“You’re damned right we are!” She met his implacable gaze with a resolute one of her own. “Marriage is a partnership, Phillip, not a feudal kingdom. Until you can accept that I have the right to dictate the course of my own life, I will not marry you. Until you can accept that my wishes and my opinions are just as worthy of consideration as yours, I will not marry you. Until you can accept that what I would give up to be your wife is just as important as what you offer in exchange, I will not marry you.”
She could hear her voice breaking, and she could feel the sting of angry tears in her eyes, and she knew she had to leave before she fell completely apart.
She turned away and walked to the door of her bedroom. Hand on the knob, she turned, for there was one more thing she had to say. “And while we are on the subject, until you demonstrate that you possess genuine love and affection for me and some willingness to win my hand rather than demand it, I will not marry you.” She opened the door. “Now, if you will excuse me, my lord, I have work to do.” With that, she walked out and shut the door behind her.
Phillip strode across the balcony to his own rooms, frustration seething within him, the words of their angry exchange still ringing in his ears.
She was refusing him because she did not want to give up her own life? What on earth did that mean? It was idiotic. A woman’s life was marriage, children, everything he had offered her.
He entered his own rooms and slammed the French door behind him, causing Gaston to come running from the adjoining dressing room. The valet, only half dressed himself, in trousers and shirt, halted at the sight of his master’s face and disheveled appearance. “Sir?”
Phillip grasped for control. In situations such as this, it was necessary for a gentleman to remain cool, levelheaded, and logical. “Draw me a bath, Gaston, will you?”
“Yes, sir.” The valet departed back into the dressing room, and a few minutes later, the sound of water gushing through the taps could be heard from the bathroom beyond.
As Phillip waited for his bath, the things she’d said continued to echo through his mind, and his anger and frustration gave way to bafflement.
Her bakery was her dream, she’d said. A dream she’d had for years, a dream she had no intention of giving up to marry him.
What sort of woman chose a life of hard, backbreaking work over matrimony? A life of servitude over a life of luxury and privilege? It defied common sense.
Matrimony, not business, was a woman’s realm. Not once, but twice, he’d offered her what any other woman would be ecstatic to accept, and twice, she had spurned it.
“Your bath, sir.”
He nodded, but as he followed Gaston through the dressing room, his mind remained preoccupied with what Maria had told him. She would rather make pastry than be his wife. Lovely, he thought as he stripped out of his clothes and stepped into the steaming water. She was spurning him for sponge cake.
He bathed, dried off, and sat in the reclining shaving chair by the bathtub. As Gaston scraped beard stubble from his face, Phillip closed his eyes and continued to try to comprehend the incomprehensible.
Her work was important, she’d said. Being his marchioness, his wife, the mother of his children evidently was not. She would rather be alone than be his.
That knowledge ripped through his chest, and he made a sound at the pain.
Gaston stopped and pulled back the razor, looking stricken. “Sir?”
“It’s all right, Gaston.” Phillip took a deep breath. “It’s all right. You didn’t cut me.”
Despite those words, his valet examined his face carefully before proceeding with his task.
Phillip remained still under the razor, striving to regain command of himself. As he dressed, as he ate breakfast, as he ordered his carriage be brought around to take him to his offices, he struggled to tamp down his emotions.
His carriage had not yet pulled up in front of the house, and as he stood in the foyer, there was nothing to do but wait. He pulled out his watch, verified the time, and put it back in his pocket. Pain flickered up from within, and he strove to quell it. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He twirled his hat in his fingers. He looked out the front windows. No sign of his carriage.
With an oath, he turned to the gilt-framed mirror on the wall of the foyer. It was not insufferable to offer marriage to the woman whose virtue you had just taken. It was simply right. It was not unreasonable to expect to marry the woman you loved. It was not unreasonable to assume that since she had just given you her virtue, she loved you in return. It was not unreasonable to offer marriage in consequence.
You did not offer it. You demanded it.
He stared at his reflection, and it suddenly seemed as if he were looking at a stranger. The face that stared back at him was not a face he recognized. It was not the cool, inscrutable face of the well-mannered British gentleman. In his reflection was every shred of pain, anger, bewilderment, and love within him, plainly written on his face for anyone to see.
How, he wondered in despair, was he going to attend that luncheon? How was he going to sit at a table with two dozen friends and acquaintances without all of them knowing exactly what he felt? How was he going to watch her coming and going with her breads and cakes, knowing she had chosen them instead of him? If there was a child, how was he to bear watching it come into this world without his name?
Phillip adjusted his perfectly straight tie, pulled an ever-so-slightly deformed petal from the white camellia in his lapel, and brushed an imaginary speck of lint from his charcoal-gray morning jacket. These motions were meaningless to his appearance, he knew, but just now they seemed vital. He could feel the only woman he had ever wanted slipping away for the third time, and he knew that this time, the pain of losing her would annihilate him.
Phillip heard the clatter of carriage wheels on the street outside. He met the eyes of the man in the mirror, and he knew somehow, some way, he had to change her mind. He had no intention of making the same mistake again.
Chapter 17
Your words are my food, your breath my wine. You are everything to me.
Sarah Bernhardt
She’d made the right decision. Maria repeated that fact to herself for perhaps the hundredth time that morning as she stood in the kitchens at Avermore House. She was putting the final touches on the pastries and confections before they were sent to the dining room, but she stared down at the tray of iced lemon cakes before her without interest, her mind elsewhere, her emotions in turmoil.
After leaving Phillip, she’d noticed the speculative, sidelong glances of her maids, apprentices, and shop assistants as they had worked to make the final preparations for this luncheon. She didn’t know which one of her maids had seen Phillip in her bed that morning, but it was clear that all her staff knew by now she was an unchaste woman. Still, that was not what was causing her distraction, for she’d never cared much what other people thought of her. She’d always known it was what she thought of herself that mattered.
Nor was it the extraordinary physical experience of lovemaking that preoccupied her today. The things Phillip had done to her had been wonderful, and—truth be told—she still felt a bit dazed and wobbly from the experience. She’d never known the happiness that could come from such an intimate experience. The physical sensations of lovemaking no doubt astonished everyone upon feeling them for the first time. But it was the events afterward that dominated Maria’s thoughts and had her vacillating from moment to moment between wanting to kiss him and wanting to kill him.
It was Phillip, only Phillip, who could send her into this sort of emotional turmoil. No other person who’d been important to her life—not any of her friends, not Lawrence, not André, not even her father—had ever been able to enrage her, fascinate her, and wound her as Phillip could do. And it always had been that way, she realized. Always.
Her mind flashed back to the first day she’d ever met him. The serious boy in short pants under a willow tree, reciting Latin as
if it were the most important thing in the world, telling her so proudly how he was going to Eton. She hadn’t even known what Eton was. She hadn’t cared. It was how he’d looked at her when she’d held out her hand to him—puzzled, as if he’d never seen anything quite like her before, a bit appalled, too, for he’d been a stuffy sort of chap even then. His expression had intrigued her, for most boys had thought her rather fun, deeming her not so silly as other girls. But it was when Phillip had broken his arm because of the rope swing she’d talked him into making, when he’d taken all the blame and gotten a beating, when he’d insisted to his father that he’d been alone, making no mention she’d been there—that was when she’d known they would be friends. She’d been sure she could depend on him through thick and thin.
The clatter of a pan hitting the kitchen floor and a curse from Monsieur Bouchard broke into her reverie, and she tried to focus her attention on the task at hand, but when she studied the lemon cakes she had to decorate, she felt no spark of enthusiasm.
Her work had always fascinated her. From the first moment her father had allowed her to help him in the kitchens when she was a tiny girl, she’d wanted to be a chef. A pastry chef. She’d wanted to make cakes for lords and princes. And she had. She’d wanted to own her own pâtisserie, and now she did. Maria looked up, staring around the kitchen, where chefs in aprons were scrambling around like ants on an anthill, and suddenly, it all seemed a silly, trivial business.
She’d told Phillip this morning how important her shop was to her. And it was. At least, it had been. Until this morning. Until Phillip had reminded her that there were other important things. She looked down again at the cakes, which would be consumed and forgotten in a matter of minutes.
A child, though. A child was different.
Maria flattened a hand against her abdomen. What if she were to have a child? Ruthlessly, she pulled her hand down. She did not want to marry a man to avoid shame or dishonor. Such things were Phillip’s primary concerns, but they were not hers. It wasn’t the life she’d envisioned for herself, true enough, but if there was a child, she would have it, and she would keep it, and she would hold her head up. She would not be ashamed, no matter what society had to say. Again, other people’s opinions had never mattered to her.
Except for Phillip’s.
Oh, how it had hurt when she’d come home from France and watched him snub her. How it had hurt when he would see her coming, stick his chin up, and turn the other way. It had been like a stab in the heart. She wasn’t good enough to talk to, once he was the marquess. Despite the fact that her father had scraped together the money for boarding school, despite the fact that she had an education equal to that of any lady, she wasn’t good enough. She had never been good enough.
That was what had turned her to Lawrence. Lawrence had been the balm for her wounds. Lawrence had never cared that she’d worked in the kitchens, and while Phillip had spent two summers making it clear he wanted nothing to do with her, Lawrence had made his admiration crystal clear. He’d been the one to hold her hand when her father died. He’d been the one to listen to her sob out her fears because she had no money and didn’t know what to do. She’d always thought Phillip was the one she could count on, but it was Lawrence who had stepped up and offered her a solution. To a frightened, grieving girl of seventeen, marriage to a gentleman, a dear and familiar friend, had seemed the answer to everything, the solution to all her difficulties, the banishment of all her worries.
But life wasn’t that easy. It wasn’t that simple. Marriage didn’t solve everything. She knew that now. And yet, even knowing all of that wasn’t what had made her refuse Phillip this morning.
She didn’t want him to marry her because being a marchioness would make her life easy. She didn’t want him to marry her because there might be a child. She wanted him to marry her because he loved her. And though she had received not one, but two, marriage proposals from him, amid all the words about desire and honor, about marriage and children, there had been no words of love. There had been no consideration of what she had worked so hard to earn. No acknowledgment of what she would be giving up to marry him.
The lemon cakes blurred before her, and savagely, she rubbed her eyes with the tips of her fingers. Once again, she tried to focus on her task. She added a tiny sprig of lemon balm and a twist of citrus peels to the top of each cake, but the decoration did not seem to make them any more interesting or meaningful.
Maria glanced around for a member of her staff to take the tray of cakes to the dining room, but since this was merely a luncheon, she’d brought only half her staff with her, leaving the others at the shop, and in the crowd swarming through the kitchen, she did not see Miss Dexter, Miss Simms, or little Molly Ross. Maria gestured to one of Phillip’s footmen, who was standing nearby, and when he came to her side, she handed him the cakes. “Take these to the dining room, please,” she instructed.
“Very good, miss.”
The footman departed, and she moved on to the next tray, but she just couldn’t bring herself to care about putting little sugared violets on little chocolate truffles. Maria stared at the tray, heartsick and miserable, and afraid.
Yes, afraid. Why not admit it?
Shrewd of Prudence to see it that day in Little Russell Street. She was afraid to fall in love with Phillip, for if he did not love and respect her, he would cast her aside, and the idea that she would be abandoned again terrified her. And this morning, when he’d talked about her giving up her shop as if it were a matter of course, as if giving up her dreams and ambitions were a simple matter, all that fear had risen up again. If she gave up the shop and he later abandoned her, she would have nothing.
She thought of the hair ribbon, and though she was touched by the fact that he’d carried it all these years—rather awed by it, actually—it was a far different thing to live with another person, make a life with them day in and day out, than it was to carry a token of them and imagine a fantasy. What if the reality of her did not live up to the fantasy he’d conjured?
She was afraid of that, too.
Maria looked around her, studying the chefs and maids dashing about in a flurry of activity. She thought of her shop, her kitchen.
Yes, she realized suddenly, she could give up the shop. She loved Phillip. If she could be sure he loved her, and not a fantasy of her, she would trade the life she had made alone for a life with him. If she could only be sure…
“Miss Martingale?”
She turned, and the footman was standing there with the tray, a horrified look on his face.
“His lordship sent them back.”
“What?” She frowned and looked at the cakes, then returned her gaze to that of the footman. “What do you mean, he sent them back?”
“I mean, he sent them back.” The servant licked his dry lips and glanced around. Maria followed his gaze, and saw that Bouchard’s saucier and sous chef, standing on the other side of the worktable, had heard the footman’s words, and they had stopped working. They were staring at her askance.
She sighed, rubbing a hand over her forehead. “What’s wrong with them? They look perfectly fine to me.”
“His lordship demands that you present yourself immediately to explain this travesty.”
“Travesty?” She lifted her head. “He says my lemon cakes are a travesty?”
The room went quiet, and as chefs, maids, and footmen stared at her, Maria realized her raised voice had drawn the attention of everyone working in the kitchen.
“Of all the—” She broke off, and grabbed the tray. She marched up the servants’ staircase, wondering what on earth he intended to do. Did he mean to dress her down in front of everyone? Surely not. Phillip would never do such a thing. Still, he had been very, very angry with her this morning, so perhaps he was paying her out for her stubbornness. Yet, that also seemed quite uncharacteristic of him.
Puzzled, and more than a little frustrated, she went down the corridor toward the grand dining room of Avermor
e House, where she paused just outside the doors. She peeked around the corner and saw Phillip sitting at the head of the long table, looking straight at the doorway as if expecting her. Caught in his sights, she froze, uncertain what to do.
“Ah, Miss Martingale,” he called, beckoning her with one hand.
She did not move. “Is there a problem with the lemon cakes, my lord?” she asked, her voice ringing out loud enough for every one in the room to hear.
“Come here, Miss Martingale, if you please.”
His words gave her a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, but she walked along one side of the long table with her head high, ignoring the whispers and stares. When she drew closer to him, she couldn’t help a quick, apprehensive glance down the table. Prudence was there, she noticed, sitting to his right, as the highest-ranking woman in the room. Further down the table was Emma. But the sight of her friends did not soothe her jangled nerves, for they moved in this world. They belonged here now. She did not.
With everyone’s eyes on her, she reminded herself again that no matter how angry he might be with her, Phillip was first, last, and always, a gentleman, and a true gentleman did not publicly dress down someone in his employ, especially not in front of her friends.
She took a deep breath and faced him. “My lord?” she inquired, striving to sound cool and businesslike.
Instead of answering, he rose and took the tray from her hands. “Take this, Jervis, if you please,” he ordered, giving it to the nearest footman.
The footman obeyed, and Phillip returned his attention to her. When he did, she saw the unmistakable hint of a smile at one corner of his mouth, and her puzzlement deepened. What on earth was this about? “I regret if my lemon cakes have caused your lordship any distress,” she murmured, trying to fathom his intentions.
“Distress? On the contrary, they have caused me no distress.”
“I don’t understand.” She leaned closer to him. “You called them a travesty,” she whispered.
Secret Desires of a Gentleman Page 24
