“I had some idea.”
He turned and stared at her long enough for her to turn away and start picking at her shift again.
“It’s just that . . . Jonathan, the object you’re holding is very important to me.”
“Clearly.” He said it flatly.
“And what would you do if your dearest possession fell into the river?”
Her dearest possession? It had sentimental value, then. Not just monetary value.
“Well, let’s see. If I was a woman—a sane woman, mind you—I would have turned to the man standing next to me and asked for some assistance in retrieving it. If, on the other hand, I were a mad, willful, reckless, difficult, capricious, pig-headed woman, I would likely have torn off my clothes and thrown myself off a bridge with no warning whatsoever to my companion.”
She had gone increasingly pink and was now blotchy with infuriated color. But she was also clearly baffled by this recitation.
This did nothing for his temper.
“How dare you, Jonathan. That is . . . I . . . I . . . I wasn’t trying to be willful or capricious or reckless. I swear to you. I’m never any of those things. Ever.”
This seemed so patently delusional he didn’t address it.
“Then why the devil didn’t you point and say ‘Oh, no!’ when this went in the water? At which point I would have gone in after it, since I grew up swimming in this very river, or I would have done something clever and male to retrieve it, like fashion a fishing pole from a stick and a watch fob.”
She was watching his mouth move as if he was speaking a language she’d never before heard. Mother of God.
“I . . . I didn’t think to do that.” Her voice was frayed now. She was staring at him wonderingly. And then she straightened her spine and threw her shoulders back, realizing his temper was driving her like a nail into the ground. “I just . . . it’s just . . . all my life, if something needed to be done, Jonathan . . . well, then I have always simply done it. The medal was floating away and there was no time to discuss it, so it didn’t occur to me to chat about it. You see, I’m just not in the habit of . . . that is, there’s never been anyone who . . .”
She stopped abruptly. Clamped her mouth shut.
And now he was staring at her. She was pink and stammering, defensive, indignant. Her composure and confidence was warping, curling at the edges, as if he’d somehow just exposed her deepest shame.
Oh, God.
And silently he finished her sentence for her: There’s never been anyone who cared.
And here he was bellowing at Tommy as if this was a crime.
“I didn’t mean to upset you, Jonathan, I swear it.”
He closed his eyes against her flushed face. He felt like . . . such an ass.
“I truly didn’t mean to upset you, Jonathan,” she said softly. There was entreaty in it. She sensed an easing in him, and she was going to work her advantage. “And I’m sorry that I did. Do you believe me?” Her hand lifted slightly, as though she meant to soothe him; he stared at it. She dropped it again.
She wasn’t his sister Violet, for whom he suspected he would die without question (and knowing Violet, he still wasn’t certain it wouldn’t one day come to that), but who had gone about threatening to throw herself down wells and the like before she married the earl, knowing someone on the periphery, a brother of some sort, would always save her from herself. She was now the Earl of Ardmay’s concern. And he was possibly the only man on the planet who could handle her.
Yet how on earth could he have known this about Tommy? He was about to learn more about her, and he wasn’t certain whether he wanted to, and yet everything in him rebelled at the idea of her hurling herself off a bridge because no one else had ever pulled her back by her metaphorical elbows. A conviction settled over him.
He inhaled deeply, and sighed out a breath.
“From now on, you will take three seconds to assess whether whatever it is you’re about to do is dangerous. If the answer is ‘yes,’ I want you to tell me, and if it absolutely must be done, I will do it instead. You can trust me to do it. Do we have a bargain?”
He expected mutiny.
She studied him, her expression cool, assessing, now.
“Very well,” she agreed softly, regally, as if giving him a gift.
Strangely, the relief he felt made it seem as though he’d received one.
If a dubious one.
He suspected she was humoring him, but he felt better. After a moment, he nodded curtly.
“Now, where did you get this campaign medal, Tommy?”
“My mother gave it to me just before she died. She was from Spain. Even if she wasn’t a princess. She fled during the war.”
“Where did she get it?”
“From my . . .” She cleared her throat, and then the word emerged sounding threadbare, as though she hadn’t the right to it. “. . . my father.”
“And who is your father?” His questions came clipped and quickly. He wasn’t interested in treading delicately.
She turned to him slowly. It was her turn for incredulity. And then she mimicked him, more wearily than with rancor. “Read the goddamned medal.”
Chapter 15
SHE LOOKED AT HIM expectantly.
He stared back at her, genuinely amazed.
“No need to curse,” he said mildly, finally.
Which made her laugh.
Oh, God. He nearly closed his eyes. It was as though he had been held underwater until this moment. It went to his head like the first draught of oxygen he’d had in hours, the sound of her laugh.
And now he knew: There had been an instant when her head had disappeared beneath the surface of the river, when all the color and light and sound had seemed to go out of the world at once.
It had been like his own death experienced.
He didn’t like knowing that his righteous fury at her was really a sort of terror.
He sat with these two new bits of knowledge, assimilating them, while she waited for him to say something.
“I don’t mean to be insulting, but . . . does your father know he’s your father?”
“I absolve you of any need to be tactful, Jonathan, as I don’t know if you can withstand the strain. My mother was his mistress. She says he loved her, but he cast her off when he married his young wife, who was very jealous when she somehow learned of my mother. And my mother said she told him about me. She claims she even brought me to him when I was a baby. He wanted naught to do with us. At least that’s what . . . that’s what . . . Why are you staring at me so oddly?”
“You do both have a sort of little dent in your chin.” He gestured to his own. “You and the duke.”
He saw her breath stop. She seemed transfixed. Absently, wonderingly, she pressed her finger into her chin.
She dropped it as though she’d burnt it, as if she’d just remembered he was watching.
“It’s called a dimple, Jonathan. Not a dent, for heaven’s sake. Some men have even called it my most appealing feature.”
“Were they . . . blind men?” he asked mildly.
She laughed, delighted, and her eyes scrunched at the corners. It was odd, but he loved how they did that, for it made them seem like stars.
“And then there are your eyes . . .” he said absently.
In truth, the Duke of Greyfolk’s face was as cold and distinct and unyielding as any dead notable carved in effigy in Westminster Abby. Very like his own father, or how other people viewed his father.
“Do I have his eyes?” Her voice was too casual. Her absently plucking fingers had frozen on her shift. Hunger burned through the words and in her eyes.
No one else in the world has eyes like yours.
This thought blew through his mind and destroyed every other thought in its path. For a moment he couldn’t speak.
He must have been staring blankly at her, for she frowned faintly.
“His eyes are green,” he confirmed softly, hedging. “What became
of your mother?”
“She died when I was seven years old. She told me all of this and gave me the medal just before she died.”
Seven years old. Seven years old was so very, very young. “At seven! At seven I was . . .”
“Terrorizing your siblings, I have no doubt.”
“I was the youngest. They tormented me. But I quickly became master of the game.”
But he was distracted. What a small imperious fireball of a girl she must have been. Full of laughter, quick on her feet, and nimble of wit. Had she been terrified when she lost her mother? Lonely?
“What became of you? Had you any other family?”
“I was sent to Bethnal Green.”
She said it quite matter-of-factly.
He was utterly unprepared for the words. They landed on him like an anvil.
The workhouse. She’d been sent to the workhouse at Bethnal Green. Which is what often became of orphans . . . that is, if they were lucky. And that’s how she knew about these children.
She flashed him a grin, enjoying his discomfiture. “A far cry from Eton and Oxford—is that what you’re thinking, Mr. Redmond?”
“I suspect it was,” he said politely.
“Don’t you dare think I was pitiful, Jonathan,” she warned swiftly, reading his silence. “I was never that. I made a great many friends there, and I have friends still.”
“Minions, you mean.”
A smile started at one corner of her mouth and spread to the other, and was fully delighted when it was done.
“I wager you were a horrible child,” he said tenderly.
“I was. Thoroughly impossible, but quite sturdy and clever and willful.”
“And superior.”
“And superior,” she confirmed. “And cheeky. Always that. Doubtless my education at the hands of life has been far more useful to me in terms of survival than the sort most young girls receive.”
And he would have believed her, would have been convinced by all of this bravado and offhanded pragmatism, if he hadn’t seen and heard her anguish as that scrap linking her to anyone at all floated away.
He had an entire family of people to anchor him to life, to both torture him and provide a net of safety. She had a tenuous grip on a campaign medal. And, if she was to be believed, she also had a terrifying father.
He knew a little something about terrifying fathers.
“And the medal . . .”
“I managed to keep it hidden with a friend of my mother until I was able to retrieve it. It’s the only proof that I am who I say I am, for he gave it to my mama in better times, telling her it was his most cherished possession. I’ve kept it safe for him all this while. My mother told me to seek him out if I ever needed him, and to show him the medal.”
“And you need him now.”
And here she began to smooth her shift over her knees absently. “Perhaps.”
There was a silence.
“Jonathan . . . may I ask . . . you are acquainted with him. What is he like?”
He hesitated. “What would you like to know about him?”
“Are you being careful with me?” She sounded indignant.
“Very well. Shall I be blunt instead? He’s a thoroughly cold, ruthless, difficult, powerful, wealthy man. He lacks charm, at least in my point of view. He doesn’t like me. He does like my father, who is, in fact, very like him. And you do look more than a little like him.”
“And he’s a very handsome man,” she said suddenly. “At least the parts of him that I could see were.”
“Oh, yes. Your looks, such as they are, are probably the only reason anyone tolerates you at all.”
She laughed again. And then with a swift sudden motion she captured her hair, which had begun to flutter and curl and puff in the sun, in one fist. She twisted and twisted until it was a knot at her nape, which she then secured in some graceful and impatient and deft and mysterious female fashion. Women didn’t know how often they betrayed their whole selves in these gestures, how moving and endearing and irritating all at once they could be. Such things could ensnare a man more than mere calculation.
“It won’t stay,” he muttered. He meant the hair.
He wondered how that rich mahogany color would feel against his palm. It looked as though it would always be warm to the touch, like a fire burned low.
“Nothing ever does,” she said philosophically. Proving them right, a strand popped out of its little knot prison and circled her ear like a fishhook out to snare hearts.
And now that he was restored to his usual reasonable temper, his other senses were asserting their rights with vigor. And when her arms raised to attend to her hair, he could see—because naturally he looked—the dark peaks of her nipples through the damp shift. The sight went straight to his head like a shot of raw whisky. Her breasts were little and arced upward, and he could suddenly vividly imagine what it would be like to take one into his mouth, and this notion seemed to communicate immediately with his groin. Her shoulders were creamy and smooth and narrow, and the line of her body, from her shoulders to her little waist to her hips and thighs, down to her bare ankles and toes, seemed suddenly unutterably carnal.
Tommy seemed to sense a change in the air. She looked toward him with a querying brow arched. And then gave a slow crooked smile.
Wench knew precisely what she was about. It amused and impressed him, given that it was effective.
He self-consciously swept back his wet hair with one hand.
It stayed where he swept it.
She studied the result. “Fetching.” She clearly meant the opposite.
He just smiled and casually stretched indolently and leaned back on his elbows. He knew her eyes followed the line of his body when he did, as surely as if her gaze was tethered to him, and he knew she was trying to pretend this wasn’t the case. He knew very well how finely he was made. He possessed his own measure of vanity.
And he had wiles of his own.
She followed suit. They both leaned back on the shore, against sand and matted reeds and flattened wildflowers, and let the sun set to work on drying them. And it was warm and high now, mercifully aiming itself right at them.
Where was the harm in a little exercise of vanity? Jonathan thought. They were semi-bare and alone, and the sun lay over them like a soft layer of warm silk. They rested in easy complicity of their own charms, knowing they were safe from each other’s wiles, because they were of course smarter than nearly everyone else, and they were not in the least what each other wanted.
She shifted her feet, and he glanced down at them in time to see a neat bracelet of shiny pink skin around one.
A scar. Perhaps a burn.
So many things he didn’t know about her. So many things about her should have warned him away long before now. And yet here he still was.
He frowned up at the sky. She might be a petite temptress. He didn’t doubt for a second she was strong.
But it was in ways that could either serve or defeat her. And she might have the bloods of the ton eating from her hand. But she hadn’t met the likes of the Duke of Greyfolk.
He rolled over, propped himself on his elbow, and looked down at her.
She looked back up at him, a query in her eyes, which had gone a bit drowsy from the sun.
“About the Duke of Greyfolk, Tommy . . .”
“Yes?”
“He may not take kindly to having his orderly existence interrupted by the appearance of an unexpected daughter.”
For Jonathan, that amounted to circumspection.
“Would you turn a daughter away?”
A startling thought—the having a daughter part. He thought about Sally. She’d been someone’s daughter. What had become of her parents?
“I’m not a duke with a fortune,” was how he avoided answering that question.
“I’ll manage it the way I manage everything else,” she said complacently.
“That’s what I’m afraid of. I don’t think you’re ma
naging things, Tommy, so much as you’re dodging or lobbing events back as they come at you, a bit like lawn tennis.”
She snorted softly.
“And where do you get money, if you’re not yet a rich man’s mistress?”
He wasn’t certain yet whether this was true. Something told him it was, and yet his breath suspended.
She hesitated. “The occasional win at the hand of cards. The occasional shilling the countess can spare. And that’s it, I swear to you. As a friend.”
He exhaled. “What do you want, Tommy?” he said softly, vehemently.
“What do you mean?
“Five years from today . . . what does your day look like? Are you in those rooms in Covent Garden? Are you still dodging bullets and lascivious doctors and stealing children? Are you married to a dull man with a title? What do you want?”
She paused.
“Why does he have to be dull?”
“They invariably are.”
“Said the man who doesn’t have one.”
“There’s always time,” he said shortly.
She smiled lazily. And then she exhaled a long breath. “Very well. I always wanted . . .”
“Yes?”
“You won’t laugh?”
“No promises.”
She sighed. “When I was very little, I was driven in a cart from the workhouse past a house . . . I don’t remember where. A row house. And a little girl was running down the stairs right into the arms of her father, and her mother stood at the door smiling, and there were flowers in the box at the window and . . . that’s it.” She gave a little embarrassed laugh.
He didn’t laugh. He was struck motionless by the fact that she may have just described the only necessary ingredients for happiness.
She wanted a family.
How very fortunate he was in so many ways.
And just then she pushed back a strand of hair over her ear, and his eye watched the movement of her breast arc against her wet stays.
And for a moment he couldn’t breathe.
He wasn’t made of stone, for God’s sake. He ought to get the two of them covered up.
He didn’t move.
“I haven’t had much time to think of another dream,” she said defensively.
Julie Anne Long - [Pennyroyal Green 08] Page 13
