She saw the hesitation in his eyes, the compassion, and lost a piece of her heart to him for his reluctance to hurt her.
Why must falling in love with a good man be so painful and pointless?
“I cannot change the past, Matthew, but I will not sacrifice my future and Priscilla’s for a passing dalliance. I return to Sutcliffe after the holidays, sooner if Thomas tires of my company. I’m half-hoping he’ll offer to keep Priscilla here, and shower her with tutors and ponies. I will ask Thomas for this very boon, in fact, when the moment is right. My duty as a mother requires this of me.”
The lump in Theresa’s throat prevented further babbling.
Matthew regarded her for a long moment, while Theresa’s heart beat a steady ostinato of “please go/don’t leave me.” She craved his company, but knew well where unbridled craving could leave her.
A clean white handkerchief appeared before her eyes, one devoid of even a monogram.
She clutched at it and barely resisted the temptation to bunch it under her nose.
“You labor under a misapprehension, madam, for which I must take responsibility. A dalliance will not answer.” Matthew probably pronounced sentence in those same grave tones.
“I’m glad you agree.” Glad and devastated.
“A dalliance will not answer when I seek to pay you my addresses, Theresa Jennings. My most respectful, affectionate addresses.”
The idea of leaving Priscilla at Linden, of merely visiting as the child grew into a well-educated, well-dowered, well-received young woman, had cut Theresa to her soul.
And yet, that prospect was also her last prayer each night and first wish every morning. She would manage to part from Priscilla with an encouraging wave, a smile, and a good, stout hug—not a tear to be seen.
Matthew Belmont’s sincere, respectful declaration, however, left Theresa crying like a motherless child.
* * *
“The child has returned to the house,” Nick said. “You can use whatever foul language you’ve been holding back.”
Beckman kept swatting at the aisle’s dirt floor with his rake. “Nicholas, who is responsible for our farm equipment?”
“Archibald Everly manages the home farm, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Beckman was in a lather about something and had been since returning from his errands in the village. He’d also been broody throughout Priscilla’s riding lesson—if the girl’s ceaseless raptures could be considered a lesson—and now he was raking as if his credit had been permanently cut off at the posting inn.
“Somebody needs to tell Everly not to leave his harrows out in the rain,” Beck said, backing up to start a new row. He worked methodically, rhythmically, a far healthier and happier man than when he’d come to Linden two years ago.
Beckman wasn’t happy now.
“Everly wouldn’t leave a harrow out in the rain,” Nick said. “The baroness would never permit such poor husbandry. We have sheds for the field equipment, and this time of year, the harrows should all be in them.”
Harrows were for working the soil after the ploughs had turned the sod. Their sturdy iron teeth broke up the earth so planting could take place with little additional effort.
“Well, somebody left a harrow out,” Beckman said, “right against the stone wall that divides our south pasture from Belmont’s woods.”
“You took the shortcut.”
Beck paused to scratch Tut’s chin. “Everybody takes the shortcut.”
Not everybody took that shortcut. “The people who take the shortcut all have horses fit enough to jump the stone wall.” The gentry, in other words, not the yeomanry. “The baron should have a stile built there.”
Beckman resumed raking. “Not if some fool leaves a harrow right against the wall where the path comes out of the woods. If the footing hadn’t been a tad sloppy, if I hadn’t been carrying a bag of nails, if I’d been in a hurry… I’d be shooting my horse, Nick, or you’d be saying last rites for me.”
Unease stirred through Nick like a serving of bad ale. “You would have jumped that wall and landed on the harrow?”
“Unless my horse badly over-jumped a familiar obstacle, he would have landed right amidst those iron teeth,” Beck said. “From the woods side, you couldn’t tell there’s anything but the same old pasture on the other side. I wouldn’t have noticed, except I used the gate farther along the tree line and still nearly trotted through the tall grass right into the harrow. Where are you going?”
“To goddamn move that harrow. Matthew Belmont uses that path more often than he uses the lanes. Spiker could ride that path in pitch darkness. I use it, the baroness, the baron, the dowager flight of the hunt field, half the damned children on their damned—”
“I moved it,” Beck said, starting another row. “I stood it up against the wall, so anybody can see it from either side. A harrow is damned heavy, but I was furious.”
Beckman was also damned strong. Two years of mucking, raking, pitching hay, rebuilding pasture walls, riding, hauling water buckets, and generally working his backside off had made him so.
“I’ll have a word with Everly before the baron comes home,” Nick said. “Harrows don’t just appear where they’re not supposed to be.”
“They don’t, but the rain obliterated any tracks that might have told us where the harrow came from.”
Beck had looked for tracks, in other words, and found none. Matthew Belmont was the best tracker Nick knew, but even he couldn’t read fresh mud.
“You think somebody deliberately left a piece of farm equipment where it would cause injury or death?”
Beck’s raking had tidied up the barn aisle, while Nick’s emotions were in riot. Linden had been through a stable fire that very summer, seen gates left open at random, and endured a plague of small boys bound for big mischief, but those troubles had come to their apparent conclusion.
Or had they?
“I don’t know what to think,” Beckman said, leaning on his rake. “People are stupid all the time. I’ve certainly been stupid, thoughtless, distracted… but between Monday and now, somebody took a piece of farm equipment that won’t be missed until spring, used at least a two-horse team to position it where it was bound to cause harm, and left that harrow sitting out in the rain. What do you think, Nick?”
What Nick thought was too foul to share with even his brother.
* * *
As Matthew resisted, barely, the compulsion to take Theresa Jennings in his arms, the analogy of a crime scene again came to mind.
The clues weren’t adding up. Theresa Jennings had had motive of a sort to seek her own ruin—boredom, adolescent rebellion, a need for acknowledgement from a resentful patriarch—and with her cousins leading the way, she’d also had plenty of opportunity to become debauched.
Matthew brought her his brandy—Sutcliffe stocked a lovely vintage—and led her by the wrist to the sofa before the fire. That she had allowed him such a presumption gave him heart.
“You will indulge in a medicinal tot, if not to steady your nerves, then to humor my need to feel useful,” he said, bracing himself against the mantel rather than take the place beside her.
He badly needed to hold her, but she needed even more to recover her dignity.
The discussion Matthew intended to embark upon had to yield the results of an effective interrogation without making the lady feel like a prisoner in the dock. She’d shackled her happiness in some dungeon or other, and Matthew’s aim was to free that captive.
She took a ladylike sip of the brandy and set the glass aside.
“Someday, Theresa Jennings, I hope to see you tipsy.”
She touched Matthew’s handkerchief to the corner of each eye. “Why?”
Brilliant. The seasoned interrogator was now answering the questions, but at least Theresa’s tears had slowed.
“Because you are a woman grown, in full possession of your faculties, and occasional silliness over a dusty bottle of elderberry cordial is your
right. I’m not proposing the fall of Rome, mind you, merely some genteel latitude among friends.”
“You’re proposing marriage,” she said, running a finger around the rim of her glass. An elegant finger it was too and, like the rest of her, completely without adornment.
“I’m asking permission to court you. Not the same thing at all.”
The very same thing, if a man’s intentions were sincere, and Matthew’s were.
“You’re not supposed to ask me for that permission, you should ask Thomas. I can’t allow that.”
“Who loves you, Theresa Jennings?”
The glass tipped over. Its shape—wide at the bottom, narrower at the lip—was designed to contain the remaining brandy without spilling.
When Theresa righted the glass, her hand trembled minutely. “What a question. Priscilla loves me. Alice is a dear friend.”
“Then I will ask Priscilla for permission to pay you my addresses, should you give me leave. I will ask Alice. I will ask the very walls of Sutcliffe Keep, for they at least sheltered you when you were in harm’s way. I’ll be damned if I’ll ask your negligent brother for the time of day where you’re concerned.”
Matthew hadn’t lost his temper since he’d deduced that Matilda was carrying Remington. Even then, he’d been unable to raise his voice to a woman. He was losing his temper now, and he half-hoped Theresa might lose hers as well.
When passion charged to the fore, honesty was sure to follow.
“You are a fraud, Matthew Belmont,” she said, taking another tiny sip of the brandy. “You trot about the shire, mild-mannered gentleman at large, but you are fierce and far too noticing. What will it take for you to stop noticing me?”
“You have gone unnoticed for too long, and so have I. If my attentions are distasteful to you, then I will quit the premises and limit our future dealings to civilities. I am a gentleman, and you are a lady, despite all protestations to the contrary.”
He was a gentleman having trouble looking anywhere besides Theresa Jennings’s mouth, God help him. He stayed by the mantel though, for she must come to him this time.
The choice belonged to the lady, and always would.
“I am a poor relation at best,” Theresa said. “I have no funds. Not a competence, not an unspent dowry. I am a charity case, Matthew. The only reason my cousins didn’t cast me and Priscilla on the parish was because they feared Thomas would get wind of their behavior.”
Well, damn Thomas Jennings all over again. No mature woman with a dependent child should live without means when her family was able to remedy that lack.
“I am angry on your behalf in so many different ways, I can hardly number them,” Matthew said. “There you were, likely still a child in many ways, no mother to guide you, no maiden aunt to protect your good name, and off you went on some spree of youthful indignation, determined to gain the notice showered on your cousins and brother. You might have been sent to a finishing school, or to a widow of your grandfather’s contemporaries. Your cousins might have been kept away from you. Any number of—”
He’d raised his voice, not to shouting, but certainly above a conversational level. Theresa regarded him as if he’d burst forth into one of Mozart’s more extravagant tenor arias.
“Go on,” she said, taking another sip of the brandy. “You weren’t finished.”
Matthew had barely begun to argue his case. “You were doomed,” he said, as gently as he could. “Unless you’d developed a religious obsession at the age of eleven, you were doomed.”
Theresa patted the place beside her on the sofa. “Were you doomed, Matthew?”
An invitation was as good as an overture. Matthew strolled—he did not run—to the sofa, and eased himself down beside her.
“What can you be alluding to?”
“You married at seventeen. I went wild at about the same age. Were you doomed?”
Back to this, back to answering questions instead of asking them.
“Perhaps I was a bit doomed,” Matthew said. “Mama was fading, and Axel buried himself in his botany studies and his music. Papa was drinking rather more than he should have, and I…”
Theresa passed him the glass, which held a final swallow of comfort. “You grew up overnight, except one can’t. Marrying Matilda was the act of a boy trying to become an honorable man, and a youth who needed to find a purpose in life while dwelling in a house of grief.”
Her insight burned its way into Matthew’s belly like the brandy, only far less sweet.
“Christopher turned seventeen earlier this year,” Matthew said, setting the empty glass aside rather than hurl it into the fire. “The weather was fine at the time, so the boys and I made it a day for shooting at targets. An Oxford education doesn’t include the proper use of weapons, and anything as dangerous as a gun in the hands of a creature as dangerous as a high-spirited young man…”
He trailed off as Theresa scooted closer. “At seventeen, I wanted to feel dangerous too, Matthew. I hadn’t realized that.”
“I missed every damned thing I aimed at,” Matthew said. “The boys accused me of missing on purpose, but there was Christopher, more boy than man, and I kept thinking, I was seventeen. Why had my father given his blessing? What was I thinking? I was only seventeen years old…”
The conversation had gone all wrong, for Matthew had failed to secure the lady’s leave to embark on a courtship. And yet, Theresa remained right beside him.
When she leaned over to kiss Matthew, her aim was impressively accurate.
Chapter Ten
Theresa could not have said why she was kissing Matthew Belmont, could not have formed a coherent sentence, in fact. She needed to kiss him, to be close to the beating heart of a man as decent as he was intelligent as he was desirable.
You were doomed.
Theresa had never dared characterize her situation thus, not in years of introspection and regretting. She was still doomed, but kissing Matthew Belmont savored of salvation, albeit temporary salvation.
He was kissing her back too, with a fervor that gratified as it intrigued.
She drew away an entire half an inch. “This doesn’t change anything.”
“Damn right it doesn’t,” he muttered, hoisting Theresa up to straddle his lap as if she weighed no more than a cat. “You make the very point I was—”
Theresa got hold of the hair at his nape and shook him gently. “No more making points. That’s for later.”
She excelled at holding on to regrets, and this occasion would likely join the heaping pile she towed with her everywhere. Unlike those regrets, however, this one would come with an aura of joy.
Matthew Belmont was still intent on making his almighty points, with his hands as they roamed Theresa’s back, with his mouth as his kisses became diabolically gentle, with his—he arched up, his arousal evident.
He desired her.
In Theresa’s heart, mind, and body, her sole reaction to his overture was feminine jubilation. Too often, she’d endured a man’s attentions, her greatest challenge to hide her boredom. Matthew Belmont desired her. He didn’t seek a mere stolen moment with a baron’s wicked granddaughter.
He wanted her, not bragging rights, not oblivion, not fleeting, selfish—
His hand, warm and confident, slid beneath Theresa’s skirts. She knew that sensation, of soft fabric sliding over her calves and thighs, warm flesh against her knee, knew the susurration that portended further intimacy.
And for the first time, she delighted in it. “Stop teasing me, Matthew. Kiss me like you mean it.”
Theresa had been slobbered over, mauled, and groped, until she’d learned to limit her indiscretions to men who brought some skill and consideration to the matter.
Matthew’s kisses tasted of exquisite passion straining at the leash of gentlemanly respect, and Theresa was famished for them.
“Matthew, I want you.” The words were out, inelegant and honest. He wanted her too, else Theresa might have had a prayer of maintai
ning some dignity.
Thomas would come home any day, and then even stolen moments would be beyond her grasp.
“You shall have me,” he said, sitting back and letting Theresa’s skirts fall. “Though I warn you, madam—”
Theresa went to work on his falls, which required a frustrating amount of concentration. She wanted not one spare moment for common sense to find her, not an extra instant for Matthew’s gentlemanly scruples to overcome his passion.
How novel, to want a man for himself, to want only him, and to fear not that he’d dawdle and make maudlin declarations, but that he’d take himself off, relieved to have pulled his horse up before a bad fence.
And yet, this was Thomas’s house, where Theresa was a guest. “Matthew, the door is unlocked.”
“I locked it,” he said, starting on the second side of his falls. “A man seeking permission to pay his addresses cannot risk interruption by stray unicorns.”
A man who’d raised three boys would know of such interruptions first hand. All over again, Matthew Belmont stole Theresa’s heart.
And her breath. His clothing was undone, and the sight of him, attire in disarray, hair tousled, and arousal clearly evident shocked her in a way drunken viscounts and strutting ducal heirs never could.
Want uncurled low in Theresa’s belly, hot and urgent. Ten years fell away, and she was once again a young woman capable of reckless determination. She took him in her hand and knelt up, cursing her stays, his waistcoat, and every other article of clothing in the library, but grateful for them too. At some point, she’d regained the modesty she’d discarded long ago. A surprise that, and a comfort.
“Slowly,” Matthew said, wrapping his hand around hers. “I will savor this experience, and please God, you will savor me.”
Theresa wanted to sink down over him, to fill herself with him, and let passion obliterate the last of her reasoning powers.
Matthew kissed her, sweetly, tenderly, and between one moment and the next, all of the anxiety went out of her, leaving only the urgency of healthy desire.
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