Those Autumn Nights

by Theresa Romain

  He folded his arms and glared at her. “You would know about such things, would you not? Obedience even in the face of ruin?”

  A hot retort sprung to her lips—but as she looked him over, she checked the sharp words. Despite his steely mien, his cravat was creased and slightly askew. The imperfection washed her with wistfulness.

  She had said more than she meant to, and he had realized it at once. Like the soundness of this ancient house, their love had worn away. Instead of raindrops, Eliza’s particular nemesis had been a lack of courage.

  As time slipped by, she had gone days, sometimes, not thinking of him at all. It seemed her mind had used those periods of forgetfulness to keep his image fresh and precious to her. He was tall, but so was she, and she knew from long-ago experience that he was just the right height to kiss when she rose to her tiptoes. His dark hair was showing a bit of gray now, and his young features had been sunburned and carved by weather and time. Now he was as sculptural as he was handsome, all strength and angles and will.

  She shouldn’t have come here.

  She hadn’t been able to stay away.

  Trying for a calm tone, she said, “My father is trusting you to do what is right for his house while you inhabit it. You were never a man without common sense, Bertie.”

  Bertie. She had been the first to coin the nickname for him when they were young and in love, and the exchange of Christian names had not been intimacy enough.

  He seemed not to like it now, for his brows lowered. “I am obeying your father, Miss Greenleaf. You ought to appreciate that.” Turning to his sister, his features relaxed at once. “Georgie, go join Mrs. Clotworthy in the upstairs sitting room. She will want your company as she knits.”

  “Mrs. Clotworthy?”

  At Eliza’s exclamation, Bertie pokered up. “My sister’s companion and chaperone. She is a widowed cousin of Georgie’s late mother.”

  “Clotworthy,” Eliza mused. “She must have loved her husband a great deal to accept that name.”

  “It can take courage to accept the name of a spouse, yes.”

  Unmistakable reproof, and one she deserved. She could have been Eliza Gage ten years ago. Ten years at his side, she’d have followed his regiment through muddy fields and insect-ridden swamps. Fearing each day that he might die.

  And maybe he would have, with her to slow him down.

  At twenty years old, she hadn’t been brave enough to trust her heart. To be defiant to the parent who had coddled her. To be physically uncomfortable for the sake of giving comfort to someone else. Such small things had seemed very large at the time.

  In the end, he had still almost died. He had been shot, she knew. When she’d heard it—idle gossip from a suitor grown just as idle as his words—she had almost felt the wound herself.

  “I was thinking,” Georgie spoke up, “that if you’re to assist on quarter day, Miss Greenleaf, you ought to stay in the house. You still have a bedchamber here, after all. And I’m the lady of the house, so I can issue an invitation.”

  There was no word for the noise Bertie made. “Mrs. Clotworthy is the hostess,” he managed.

  “Yes. Thank you. I accept.” Eliza curtseyed to Georgie. “As soon as the rain slows, I shall send for my things from Lord and Lady Sturridge’s home.”

  Another unnameable sound from Bertie, as Georgie bobbed a curtsey of her own and darted off to the main staircase.

  With a sigh, Bertie turned back to face Eliza. “She’s been ill. My sister, I mean. Not in the head—though you wouldn’t know it from her behavior today—but in the lungs. If you’re to stay here, I should not wish you to plague her beyond her strength.”

  Georgie Gage had looked a bit thin, but she hadn’t lacked for spirit. Eliza let this evidence of brotherly worry pass, though, adding only, “And what about you? How much may I plague you?”

  This won from him a slight smile. “There was never a limit to that amount, was there? Come, Eliza, and speak with me in the study. You can tell me why you’re really here.”

  No, she couldn’t. Not yet.

  But if he would only call her Eliza again, instead of Miss Greenleaf, she’d follow him anywhere.

  * * *

  The study was one of Bertie’s favorite rooms in the Friar’s House. Usually.

  The home took its name from its thirteenth-century origin as a monastery. Over the centuries, when stone crumbled or walls were added on, newer brick and neatly trimmed stone repaired the fallen portions.

  The study was bounded by some of the oldest portions of the hodgepodge of a house. Dark, but warmly so, it was flanked by a fireplace and a great desk and was lined with shelves full of ledgers. Apart from these, there was just enough room for a small sideboard and a pair of wing chairs that faced each other before the fire.

  It ought to have been entirely comfortable. But—damnation. Eliza Greenleaf. He had not stopped reeling since Florian had spoken her name, a name long forbidden to his own thoughts.

  “Take a seat,” Bertie said, and Eliza did so. Outside, thunder grumbled its displeasure.

  But with what? There was no fault to be found in her appearance. If his memory of her were to be trusted, she had not changed much. Her laughing green eyes still held a sultry look, as though they’d seen everything amusing under the sun and had enjoyed it all. Her hair was pinned in tousled curls of a shade between blond and brown. And when she saw him looking at her—really looking—she held his gaze.

  And then she smiled. “It’s good to see you again, Bertie.”

  “Is it?” He sat heavily in the chair facing hers, as though his knees had been unpinned.

  What did I ever see in her? He had asked himself often over angry years. With the blur of time, he was not sure. He could recall only the certainty he had felt when they met at a long-ago ball. This one. She is the one.

  Then twenty-five, he’d already lost a mother and a stepmother, and he’d been a rootless cornet in a cavalry regiment for four years. Long stationed on the Continent, he had been in England only for a brief leave.

  Always ambitious, his father had wanted Bertie to mix in high society. Patrick Gage had been certain that a uniform would turn heads. Such smartness had, after all, won the elder Gage a lovely Spanish bride during his own military career a generation earlier.

  That was before England sank into a war that felt ceaseless. Before a cavalryman’s coat reminded the ton that their peace was fragile. There was no place for a man such as Bertie in the ballrooms of London.

  Until, one day, there was. And it was at the side of Eliza Greenleaf.

  When he met her, even before they spoke a word to each other, she’d felt like home. The first home he had known in a very long time. And when she jilted him, he’d felt he would never have a home again.

  But he did now. Didn’t he? He had the Friar’s House. At least until the end of the year.

  A loud slap of rain against the study window drew him back to his surroundings. Before the fire, Eliza settled into the depths of the wing chair, her face pale against the dark tapestry covering. “You don’t look as I expected you would.”

  “Aging ten years will do that to a man. Getting shot in the side doesn’t help either.”

  A flash of something painful crossed her features, then smoothed away. “The gray at your temples suits you well, actually. I rather meant you looked like a man of fashion now. Such elegance of dress! I cannot recall whether I ever saw you out of your Hussar’s jacket and shako.”

  “You did. Once.”

  His tone was dry. He waited, silent—and there, a blush bloomed over her cheeks. Evidently remembering, as he did, that long-ago autumn night at the burnt end of the season when they stripped one another bare and made promises to last a lifetime.

  Mademoiselle Greenleaf, the butler had called her, and the realization was a quick lash of heat. She had never wed, and a corner of his heart wondered whether it was because she had held those promises dear after all.

  “Why are you here?�
�� he asked. His voice sounded gruff and wary, and he cleared his throat and tried again. “You cannot truly be here out of the goodness of your heart. To help me.”

  She waved a hand, still gloved in kid. “Pure self-interest. Would you believe that instead?”

  “Yes.”

  She raised her eyes to the ceiling—which was, in this room, untroubled by water and damp. “I thought so. Though family interest might be a better way of putting the matter. My three brothers were here to assist tenants on the past two quarter days, and they likely made matters more difficult than if they’d not come at all. Is that not so?”

  “I am not eager to repeat the experience, no.” Foppish dandies all, the three brothers insisted on taking charge despite their ignorance, and somehow everyone wound up in the Friar’s House with no one to help them while the brothers drank their way through the best vintages in the cellars.

  “They will stay away. And I will be here instead, and everything will be fine.”

  Everything would be fine. With Eliza around. Ha.

  His expression must have communicated his doubt, for she added, “It will be, Bertie. I’ve a fair gift for numbers. You won’t be inconvenienced in the slightest—ah, you’re making that noise again. Sort of a choke or a splutter. Very well, you’ll not be inconvenienced beyond being put to the trouble of housing me.”

  “Really.” Bertie’s tone was thick with disbelief. “So I won’t have to look at you? I won’t be required to speak to you?”

  “Is it an inconvenience only to lay eyes on me?” She sounded curious rather than petulant. Frankness, that had always been her way.

  “You know it’s not,” he granted. “You’re still pleasant enough to the eye.”

  This was such an understatement that he almost tripped over the words. Eliza’s face had, at some point during their long-ago courtship, become his idea of the best face possible, and he had never quite shaken the impression.

  “You don’t want to speak to me. Because you don’t trust me? Or because you don’t trust yourself?” She ticked off the questions on her gloved fingers.

  “What could we have to say after all this time?”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  His fingertips clenched on the arms of the wing chair. “All right, then. A bit of both”

  After a second, her gaze fled from his, and he was glad. “Why don’t you trust yourself?” she asked.

  Had he thought the ceiling falling in was to be the oddest thing that happened today? Now the very sky was falling.

  He took a deep breath and let it crumble about him. “Because, Eliza. I wanted to marry you once, and though I’m not the same man I was, it is so good to look upon you that it hurts me.”

  His hand drifted to his ribs. There was the scar, where a bullet had punched through flesh and bone to lodge within him. He would carry it inside for the rest of his life.

  She seemed to sink into the depths of the chair. Then, with a determined shift of her shoulders, she sat up straight. “I am not the same as I was either. Is that not as it should be? If we did not change in the past ten years, we should be ashamed of ourselves.”

  “Oh, yes? And in what ways have you altered, Miss Greenleaf?”

  A sly, slanted look. “I no longer bother with answering questions I don’t wish to.”

  “You never did. It was one of the things that made me admire you.” Was that past tense? Strictly? Irrevocably?

  He wasn’t sure.

  She swallowed. “I am thought a great flirt and an even greater scandal. Free with kisses to those who ask me to dance, spinster that I am.”

  “Again. Just as I remember. Surely you haven’t forgotten the night of Lord Tantamount’s party, when you met me in the garden, and we—”

  “I remember that well enough,” she broke in. “But there was no scandal in it.”

  “There would have been if we’d been caught.”

  “I wish we had been,” she murmured.

  Had she? He had wished that often himself. Why had they been careful not to be seen? Why had they sneaked, laughing and groping, to quiet hidden corners? They had loved each other. They had wanted to wed. They should have forced her father’s hand instead of letting it shove them apart.

  The silence had drawn out long. But they had been separated for far longer, and that was what really mattered.

  Though it was only mid-morning, Bertie felt tired, the bullet within him heavy. “All right. You’ve convinced me,” he finally said. “You never wanted anyone to know of our romance when we first met, so it seems you really have changed.”

  Her lips went pale, pressing together. “All right. I deserved that.”

  “That and much more. You said you’d marry me, then you threw me over on the day of our elopement.”

  There. It was out.

  He felt as though he’d lost something by being the first to mention it.

  Or…maybe not. Eliza winced as though the words were a slap, then she set her jaw. “I did. And I did. I…had to.”

  “Because your father said I wasn’t good enough for you.” Greenleaf had never liked Bertie. Which made leasing his house a cruel pleasure.

  “Because I had to marry into the nobility.” Her voice held a pleading note. “For my family. They needed me to wed someone of influence to cover and defer their debts.”

  “So you chose them over me.”

  “One living parent. Three brothers. Three sisters-in-law. Five nieces and nephews.” She picked at the fingertips of her gloves, drawing them off in agitated flickers of movement. “One Eliza. One Bertie. The mathematics…you see, it doesn’t add up.”

  The silence that followed this explanation was somehow less heavy than the previous one.

  “You were right,” Bertie granted. “You have a fair gift for numbers.”

  Her smile was a thin, fragile curve.

  “Yet you didn’t make the brilliant match of your dreams.”

  Slowly, she rolled the fragile tan gloves into a neat cylinder. “I couldn’t sell myself, in the end. Not when there were other things to sell.”

  Or lease, he thought. “So you gave me up for nothing.”

  Setting the gloves aside, she leaned forward, bracing her elbows on her knees. A shadow dipped between her breasts. Gray light through the window made her eyes cool, while firelight painted her lips the red of sin.

  “Your butler is French. Your footmen and maids are French. You live among our former enemies. How can you forgive the French for almost killing you, but you cannot forgive me?”

  “There are other ways to take the heart out of a man besides shooting him. And the French might have tried to kill me, but they also saved my life. How have you ever tried to atone?”

  This time, the smile was sweet, but also dangerous in its promise. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Chapter Three

  * * *

  Despite Eliza’s promise, the process of installing her anew in the Friar’s House did, in fact, involve inconvenience to Bertie.

  When her trunks arrived from Sturridge Manor, raindrops beading on their painted wooden lids, it was inconvenient to see servants swoon over her smiles and reply to her perfect French.

  When he retreated to the study to tug a ledger from one of the bookcases, it was inconvenient to hear her laughing with Georgie. And when he ventured forth to investigate—and grab a biscuit or two, which the women were enjoying with tea—it was inconvenient to step over the contents of Mrs. Clotworthy’s workbasket, which Eliza had unrolled all over the floor of the morning room.

  As the day wore on, it was most inconvenient of all to realize that he was distracted, listening for her step around every sliver of a corner, or for the luxurious swish of the deep-colored silk she wore.

  By the time they all dined at the tail of the afternoon, Bertie was in a state of complete bewilderment. So easily had Eliza slipped into their family circle that he could almost believe the Friar’s House had never stopped being hers. When they
entered the dining room, she had even seated herself at the foot of the long table before hopping up, cheeks flushed, with a “Beg your pardon” that made Georgie laugh.

  And he—if this were not his household after all, what was there for him to do? An ill-timed bullet had stripped from him the only occupation he’d ever known. Thanks to the money Georgie’s brewery-heiress mother had brought to the family, both Bertie and Georgie had the means to lead a life of leisure. But he couldn’t manage such idleness. For years, he had controlled a regiment, and now the only person he had to oversee was Georgie.

  “Try the potatoes,” he suggested to his sister. “Madame Florian made them with extra butter this time, to strengthen you.”

  “They were already half butter last time she made them,” Georgie muttered, but she took a dutiful spoonful.

  “I like them,” decided Eliza. “Look, Georgie, you can put a pat of them atop the fish, and they melt all over.”

  “Potatoes never melted when I was a young woman.” Mrs. Clotworthy’s pleasant, plump features looked aghast as she helped herself to boiled vegetables. “This French cooking is too elegant for me.”

  The four diners sat in a little square midway along the stretch of the great table. One of the grandest rooms in the Friar’s House, the dining room soared with cornice upon cornice up to a coffered ceiling, and the long room ended in a wide bay window draped in velvet of the vivid shade women called Pomona green and seemed to adore.

  Outside the window, all was gray. The autumn rain had continued all day, draining the color from the leaves and sky. Within the dining room, branches held candles enough to cast a heated glow. The table, all polished mahogany, was long enough to seat eighteen, and its surface sparkled with the china and silver plate Bertie had bought over the past several months.

  Across from him sat Eliza. Closer than she’d been in ten years, but irrevocably distant.

  He should have set a place for her at the foot of the table, to keep space between them. Seated in a cozy knot, it was impossible to ignore her.

  And yet. This was, for now, his dining room. Why should he try to ignore her? Ignoring her would be…well, inconvenient. Better to pay the attention to her that he would like to, allowing himself to notice the way candlelight found bronze strands in her hair. Flickered over the lovely lines of her face. Flattered the swells of her breasts in a maiden-white gown trimmed in gold.