And then he’d been shut out like the inconvenience he was. To them, the Goodes, he was still a nobody. Nothing. They would never think about him after today unless the dog shat upon the carpets and someone needed to clean it up.
Would she? Would she come to him? Had she noticed him, truly? Not as a servant or a savior but as himself…
One question haunted him as he dragged his feet down the hallway, back to the mews, his hand curling over the memory of her skin.
Would he ever get to touch her again?
Four Years Later
“I do believe someone is dead beneath your greenhouse,” Amanda Pettifer said with no real concern as she pulled the curtain back from the carriage window. “That’s quite a structure for merely a Baron’s home. Why, it’s as long as your stable walls.”
Honoria Goode didn’t miss Amanda’s latent jab at their rank. As the daughter of a viscount, she needed, upon occasion, to put them in their place. It wasn’t the most pleasant virtue for a friend to have, but neither was it uncommon among their class.
“Let me see!” Prudence lunged over Amanda’s lap to peer out the carriage window as they clopped in beneath the mews. “Holy Moses! You’re right. A man’s legs are sticking out from beneath as if the structure landed right on him. What if he drowned in that puddle of muck he’s in? Someone should do something, Nora! Oh…no…wait. The legs are moving. All is well. At least, I think it is.”
“I’m glad our welcome party isn’t a corpse.” Secretly pleased that her sister Pru still used the nickname she’d gleaned at finishing school, Nora marked her page and closed her book. She’d never liked the name Honoria. It was stolid and plain, belonging more to a nun or a suffragist than a debutante. Nora sounded much more sophisticated, she thought. Tidier, even.
Though Amanda Pettifer was Nora’s age at twenty, she and Prudence—almost three years their junior at seventeen—were thick as thieves. Likely, because they both shared a penchant for mischief and misbehavior.
They’d all bundled into the carriage from the Green Street Station, anxious to arrive home. Nora’s coming out ball was in three days, and there was so much to be done. She couldn’t help but become almost overwrought with anxiety at the thought.
The carriage trundled to a stop in their Mayfair courtyard as she swept aside the curtains to see what all the hullabaloo was about.
Along the wall of their extensive stables, tucked into the square behind their grand row house, Mrs. Fick’s glass and wrought-iron greenhouse glinted with the colors of the setting sun.
Indeed, sprawled in a shallow mud puddle from a pit dug beneath the foundation, were two long male legs clad in filthy trousers. As the girls all watched, the legs bent and splayed indecently as mud-caked hands appeared and clasped the underside of the structure. Then, with a serpentine struggle, the entire body of a man shimmied on his back from beneath.
Before sitting up, he reached back under and retrieved several work tools.
“Good lord, Nora, he’s all but naked,” Prudence gasped.
The young man hauled himself to his feet and smoothed his muddy hair before scraping some of the muck from his torso and flicking it onto the ground.
Amanda’s buttercream lace fan snapped open with a frenetic rip. “My,” she exclaimed huskily. “He’s built exactly like that statue of Ares in the Louvre.”
Nora barely heard their remarks, so arrested was she by the sight of him.
Amanda had the right of it. His figure could have been sculpted by the hands of a master. His jaw chiseled granite and his smooth sinewy torso shaped from marble. He was long-limbed and slender, his shoulders round and his arms corded with lean muscle. The flat discs of his chest gave way to grooved ribs and an abdomen so defined she could count the individual muscles, six in all.
She’d never seen a man like this in the flesh. Sculptors were a talented lot, to be sure, but they worked in clay and stone. A cold, lifeless modality in comparison. It could not begin to capture the jaw-dropping glint of golden skin. The line of intriguing hair disappearing into his trousers. Nor the peaks and shadows created by the grooves of muscle as he moved and flexed beneath the disappearing sunlight.
The moment the footman opened the door, Amanda accepted his hand and all but leapt out of the carriage to whistle at the workman. “You seem to have lost your clothing, sir,” she taunted.
His head snapped up as Prudence followed Amanda out of the carriage and tittered, “Mr. Fick will have to turn the garden hose on you, before all that mud dries you into a statue.”
“Let it dry, I say.” Amanda made a show of leering over at him, assessing him from head to toe. “Store him in a museum. I’d pay admittance to see that work of art regularly.”
“Amanda! What if someone heard you?” Prudence put a lace-gloved hand over her friend’s unruly mouth, though they were both giggling uncontrollably.
“What do I care?” Amanda grappled her hand away and flounced toward the door, her cream ruffled skirts fanning out behind her. “I’m to marry a short, pudgy lord who owns half of Cheshire, but I will always be an appreciator of excellent artisan workmanship. They don’t make men like that in our class, do they? More’s the pity.”
Nora was about to deliver a sharp word of reprimand when Mr. Fick, the spindly, white-haired stable master tossed a balled-up cotton shirt at the lad, hitting him square in the chest. “Oi! Titus! Make yourself decent; you’re offending the ladies!”
“He really isn’t,” Amanda said huskily.
Turning, the kindly Mr. Fick bowed as Nora was the last to step down from the carriage. “Miss Goode, Miss Goode, Miss Pettifer, welcome back.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fick, it’s lovely to see you!” Prudence greeted with all her usual cheer.
Nora couldn’t bring herself to speak, gaping as she was in slack-jawed amazement.
That was Titus Conleith?
He touched the shirt as little as possible as he held it away from his mud-covered skin. Shifting restlessly, his features arranged themselves into an uncomfortable frown that lanced Nora through with mortification.
“Pardon me, ladies. Mr. Fick, I’ll test the piping to see if the water pressure is returned.” His voice was deep and graveled, the register low enough that Nora had to strain to hear it. He barely gave them a curt nod, opened the door, and escaped into the long greenhouse.
“Let’s go and surprise Mama and the Pater,” Prudence crowed, peeling her hat away from the onyx curls that matched Nora’s own. “Then I’ll show Amanda to her room and hopefully supper will be ready soon. I’m positively faint with hunger. Are you coming, Nora?”
“In a moment,” she replied, barely noticing the girls’ giggling retreat.
Between the rows and shelves of vegetables, herbs, spices, and flowers tended by Mrs. Fick’s magical green thumb, she could catch glimpses of Titus through the panes of glass as he drifted deeper into the greenhouse.
“Watch your pretty shoes, there, miss.” Mr. Fick motioned to the puddle nearly large enough to be a pond. “We installed irrigation pipes into the greenhouse last week, and already one of them sprung a leak. Titus’s been at fixing it all day. Knowing you, you’ll be wanting to greet the horses before the people,” he said affectionately. “I think old Cleo is back there waiting for you.”
That drew a genuine smile from her. She did, indeed, prefer horses to people in almost all cases. “Yes, thank you.”
He blinked over at the greenhouse, then cast the retreating girls a look of veiled disapproval before taking himself off toward the servants’ entrance.
Nora waited for him to disappear inside before skirting the puddle, lifting the hem of her powder blue gown, and hopping onto the landing of the greenhouse to slip inside.
Moist air fragrant with loamy soil and herbs suffused Nora’s lungs. She breathed it in, longing for the country. The sound of running water drew her past strawberries and asparagus, basil, rosemary, coriander, thyme, even a tomato vine struggling to find the sun.
She found Titus surrounded by a bevy of hanging plants, bent over a drain as he scrubbed the dirt from his hair and back with the pump Mrs. Fick used to water her plants.
“Leak is patched, I’m sure of it, Mr. Fick,” he said, shaking his hair like a dog. “Whoever installed that pipe must have been drunk or blind.” He dropped the hose to the drain and ran his hands over his face, swiping water and grit away from his eyes. “Will you hand over my shirt?”
Even after his many years in the city, he had not lost those lovely long vowels of Yorkshire.
Nora retrieved his nearly white shirt from where it splayed over a bush that had been clipped ruthlessly short, and held it over to him. She had the odd desire to keep it captive, or do something ridiculous, like hold it to her nose and test the scent. “Here you are.”
He didn’t straighten so much as jump, his wet hair releasing a little arc of spray that barely missed her. It was the color of dark sand after the lap of a wave had been called out to sea, and it hung to his eyes in spiked gathers that dripped onto his skin.
The effect made his symmetrical features more powerful, somehow, causing the bones to etch dramatic angles that she knew would become even more stark and compelling when he was an older man.
He slicked his hair back with frantic motions before running his hand over his eyes and face once more, as if clearing the water from them would dissolve her from his sight.
The movements did things to the muscles of his arms and chest, that transfixed her into a mute sort of appreciation that should have shamed them both. He was cold, she noted. His nipples pebbled and gooseflesh chased across his skin.
What a constitution one must have, to bathe with the irrigation hose, the water pumped from frigid wells and aquifers.
“Honoria.” Her name manifested in a throaty whisper, then he winced. “That is, Miss Goode.” Instead of stepping closer, he bent at the waist and snatched the shirt hanging from her lax fingers.
She’d almost dropped it whilst gawking.
“My friends call me Nora,” she said inanely before cursing herself for a ninny. He’d not be allowed to address her thusly. They were not friends because they were not equals.
He threaded his arms into his shirt without even bothering to dry himself, heedless, it seemed, of the fact that his trousers were still filthy, thus rendering a clean shirt obsolete.
Propriety dictated, however, that he protect his modesty—and more importantly hers—before his own meager wardrobe.
He didn’t look at her as he fumbled with the buttons, his eyes cast down at the drain. “Is there something I can do for you?”
She shook her head, suddenly feeling silly and…oddly short. The last time she’d seen him, she’d looked down at him. Now, he could likely rest his chin on top of her head.
Nora did her best to stammer out what she had come to say. “Y-you are owed an apology. Amanda and Pru—well, I suppose we all were being disrespectful just now by staring and carrying on. I’m sorry if we embarrassed you. It’s only that, we’ve had an arduous journey back from a terrible few years at finishing school and we’re all feeling a bit spirited. I suppose, what with the ball upcoming and such…” She trailed away, knowing she was babbling, and realizing how weak and awful her excuses made her sound.
She could cheerfully murder Amanda right now.
And then, perhaps not, because she had a reason to be alone. With him. She had the image of his musculature etched into her memory to take out and appreciate at her own leisure.
Titus Conleith.
She didn’t used to think the grand name suited him when he was a small and skinny boy with huge, hungry golden eyes. His gaze had always reminded her of Ramses, their German shepherd puppy, when he begged at the kitchen door for scraps.
But, like Ramses, Titus was no pup now. Though his eyes were still hungry.
Piercing but evasive.
“Anyway,” she said, stroking at the leaf of a dangling ivy plant, if only to have something to fidget with. “I hope you’re not cross. Most young ladies are unused to the sight of… well…” She gestured in his general direction, lamenting the disappearance of his smooth chest as he buttoned toward his neck.
“I’m not cross, miss.”
She could feel her brow crimping with worry. It was impossible to tell from the tone of his voice if he was merely being polite. Perhaps he felt as though he could not convey his affrontedness because her father was his employer. She disliked that thought immensely.
“It wasn’t well done of us to stare, let alone for anyone to make a comment. It was uncouth and rude and—”
“You can stare.” His eyes met hers then, the golden gaze intense and inescapable, though his sober features never changed from intractable. “I wouldn’t stop you.”
The way he was looking at her now, made her very aware of the cinch of her corset and how little air she was allowing into her lungs.
She did stare, then, rather dumbly, trying to dissect the meaning beneath his words. He wouldn’t stop her because he could not? Because she was his superior? Or he would not stop her… because he desired her to look at him?
Because he wanted her to appreciate what she saw?
Because she had.
She did.
The air thickened between them, taking on the muffled, expectant quality of the atmosphere right before a thunderstorm. The hairs on her body lifted, shivered, as if anticipating a lightning strike.
“Nora!” Mercy’s screech broke the spell of the moment as her little sister exploded into the greenhouse. “Nora, you’re home!” The gangly, golden-haired girl barreled into her, cinching small, surprisingly strong arms about her waist in a breath-stealing hug.
Felicity, Mercy’s twin, wasn’t far behind, though she waited patiently for her turn. “Hullo, Titus,” she said, adjusting her spectacles as if looking at him blinded her a little.
Nora understood the feeling.
“Oi, Miss Felicity.” His voice softened when he spoke to her sister, and the effect was something like velvet rasping over silk.
“I’ve almost finished Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Production of Vapour,” Felicity announced. “If I return it this evening before you go, might you ask Doctor Alcott for another?”
Doctor Alcott? Nora wondered. Were they still in touch after—?
“Have you now, with those big words and everything?” Titus’s eyes crinkled at the edges in a most alluring way when he smiled. “Clever girl, you are. I think Alcott has one on alchemical preservation I could bring you. It is all about mummies.”
“I love mummies.” Felicity blushed to the roots of her blond hair, and Nora realized that whenever the word clever was used regarding Felicity in their household, it wasn’t complimentary. One would be pressed to find a volume that wasn’t religious or political in nature. The Goode girls were not allowed vulgar modern literature. In fact, she should hide her novel before she went inside.
At the thought of returning home, another long-held anxiety floated to the surface like a poorly weighted drowning victim. Per her father’s insistence, her ball gown wasn’t cut to style. High necks were for everyday gowns, and evening wear went so far as to slide below the shoulders.
And yet hers was buttoned to the chin.
Everyone was going to laugh.
Suddenly a memory blew across her mind like an autumnal gust.
Titus. His hands at her neck, doing or… undoing buttons. Her buttons… brushing soft, cool cloths over her neck and chest.
She swallowed, her fingers lifting to tug at her lace collar.
Mercy released her waist only to seize hold of her hand. “Papa sent us to fetch you, Nora. After you meet with him, you must come and have tea with us in the nursery. I’ve written a play and Pru said she’ll be the boy but only today as you
’ll be too busy with your blasted ball after that.”
“Don’t let nanny hear you say blast,” Nora warned, too charmed to truly scold her beloved sister.
“There’s kissing in the play,” Felicity said with a scandalized look up at Titus. “But we put our hands over our mouths.”
“Come on.” Mercy tugged. “Do hurry!”
“Good afternoon, Titus,” Felicity said with a prim curtsy.
He nodded his head at them each in turn. “And a good afternoon to you, Miss Felicity, Miss Mercy.” He bowed to them both with all the starched sobriety of a general before turning to her and inclining his head. “Miss Goode.”
As Nora allowed herself to be towed to the house by two cherubic ten-year-old tugboats, she couldn’t help but notice he’d called her Miss Goode. As he should have…and yet…
He’d enjoyed a bit of familiarity with the girls. Why not her? Could she insist he call her Nora? What would the word sound like now that his voice had altered so profoundly?
It was all she could think about for the rest of the day.
The Ball
Nora hated every moment she shared with Michael Leventhorpe, the heir to the Marquess of Blandbury. He was not only a fool, but a bully and a rake.
She didn’t like him.
She didn’t want him.
And she was left with no choice but to marry him.
Which was why he’d been allowed to conduct her away from the stifling ball, out onto the balcony. He swept her to the darkest corner, where the stone columns of the banister overlooked the garden. The pathway was dimly lit for the occasion by decorative antique braziers that brought to mind Shakespeare’s London.
Though most of the girls considered Blandbury handsome, nay, the catch of the season, Nora categorically disagreed. He was a big buffoon of a man, sporting and solid with pale hair and skin so white she could see some of the blue veins beneath the skin of his eyes. For some reason, she could stare at little else, all the while berating herself for being too critical of appearance.
Courting Trouble Page 3
