A Kiss for Midwinter (The Brothers Sinister)

by Milan, Courtney

He looked into her eyes as she spoke, and she felt an unwelcome thrill deep in her belly, as if these words had found their target deep in her solar plexus. She shook off that odd feeling and turned away from the direct intensity of his gaze.

  “Believe it or not, Doctor Grantham, I am beginning to like you. Your personality may be…well, a bit abrasive, but it grows on me. I want to help you, give you a push. Even abrasive, difficult men deserve happiness. I should be able to figure out who you’re enamored of without too much difficulty.”

  “Yes, you should,” he said.

  Every sentence sent a little pulse of excitement through her.

  She made herself look up at him with a smile on her face. “Maybe I could help you. Put in a good word for you, that sort of thing.”

  He smiled faintly. “When you figure it out,” he said, “I’d be much obliged. Tell her that I may be difficult, but I am remarkably constant in my affections, that I have thought of her every day for these last sixteen months. Even when it made no sense.”

  And that left her with the biggest thrill of all, her whole body vibrating with an unexplainable urgency.

  Chapter Nine

  FOR THE SECOND NIGHT IN A ROW, Doctor Grantham had left Lydia in a state of bewilderment. After he’d returned her to her doorstep, her confusion had refused to untangle. She’d thought of what he’d said as she entered the house, throughout dinner. She was still thinking about it when she joined her parents in the back parlor.

  He’d admitted that he’d been taken with a woman for more than a year. It was such a romantic thing to say. Which was why she could hardly countenance it from him.

  If someone had asked her before today, she would have imagined that he was the sort to say that all women were alike. He’d use medical terms. One vagina, he might say, was much like another. Both provided the same stimulation to the pleasure centers. She bit her lip, imagining him saying that in his dark, gravelly voice.

  But he hadn’t said that. And today, behind the tree…

  She would never be able to explain how much it had meant to have his arms around her. He’d made her feel that all would be well, even though she had never cried like that before. Even though that scent of pine had reminded her of that long-ago hurt. He’d helped her, at the cost of his personal embarrassment. It was only fair that she try to advance his cause.

  As she sat next to her mother, embroidering her tablecloth, her mind kept shying back to Grantham.

  “Mother,” she said, finally, “what do you know of Grantham?”

  “You’re going on a few house calls with him, aren’t you? Is there any interest there?”

  Lydia colored. “No, no. Of course not.” She wasn’t so foolish as to become interested in a man who wanted another. Even if she did want to know who it was.

  Her mother looked at her for a long while, until Lydia dropped her eyes. There wasn’t any interest on her part. Just…curiosity, that was all. She wanted to know what sort of woman would capture the imagination of that sort of man.

  He was singularly straightforward. His regard would be a compliment in a way that another man’s would not. He wouldn’t be the sort to imagine a girl perfect because he was confused by his physical desire. He would see her—all her faults—and would decide that he wanted her anyway. Lydia simply wanted to know who this paragon was who had earned his affection.

  Whoever it was, she had to be pretty. He wouldn’t have made a list of pretty women if he didn’t value the characteristic. Maybe it was Joanna Perkins. She was absolutely lovely, with that bright golden hair and that brilliant laugh. He’d like a woman who laughed—they could laugh together.

  But he’d said he’d paid her marked attention, and she could not recall Grantham once walking with Miss Perkins and courting that laugh of hers. She tried to remember seeing him talking to another woman. He was so tall that he would have to bend to murmur sweet nothings.

  That mental image—the idea of Grantham leaning over another woman the way he had with Lydia today, giving her that dark, wicked smile that seemed meant for her alone—that made her fists clench in a way that she didn’t care to examine. She would have remembered seeing him talk to another woman that way. She couldn’t have helped but remember it.

  Maybe he was more circumspect than she’d imagined. She’d tell him that tomorrow that he needed to be more marked in his affections.

  Her father had joined her mother today. They sat next to each other, she embroidering, he reading through a list of reports, his spectacles perched on the end of his nose.

  “What do you think of Grantham?” Her heart raced as she spoke.

  Her father looked over the rims of his spectacles at her. “Am I going to have to have another talk with him?”

  “No. No. I’m just accompanying him on a few house calls.” And hitting him, and bursting into tears, and letting him hold her. And then there were the topics of their conversation. Safe to say that she wouldn’t tell her father that Grantham was instructing her on the use of French letters. He might take that amiss.

  Lydia looked up at the ceiling. “He’s an interesting man. I only want to figure him out.”

  “Hmm,” her father said. He glanced over at her mother, who gave him a repressive shake of her head.

  Grantham had said she could figure out who it was, and Lydia wouldn’t be able to sleep until she did. It couldn’t be that he’d been in love with Minnie, could it? Lydia’s best friend had married recently, and it would make perfect sense if he liked her. She was intelligent and beautiful—perhaps not the kind of beauty that would land on lists, but the kind that anyone with eyes could see, if only they looked long enough. It would explain why he hadn’t said a word. Lydia could have ceded him to Minnie without even thinking.

  Except…

  Except that up until two months ago, Minnie hadn’t had a decent prospect at all, and she’d been near the point of desperation. Grantham would have had only to speak the word, and she would have been his.

  Not Minnie.

  Doctor Grantham had told her that he had a few defects in his character.

  Lydia knew she had a few faults of her own, and one of the things she knew she was shockingly good at was telling lies to herself. She had convinced herself she would be happy to marry a man she didn’t care for, simply because it made sense to marry him and would have done her father good. She’d convinced herself that there was something else that would happen when she married—something besides the unholy joining of male and female forms, something beside the emission of seed, simply because the man she loved had said it was so.

  She’d convinced herself that she wasn’t angry about what had happened to her. Lydia knew that she lied to herself as assiduously as Grantham told the bare truth.

  But occasionally, she managed to shock even herself.

  She had just thought to herself that she could have ceded him to her friend. As if the mere fact that he’d held her this afternoon meant that he belonged to her. She didn’t want him for herself, did she? She couldn’t want him. He was… He was…

  Lydia swallowed.

  He was in love with another woman.

  She knows, she remembered him saying calmly. I am not a particularly subtle individual.

  “Oh,” she said aloud, “you sly little…sneaky…ridiculous…”

  She ran out of insults just as her parents both looked up at her.

  “Not you,” she said to her father. “Not you either, Mother.”

  But he hadn’t been sly or sneaky. He’d been remarkably upfront. He’d told her that he was madly in love with her, that he had been for months. And he’d said it just sarcastically enough that she’d shook her head and refused to think about the flutter in her belly. It didn’t make any sense, though. He couldn’t be in love with her. Why, he knew that she’d been pregnant—that she’d had relations with another man outside of marriage.

  The hymen is just a membrano-carneous structure…

  Oh, God. If she started with the premis
e that he wanted her, this whole wager took on an entirely different complexion.

  If she started with the premise that he wanted her, she didn’t even know if she could talk to him. Their easy conversation of the last day, their friendship, his jokes about gonorrhea… The way he’d put his arms around her and held her, even when doing so had made the circumstance of his physical arousal so apparent. Everything had been so simple.

  I may be difficult, but I am remarkably constant in my affections, and I have thought of her every day for these last sixteen months.

  He was talking about her. He’d been talking about her the whole time. He’d known it and he’d looked straight at her and said those things, knowing precisely what he was saying and who he was saying it to.

  And he was right. She’d known it. Even when she had been unable to admit it in her mind, her body had known, inclining to his, molding to his. She’d thrilled when he’d looked at her. That was neither fear she felt nor antipathy. That shock that traveled through her when he looked at her…that was attraction.

  Lydia swallowed.

  She should have been happy at the discovery. She was beginning to like him—perhaps more than like him. To realize that he felt the same way about her, that he’d been so fixed on her despite all the things she’d said to him…

  No. The last thing she needed was this want, this feeling that he might complete her in a way that everyone else could not. The last thing she needed was to flush when he talked of sexual arousal, to have him tell her in that calm way that it was natural, normal. That she could have it, that it wasn’t wrong.

  If she didn’t acknowledge what she felt, what he wanted, then it couldn’t lead her astray. She wanted to turn away and bury her head in her skirts. She wanted to take that certainty and stuff it back where she’d hid it before. But there was no way to unknow the thing she didn’t want to know. He wanted her, and she wanted him back.

  Knowledge led to action; action led to heartbreak.

  She knew, now, and she wished she didn’t.

  Chapter Ten

  SHE KNEW.

  Jonas could tell from the way she no longer met his eyes, the way she wouldn’t take his arm this afternoon. He could tell by the way she scarcely answered him when he spoke to her on the way to their final destination. And he could most particularly tell because when he guided her into the house far down Fosse Street, when he brought her close to him and led her through the labyrinth of rubbish that made up the front room, she drew away from him as soon as they reached the hob in back.

  “You should go on ahead of me,” he said.

  “But—”

  “He’s expecting you,” Jonas told her. “I told him the other night that you would be here, and you can rest assured that he was delighted by the prospect of a visit from a pretty girl. He wouldn’t hurt you, even if he could.”

  He looked around the room at the chaos that always reigned here, and felt a full-blown body itch settle into his skin. “I have a few things to do down here first.” Such as washing his hands and wrapping that end of cheese in wax paper. Such as avoiding the fact that he’d intended to introduce Lydia to his father.

  When she hesitated, he said, “You’re welcome to stay down here. Alone with me.”

  And of course, on that, she went up without him. He washed the teapot and found a bucket for water.

  “Call me Lucas,” he could hear his father saying, as Jonas slipped out the door and headed to the pump.

  By the time he got back and put some water on the hob to boil, they were chattering like old friends. He couldn’t quite make out their conversation over the clank of the dishes as he scrubbed them out. Trust Lydia to charm his father in a quarter of an hour.

  He snorted.

  Trust his father to charm Lydia as well. He gathered up tea things on a tray—all clean now, the silver shining and the teapot whiter than it had been in years—and started up the stairs.

  “I do want some explanation,” Lydia was saying. “What is all of this?”

  Jonas could hear the note of distaste in her voice, could imagine her gesturing to the piles of rubbish alongside his bed.

  “This is my independence.” Just as easily, he could hear the pride in his father’s voice. “I don’t mean to be a burden on my son in my old age,” his father said. Pride. Overwhelming pride.

  Granthams don’t cry, he remembered his father telling him when he was eleven. So you’re going back to school, and I won’t hear any more complaints from you. No matter what they do to you.

  “Does your son think of you as a burden?”

  “He’s just starting out in life,” his father said earnestly. “About to get married, he is. He doesn’t want an old man leaning on him. When I’m back on my feet, I’ll be able to cut this all up for the scrap metal.” Jonas came up the last few stairs, just in time to see his father lean in. “You see this? Everyone thinks it’s junk. But what you can see right now may well be worth ninety-five pounds. You hear that? Ninety-five pounds, if you know what to do with it.”

  That last was delivered in the kind of voice that an elderly man believed to be a whisper, but which could have been heard three counties over.

  To her credit, Lydia didn’t guffaw. “Ninety-five pounds,” she said quietly. “My, that’s clever of you.”

  “Clever. Ha. I’m not the clever one. You know my son. Now, there’s a clever boy. When he was three, I said to his mother—this boy is going to be something, if only we don’t get in his way. The local grammar school wasn’t good enough for him, no. We knew we had to get him into Rugby. Not easy for a scrap-metal dealer, do you think?”

  She made an appropriately appreciative noise. Neither of them had seen him, standing in the shadows of the stairwell, simply drinking in the sight of them together.

  “If there was a penny to be squeaked, my wife squeaked it,” his father announced proudly. “And what she didn’t save, I found. And after she…well, never mind that. My son, he went from Rugby to King’s College. Worked with them over on Portugal Street for a few years, he did.”

  “You must be very proud,” Lydia said.

  “Well, that’s as might be. Right now, I just want to know, where the devil is the—” He turned toward the stairwell and caught sight of Jonas standing there. All that proud boasting closed in on itself. He folded his skinny arms and looked down. “Took you long enough,” he grumbled.

  It had ever been like that between them. For years, Jonas had thought that his father was gruff, that he could never please him. It had taken him until early adulthood to understand that his father was proud—so proud that his pride shamed him.

  Jonas set the stacked cup and saucers on the bedside table, distributed them, and poured the tea.

  He handed Lydia her cup. “There’s no cream or sugar, unfortunately. It’s not good for his heart.”

  “As if I would in any event. Did you know the average man spends one pound six shillings a year on sugar, if you add it all up? I read it the other day. Over the course of a man’s life, that adds up to well over sixty pounds. Just for having a little sweetener. You seem a sensible woman, Miss Charingford. You don’t take sugar, do you?”

  “A little.”

  “Two sugars. And cream.” Jonas had watched her often enough.

  “Two sugars?” His father looked scandalized. “Why, that’s a hundred-pound habit. Best to break it now. But do you know what this fellow has me doing?” He gestured at Jonas.

  Lydia shook her head.

  “I’ve told him a thousand times that if you mix lard with rice, you can scarcely taste the difference between that and meat. Can you believe he’s had the temerity to instruct the grocers not to send me any more lard?”

  Lydia’s eyes only widened a fraction at that. She blinked a few times, but then managed to answer. “I can believe it,” she said. “He is a most officious man, when he puts his mind to it. But…” She glanced once at Jonas, and then looked away. “But I do think he means well,” she whispered
.

  “ARE WE STILL PRETENDING THIS IS ABOUT A WAGER?” Lydia asked, as they left his father’s home.

  He looked over at her. “There is a wager on the table. And if I win, I still intend to collect.” The last thing he wanted, though, was to win.

  She looked away. “I have no idea what you’re doing.” Her voice was quiet. She threaded her fingers together, looking down. “You could have shown me a great deal worse than you have. You aren’t even trying to win. I don’t know what you want.”

  She still hadn’t looked at him.

  “I think, Lydia,” he said carefully, “that you do know.”

  She shook her head furiously. “I don’t,” she insisted. “You can’t want me to say that I see nothing good about that old man. That’s ridiculous. He’s not well, and his mind seems…not what it might once have been. I surmise that his house is the cause of Henry’s injury, and I could weep for that. But the pride in his eyes when he talked of his son, his sense of familial feeling… There is love there. And that means I win the wager.” Her fists balled. “I win, and you don’t care, and I don’t understand you.”

  “There is only one thing you don’t understand,” Jonas said quietly. “I didn’t intend to ask you if you found something good in the man we visited today. There is a great deal that is good in him. I wanted to ask you what you thought of his son.”

  That stopped her in her tracks. She frowned. “His son?”

  “His son. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to discover. How you felt about his son.”

  “But…” She swallowed.

  “Let me tell you a little about the family before you proceed,” Jonas said. But he didn’t think he could finish this, not on the public streets. Instead, he put his hand in the small of her back and led her across the street to the park.

  In the last day, the tree had been trimmed. Little metal candleholders graced the ends of the branches. Snowflakes made of quills and goose feathers nestled among the greenery, and a gold ribbon had been threaded around it. As he came closer, he could smell the orange-and-clove of constructed pomanders mixing with the smell of fresh pine.