No honest, untitled Scot lived far from the fear of homelessness, but Margaret’s fears went deeper, and Hector hadn’t even suspected she harbored them.
Paper crackled under Hector’s kilt as he shifted two inches closer, though he cared not if he sat upon the Christmas Eve menu or a draft of somebody’s Last Will and Testament.
“You will always be welcome in your brother’s household, Margaret, welcome and loved.”
“So you say now, but soon Dante and Joan will start their own family, and dear old Aunt Margs will be towed along on family outings, invited to dinner parties at the last minute to make up the numbers. Who will speak to the women at the mills when they’re too shy to bring their concerns to Dante? Who will remind Dante that his children go for days without seeing him? Who will keep an eye on Charlie’s governesses and Phillip’s tutors? Lady Joan is all that is kind, but—”
“The women in the mills can talk to me.”
Though they typically did not. For the most part, Hector and the mill employees moved on opposite sides of the business’s owner, and kept a wary, respectful distance from one another.
“They won’t, though. Now that Dante has taken a wife, he will turn her loose on me. Joan will expect me to attend balls and teas, and wear fancy dresses, and Dante will be hopeful, when he recalls he has a sister, that Joan will succeed in making a lady of me. All for my sake, of course.”
Part of Hector wanted to slap a hand over her mouth and roar at her that she need put up with none of that, that she was a woman of dignity and substance, and could control her own fate.
The other part of him had seen enough negotiations to know a more subtle course was called for.
“If you’re confiding these worries to me, you must be very upset.”
He was upset too, because sooner or later, one of the prancing ninnies frequenting the Edinburgh ballrooms would see what a treasure Margaret Hartwell was. She had the gift of managing without being seen doing it. Her visits to the mills were to take Dante his lunch, to put a bouquet on his desk, to count the number of Christmas baskets needed for the employees each year.
And yet, she knew the names of many of the women and girls employed at the mills, knew who was cousin to whom, and who was walking to church with the tobacconist’s son. Hector had heard her passing along this information to her brother, making suggestions—suggestions only, of course—regarding promotions, and even which women would not work well together.
“I am upset,” Margaret said, “and I fear I’ve taken out some of my ill temper on you.”
Oh, he wanted to kiss her for that—he always wanted to kiss her, but particularly when she was being brave and honest, and Margaret.
Hector tucked his hands under his thighs and hunched forward. “You’re right to be concerned for your brother, for your family. This marriage…”
Margaret hopped off the desk, which was probably prudent of her. “Dante is not in love, and while I’m sure Lady Joan deserves a man who loves her, Dante deserves a woman who loves him too. Rowena didn’t, not at first. He was her unpaid mill foreman, and a way to have children.”
Margaret had a temper, and Hector would love to see it unleashed someday—though not at him.
“They muddled along well enough, eventually.” Though Dante had confided that he’d been relieved when the children arrived, because Rowena’s expectations in the bedroom were no longer an issue in the marriage.
Rowena Shatner—Rowena Hartwell—had had inflexible notions about schedules, and about the universe running to the timetable she preferred.
“I didn’t blame Rowena, of course,” Margaret said softly. “If I could have a mill of my own and children, I’d marry a decent, hardworking man to get them.”
“You’re allowed to want those things, Margaret Hartwell.” Though the part about the mill came as a surprise. “I wish I could give them to you.”
She peered at him, as if somebody had misplaced the objectionable Hector, and some other fellow shared this late night tête-à-tête with her.
“You hide your sweetness almost as well as Dante does. I’m sorry I’ve been out of sorts.”
“You’ve been nearly panicked.” He couldn’t give her a mill, and without benefit of matrimony, he wouldn’t give her children.
But he could give her something to think about.
“When you go to bed tonight, consider what you want, Margaret Hartwell. You see your brother’s marriage as cutting you off from the role you’ve loved, but it also frees you to pursue those fellows who can give you mills and children.”
Which number did not include Hector. The pain of that should have been expected, and yet, it reverberated through him like the bells that would toll throughout the shire on Christmas morning.
For a long moment, Margaret studied the fire, saying nothing.
She was a pretty woman, though not in the striking, impressive manner of a Lady Joan. Margaret’s beauty was soft, sweet, and subtle, but it would age wonderfully.
“Off to bed with you, now,” Hector said, rising from the desk and joining her in the warmth nearer the hearth. “You’ll go with me on tomorrow’s jaunt into town?”
Because a doomed man was entitled to worship from whatever proximity he might torment himself with.
She nodded, and Hector ordered his feet to move. A fine old English tradition spared him the effort when Margaret left off studying the fire to peer up at him.
“Thank you, Hector, for listening to me. For not laughing, for not dismissing me.” She kissed him, a somewhat awkward undertaking, because he was a foot taller than she, and slow to appreciate his good fortune. Margaret had to haul herself up his chest by bracing one hand on his shoulder and anchoring the other at his nape.
Once she arrived to her destination, however, she at least permitted Hector time to be shocked and pleased, and—more important, to wrap his arms around her and kiss her back.
And then to kiss her back some more.
***
“Mr. Hartwell.” Lady Joan’s posture and tone suggested she was surprised to find Dante standing at her bedroom door. The peculiar shine in her eyes suggested she was also unhappy, maybe on the same general account.
Well, so was he. In three days’ time, they’d remove to Aberdeen, and the next day, they would marry. Tonight was possibly Dante’s last chance to be private with his intended before they took their vows.
If they took them.
“May I come in? Should your brother find me lurking by your door, he’ll do me bodily injury at least, or worse, lecture me to death.”
“Tiberius believes in the proprieties,” Joan said, stepping back.
“He does,” Dante said as he slipped into her room, “unless he thinks he’s unobserved with his countess beneath the mistletoe.”
Then his lordship was a lusty English fiend—an encouraging revelation, that.
The door clicked closed behind him. “Does your call have a purpose, Mr. Hartwell?”
Mr. Hartwell. Something in Dante wilted at her crisp question. He took her hand—her fingers were cool—and tugged her over to the fainting couch.
“Yes, my visit has a purpose. We’re a courting couple. I have it on good authority that we’re entitled to sneak behind a few hedges as the nuptials approach, though hedges are in short supply at this time of year.”
And her infernal brother, her two sisters, or even her flighty mama seemed to lurk behind every one.
“We aren’t a courting couple.” She perched beside him, back straight, and ran a hand over the green velvet of her dressing gown.
“Then why is every single soul at this house party behaving as if we are? Why are we getting married in less than a week?”
The questions were meant to be rhetorical, to get Joan to look at him.
“That’s a lovely dressing gown,” she said. “Brown is a neglected color, but it becomes most men. Silk makes a much warmer lining than satin.”
She’d looked at his dressing gown. The wilted feeling sank
lower, to something worse than bewilderment, though he’d sensed tumult behind her growing quiet at meals. “How are you, Lady Joan?”
Her gaze went to the escritoire, where some crumpled attempt at correspondence sat on the blotter amid sketchbooks and letters neatly sealed with her papa’s waxed crest.
“I am tired. My sisters came to call.”
“Tell me.” Because in her present mood, Dante would take any conversational gambit. He’d forgotten that marriage entailed this sort of work, and he’d never been very good at it—not with Rowena.
“Dora and Mary Ellen and I are not…not close. I’m the oldest, and because I’m tall, Mama seemed to think by the time I was fifteen, all my interests would be in common with hers.”
Dante risked taking Joan’s hand again. “She shares your interest in fashion.”
Joan shook her head, some of the starch leaching out of her posture. “Mama likes to wear fashions, she has not the first clue how a dress is constructed, or which fabrics have what personality. Mama also overdresses—her wardrobe should be quieter, more elegant, but she likes noisy, fussy clothing.”
Joan had probably grasped the difference between elegant and fussy by the time she was learning her letters.
“When your mother singled you out, your sisters resented it. Might we have this discussion under the covers?”
Now she looked at him, and not with the reckless glee of the prospective bride. “Under the covers, Mr. Hartwell?”
For the love of God. “Dante will do, seeing as we’re private. You’ve banked the fire. Your feet have to be getting cold.” So to speak. Her entire room was cooling down, for that matter, suggesting she’d banked the fire some time ago.
She studied her toes as if they’d arrived on the end of her feet all of a sudden. “I suppose sharing a bed with you should become a habit.”
The notion appeared to confound her.
“A comfort,” he said, “something to look forward to at the end of a long and sometimes trying day.” Though he and Ro had never quite arrived to such a state.
When Dante expected dithering and equivocation from Joan, she crossed the room and turned the covers down on the side of the bed closest to the fire. His respect for her rose, also his liking.
And his desire.
“Do you miss that? Climbing into bed with your wife?”
He came around to the opposite side of the bed, so they had the expanse of a big mattress between them, all cozied up with pillows, plaid coverlets, and tartan blankets.
“I’ll explain it as best I can. Will you take your dressing gown off?” He shrugged out of his, which left him in a pair of black silk pajama bottoms.
“You don’t wear a nightshirt?”
“I rarely wear anything to bed. One gets hot, and a nightshirt twists up, and then one wakes up and thrashes about.” He sounded like Hector delivering a report, so he shut up.
Joan did not climb up into the bed, but rather, turned, sat, and swung her legs up together. Then she lifted the blankets and slid beneath them, all still wearing the green velvet dressing gown. She came to rest reclining on banked pillows rather than curled up under the covers.
“My sisters came to offer to help with my wedding dress. They surprised me.”
Rather than hop up onto the mattress, Dante did as Joan had. Sit, lift, spin, tuck—which left them nearly a yard away from each other—rather like a married couple.
“An olive branch?” The headboard behind Dante’s bare back was cool, and that was a fine thing.
“An olive branch I could understand. My family suffered a blow with my brother Gordie’s death, and we’ve never really come right. Between my sisters and me, it’s as if we all stopped maturing when Gordie died. I’m still seventeen, ready for my come out, Mama fussing at me incessantly. They’re fifteen and fourteen, resenting me for something I cannot help.”
“I had not thought you’d be lonely for the company of women.” At the mill, the employees always seemed to be chattering and bantering with one another, casting sly looks and falling silent when Dante came into their midst, then bursting into more chatter—and laughter—the moment his back was turned.
“I’m not lonely, not exactly.”
She was profoundly lonely. Dante hoped her husband could do something about that.
He rose from the bed and made a circuit of the room, blowing out the candles, one by one. “You asked about my first wife.”
“I understand you loved her and you miss her.”
The last candle brought him to Joan’s side of the bed. He left that one burning. “Move over. If we’re under the covers to keep warm, then a certain proximity will aid that goal.”
Now, he sounded like Spathfoy. The earl’s ability to acquit himself adequately under the mistletoe notwithstanding, Spathfoy was English.
“You want to cuddle?”
“Yes.” For reasons he could not fathom himself.
She moved over, and he situated himself immediately beside her, then looped an arm around her shoulders and scooted down. Her dressing gown meant he was embracing mostly velvet, with a few inconvenient buttons and a tightly knotted sash.
“What are your expectations of this marriage, Joan?”
She shifted up, managing to elbow him in the process. “Are you having second thoughts? I hardly see how permitting you into my bed—”
“No second thoughts,” he said, pressing a finger to her lips. “But I’d be lying if I said our nuptials never crossed my mind.”
She subsided, her head on his shoulder. Her hair was still in a tightly braided coronet, and a hairpin jabbed into Dante’s shoulder.
“Our nuptials are never far from my thoughts. I hope we shall suit, Mister—Dante.”
He extracted the hairpin then found another. “It’s hell when a husband and wife don’t suit.”
“I thought you loved your first wife.”
“Love developed.” More hairpins yielded to his questing fingers. “Rowena made it plain that she was marrying me to secure the mills and to secure children. She’d been an only child, and then lost her mother early. I eventually understood that this history made her unnaturally keen on having both her own way and a family of her own.”
“She married you to provide her heirs. There’s something of the old-fashioned aristocrat about that.”
“Let me—” Joan turned her face into his shoulder, without his having to explain, and he searched out the last of her pins. “There. You don’t typically sleep with all those pins in, do you?”
“No, but my evening routine is disrupted.”
She settled back against him, her posture more relaxed. Dante let his fingers tunnel through her hair again, as if searching for pins, but in truth he was simply enjoying the feel of her less tightly bound hair.
“That’s lovely,” she said on a sigh. “Tell me about your wife, for I’m an aristocrat, and I want children.”
These parallels hadn’t occurred to him—not consciously, but perhaps they’d driven him to seek her out late at night, when privacy was possible.
“How much do you understand about the conception of children?”
She yawned, delicately, of course. “That part is undignified, but quickly over. One need not belabor the specifics. My mother suggested it can become enjoyable, but Mama’s given to exaggeration, and…she’s loyal to my father, in her fashion.”
Low expectations in a prospective wife were not a bad thing—were they? And yet, undignified and quickly over…well, they’d have time to work on that too, God willing. Decades of time.
“In the early years of our marriage, Rowena resented the hell out of me, and yet she expected marital intimacies with me. This created a befuddling awkwardness for me to which she was not sympathetic.”
A beat of comprehending silence went by, which was fortunate. Dante could not have explained the peculiar challenge of his early married years any more articulately if he’d been, well, the Earl of Spathfoy.
“Oh, you p
oor man. And here I am, nearly a stranger, in want of the same intimacies so my child might have the fiction of legitimacy. What a muddle.”
A tension in the pit of Dante’s belly eased. However sheltered she’d been, Joan grasped the fundamental challenge of a man expected to regularly swive a woman who on some level resented the hell out of him.
“I want us to be friends, Joan. I want at least that, and friends are honest with each other. Will you bestow a friendly sort of kiss on your fiancé?”
***
Edward’s letter sat two yards away, a crumpled-up ball of malice and cheerful innuendo Joan had put from her mind for the duration of her sisters’ visit.
Friends are honest with each other. Mr. Hartwell’s words brought the letter and its ramifications slamming back to Joan’s awareness with all the subtly of a hem ripping at high tea.
And yet…Joan’s prospective husband was asking for something, something that had nothing to do with Edward’s sly intimations. Snug in her fiancé’s embrace, Joan felt a sense of security that she thought she’d left behind in Edinburgh, possibly forever.
“You want me to kiss you?” Joan was glad he’d asked, for chaste pecks on the cheek had only made her miss his kisses—his other kisses.
“We’ve kissed before,” Mr. Hartwell said, drawing the covers around Joan’s shoulders. “Kissing seems like a good place to start.”
“To start—?” She thrashed up to her elbows, her dressing gown thwarting her for a moment. Mr. Hartwell lay on his back, his expression unreadable in the candlelight, but in his eyes… Hope? Expectation?
Vulnerability? Joan felt an abrupt and happy dislike for the late Mrs. Rowena Hartwell, though in all likelihood, the poor woman had been raised with the exaggerated propriety of the newly wealthy class.
And Rowena had had no brothers to give her even a passive understanding of the male of the species.
“Just a kiss,” Mr. Hartwell said. “I’ve had one wedding night I’d as soon forget. With you, I’d like to try for a happier start to our marital life.”
“Tell me about your wedding night—your first wedding night.” Joan situated herself against him and wrapped her arm around his waist. The sensation of his bare skin against her forearm was odd, but…friendly, in a married sort of way.
What A Lady Needs For Christmas Page 17
