He’d never breathe a word of the incident to anyone, and Miss Westbrook, with so much more to lose, would surely keep the secret just as close. In company—and henceforward, he’d be sure they saw each other only in company—they’d behave as though no such thing had ever happened. Then with luck, and perhaps a bit of time, it would be as if no such thing ever had.

  MR. BLACKSHEAR had been right in his prediction. She was sorry. From the ends of her hair to the tips of her toes, she was sorry, sorry, sorry for having been so careless as to—

  No. Kate curled her hands into fists and set her teeth, staring up into the darkness of her room. Careless made it sound like an accident that had happened while her guard was down. As if she’d had charge of Lady Harringdon’s spaniel and turned her back long enough for the thing to run off. A matter of mere negligence, with no conscious wrongdoing.

  She knew better than that.

  She was sorry, from the unsettled pit of her stomach on out to all her restless limbs, for her part in—

  No. Not her part. It was only half a repentance, if she took only half the blame. She flexed her fingers and curled them again.

  He’d been the one to set his hand at her jaw and bring his mouth to hers, yes. He’d been the one to kiss, at first, and she the one to be kissed. But between that first friendly touch of his lips on her forehead, and the searing contact of mouth against mouth, she’d had ample opportunity to discourage him, and—

  And no, even this was a dishonest way of recounting it. He hadn’t meant that kiss on the forehead to lead to anything else. He’d had no intentions, no designs, that wanted discouraging by her. He would have waited, chaste and cordial, for her to regain her legs, if she hadn’t caught her breath and tipped her face toward him and willed him, from some wild, foreign impulse, to put his lips on her again.

  A half dozen small memories dove in like hornets. Her coarse, wanton sigh. I’m not sorry this happened, Nick. The clumsy eagerness with which she’d gripped his arms and dragged her mouth across his. His regret, owned frankly aloud while all her nerve endings were still pining for his touch. That long walk back through the ballroom, sure at every step that her eyes, her cheeks, her lips must make a plain confession to any onlooker of what she’d been about.

  She brought her hands up to cover her face, to hide from the memory hornets, and she let out a long, wavering breath.

  “For Heaven’s sake, what is it?” Viola’s voice nearly spurred Kate out of her skin. “You may as well be over here jumping up and down on my mattress, for all that I’m likely to sleep.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’d thought you were asleep.” She had been when Kate had come in a little after four. Only Mama had waited up, and only long enough to see that she was safely home. She hadn’t demanded to hear every last detail of the evening, and thank goodness for that.

  “I was asleep, but I’m not now.” A yawn sounded through the darkness. “Is something the matter? Did Lady Harringdon make you walk three paces behind her and forbid you to speak or meet anyone’s eyes?”

  “No. You’re very unjust. She showed me a great deal of kind attention.”

  “Then what’s unsettled you so? You’re shifting about as if you had cake crumbs strewn across your sheets.”

  Kate slowly took her hands away from her face. The dark, she’d learned already tonight, had a nefarious way of making reckless acts seem reasonable. Now suddenly it pressed in on her with a new suggestion: Tell her. Why not tell her?

  She could hear her own breath in the room’s quiet. She could almost hear her heartbeat.

  When she’d come back into the ballroom she’d felt as if she was viewing the guests and pleasant diversions through a pane of crazed glass. The modesty with which she impressed Lady Harringdon was but a fraudulent piece of playacting. Mrs. Smith would surely never let her daughter speak to Miss Westbrook again, if she knew the truth. She’d begun the evening feeling she’d finally found her place among people who spoke her language, and she’d ended it feeling utterly alone. Unworthy. Set apart from any chance of real belonging by her imprudent act, and all the necessary secrecy that followed.

  “Kate?” Viola had sat up. All the irritation had fled her voice, its place taken by sisterly concern. “What is it? What happened?”

  And all at once she felt the full weight of her daily burden, of being the only one in this house who went about measuring all her actions by how they might aid or hinder the family’s respectability; by what they might mean for her younger sisters’ prospects.

  Or usually, rather, she measured her actions that way. Usually she kept respectability in mind. She’d finally staggered beneath that burden, and now she had a chance to step out from under it, for the length of a conversation at least.

  “I kissed someone.” She kept her voice low and gripped the counterpane in fistfuls. “At the party tonight, someone kissed me.”

  “What?” Viola’s whisper shot across the room like an arrow in flight. “How could such a thing happen? Surely you didn’t let a gentleman draw you away from the company, after Papa’s warning. Where was Mr. Blackshear? He was supposed to guard against this.”

  They couldn’t have this conversation across even the small distance that separated their beds. Kate slipped out from under the covers and padded over the carpet to climb in with her sister. She felt as if she were stepping into water whose depths she didn’t know. She pressed her lips together, keeping the secret for one second more. Then she spoke. “Mr. Blackshear was there at the time.”

  Darkness prevented her from seeing the comprehension spread over Viola’s face, but she could imagine it. It made a slow progress, like those outward-traveling rings that marked where a pebble had been tossed into a placid lake. Six seconds went by before the first ring lapped up against the shores of her sister’s understanding.

  “Mr. Blackshear?”

  She couldn’t blame Viola for her hushed, incredulous tone. The story was in every way preposterous.

  Briefly it occurred to Kate to dart a
way from the truth. But she couldn’t even begin to think of a credible lie. She took a breath. “Mr. Blackshear. Yes.”

  Vi, who’d remained sitting up, now lay down slowly. They’d shared a bed when they were small. Her sister’s presence beside her, all space-claiming elbows, felt familiar and comforting. “I can scarce believe it of him.” Not so incredulous now, despite her choice of words. Wondering, though, and more than half the way already to appalled. “He’s always conducted himself here as the very pattern of honor and respect. I never would have guessed him for the sort of man who would turn a lady’s trust to his unscrupulous advantage.”

  “He didn’t. It wasn’t—” The explanation stuck in her throat; she had to swallow and try again. “He’s not that sort of man. He didn’t take advantage.”

  “I don’t understand. It was Mr. Blackshear who kissed you?”

  “Yes. And he shouldn’t have done it. He said as much himself. But it’s not as though he’d schemed and calculated to bring it about. He’d drawn me aside to speak privately and we were nearly seen. It would have meant ruin. And somehow the fright of that predicament … and then the relief, when the danger had passed …” Words fell so pitifully short of conveying what that moment had been. “I was shaking, and a bit faint. He caught me at the elbows to support me when I couldn’t stand. And then we were very near one another. And it was dark.”

  “He drew you aside to speak privately in the dark?” Viola queried like a single-minded barrister, seizing those details that bolstered her grim reading of the events.

  “He didn’t plan what happened.” Like the most stubborn of witnesses, never swaying from her story because she knew she spoke the truth. “I’m sure to my soul of that.”

  A brief pause, while Viola considered her sister’s certainty, probably reviewed her own experience of Mr. Blackshear’s character by way of corroboration, and tossed it all onto the scales against the bald fact of the transgression. “Very well, but that doesn’t excuse him. Falling victim to the passion of the moment might not be quite so villainous as plotting a seduction, but it’s still despicable. I cannot respect a man so at the mercy of his appetites that he would impose his attentions on a lady, even if the insult stops at a kiss.”

  “Viola.” Here it came. The bombshell twist in her testimony. The step into deepest water. And yet she felt so strangely calm. “There was no insult. There was no imposition. If he was despicable, so am I.”

  “I cannot fathom your meaning.” Vi turned on her side, as if to somehow read Kate through the dark.

  “I wanted him to kiss me. I don’t believe he would have done so, but that he sensed that I wanted him to. And I didn’t stop him, either from starting or from carrying on. He was the one who stopped, at last, and said we oughtn’t to have done it.”

  “Kate!” Up on one elbow now, her voice a scandalized whisper. “Are you in love with him?”

  “I don’t see how I could be. We’ve known him all this time. Surely if I were going to fall in love with him, I wouldn’t have waited until now to do it.” She’d asked herself this same question at length in Lady Harringdon’s carriage on the way back home.

  “It does sound … unlike what one hears about falling in love.” The mattress sighed as Viola slowly lay back down. “Papa says when he first saw Mama it was like being struck by lightning.”

  “Yes.” That was how love was meant to happen, one heard. “Of course it wasn’t the same for her.”

  “No. She came to love him as she came to know him.” They’d heard this story so many times, they could practically recite it in their parents’ own words. “But that takes only a few weeks. Months, at the most. You’ve known Mr. Blackshear a great while longer than that.”

  “You see? It doesn’t make any sense that I would be in love with him now. Besides, I wouldn’t be in any doubt, would I? Surely I would know.”

  Viola mulled this over for several silent seconds. “I’m further than ever from understanding, then. Why did you let him kiss you if you’re not in love with him?”

  That was the very question with which she’d wrestled, once deciding that she was not in love. Because I’m a wanton had been the first, shameful answer, the self-condemnation that slithered in even before she’d stepped out onto that terrace to go back to the ballroom.

  The longer she’d thought on it, though, the flimsier that answer had grown. Her sister, certainly, would not be satisfied with such a pronouncement. She’d demand it be justified and elaborated upon.

  “I begin to believe, Viola, that there have been some major omissions in what we were taught of these things.” Were these the words of a wanton? Maybe. They were no less true for that. “I, too, had always supposed that it was a man’s part to kiss, and a woman’s to permit or deny him. That men sought favors and women granted them, sometimes, for the sake of love. No one ever told me I might want to kiss a man for the sake of the kiss itself.”

  She could all but hear her sister chewing over this new and meaty thought. “You mean to say … it was pleasant,” Viola said after a moment.

  “Pleasant in the way I imagine strong drink must be.” Part of her wanted to tell all the particulars: the heady sense of his nearness; the feather-light progress of his lips along hers; the various evidences of his enjoyment; his fingertips playing at the nape of her neck. But she was already betraying Mr. Blackshear a little by telling as much as she had. She would leave him this much privacy, at least. “And every bit as clouding to the judgment as drink. If he’d attempted anything beyond the kiss, I’m not at all sure I would have objected.”

  “You would have let yourself be ruined, even? Knowing a child could result?” Viola’s voice went thin with amazement.

  “I’d like to think I would be mindful of the consequences, and stop short of that point. But I risked grave consequences already, kissing him where we might have been discovered. I ceased to be a rational creature somehow. I’m ashamed to tell it. But so it was.” A thought flitted in: how apt a word unburden was. Here she was, confessing her dark disgrace, and she felt lighter, looser in her shoulders and chest. “Are you terribly shocked at me?”

  “Maybe a little. Surprised, at the very least.” Vi spoke slowly, in the way she did when certain gears in her brain began their industrious turnings. “And yet why should I be? If men lose all their reason when their passions are engaged—and isn’t that precisely why we’re warned against allowing so much as a private interview with a man? Isn’t that precisely the fancy upon which novelists like Mr. Richardson have spun so many tales?—then why on earth shouldn’t that experience be the same for a woman?”

  Bless her militant sister, so quick to absorb the shock, dispense with the shame, and begin shaping the whole experience into some new grist for one of her theories. Kate smiled into the darkness, pulling the covers up to her chin. “Maybe that’s why I’ve never cared for Mr. Richardson’s novels. Maybe I always suspected them to be full of lies.”

  “It’s been a gross fraud perpetrated on our sex, I think. Richardson was but one in a vast army of charlatans. Why, every girl’s mother is culpable, if she does not speak openly with her daughter on the subject of pleasure and passion. A girl taken by surprise, as you were tonight, could easily fall into disaster.”

  “I cannot judge reticent mothers very harshly, though.” Kate yawned halfway through the thought. A warm drowsiness was settling in, now that she’d made her confession and been absolved of wantonness. “I’m sure they’re wary of instilling a temptation where perhaps there had been none before.”

  “Then I shall have to do what they will not. Arm young ladies with true and comprehensive information. A separate pamphlet, I should think, in addition to the revisions I must make to my chapter on fallen women.” She paused. “This may even call for some slight emendation to my thoughts on bodily integrity.”

  “I’m glad I told you, Viola.” Those few words stood for a host of others. Thank you for knowing something was wrong. Thank you for listening. Th
ank you for being the one lady of my acquaintance who could hear such a tale and find no cause for blame.

  “So am I, to be sure.” Vi turned away on her side, taking most of the covers with her, as had been her habit in their youth. “I wasn’t likely to find out the truth about kissing by any other means. And now I shall have a great deal of thinking and writing to do.”

  Kate stayed in her sister’s bed. To be here, crammed alongside like children again, was a comfort. She could almost believe she was small still, innocent, years away from grown-up folly.

  She breathed, slow and even, waiting for sleep. Facing Mr. Blackshear again was going to be a mortifying trial. Dimly she knew that, even drowsing in the glow of Viola’s ready exoneration. The prospect plucked at her thoughts and later thrummed along the edges of her dreams, distracting as gloved fingertips trifling through her ribbon-bound hair.

  HE’D THOUGHT some, in the three days since the event, of what he might do to put her at ease. To reassure her that nothing would change between them; that he took all the blame for what had happened upon himself; that he’d already all but forgotten the particulars, up to and including I’m not sorry this happened, Nick.

  She had apparently been mulling over the same matter, and decided on a facade of frivolous, impersonal gaiety. It hurt, somehow, to watch. He didn’t like to be responsible for making her do anything false.

  But here he was on his first visit to the house since promising her father to keep her safe from unscrupulous men, and his few incidental interactions with her had all the weight of the silk thread with which she was presently sewing some decorative thing. She sat on the sofa, Miss Viola beside her, their attention half occupied by their respective needlework frame and book, and half engaged by the odd exercise going forward at the hearth end of the parlor.