“My lord,” Nolan murmured, bowing. He stood there long after Lord Lovell left. Stood in silence staring at the Serpentine until the cold numbed his fingers. And then he made the journey home.
All the while, the viscount’s words echoed around the chambers of his mind. Haunting him late into the night, when the house slept and he sat in his barren office, with the fire’s shadows his only company. Fingers steepled under his chin, Nolan sat on the cold floor, legs drawn up to his chest. How simple he had made it seem. The gentleman had spoken as though finances were not an issue. And even with a dowry that Sybil brought, it would not be enough to right his family’s circumstances and, more, he’d never touch the money that belonged to her.
Then, marriage to Sybil would never be about one person…but rather a partnership. A wistful smile pulled at his lips and he briefly allowed himself the dream of a life with Sybil at his side. There would never be a want for laughter or learning or excitement. He grabbed the fireplace poker and jabbed at one of the dried logs. Sparks crackled and hissed.
From behind him, the door opened and then closed. By the soft tread, he didn’t even need to glance back to know who his nighttime interloper was. “It’s past your bedtime, brat.”
Josephine snorted. “You’re a good deal less wicked than you let on, if you naively believe I ever kept a proper bedtime.” His sister slid down, claiming the spot beside him. “Unable to sleep?”
He grunted and jabbed at the log once more.
“Henry came by earlier this morn, while you were out.”
“Yes.” His butler had handed him the card indicating he’d missed Henry’s unexpected business. Because while Henry is off saving the estates, I was off to meet the woman who has occupied my every thought since she stormed this very room.
“He believes you were at your clubs.”
Nolan started. “Did he say as much?” That went against the straitlaced, honorable brother he’d always known.
“No.” Josephine grinned. “But I well knew what he was thinking.”
It was what all would likely assume. And for years, he’d reveled in that ill-opinion. Those low expectations had kept him safe and insulated him from people probing and seeing who he was inside.
“Do you know what I believe?”
Nolan avoided her eyes. She’d probe too close. She’d always been too clever by half. Certainly more clever than he’d ever been, even before his accident. He braced for the onslaught of shame…that did not come. Sybil had shown him there was no shame from what had happened to him. “What is that, poppet?” he murmured, setting aside the wrought iron prod.
“I believe you met a lady,” she ventured softly. Her tone was absent of the usual lightheartedness.
He froze. Had he been so very transparent?
“You were,” Josephine confirmed with a nod.
Nolan gave thanks for the heavy shadows and cover of darkness that concealed the heat burning his neck and face.
“The morning escapades were what did it,” Josephine went on to explain. “Everyone knows a rake and rogue spend their evenings out, but you’ve not gone to your clubs once this entire week.”
He dusted a hand over his face. “You’re too clever for your own good.” Certainly for his own good.
Josephine beamed. “Though, in truth, it wasn’t just your morning trips. There was the meeting with Henry you nearly missed and the singing. Mustn’t forget that.”
Nolan managed a sheepish grin. “You’ve found me out,” he confided. “Just don’t go saying as much or you’ll ruin my reputation.”
His sister dropped her legs before her and leaned back on her elbows. “Your lady is the one responsible for that. And it’s called reforming a rake, not ruining you.”
They sat in silence, with only the crack of the flame filling the quiet. “Do you love her?”
And for the second time, another soul had asked him that question. If he’d been a proper rake, Josephine and the viscount’s talks of love would have set him running in the opposite direction. But he was no rake. He was simply a man in love with a woman. “I do,” he said quietly, his voice hoarse.
“Then you must marry her,” she said with a stoic logicality.
“I…” His words trailed off. Speaking about how he’d lost his heart to Sybil Cunning was revealing enough. Subsequently sharing the financial state he found himself in with Josephine was a truth she needed to be protected from. Protected, when he’d already failed her in every way.
“Does she care that we’re in dun territory?”
He whipped his gaze over, meeting Josephine’s wise-before-her-own-years expression.
“Because if she does,” his sister said with increasing vehemence, “then she is certainly not someone we’d want in the Pratt fam—”
“I haven’t asked her if it matters.” His sister puzzled her brow. “I didn’t offer for her, because of…because…of that. My finances.” Our finances. Most lords and ladies came from cold, unfeeling families. Whereas Nolan found himself with a brother who worked to set their circumstances to rights and a sister who did not hold Nolan to blame for his mistakes. Instead of upbraiding him, they rallied behind him, claiming the financial issues as theirs. Something stung his eyes and he blinked it back. Must be dust from the hearth. There was no other accounting for it.
His sister grunted. “Well, then given your cowardice, sulking in your office in the dead of night, making sad eyes at the fireplace, I’d say you don’t belong in the Pratt family.”
He chuckled and knocked his shoulder lightly against his sister’s. His quiet amusement faded. “I’m sorry for the state we find ourselves in.”
“I’m not worried about it,” she said with a simple shrug of her shoulders.
Yet another member of the peerage, his sister, now claiming those essential details that sustained families and tenants didn’t matter. “I don’t want you to worry about it.”
“What I am worried about, Noel, is that you give up whoever your lady is out of some misbegotten sense of guilt for trusting Father’s man-of-affairs.”
How much she’d seen over the years. More than he himself had. “Henry hasn’t wed Lady Alice because of our circumstances. How could I—?”
“Pfft,” Josephine interrupted. “Henry’s a different matter altogether. His not marrying his Alice has nothing to do with how you kept or didn’t keep the books and his own determination to rise inside that blasted law firm. And if he’d expect you to forsake your happiness and love, then he isn’t worthy of the Pratt name, either.”
Nolan rested his chin atop his knees and stared into the fire. His sister was still innocent enough that she saw life in absolutes. To Josephine, there was black and there was white, and she could not see the shades in between.
“Noel?”
He glanced over.
“Don’t make a mistake you’ll regret for the remainder of your life.” With those sage words from his youngest sibling, she hopped to her feet. “Now, I must be going.” She waggled her eyebrows. “It is now past my bedtime.”
They shared a smile.
“Josephine,” he called out, staying her when she reached the door.
She glanced back.
“Thank you.”
She winked. “Do not thank me. Thank the lady who snuck inside our house earlier in the week for thawing your heart.”
He started.
“She is the one, isn’t she?”
“She is,” he murmured to himself. She had been the one since the moment she’d sailed in his office and commandeered a meeting.
Josephine flashed him a crooked-toothed smile, bringing him back to the moment. “A bold lady who defies conventions and manages to steal your heart? I do say, I love her already.” With a jaunty wave, she was then off.
Nolan leveled himself to a stand and stalked over to his desk. He dropped into his chair. How simple Lord Lovell and Josephine made it seem. They acted as though all he and Sybil would need was love and that all their prob
lems could be overcome.
Tugging out the drawer, he fished out a small, velvet sack, cradling it in his palm. And that was assuming the lady even wished to have a life with him. If she was as clever as he knew she was, Sybil Holly Cunning would steer clear of any further dealings with him.
Nolan remained in his office long into the night. Until the nighttime hours gave way to morn. And then opening his desk drawer, he pulled out several sheets of parchment and reached for his pen.
Chapter 13
The house was bustling.
Of course, given Sybil’s scandalous meetings with Nolan, Mother had descended into a state of panic and fear that it would come to light and the family would be ruined. Or, as Mother referred to it each time: “Ruined. Ruuined. Ruuuuined.” With varying degrees of timbre and pitch, but it was all the same.
She sat at the edge of her bed while her maid rushed about packing the final pieces for their travels. The girl was careful to avoid her eyes. Just as she’d been for the past two days, when Sybil’s joyous interlude had been so painfully cut into.
With shaking fingers, she picked up one of the skates on her coverlet. She trailed her fingertips along the cool, metal edge.
…That was not romantic, Sybil. This is romantic…
Pain, regret, and longing all stuck in her throat, strangling her. For in the end, her research had proved disastrous in ways she could have never imagined. Nolan had not only revealed the joy that had previously been missing in her life. He’d also dangled the dream of something more—the whimsical hope of love with a good, honorable gentleman.
Oh, he’d never seen himself, nor would he likely ever see himself, in that light. But that was ultimately what Nolan Pratt, Baron Webb, was. A secretly loving, loyal brother who worried after his siblings’ futures and who blamed himself for mistakes that had nothing to do with recklessness and everything to do with a long-ago accident and his fears of the world knowing of it. A single tear streaked down her cheek.
“Egads, are you crying?”
The skate slipped from her fingers and landed with a noisy thwack at her feet. “No,” Sybil said quickly, dusting the back of her hand over the lone drop.
Her sister stood in the open doorway, hands on hips, fury in her eyes. It was that fury that pulled her back from the edge of despair. For only Aria could ever be so outraged and not pitying about her elder sister doing something as shameful as crying.
Apparently mollified, Aria came over. She fixed a brief glare on Hannah. “Traitor,” she muttered and the girl’s eyes welled with tears. “Off with you now. I wish to speak to my sister.”
“Aria,” Sybil chided. Bending, she retrieved the skate and dropped it atop her bed. “Hannah,” she called after the servant. Her maid turned slowly back, still not meeting her eyes. “It is not your fault,” she said quietly, at last offering that belated but deserved forgiveness. As a bluestocking, nearly thirty years of age, Sybil was not oblivious to the plight all women faced. For those outside of the nobility, their fates were even more fickle and precarious. Hadn’t Rosaleen reminded Sybil of that very fact on the eve of her wedding to stodgy Lord Hamilton with his deep pockets and stern countenance?
“Thank you, miss,” Hannah’s breathless words barely reached across the room.
As soon as she’d gone, Aria turned to Sybil. “Mother is looking for you. Some such nonsense about rooms that still need reviewing.”
She sighed. This was to be her life. The stolen pleasures to be had in the pages of her books, and during the day…this. Mistress of her mother’s household and helper of her father’s books.
Her sister wandered over to the bed and picked up that precious skate, turning it over in her hands. “She asked why you’d not gathered the books from the library yet, for our travels.”
Sybil cocked her head. “Mother asked that?” Of all the things their mother had worried after over the years—of which there were many—the impressive stack of leather volumes Sybil often carted about had never been at the top of any proverbial list.
“Indeed,” Aria concurred. “That was my very thought. But you really should go there, you know. To the library,” she clarified. “Mustn’t leave behind the only happiness you’ll ever know, forgotten.”
Her heart cracked. How humbling to know her sixteen-year-old sister had been right about life, love, and laughter, all along. “I’ll see to it shortly,” she managed past a thick tongue.
“Sybil.”
Oh, blast.
They looked as one. Mother stood framed in the doorway. Eyes still red, the viscountess was not, at present, weeping, which was a vast improvement these two days. “We are very nearly ready to depart. Have you seen to the final preparations?”
“I have,” she replied automatically, finding some small relief that this exchange with her sad-eyed mama hadn’t included the ‘Ruined. Ruuined. Ruuuuined’ nonsense.
“The library?” her mother demanded.
“Enough with the bloody library,” Sybil cried. She tossed her hands into the air. “I am tired of seeing to your household and being dutiful and being bloody proper.” I want to be who I was those five glorious days with Nolan. Laughing. Teasing. Happy. His visage slid forward, sharpening the pain. “I will gather my blasted books before we leave. But for the love of all that is holy, please, do not ask me again.”
Shock rounded out the eyes and mouths of the Cunning women.
“And it is a dreadful name,” Sybil shouted, feeling invigorated for yelling and cursing and simply being alive…if even just to rail at the dreary life she’d lived these past thirty years.
“Well,” the viscountess snapped, patting the back of her elegant coiffure. “Mark my words, Sybil Holly Cunning, you will owe me an apology.”
In a remarkable contradictory show of disloyalty, Aria gave an enthusiastic nod. “You will,” she silently mouthed.
Yes, later. But for now, she wanted to be alone and away from the questions and demands. From all of it.
With her mother and sister left gaping at her, Sybil stalked past them, out into the hall. By servants hurrying about with valises and trunks. “The bloody library,” she muttered as she reached that much talked about room. “As though I give a jot about what damned books I’ve forgotten or might forget.” She pushed the door open. “I…” The words trailed off and she cocked her head. She’d spent these past two days so often thinking of him and dreaming of him, that she’d surely conjured him. Sybil blinked several times. But no matter how many times, the sight remained. Gloriously blond and tall like that golden angel Michael, who’d cast the darkest sinner outside the gates of heaven Nolan stared back.
“Sybil,” he murmured, that husky baritone washing over her, warming her when she’d been so very cold these two days.
“Nolan,” she whispered, glancing around. “What—?” He withdrew a sack from his sapphire jacket and her heart lurched.
“This is yours.”
This is why he’d come. He may as well have slapped her for the sting of pain that lanced her heart. Lifting her palms, she warded off that damned sack. “It is yours. As is the thousand pounds,” she said, the words coming as though they belonged to another. “I…” I cannot say hired. Not when it would sully what they’d shared. “It was wrong of me to ask you to,” she scrabbled with her skirts, “help, but help me you did.” And showed me more happiness in those handful of days.
He rocked on his elegant black heels. “I wanted to thank you.”
“Thank me?” she echoed dumbly.
“For instilling in me the courage to speak with my siblings about my,” he touched the back of his head. “About my injury. My brother and I have spent the past two days examining business ventures. Lucrative ones.”
Nolan looked at her. What did he expect of her here? Something was expected but through the tumult of her emotions, she couldn’t puzzle it out. She dampened her lips. “Indeed?”
He nodded.
After years of cloaking himself in guilt and sh
utting out all, including his siblings, he’d let them inside. This is why he’d come. To thank her for that. She drew in a shuddery breath, feeling petty and selfish for this not being enough. But she was grateful just the same because she’d brought something positive and good to his life.
“We will struggle,” he went on. “Creditors will continue to come…but in time…”
Sybil let her hands fall to her side. “I am so happy for you, Nolan.” For he’d found peace and there was nothing more important than that. Other than love…
“Would you please sit, Miss Cunning?”
Miss Cunning? Her heart ripped. That polite address stripped away all of the tender warmth shared between them.
He gestured to the leather button sofa closest to him. “Will you please?”
That entreaty brought movement back to her limbs, only stopping when she’d reached the indicated seat. Sybil searched his face but found no hint of emotion.
“You are a woman of logic and reason.” He looked at her.
She wetted her lips. “I was.” Until you.
“You know precisely what you want and how you will live your life.”
I thought I did. You showed me I know far less. Unable to humble herself with that truth, she remained silent.
“As you are logical and practical, Miss Cunning.” He reached down and picked up a thick sheet of vellum on the table beside him. “You know all the reasons I would make you a rotted husband.” He discarded that sheet, setting it down on the rose-inlaid table beside him.
She froze. And then it made sense. “This is why you’re here,” she said flatly. He’d come not only to share about his healing with his family but also to convince her that she was better off without him. She wasn’t. Her life was fuller with him in it. “I’m not looking for you to marry me,” she said, proud of that even deliverance when, inside, she was breaking.
A Heart of a Duke Regency Collection : Volume 2--A Regency Bundle Page 112
