Milly paused with him outside the library, where the scent of roses and greenery wafted on cool breezes from the foyer.
“You’re in trouble, aren’t you? Either you’ve spent too much replacing Lady Freddy’s jewels or your lavender is failing or you’ve—”
The bleak humor in his eyes told her she was sniffing in a promising direction. She hadn’t guessed the whole of it, but he was in difficulties of some sort.
“I am forever offending somebody, Miss Danforth. This is my fate, and you must not allow it to upset you. I believe on occasion I have even offended you?”
He winged his arm, but Milly could not deal with his lordly flummery, not when two dueling pistols had been sitting on top of their case right beside the jewelry tray.
Had he been reviewing his last will and testament? Was that what the infernal brooch had been about?
“You could marry wealth, my lord. The Germans always have some princesses on offer, the professor would know which ones to ask. A French aristo with no taste for republican government would do. Lady Freddy is desperate for you to have somebody to love.”
They paused near the foyer.
“Lady Freddy is desperate for me to have sons. She’s worked too long and hard to keep the St. Clair holdings together to see the Crown get its hands on generations of family wealth. And while I am inclined to share her sense of possessiveness—”
Milly could not abide the drawling humor in his tone. She got her hands on him. Sank her fingers into his every-which-way hair, plastered herself to him, and kissed his fool, blathering mouth into silence.
“She wants you to have somebody to love, you idiot man,” she growled against his teeth. “Somebody to love you.”
He might have argued, except Milly was not turning loose of his mouth. Something shuddered through him, a groan or a sigh, and his arms came around her slowly, then quite, quite snugly.
“Better, my lord.”
“My aunt has hired a madwoman.”
He was a madman, but he kissed wonderfully, turning Milly’s assault into a dance, a twining of tongues, sighs, and bodies that had nothing to do with dueling pistols—at least in Milly’s mind.
She would never presume to know his lordship’s.
St. Clair’s hand cupped Milly’s breast from below, a lovely caress, one that inspired her to sink her fingers into the firm musculature of his backside. The urge to climb him stole into Milly’s imagination, along with a burning desire to relieve St. Clair of his remaining clothes.
“I’ll just get my fich—”
Lady Freddie’s voice stopped abruptly as the front door was thrown open, and cold air swirled into the foyer.
“Sebastian, unhand Miss Danforth.”
Four little words, but they presaged Milly’s ruin. Over her shoulder, she saw the professor intently examining the roses—or studying the scene in the mirror—while Lady Avery and Lady Covington examined Milly and Sebastian.
And Sebastian did not unhand her, for which Milly’s knees were grateful.
“Aunt, my ladies, I do beg your pardon. You will forgive me for taking the liberties a fiancé ought not to attempt unless privacy is assured.”
Milly’s head came off Sebastian’s shoulder, only to be shoved gently against his shirt. He was back on his English, and sounding coolly pleased with himself.
“A fiancé?” Lady Avery echoed. “You’re snatching your aunt’s companion for your baroness, St. Clair?”
Lady Covington produced a lorgnette. “She’s a pretty little thing. Not too old.”
“I am not—” Milly began, only to find Sebastian’s mouth brushing over hers.
“My dear Millicent is not in the habit of permitting me kisses. I must apologize for having become carried away.” And then, murmured right next to her ear, “Calme, s’il vous plaît, petite tigresse.”
His petite tigress stifled the urge to bite him. She settled for stomping on his toes, which had no effect whatsoever.
“Blessed saints,” Lady Freddy said, clapping her gloved hands. “I own myself relieved to have a simple explanation for a small lapse. Milly, you will go straight up to bed, and, Sebastian, you shall draft the particulars for the professor to send to our friends. Ladies, shall we away? I cannot abide the idea that the Countess Thrall might be winning every hand for want of our steadying influence on the gentlemen.”
With pointed looks at Sebastian and Milly, Freddy’s companions followed her out. The professor lingered only a moment, his expression bemused.
The instant the door closed, Milly wrestled free of Sebastian’s embrace.
“What have you done?! Those, those women will bruit it about all over London that we’re engaged, and because of a mere kiss!”
“A mere kiss?”
Milly paced the confines of the foyer, arms crossed, skirts swishing.
“And Lady Freddy will be so disappointed when there’s no ceremony. You should be ashamed!”
“I should be ashamed? Of kissing you?”
Milly rounded on his lordship. “I’m well aware that I should be ashamed for kissing you, my lord. Well aware, but there are employment agencies in York, and a small indiscretion can be overlooked when an unattached, titled gentleman is involved. But now you’ve gone and—”
Sebastian was smiling at her, and that more than any rousing argument suggested to Milly he might not grasp the situation in all its terrible entirely.
“I cannot marry you, my lord.”
“You can kiss me, but you can’t use my name?”
“And I cannot marry you. I am a companion, in service, in case you’ve forgotten.” His smile did not falter, so Milly fired her biggest cannon. “I cannot read. What baroness cannot even read the menus put before her by the cook? Cannot read bedtime stories to her own children? Can barely follow along in the Book of Common Prayer—”
His smile shifted, becoming tender rather than pleased.
“You can sing to the children instead, tell them stories you make up, or listen to their own fanciful tales. You’re resourceful, my dear, and you shall contrive. As a baroness, you will contrive magnificently.”
Based on the pride Milly heard in his tone, St. Clair had already dispatched announcements to Lady Freddy’s cronies, cried the banns, and said his vows. He was not resigned to this dire turn of events; he was rejoicing in it.
While she…could not read. When St. Clair slipped his arms around her again, Milly leaned into him and tried not to cry.
***
“MacHugh said you may have as much time as you like to put your affairs in order. He’s offended by you, not by the entire St. Clair succession.”
Michael could not have sounded more disgusted as he rode along at Sebastian’s side.
“So I’m to get a child on my prospective wife, allowing MacHugh the comfort of knowing he won’t put Lady Freddy on the Crown’s charity when I’m laid to rest? And what if my baroness is so disobliging as to present me with a daughter? Or she doesn’t carry the child safely through birth? Am I to put MacHugh off, year to year, until my heir and spare are grown to manhood and MacHugh and I are too old to give a good account of ourselves?”
“Beating each other to death is not giving a good account of anything, and your barony is ancient enough that it likely can be preserved through the female line.”
They passed a lilac bush blooming next to a stand of yellow tulips, the lavender and yellow making a cheerful contrast to their dreary conversation. Sebastian bid Fable to pause so his rider might catch a whiff of lilac.
“What does the lilac symbolize to the English?”
“First emotions of love. You don’t have to marry the girl at all.”
“Yes, Michael, I do. Her reputation was at risk simply because she sought employment in my household, and Aunt’s cronies are not about to let my indiscretion remain a se
cret. Then too, Aunt caught me once before in a similar moment with Miss Danforth.”
A similarly lovely moment. Sebastian signaled his horse to toddle on.
“Milly Danforth is a companion, for God’s sake. A nobody, a nothing to Polite Society. They’ll dine on her bones for a week then go yipping and baying to their next kill. All you did was kiss her, or endure her kisses.”
Fable snatched a bite of some leaves hanging over the bridle path.
“Naughty boy,” Sebastian chided mildly. “Miss Danforth is a nobody, Michael, but that makes it all the more imperative that my behavior toward her be honorable, which it was not.”
He really ought to be ashamed of himself for that, but he was too pleased by the knowledge that Milly Danforth had started the kiss that had resulted in their engagement.
“I’ll find somebody to marry the damned woman,” Michael spat.
“Dear fellow, on general principles one should not procure a spouse for any female whom one refers to as the damned woman. Miss Danforth is not pleased to have me for a husband. I don’t think she’d allow any convenient eligible of your acquaintance to so much as kiss her cat.”
The turn of phrase was unfortunately prurient, the mistake of a man who’d misplaced his native language for too many years.
“I daresay you won’t be kissing her—”
“Hush, Michael. One duel hanging over me is one too many.”
Michael turned his horse down the left fork of the path, the less traveled route, the one they always took. “You could apologize.”
“No, I cannot. MacHugh struck a stout blow before at least one witness. He wants no apology from me, he wants satisfaction, though I do wonder—”
He broke off as Fable’s head came up. The Duke of Mercia rode around a bend in the path, looking handsome and severe in the early morning light.
Sebastian gave a slow nod and nudged Fable onto the verge. For His Grace, Sebastian would have positioned his horse in the middle of a wet muck pit—and cheerfully dismounted in the same location.
“Mercia.”
His Grace checked his horse, a glossy, well-muscled chestnut with perfect manners. “St. Clair.” The duke glanced at Michael. “He’ll second you?”
“Mr. Brodie has that honor.” Again. Michael had seconded St. Clair when he’d met Mercia too, of course. And Pierpont, Neggars, and Cambert, as well.
Mercia switched the bight of his reins from the left to the right side of his horse’s neck.
“MacHugh is damned good with his fists, but he’s careless—or arrogant. He doesn’t close up his defense as snugly as he ought, and he leaves openings. His right is formidable, though he relies on it almost exclusively. Good day.”
Mercia touched a gloved finger to his hat brim and cantered off.
The duke’s short discourse was astonishing in several regards, not the least impressive of which was that it silenced Michael for a distance of two furlongs. When their path emerged near the sparkling beauty of the Serpentine, Michael found his tongue.
“I must write to my sisters at Blackthorn and ask them whether the wee piggies have sprouted wings.”
“Blackthorn is your estate in Ireland?”
Michael was silent for another half furlong, making the day nothing short of miraculous—or damned strange. “My mother’s people are Irish, and my sister Bridget married an Irish earl’s heir. My sire hails from Aberdeenshire. Hailed.”
Hence his Highland attire and his tendency to lapse from a brogue into a burr when in the grip of strong emotions.
In the face of such a revelation, Sebastian trod lightly. “Not much summer that far north.”
“What there is has no comparison anywhere in the world.” Michael petted his horse, a Roman-nosed bay gelding with a tendency to nip and spook.
“You are homesick, Michael. Many a married man does without a valet.”
A gaggle of ladies with their grooms appeared on the path ahead of them, Lady Amelia among them.
“Are you sending me away, my lord?”
Holy Mother, preserve me from the pride of the Celt. “I could neither send you away nor summon you to my side unless you wished it, Michael. You cannot protect me from every enraged English officer who wants me dead. Your family must miss you, and they should be your first obligation.”
“As your family has been yours?”
Lady Amelia’s group passed them single file, grooms bringing up the rear. When it came Amelia’s turn to pass him—to snub him—she instead gave him the barest, most infinitesimal nod, her gaze touching Sebastian’s for only an instant.
The grooms came along on their unprepossessing mounts, and Sebastian waited until they’d passed to resume the conversation with his self-appointed conscience.
“You told me not to marry Miss Danforth, Michael, and yet marrying her fulfills both my obligations as a gentleman and my obligations to the succession—to my family. I am mindful of my obligations.”
And Amelia had acknowledged him. His engagement to Milly Danforth had become public earlier in the week, and Amelia had acknowledged him.
Michael glanced around, likely making sure nobody else could overhear.
“Do you suppose Lady Amelia feels safe from you now that you’re betrothed to somebody else?”
Betrothed was a sweet word, a word full of belonging and hope—also sadness, an emotion Sebastian used to brush aside like so many ashes in a hearth.
“Lady Amelia’s group came from that direction,” Sebastian said, pointing to a rise off to the north. “She saw no less than the Duke of Mercia acknowledge me with conversation, and hence allowed the smallest crack in her reserve toward me. We should get back to the house, or Lady Freddy will pronounce us late for breakfast. Thank MacHugh for his forbearance, and tell him I will meet him one week after the wedding.”
Michael swore in Gaelic and sent his bay forward in a smooth canter, while Sebastian held Fable back to a brisk trot. Lady Amelia had acknowledged him, and yet, he’d rather she’d cut him once more, for instead of indifference, her gaze had held wariness and loathing.
Sebastian was damned sick of people watching him with that same uneasy, anxious gaze, as if he’d drag them off and delight in applying manacles and thumbscrews in hopes of learning how much they owed the tradesmen or what they’d lost at the tables last week.
He kicked Fable up to the canter, and admitted to himself he was marrying Milly Danforth—he could marry Milly Danforth—in part because she had never once regarded him with wariness and loathing.
Ten
“Walk with me, Miss Danforth.” Mr. Brodie winged his arm at Milly, but when she leveled a stare at him in response, he managed to tack on the requisite sop to manners. “Would you mind walking with me for a moment, please?”
He was trainable, then. Milly doubted Sebastian would have kept Mr. Brodie about if he were not, though Sebastian—what a delight, to think of him thus—could not be choosy about his familiars.
A daunting thought, when she might well become one of them.
“A few minutes only,” Milly said as they turned down between two rows of silvery green lavender. “Lady Freddy will get into mischief if she’s left without supervision for very long.”
Mr. Brodie looked as if he had wind, or perhaps was trying not to smile. “On a horticultural farm bordering Chelsea?”
“Anywhere. St. Clair and the professor can curb her natural impulses for only so long, and then she must meddle. She’ll be telling his lordship what’s amiss with his herbs, and the gardener won’t dare countermand her directions. She’ll tell the lads how to feed that wretched donkey and demand they groom the burrs from the stable cats.”
Mr. Brodie bent and snapped off a sprig from a low-growing bush, bringing it to his nose then passing it to Milly. “Does she know what’s amiss with his herbs?”
“Only his
lordship can puzzle that out, but you did not request this stroll to discuss Lady Freddy’s queer starts or his lordship’s horticulture.”
“I did not. I requested this stroll so I might return some correspondence to you.” He produced a packet of letters from an inside pocket and passed them to Milly. “I assume the professor abetted you.”
Milly glanced at the letters fleetingly, as if they were contraband, then slipped them into the pocket of her walking dress. To give herself time to sort the emotions rioting through her at the sight of her own handwriting—the professor had helped her only a little with these employment inquiries—she brushed the sprig of lavender under her nose.
“It’s a comforting scent,” Mr. Brodie said, “having only positive associations.”
Wretch. “You are saying St. Clair has been only honorable toward me. What about my honor, Mr. Brodie? How am I to behave honorably toward him?”
They ambled along, gravel crunching under their feet, the low, shrubby bushes making a pretty green carpet beneath the sun. Despair welled up as the odors of turned earth and stables imbued the very air with bucolic benevolence.
“How is your honor served by tucking tail and heading for the West Riding, Miss Danforth? Meaning no insult, you will not make St. Clair an ideal baroness. I told him to treat you to a long engagement followed by a quiet, well-compensated jilting. He listened patiently then politely told me to mind my own business.”
A capital notion, considering Mr. Brodie had sorted through Milly’s belongings and now had taken to sorting through her correspondence. Either Mr. Brodie was a very unscrupulous man, or his devotion to Sebastian was without limit.
Possibly both were true.
Sebastian stood across the field of lavender, head bare, dark hair riffling in the mild breeze as he conferred with his gardener. Milly took a moment to memorize the sight of her fiancé, just another Englishman being conscientious about his land—a handsome Englishman haunted by bad memories, a trying present, and a difficult future.
“I’m not abandoning him,” Milly said. “I’m trying to be sensible. I am a semiliterate companion, not a baroness. I cannot read a program at the theater, cannot write out my own invitations.”
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