More silence.
“Very well, Lyon,” his father said at last, in a tone Lyon found difficult to interpret. “Go home to Pennyroyal Green. See to your mare. And tell your mother I’ll be home in a week.”
OLIVIA TOOK A deep breath of clean, free air before she crossed the threshold into the Duffy household, much like a diver preparing to enter a murky sea. Her only responsibility was to leave the food with a quick, charitable smile and then depart—it really was all her parents had given her permission to do—but she never could. It wasn’t as though they were chickens in a barnyard, for heaven’s sake. She didn’t know how any human with a heart or conscience could look about the Duffy house or into Mrs. Duffy’s face and not offer some momentary respite.
She’d grown fond of the children, some of them noisy little heathens, some of them angels, all of them, truly, some blend of each, all of them vying for a scrap of attention from their exhausted, beleaguered mother and their indifferent, hapless, usually absent father. The children scarcely were allowed to be children, anyway, pressed into service as nannies and cleaners as soon as they could walk.
Olivia tried to give each of them a word of praise, a special greeting, a question that told them that she recognized them as separate little individuals, not a mass of hungry open mouths. Everyone, she fervently believed, had a right to be loved, to be fed, to be clothed and sheltered. But her attentions were like a drop in an ocean of need.
She settled the basket of food on the begrimed table, whipped open the curtains, and slid open a window, which let out a little of the foul air but revealed the crusty remains of porridge on the stove and the fine layer of dirt that coated everything, children included. The fire was low, and wet clothes draped on the hearth seemed on the brink of mildewing.
Mrs. Duffy immediately began to unpack the basket as her children clamored around her.
“Scones today, Mrs. Duffy,” Olivia said brightly.
“Thank you.” Mrs. Duffy swiped a strand of lank hair behind her ear. Whatever pride she might have laid claim to had gone down beneath a wave of hungry mouths to feed and soiled baby clouts long ago. She accepted whatever charity she could get.
Had Mr. Duffy ever looked at Mrs. Duffy with a face lit with awe and hunger?
Had Mrs. Duffy’s heart ever leaped when she looked at Mr. Duffy?
“Shall I hold the baby for you, Mrs. Duffy, whilst you feed the others?”
Wordlessly, the drawn and weary Mrs. Duffy handed over the baby, a pretty little thing who had once been generous with her laughter, delighted at the newness of the world, even the dusty, grimy, shrill world of the Duffy house. Now she was listless and frighteningly too warm. She’d been unwell last week, too.
Olivia’s gut clenched. She looked up, desperate to leave here, desperate to do something to make it better and knowing whatever she did would matter for only a few minutes.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she murmured to the baby, who fussed. “Do you think a doctor ought to see her, Mrs. Duffy?” she whispered.
“Of course she needs a doctor, Miss Eversea.”
Mrs. Duffy smiled a tight, bitter, faint smile, so resigned that it chilled Olivia’s very bones and made her feel abashed and very young. The Duffys could not afford a doctor. Or a headstone, either. The baby, when she died, would likely be buried beneath a wooden cross somewhere behind the house.
Mrs. Duffy would have to keep on living here.
And Olivia could leave.
“I’ll see you next Tuesday,” she whispered.
She kissed the baby between the eyes and handed her back to Mrs. Duffy, who hoisted her up like the burden she was, not the person she could become if she survived to adulthood.
And Olivia seized her basket and left the house.
She fought back tears as she gulped in huge breaths.
She now understood that Lyon was a grace note on top of all the other blessings in her life. Suddenly not even Lady Arabella or the broadsheets or his father mattered in light of this. What mattered were the moments she had with him.
She was frantic to see him one more time, if only to tell him how grateful she was.
Chapter 10
IT WAS TUESDAY AT three o’clock, not two o’clock, by the time Lyon was in Pennyroyal Green again. Not even he had yet been able to alter the laws of time, but his horse was fast and the roads were good and he’d all but run from the stables to the elm tree, still dusty from the road.
He stood next to the “O” he didn’t dare turn into “Olivia” with his knife. He didn’t need to. The word was carved on his heart. But if he was lucky, very lucky—and when wasn’t he, for he excelled at making his own luck—he would be able to intercept her returning from the Duffys.
And when her familiar petite form came into view, he closed his eyes and said a silent hosannah.
He opened them again, and stepped out from the tree slowly, so she wouldn’t be alarmed.
She didn’t see him. Her head was lowered, eyes on her feet, rather than on the sky and scenery as usual.
His heart lurched. Something was off. It was a bit like watching a kite struggling to get airborne.
She stopped abruptly when she saw him, and clapped one hand to her heart.
And for a long moment neither said anything at all. But her face said everything, and he was certain the brilliance he saw there was a reflection of what she saw in his.
“I thought you were going to be gone for a month,” she said softly.
“I invented an excuse to come home.”
“I thought you wanted to be in London.”
“All I ever want is to be wherever you are.”
He literally saw her breath catch when he said it. She moved closer, slowly, as if his expression, his very need for her, was spooling her into him.
Her lovely face was still a trifle guarded.
She lowered the now-empty food basket on the ground.
The silence was taut, their joy in each other all tangled in a net of tension and recrimination and frustration, of responsibility.
“Did you see her?” she asked. But she sounded more abstracted than accusatory.
“If you mean did I see Lady Arabella, yes. I saw her. I danced with her. I rode with her in Rotten Row.”
She watched him unblinkingly.
“I thought about you every moment of every day, Liv. I saw you everywhere. In trees, in clouds, in the faces of women who walked by, in the puddle of gravy on my roast beef . . .”
She tipped her head and studied him with those blue, blue eyes, deciding whether she thought this was true. There was a glimmer of what might be amusement about the corners of her mouth.
“She means nothing to me. I was like a man in Newgate. I made a mark with a nugget of coal on my bedroom wall for every day I was there.”
This made her smile faintly. “You did not.”
“I even wrote a poem: ‘For Olivia, Who Would Not Accept My Gloves.’”
She smiled in earnest.
“I have learned that everyone else in the world is boring except you.”
“It has taken you this long to realize it?” Still, it was a shadow of her usual sparkle.
Now he was truly worried. He stepped toward her, stopped just shy of touching her, but close enough to catch a hint the lavender she likely stored her clothes in.
“Liv,” he said softly. “Something is very wrong. Please tell me.”
She drew in a breath.
And then it was like a cloudburst.
“Oh, Lyon. I’m sorry I behaved like such a child. It’s just . . . the gloves were so beautiful and thoughtful, and I . . . I’ve been wretched thinking about how I hurt your feelings. And I thought—”
“It’s my fault,” he interjected hurriedly. “I just didn’t think it through. I never, never meant to hurt you. And all I wanted—”
“—I thought . . . what if I never see him again? What if he had a carriage accident or rode his horse into a ditch and lay there, broken and alone?”
He gave a startled laugh. “That’s quite a vivid picture, but I’m a very good rider.”
“Don’t laugh! And I’d been so beastly to you, and you wouldn’t have anything to remember me by, as you lay in the ditch alone. So . . .”
She fished about in her apron pocket, and then drew in a steadying breath. “Before another moment goes by I wanted to give this to you. If you’ll accept it. Hold out your hand.”
Eyebrows raised, he hesitated, then did as ordered.
She settled something into his palm. And then bit her lip, waiting for his response.
He looked down. From his cupped hand, her sweet face looked up at him: the blue eyes, the soft clouds of dark hair, lovely and so vibrantly alive. The miniature wasn’t nearly as beautiful as the original standing before him, of course, but the spirit of her was captured so perfectly in strokes of paint he was too moved to speak. It was the best, most perfect thing he’d ever been given.
He was a grown man, but he didn’t quite trust himself to look up yet.
A little hush had fallen over them.
He cleared his throat. “I shall cherish it forever, Liv.”
His voice had gone a bit husky.
He closed his hand gently around it, and tucked it into his coat.
“I should hope so,” she said, sounding a bit more like herself. But her voice was husky, too.
He looked up then. They smiled at each other, and his world and hers began to restore itself to rights, but she was still shadowed.
“Liv,” he said abruptly. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
She went still.
And then alarmingly, she brought her hands up to her face and covered it.
And then she took a deep breath, sighed it out, and when she swiped her hands down again her grief was plain and frightened him.
“Very well. I may as well tell you . . . Lyon . . . it’s just . . . it’s the Duffys’ baby. She’s so ill. I don’t think she’s going to live. And it’s so heartbreaking. She needs a doctor. And they don’t even have enough money for the rent this month. That’s not unusual, of course. Except that they’re so late they’ll likely be evicted and then the baby will die for c-c-certain.”
She drew in a shuddering breath.
His gut clutched. By now he felt as though he knew every Duffy intimately and was invested in their collective well-being.
He produced his handkerchief and gave it to her just as the tears welled, and the wheels of his mind began turning. Relieved that he’d found the source of what was troubling her, because now he could set about fixing it.
“I’m so terribly sorry to be so weepy, Lyon. It’s just been difficult to witness. She’s such a pretty baby, doesn’t fuss at all, and she hasn’t a prayer of a decent life, really, even if she does live. I’ve asked my father for help with them before and he’s been indulgent with me but they’re hardly the only poor family in Sussex and he says they’ll simply come to expect it and he can’t feed everyone. I can’t ask him again.”
“Sounds very much like my father.”
Lyon was, at his core, pragmatic. He agreed with both fathers. Some families navigated poverty with dignity and resourcefulness. The Duffys, thanks to Mr. Duffy, weren’t one of them.
Still, he couldn’t stop himself from doing what he did next. It was more reflex than thought, born of need.
He thrust his hand into his pocket. “Take this.” He pressed his pocket watch into Olivia’s hand.
“Your watch? Why?”
“Take it,” he insisted. “Give it to their landlord. He’ll be able to pawn it for a year’s rent, at least. Instruct him to return the balance, if any, to an attorney in London named Bartholomew Tolliver, to be held in trust for the children. Good sort, Tolliver.”
She stared down at the watch, dumbstruck.
“But . . . your initials are on it . . . Lyon, you love this watch . . . was a gift . . . I can’t . . .”
“It was a gift to me, and now I’m giving it to you. If I had a sack of guineas in my coat pocket right now, I’d give that to you, but I don’t. If I could, Liv, I’d feed all the hungry myself, and wipe out the Triangle Trade forever for you. But the need is now and urgent, and we have a solution. Take the watch. I’ll have another watch, one day.”
And still she hesitated. “But Lyon—”
“Olivia.”
She looked up at the tone in his voice, her eyes widening.
“You must allow me to give you something.” He said this slowly, a subtle anguish thrumming through all of those words.
She closed her fingers over it.
“I don’t know what to say,” she whispered.
“Say thank you.”
“Thank you.” She looked down at it, running her thumb gently over the satiny metal he had opened and closed countless times. He’d cherished that watch. And somehow he felt only relief that he could ease her troubles.
She looked up at him, smiling faintly. “It’s round. Like the moon.”
“So it is.”
He smiled at her, too.
“What a ninny I am, Lyon. I didn’t mean to cry.”
“Ninny?” He was incensed. “What ‘ninny’ walks into a house, gets their heart shredded, and still goes back, over and over again because she’s needed? You’re a tigress.”
And that’s when the tears spilled again in earnest.
He didn’t remember doing it, but one moment she was glowing up at him, tears beading her eyelashes, the next his arms were circling her and she was clinging to his coat. She tipped her forehead against his chest. He cradled the back of her head with one hand, and slid the other down her spine to rest in that sweet small scoop right before the curve of her arse, and murmured things he’d never dreamed would ever pass his lips.
“Oh, Liv. Liv. My heart. My love. Please don’t cry. Please don’t cry. It will be all right.”
She wept a little, quietly, for a time. And at last heaved a sigh.
And then he simply held her.
It was as perfect a moment as he’d ever known. It seemed an astonishing privilege to be the person who could comfort her.
He’d never known there was much pleasure in simply quietly breathing with another human being.
“I missed you so,” she whispered.
His heart broke, then regrew three times bigger.
The soft press of her breasts against his body, the rise and fall of her breath beneath his hands. The sheer glory of having her in his arms was well nigh unbearable. It was like the sun had taken up residence in his chest.
And he held her and murmured things, and his hands moved soothingly over her back.
And without thinking, he brushed a kiss over the top of her head.
He felt her breathing stop.
And then her back moved again in a great exhale, and she slowly tipped her head back and looked up at him.
“Liv?” he whispered.
A warning.
The only one he was going to give her.
But she rose up on her toes to meet his lips as they lowered.
He brushed his lips across hers so softly, and even that much was playing roulette with his control. A heaven of petal-softness and give, her mouth.
He tightened his arms around her. His limbs were suddenly awkward, thrumming as he unleashed, just a little, what felt like a lifetime’s worth of desire.
His lips sank against hers more determinedly, this time claiming. He parted them with a little nip of a kiss.
She made a little sound. A sort of gasp that was both surprised and wholly carnal.
It went to his head like bolted whisky, that sound.
He kissed her again, and this time he touched his tongue to hers, then twined his with it softly, exploring, teasing, arousing. Her head tipped back into his hands, to allow him to take the kiss deeper, and, oh God, she kissed him back as if she’d been born knowing how.
He took his lips from hers briefly to breathe.
“Di
d I do that correctly?” she whispered.
“God, yes,” he rasped.
“Can we do it a—”
He took her mouth before she could say “again.” Fiercely now. She met him with full hunger. Desire was a thing with claws and it spurred him on. His hands wandered her shoulder blades beneath her muslin, the warm satin of her skin just a fine, fragile layer of fabric away from his hungry hands, and he wanted to tear it away like a savage and bury himself in her.
She wrapped her hands around his head and pulled him close. Her mouth was honeyed sweetness and he was dizzier, drunker with each kiss, pulled deeper and deeper into a maelstrom of need.
He backed her up against the elm tree. And now they were nearly climbing each other, the kisses swift, rough, plundering.
They paused between each kiss to breathe raggedly against each other’s lips. He heard his own breath like a distant storm in his ears.
Her hands slid down to his waist and she pulled herself tightly against him, and his cock was so hard her slightest movement sent an agony of pleasure through him. He hissed a breath in through his teeth.
“Liv.” He bumped his lips softly against hers.
Her eyelids were heavy, and her breath came hot and swift between her parted lips. She moved against him, seeking her own pleasure, not quite knowing how to find it.
He knew if he hiked her skirt he would find her wet and hot, and he could slide his fingers between her legs, and he could make these woods echo with his name as she screamed it.
He was losing his mind.
She arched against him.
“Liv . . . I . . .” His voice was a shredded rasp. “You mustn’t . . .”
Her head went back and her eyes were closed, and he could see her pulse in her throat, and her breath came swift and hot through her parted lips as she pulled him harder against her body, her hands sliding down to his hips.
“Oh God. Oh God.”
His voice was in shreds. He buried his face in the crook of her neck and bit his lip hard as his release tore through him. Wave after wracking wave of unimaginable pleasure. He soared out of his body, somewhere over the Sussex downs.
The shame and glory of it.
The Legend of Lyon Redmond Page 13
