She sucked in a sharp breath.
“Look here,” he said, his palm flattening against her solar plexus, his fingertips resting between her breasts. “That’s where you’ll always find the truth.”
Painfully conscious that she was in her own street, where her neighbors could see her, Emma glanced around, but thankfully it was the dinner hour, and no one seemed to be about. “You mean truth is in one’s heart, I suppose?”
“No. What I mean is that you find the truth about everything in your guts. Your heart can lie to you. Your intuition, your instincts never do.”
“And you always follow this guide yourself?”
“Usually.” He paused and let his hand fall away. “Not always.”
It was none of her business, but she had to ask. “When you listened to your heart instead of your instincts, what happened?”
“I got married.”
“I see.” She hesitated, but she had to ask. “And which organ was it—your heart or your guts—that led you to divorce your wife?”
He made a sound of derision. “I suppose like all of society, you condemn me for what I did. Despite the fact that I was the wronged party.”
“I was brought up to believe that marriage is a sacred vow before God and not to be broken, if that’s what you mean.”
“How easy that is for someone like you to say.”
“Just because I am a spinster, it does not mean I cannot form an opinion on the morality of divorce!” she countered, stung.
“Your opinion being that no matter what my wife did, I was wrong to divorce her?”
“It’s not my place to say.”
“Not your place?” He laughed, but it was a harsh sound. “Mrs. Bartleby spends a great deal of time advising people about the proprieties, so what’s proper in a case such as mine?” His voice was low, vibrating with an anger she’d never heard him express before. “What decorum should a man adopt when his wife spends every day of her married life loathing her husband and pining for another man? Should he be civil and sporting about it all and pretend to her that it doesn’t hurt? Should he be a saint or a martyr who never lashes back?”
He turned toward her, and in the twilight, something glittered in his eyes, something cold and icy blue. “When she runs off to America with her lover, publicly humiliating him and leaving his entire family open to scandal, should he have a stiff upper lip about it? Pretend it doesn’t matter? Should he file for legal separation? Should he live celibate? Take a mistress?”
She was startled by the raw pain in his face. “You loved your wife,” she said, appreciating that fact for the first time.
“Of course I did!” He looked away, drew a deep breath. “I wouldn’t have married her otherwise.”
“I didn’t understand that. I thought—” She paused, considering. “I suppose I always thought that if you loved her you would have gone after her.”
“I should have followed her to New York, you mean? Dragged her from her lover’s arms and resigned myself to spending my life in hell? Would that have been more proper than divorce?”
She looked at him helplessly, with no answer to offer. Divorce was an unthinkable thing to her, as alien a concept as going without a corset or not going to church. On the other hand, what did she understand about the private relations between men and women? Next to nothing.
“I fell in love with Consuelo the first moment I saw her,” he said, turning to lean back against the brick wall of the building. “I knew nothing of her character, nothing of her mind, nothing of her temperament, but I didn’t care. I fell in love with her the first moment I looked into her eyes. She had the biggest, darkest, saddest eyes I’d ever seen. I’d set myself on marrying her before the introductions were even finished. It happened that fast.”
She stared at him, stunned, her mind flashing back to the day long ago in Auntie’s drawing room when another man had confessed a similar experience.
“I was in love once, too,” she blurted out.
“Were you?”
She nodded and leaned back against the door, staring across the street, her mind’s eye seeing right past the tidy brick buildings in front of her to Red Lion Square six blocks away. “His name was Jonathan Parker, and he was a friend of my mother’s family. I vaguely remember having met him once or twice when we were small children, but after my mother died, my father cut all ties with her family and acquaintances, and I didn’t see him again until I moved to London to live with my aunt. Mr. Parker and I became friends. The best of friends.”
“Sweethearts?”
Emma drew a deep breath. “I thought so.”
“What happened?”
“He came to call at Auntie’s house nearly every day. He dined with us two or three times a week. It was uncanny how much he and I had in common, how we thought the same way about everything. At parties, if there was dancing, we always paired up for the waltzes, for we danced together perfectly. We were seen together so often, it became a forgone conclusion we would marry one day. Everyone thought so.”
“And?” he asked when she paused.
“And then, one night he went to a public ball. I was supposed to attend as well, but I developed a terrible cold and could not go. Auntie stayed home with me, but the next morning, I heard that Mr. Parker had danced all my waltzes with someone else, a very pretty girl with blond hair. Her name was Anne Moncreiffe and she was from Yorkshire.”
As she spoke, Emma was relieved that talking about it brought no pain. “Three days later, when I had recovered from my cold, Mr. Parker came to tell me, his dear friend, the happy news. He had fallen in love with Anne. She was the most beautiful, the most vivacious, the most charming creature he’d ever met, and he was going to marry her.” She paused, shaking her head, still baffled by it. “He’d only just met her, and already he had decided to marry her. The six years he and I had spent in such close company were obliterated by a mere three days with her.”
“I’m sorry he broke your heart.”
“It was not just my heart. I lost my dearest friend that day. Betrayal hurts, too.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “It does.”
“How?” she asked, curious, hoping Marlowe could explain a phenomenon she had never understood. “How does something like that happen? How can anyone fall in love in an instant?”
“I don’t know. Speaking from my own experience, I can only describe it as a sort of madness.”
“And then one comes out of it?”
“Yes. If one is lucky, the madness passes before the wedding day. I wasn’t so fortunate, but what of your Mr. Parker? Is he happy in his marriage?”
“The last I heard of him, he was happy. Of course,” she added with rather uncharitable glee, “he lives in London and his wife lives in Yorkshire.”
Marlowe gave a shout of laughter. “The recipe for true marital bliss, no doubt.”
“No doubt,” she agreed, laughing with him. She felt strangely light of heart all of a sudden, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She turned her head and looked at him. “It’s odd, but you’re the first person with whom I’ve ever spoken of it. Auntie knew what had happened, of course, and our friends, but no one talked about it, including me. Ladies, you see, don’t break down in front of anyone, and they don’t ask each other indiscreet questions. I never felt able to tell anyone how much it hurt.”
“It always hurts to find one’s love is not reciprocated.”
“Your wife never loved you?”
“No. And the odd thing is, I knew it.” He pressed a fist to his own abdomen in the same place where he had touched her moments before. “I knew it here, in my guts. But I didn’t listen. I listened to my heart instead. Had I listened to my instincts, I would have saved both Consuelo and myself from years of misery.”
Abruptly, he shook his head and moved as if to depart. “It’s getting dark. I’d best be on my way.”
“Yes, of course. Good night, my lord.” She turned to open her front door, but his vo
ice stopped her.
“Emma?”
She looked over her shoulder at him.
He was standing on the sidewalk, watching her. “If you really think what I did today was wrong, then why didn’t you stop me?”
Without waiting for an answer, he turned away and started toward his waiting carriage. It wasn’t until he was in the vehicle and it was halfway to the corner before she admitted the truth. “Because even though I thought it was wrong, I felt it was right. And that terrifies me.”
She watched as the carriage vanished around the corner. She knew the rules for nearly everything, and yet, she couldn’t help wondering if those rules had anything to do with what was right and what was wrong. Worse, she was beginning to think that despite being a mature woman of thirty years, she knew nothing at all about life.
Chapter 12
Virtue may be its own reward, but to my mind, that’s not much of an incentive.
Lord Marlowe
The Bachelor’s Guide, 1893
As much as he hated to admit it, Harry knew that Emma was right. What he’d done at Au Chocolat would have hurt her reputation had anyone seen them. Despite his insistence to her that what he’d done had been harmless, he knew it wasn’t. A woman’s virtue could be so easily compromised. He didn’t care what people thought, but he was a man, and he was fully aware that for a woman, the consequences of what had happened could have been far more serious.
He knew he had to put things with Emma Dove back on the impersonal footing they’d had before. Instead of meeting with her, he used the excuse of other business obligations to avoid her. He sent her revisions to her by courier and communicated with her through Quinn.
Distance, however, did not prove the deterrent he’d hoped for. Time and again, he found his thoughts veering toward that afternoon at Au Chocolat, his imagination reliving that moment when he’d seen passion come alive in her face. He’d never seen anything like it before.
Until that moment, he’d never dreamt such a deep capacity for passion existed within the prim and proper Miss Dove. Now he knew the truth, but it did him little good. She was not the sort of woman to ever consider an illicit liaison, a fact he found so damned aggravating, his only choice was to redouble his efforts to stay away from her.
On a more positive note, his domestic life smoothed out a bit. Diana, it seemed, had finally accepted the fact that neither of the Dillmouth girls nor one of their Abernathy cousins was the special woman destined to capture his heart or get him to the altar. Their visit at an end, all four young ladies returned to Lord Dillmouth, much to Harry’s relief, and life within the Marlowe house hold returned to normal, at least in most respects.
Breakfast, however, remained the place to discuss the wonderful Mrs. Bartleby. Now that he had acquired her, Harry might have found this sort of conversation much more acceptable than he had when she wrote for Barringer, except that the women of his house hold were determined to learn that lady’s true identity. Having discovered that he had purchased the Social Gazette, and Mrs. Bartleby’s column along with it, they made every possible attempt to wheedle her real name and family background out of him.
Harry, however, was no fool. Though his sisters could be trusted with the secret, he had doubts about the other two women in his family. Despite her pretense of dignified restraint, Grandmama was a terrible gossip. As for his mother, heaven bless her, she couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended upon it. Harry was determined to keep mum.
“How can you be so tiresome?” Louisa looked at him with disappointment. “She writes for you now, doesn’t she? I don’t see why you don’t just tell us who she is.”
“It is vital to preserve her anonymity,” he answered as he began spreading butter on his toast.
“Well, it isn’t as if we’d go around telling everyone,” his mother said with a sniff. “We can be discreet, I daresay.”
“You are discretion itself, Mama,” Harry answered, even managing to say it with a straight face. “But I must respect Mrs. Bartleby’s privacy.”
All the women of his house hold were forced to accept this, but Harry didn’t like the thoughtful way Diana kept looking at him throughout the meal. When he departed from the table to have his carriage brought around, she followed him. Her pretext was asking for Jackson to fetch their second carriage so that she might go out, but Harry understood his sister well enough that he knew the second carriage was a pretext.
“Have you heard anything of Miss Dove?” Diana asked him as they waited together in the foyer. “Has she found other employment?”
He turned and gave her a sharp, searching glance, but Diana wasn’t looking back at him. She seemed thoroughly absorbed in the task of putting on her gloves.
“I’m certain she has,” he answered.
“Hmm, perhaps she’s writing those etiquette books now?”
“Perhaps she is. I wouldn’t know.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Diana turned, and there was an ironical little smile at the corners of her lips, but before he could answer, she spoke again. “I wonder if Miss Dove might give me some assistance with my wedding plans. She’s so efficient, and I’m sure her advice would be impeccable. Even Mrs. Bartleby would no doubt approve of Miss Dove’s knowledge in such matters, don’t you think?”
“Diana—” he began, but she cut him off.
“Don’t worry, Harry.” Her smile widened into a grin. “I won’t tell.”
“How you guess these things is beyond my ken,” he grumbled.
“Simple deduction, dear brother. Rather like Sherlock Holmes, you know.” Her expression became serious. “But I do need help with the wedding, Harry, really I do, and I’d love some of Mrs. Bartleby’s clever ideas. Would it be all right if I asked Miss Dove for her assistance?”
He gave her a rueful look. “Could I stop you?”
“Of course. If you ever said no to me, I would accept that. It’s just that you never do say no. You spoil me. Spoil us all, really. In your eyes, nothing is too good for us.”
He looked at his sister, and he wanted to tell her why. He wanted to say it was because he loved them all. Because he was head of the family and he had to take care of them and he would cut his heart out before he’d let anything happen to them. He wanted to say that nothing was too good for them because nothing he could give would ever make up for how they had staunchly stood by him through the five painful years it had taken him to obtain his divorce. They had been as disgraced in the eyes of society as he, but had never complained, had never questioned his decision, and he knew he could never do enough to make up for that.
Harry looked into his sister’s eyes, and he wanted to say all those things. “Diana, I—” He stopped, the words stuck in his throat. What an irony. Glib as he was, he always found it so hard to say the serious things, the important things. He cleared his throat and looked away. “Yes, well, soon you’ll be Rathbourne’s problem,” he said lightly. “Poor fellow. Good thing he’s got pots of money. Spoiling you requires lots of it.”
She jabbed him in the elbow for that comment.
“Your carriage, my lord,” Jackson said, stepping away from the window to open the front door.
Harry started out to his carriage, but his sister’s voice followed him. “Harry?”
He paused and looked over his shoulder. “Hmm?”
“We love you, too.”
Harry jerked at his tie. A tight sweetness squeezed his chest. “Get all the clever Mrs. Bartleby ideas you like,” he told her. “Just be discreet about it.”
Diana understood at once. “Because Miss Dove hasn’t the background and bona fides?” When he nodded, she went on, “People are so silly, aren’t they?”
“They would be more than silly,” he said and started out the door. “They would be cruel. So it’s important to preserve the secret of Emma’s identity. I don’t want people ridiculing her.”
Emma? Diana stared at the door in astonishment as Jackson closed it behind her brother. He’d called Miss Dove
by her Christian name. As unconventional as Harry could be, some things were just pounded into one from birth, and referring to a woman by her Christian name was just not done. Unless…
“Good lord,” Diana murmured, causing Jackson to give her an inquiring glance. She shook her head in reply, but did not speak, for she was trying to wrap her mind around the incredible thought that had come into her head. A man did not use a woman’s Christian name unless she was an intimate acquaintance.
Diana cast her mind back to the one time she’d met Harry’s former secretary, and she felt a momentary doubt. There had always been gossip about Harry and Miss Dove, but Diana had always found it hard to take seriously. If memory served, Miss Dove’s hair was a nondescript sort of brownish red. She wasn’t plain, exactly, but she was no exotic beauty. And she certainly did not possess a volatile temperament. She was not Harry’s sort of woman at all, and Harry would have been the first to say so.
Still, Diana had introduced her brother to any number of dark-haired, hot-tempered beauties during the five years since his divorce from Consuelo had become final, with little success. Perhaps Harry’s sort of woman wasn’t what any of them had thought her to be, including Harry himself.
Diana smiled. Enlisting the aid of Miss Dove could prove fruitful in more ways than one.
Emma was determined to concentrate on her work. She would not indulge in any more idle daydreaming that put her behind schedule. She would not be disappointed every time Marlowe sent his revisions to her by courier instead of meeting with her in person. She would not miss his teasing and his laughter and his company. And she most certainly would not imagine him licking chocolate off her fingers.
She’d determined years ago that he was not the sort of man any woman with sense would want. A sensible woman would run as fast as she could from a man who broke off romantic liaisons by letter, who had the propensity to fall in love instantly and often, who put a woman’s reputation at risk for a bit of fun, who was divorced and would never remarry. And despite all her own efforts to become more daring, Emma was at heart a woman of sense.
And Then He Kissed Her Page 15
