A Pursuit of Home

by Kristi Ann Hunter

  Derek’s notes and sketches were spread out in Ryland’s study, along with the map and ribbons they’d already determined. Well, the ones they had already guessed. It was still possible they were interpreting the diary completely wrong, there was no secret treasure, the map wasn’t going to come together, and the old queen had simply been a frivolous poet.

  After circling through the garret rooms and startling three maids, Jess came down the servants’ stairs to avoid the private parlor where Kit and Daphne occasionally liked to sit. Then she darted through Miranda’s dressing room, knowing the woman would have been long since dressed and meeting with the housekeeper. From there, it was easy enough to make it to the main stairs and down to the front hall.

  Although almost everyone started the day in the study pretending to be able to find something new in their search, it was possible they were still breakfasting at the back of the house. Jess had requested a tray be sent up to her room, and Miranda wasn’t quite to the manipulative point of refusing that request, particularly since some of the maids were still rather loyal to the girl who had once worked alongside them.

  After two turns and a brief pause that involved balancing in a window and tucking her legs up behind the drape, she made it to the study.

  Derek was already in there when she arrived, but he wasn’t hunched over the desk the way he had been the past two days—something that reaffirmed for Jess that Derek was either oblivious of the machinations around them or as determined to avert them as she was. Now, though, he sat in one of the chairs that flanked the fireplace. Low flames flickered in the hearth in deference to the encroaching chill and dampness. Soon travel would become more difficult.

  A glance around the room revealed the materials they’d labored over had been neatly stacked and set aside.

  Jess approached the fire slowly. What was he doing? What was he thinking? Should she leave before he noticed her arrival? Hide until someone else came in as well?

  Given everyone’s obsession with leaving Jess alone with Derek, she could only imagine what they’d think if she started the day that way by her own choice.

  “Good, you’re here.” Derek jumped out of the seat, startling Jess enough to pull a small gasp and jump from her. He rubbed his hands together, a look of giddy anticipation on his face.

  “Yes, I am. Where is everyone?”

  Confusion fell briefly over his features as he looked around. Had he truly not noticed he was alone? “I don’t know. They were here earlier. I told them I was taking a break this morning because you and I had been thinking about nothing but this for weeks, and we were obviously missing something.”

  “Obviously,” Jess said quietly, trying not to groan. No wonder none of them were here. They’d have grasped on to the possible implications of such a statement with the grip of a child with a sweet.

  “That’s why I move around so much when I’m working at a house,” Derek continued. “Fresh looks are the most telling. You only see something new when you stop seeing what you saw before.”

  It made sense, but Jess could think of many ways to step away from this fiasco that likely didn’t involve whatever he had planned. She opened her mouth to tell him they could take a break separately, but his grin stopped her. She hadn’t seen him this excited since, well, since he thought her roasted beef had been served on a piece of rare pottery and he’d attempted to ransack her kitchen in an attempt to find more.

  She’d quashed his smile quickly then. She didn’t have the heart to do it now. He’d suffered through some horrible experiences on her behalf. She could suffer through one morning. “What are we doing?”

  With a flourish he stepped aside and indicated a basket that had been sitting at his feet. “This!”

  Oh please, no, not a picnic.

  He knelt down and opened the basket to reveal . . . Jess coughed. “Is that yarn?”

  “Yes.” He rose with a grin of triumph. “I’m going to teach you to knit.”

  “To . . . knit?” Jess pinched herself. She was dreaming, wasn’t she? There wasn’t possibly a man standing in Ryland’s study, excited about teaching her to knit.

  The sting in her arm said otherwise.

  Well, she’d just decided she could suffer through a morning with him. What did the activity matter as long as he enjoyed it?

  “Yes, knit.” Needles and yarn spilled from the basket as Derek sat and began emptying the contents onto a table between the chairs. “That was what told me something was wrong in the mail coach. You weren’t really knitting. If you actually know how to knit, your old lady disguise will become much stronger.”

  Jess froze, one hand on the back of the second chair. He’d chosen this activity for her. What a bizarre, unexpected, and considerate thing for him to do.

  “All right,” she said, slowly lowering herself into the second chair. “Teach me to knit.”

  “For what you’re doing you don’t need to learn anything particularly difficult. A basic stitch will do.” He grabbed a set of needles and a length of yarn. “You hold the needles well, of course, or the ruse would have been more obvious, but the yarn is held this way.”

  He demonstrated the proper position and Jess tried to copy it.

  “No, the yarn threads through like this.” He knelt in front of her chair and adjusted her hold.

  The feelings of attraction that had rushed over her in the ambassador’s closet returned. Without the imminent danger to subdue them, they were harder to push aside. Did he feel it, too? The urge to extend the contact? To form whatever excuse was necessary to maintain it?

  His hands were steadily correcting her hold and motions, so it was likely he didn’t feel the same. That was good. If he didn’t, then she could find a way to ignore it, could convince herself it didn’t matter.

  She lifted her gaze to his for confirmation.

  He wasn’t looking at the yarn.

  Instead he was looking at her, a small smile on his face. Fine lines creased the area around his eyes, as if the smile was larger than it appeared at first glance. A sense of wonder glazed his expression, as if he felt the same way she did, only without the ensuing terror.

  She swallowed hard. If he wasn’t afraid, she wouldn’t be either. She’d faced death, imprisonment, and war without flinching. Knitting and attraction wouldn’t be the thing that sent her fleeing, even if they felt far more dangerous than any fight she’d ever entered.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Derek had studied romantic interludes in the context of art and the multiple ways it had impacted people throughout history, but now, faced with a real-life example, he had many questions.

  Could attraction come from other emotions? Could the body manifest the feeling in order to mask or distract from fear and anxiety? Was it possible for his lungs to actually stop breathing? His chest felt solid, as if it no longer possessed the ability to expand and contract.

  It had seemed so logical to teach her knitting this morning, to see if this attraction still existed when the moment wasn’t fraught with tension or weighed down by impending doom. Now he wasn’t so sure. What was better? Not knowing if he was truly feeling something for this woman, or not knowing if there would ever be something he could do about it?

  “You have to hold it gently,” he said, talking to himself as much as to her. As much as he wanted to drop the yarn and simply hold her hand, he’d never been a man given to impulse. “Allow the yarn to move as it needs to.”

  He adjusted her hands once more, running one finger along the edge of the yarn to show her the proper looseness. Her hands were small but strong, roughened in a way that confirmed she’d done a great deal more than kitchen work in her life.

  For now she was holding the yarn correctly, so he had no excuse to remain at her feet, leaning into her space. He shifted back to his seat and picked up his needles. Knitting was fairly simple once one got the pattern down, but it was awkward at first. Likely he would have to adjust her hold again, but he refused to artificially create a re
ason to feel her small hands in his. It wasn’t the time.

  It may never be the time.

  Keeping his movements slow, he demonstrated the basic stitch. It took her a few more minutes and a handful of corrections by him, but soon—rather faster than he would have liked, in all honesty—she had the hang of it.

  “Unraveling it is a bit more difficult.” He shifted his hold on the yarn to pull his stitches out. “You may need to have two sets of stitches going so you knit one and unravel the other as you go.”

  They sat there, knitting and unraveling, as the morning drifted by. Her movements got smoother, and eventually he was showing her more advanced stitches.

  “How did you learn to knit?” she asked as she whipped out another row of simple stitches.

  “My grandmother. She lived with us, but her eyesight and her health were failing. There was little she could do besides sit in her rocking chair and knit. She couldn’t see the yarn well anymore, but she could feel the stitches.”

  “Why you?”

  “Why not me?” It didn’t seem very polite to say that the rest of his family hadn’t had the patience to sit around with a cantankerous old woman who had spent half her time grumbling about what she could no longer do and the other half barking at people to do it for her. “She didn’t handle her immobility well, and my family couldn’t block it out, I suppose. I started watching her knit as a form of distraction. It was easy enough to ignore her ramblings if I had something to study.”

  Jess lowered her block of knitted yarn to her lap and stared at him.

  Derek shifted in his seat but kept working, though he wasn’t paying attention to what stitches he was making. “One day she realized what I was doing and handed me a set of needles and a ball of yarn. She became a bit less difficult after that. Teaching me gave her a purpose, I suppose.”

  His father hadn’t loved the idea, but he enjoyed the yelling of his mother even less, so he’d allowed Derek to continue. Neither his father nor his brother—nor even Derek, truth be told—would have guessed that one day, that would be the skill he would use to test his bond with a woman.

  “Do you still knit?” Jess yanked on the end of her yarn with enthusiasm, grin widening as the entire business unraveled. As the last stitch gave way, she let out a soft laugh.

  Would she laugh in truth if he admitted that he did, in fact, still knit? It had been a source of mockery in his own home until his mother had scowled everyone into silence. What would Jess think?

  “Yes,” he said, after taking a deep breath. “I do. At first it was to finish the blanket my grandmother had been working on. It seemed wrong to leave her last work incomplete. I found the project relaxing.”

  It was more than that, of course. Knitting followed a set of rules. Unlike painting or drawing, which needed that extra little flourish to become art instead of simply lines, knitting was all about the tension of the yarn and the consistency of stitches. The talents that made him a connoisseur of art instead of an artist made him good at knitting.

  “I learned cooking as a distraction.”

  His fingers paused as he looked up. Jess’s needles clicked on, her entire attention focused on them. Should he say something? “From your mother?”

  A burst of wry laughter shook her body. “Goodness, no. Mother never gave up hope that we would all one day return to the palace, so she did everything she could to maintain that lifestyle. She tried to make that four-room cottage a twenty-room palace.”

  She fell into knitting again, but this time Derek remained quiet. Like paintings that revealed themselves over time, she required patience. Grasping for more might yield results, but he would lose the nuance, the little details that told him more than her words did.

  “It wasn’t only my family in that cottage. Some of my uncle’s advisors and our personal servants came, too, aware they’d be the first targeted after we disappeared. Everyone was tense and solemn, except for Ismelde, the palace cook.”

  “Your cook knew enough state secrets to be in danger?” Derek couldn’t hold back the question. Advisors and secretaries made sense, of course, but cooks? Had the maids come, too?

  “No,” Jess said with a shake of her head. She stopped knitting and twined the yarn through her fingers. “She was from a village on the Rhine. She was afraid what the French would do to her. As a child, I found her happiness far more enjoyable than everyone else’s gloom. Cooking was more fun than trying to learn how to take tea and behave at court, especially since I had to pretend the crops were the other people.”

  “Ismelde taught you to cook, then?”

  Jess nodded. “She was amazing. Even with our limited resources and rudimentary kitchen she managed to produce the most splendid meals. Desserts and puddings were rare, but they were her favorite.”

  “No wonder you enjoy cooking.”

  She was silent and still for a moment before she pulled the yarn from between her fingers and began knitting again. “Actually, I hate it.”

  Derek placed his knitting aside and leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees so that his face was level with hers. “But you’re a cook.”

  “The end of the war made me vulnerable, so I had to leave London. I knew that should Verbonne ever become its own country again, someone was going to want what I had, even though I wasn’t even sure what it was. That’s dangerous, you know, having a secret you can’t even bargain with because it’s a secret even from you.

  “Ryland did a good job convincing everyone I was someone else, that he’d found me somewhere else, but it was a story that couldn’t hold if someone really started looking.” Jess shrugged. “Becoming a cook was the best way to hide.”

  “How did you end up at Haven Manor?” Derek didn’t know everything about the history of the ladies working at the secluded country estate, but he knew they’d been hiding children who would ruin important reputations.

  “Kit was in London on . . .” Jess flashed a grin. “We’ll say she was here on business. She ran into a bit of trouble. I helped her out of it. In return she gave me a place to go.”

  Derek knew there had to be more to it than that, but that wasn’t what he was most concerned about at the moment. “Why a cook, though?”

  “Cooks stay in the kitchens.”

  “You felt a need to hide among a group of people who were already hiding?” Derek asked with lifted eyebrows.

  She sighed and let her work fall into her lap. The pale eyes she lifted to him were flatter than any he’d ever seen. The spark of life and determination he always saw in her was nowhere to be found. “I know Ismelde probably didn’t survive that night. She wasn’t valuable enough to imprison, and her thick accent was one no Frenchman would want in his household. Cooking reminds me of what I lost. It reminds me how quickly everything changes.” She poked at the yarn. “It reminds me not to become too attached.”

  Her face tilted toward him, her normal smirk back in place though the spirit wasn’t yet visible in her eyes. “Besides, the only cooking Daphne does is boiling the mess out of something before smashing it into submission. Kit can make stew. Eating their cooking for years on end wasn’t an option.”

  Derek laughed with her, though it took a bit of effort, given the pain slicing through his heart for Jess’s loss. “Tell me about living with them.”

  To his surprise, she did. Her yarn and needles were forgotten as she shared about the way they’d forced her to interact, their friendship non-optional. She talked of the children they’d cared for with a bit of awe and fear but also affection.

  He shared his favorite travels and paintings.

  She spoke to him in seven languages.

  By the time the clock in the main hall chimed noon, Derek knew a great deal about her that he hadn’t at the beginning of the day. Most of all, he knew he’d never again meet a woman like Jess. Even the greatest goddess ever painted couldn’t impress him more.

  The thing was, despite her confidence, he didn’t think she saw herself as someone impressive
.

  He reached one hand across the space between their chairs and placed it on top of hers. She looked up at him through her lashes but didn’t move her hand. “Jess, I—”

  A throat cleared from the doorway, causing Derek to jerk back hard enough that the chair rocked on two legs for a moment before crashing back down.

  “Jess, you’ve a visitor,” Miranda said, not even bothering to hide her fascination at the scene she’d walked in on. “Ryland refuses to let him past the front hall.”

  Jess stood, the knitted lump falling to the ground as she adjusted her skirts. Derek stared at her, but she never gave him so much as a glance. “I’ll be right there.”

  Not looking at Derek required every last bit of Jess’s effort. She wanted to look his way, offer him some sort of reassurance, but any attention she bestowed on him would only make the situation worse.

  Miranda grinned as she stepped aside to let Jess through the door. Despite the discomfort, part of Jess was thankful for the interruption.

  She was less thankful for the fact that as soon as this apparently unwelcome visitor was taken care of, Miranda would be in Ryland’s ear, as well as everyone else’s, about what she’d seen.

  Jess didn’t care what they did with that information as long as they didn’t say anything to Derek. If Ryland even thought to make life difficult for the scholar, Jess would cut him down with a plethora of embarrassing stories about him. They wouldn’t make Miranda love him any less, of course, but what wife would be able to resist teasing her husband about the time he had to go a week in trousers that were five inches too short and an entire person too big in the waist because they were the only ones Jess could procure?

  Jess entered the front hall to see Ryland standing, feet braced, arms crossed, and icy glare directed at a very docile Leonard Merkins.

  Ryland’s gaze shifted as Jess approached, turning on her with the same hardness. It was almost enough to make her flinch. No wonder Merkins wasn’t being his normal obnoxious self. “You enlisted his assistance?”