“Mr. Duncan isn’t silly at all. Except when he eats torta. He eats more than anyone.”
“Does he?”
“He ate almost a whole cake today.”
Natasha joined them, carrying another set of dishes for him, as well as a platter laden with simple foods. He watched her come and go, bringing dishes into the small dining room as any of his servants might. Yet she did it more in the way his old nanny would have taken care of him.
A shiver ran across his body. This was his family.
Once they were all seated around the table, Leona chirped up again. “The rector taught me about a man named Enus, from Troy. And a great big poem about him.”
“Aeneus?”
Leona nodded.
“Ah yes, Virgil. He wrote a great many poems. Personally I prefer Catullus.” Marcus slanted a glance toward Natasha, who avoided meeting his gaze.
“You read Latin?” Leona continued.
“Yes and Greek and French, of course,” he said with a shrug.
“How do you know so much? Are you older than Reverend Duncan?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only met the reverend twice. But most educated men do learn the classics. He must be a very distinguished man to have earned your respect.”
“The rector knows everything. Almost everything,” Leona admitted. “He doesn’t know that Mama lied.”
“You must forgive your mother.”
She was only four, but that moment had changed her. He tried to remember when, in his own childhood, he had realized his parents were flawed. With his father it had been early––after the second bastard was born.
Leona would forgive, move on, and the loss of innocence would fade but not disappear.
Right then, Natasha looked like she wanted to cry.
“Do you remember, Natasha, the day we first met?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He watched her as he spoke, though he directed his words to Leona.
“I saw your mother across Covent Garden. She was buying flowers.”
“And I thought you were a gentleman.”
“I…I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”
“I was just a girl.”
“I still do.”
“Beauty fades.” Her words were a warning, and he thought about Natasha getting older. How she’d look when her hair grayed, her skin softened and thinned.
“Yours will only grow, and I want to be there, watching.” Natasha wouldn’t look at him, focused steadfastly on her plate, but he took in every little movement, every change of her expression, from the slight opening of her eyes to the parting of her lips, the shaky exhale. “I asked your mother to marry me.”
Leona didn’t respond. The little girl was playing with her food, dragging her fork across the plate with exaggerated interest.
“Leona, would you like that?”
“I don’t know.” She dropped her fork and slumped back, arms folded across her chest.
“Are we finished then?” Natasha asked. She didn’t wait for his response but pushed herself back from the table, stood, and started gathering plates.
Marcus unfolded himself from the chair to help, picking up the platter of partridge and the bowl of buttered asparagus from the center of the table. He found Natasha and Leona staring at him in shock.
“Reverend Duncan never takes the dishes up when he comes for lunch,” Leona said.
“Ah well,” Marcus said with a shrug, “the sooner we clear the table, the sooner we can have dessert.”
“Trifle,” Leona enthused, clearly energized by the thought of the treat.
Natasha laughed. Marcus stilled at the sound. He wanted to hear her laughter every day of his life. It would be his mission, his life’s work, to make her happy from this moment on.
“Bring the pudding, sweetheart,” she instructed their daughter as she continued to the kitchen. Marcus followed her.
He placed the serving dishes down on the kitchen table. It was one thing to help bring plates back from the dining room, but the kitchen itself was a mystery to him.
“Thank you.”
He leaned against the large center table and looked around.
“Why do you not hire more staff?” The slight pause, a vacancy in the air, made him realize it was the wrong thing to say.
“I don’t have an annuity. Nor a profession. I need to look ahead to the future, and that doesn’t involve wasting money where I can do for myself.”
“Your life here would have been easier,” he said quietly, wishing he could have made it so.
“I live in Little Parrington, Lord Templeton, because life hasn’t been easier. People might be suspicious here, but it is because I am a newcomer, not because I am poor. Reverend Duncan—”
“I don’t care about Reverend Duncan,” Marcus said curtly. He didn’t want to hear her wax on about the man’s beneficence. He didn’t want to hear a word about another man ever cross her lips. “And I’ll never just be Lord Templeton to you.”
She rested her hands on the counter and looked at him, her green eyes more gray in the dim light. “What you want from me––”
“Is no more than I am willing to give in return.”
She looked away a bare moment before Leona entered. The intense intimacy between them evaporated with Natasha’s quick, efficient movements around the kitchen.
“As you can see, there is work here to be done. Would you mind showing yourself out?”
He hesitated. He could plead dessert, call on the trifle to spend a few more minutes in her company. He shook his head, physically banishing the thoughts.
“Yes, yes, of course. Tomorrow, perhaps, a ride in the carriage?”
“To where?” Natasha said with a laugh. “It’s winter and an ugly one at that.”
“Tomorrow will be clear,” he assured her. He started to reach for her hand, to kiss it and her good-bye, but she pulled away.
“My hands are wet.”
They were, but it was an excuse. Patience, he reminded himself. “Till tomorrow, then.”
Chapter Eight
A storm thwarted his plans. The wind had picked up again, and the day outside was obliterated into a cloud of grayish white. It was what kept him from where he wanted to be, by Natasha’s side. There had been that moment yesterday, in the kitchen, when she had listened to him, had almost accepted the honesty of his words. As surely as this weather would pass and this snow would melt, Natasha’s heart would thaw. Although, preferably, she would come to him a bit earlier than that.
The storm didn’t ease until late in the day, and by then the roads were impassable. However, on Saturday, sick of pacing his room, the parlor, and the taproom, sick of chess and cards, gentleman’s magazines and farmer’s almanacs, and all the other excruciatingly tedious ways to pass the time, Marcus stepped out into the slush and sludge of a clear, bright day.
He took Juniper, but even with the horse, he still picked his way through the thick, sucking mess that lay between them and solid ground. Marcus arrived at Natasha’s house cold and splattered, his boots discolored from the wet.
Natasha answered the door herself. She shook her head at the sight of him.
“Such lovely clear days we’ve been having.” Her teasing smile felt like spring’s first thaw, and Marcus blinked rapidly. He wanted to take her in his arms again. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted––
“I love you.”
She took a step back. Her eyes widened, and her lips parted. She looked stunned and surprised, but he knew he’d said those words before. They’d been trapped in his heart these last five years. They’d repeated in his mind and his dreams.
“You’ve never…” Then her lips, those ripe pink lips, closed shut and she narrowed her eyes. “I’m not entirely certain what or whom you love, Marcus, but it isn’t me. Lust, I’ll allow. And I’ll allow I feel it, too.” Triumph surged through him at those words. “But not love.”
He shifted his weight, ready to slip
his foot forward if she tried to close the door. But she stepped back again, opening the door wide.
…
She was inviting him in. Again. Despite her best intentions, he was striding past her into her house.
I love you.
The three words still ricocheted in her body. She was foolish. She was vulnerable.
And she wanted to believe.
Natasha tamped down the unbidden yearning, the girlish dreams that she had thought long since relegated to fantasy.
Soul mates. He had suggested the idea to her so long ago, seduced her with it, and then she’d forced it away, derided herself for ever entertaining such a thought. Of course, she had been prime for such suggestion. Had she not felt that urgent rush of…something…a push forward from her heart to his? She had been so ready to think it grand, extraordinary, fated.
Despite the derisive tenor of her thoughts, it was difficult to completely erase the glow of pleasure she felt at his declaration of love. Chiding herself for that insidious emotion was unsuccessful as well.
“Leona is outside in the garden making snow angels.” She closed the door and turned to follow him into the sitting room. Only––
He hadn’t moved very far and suddenly he was looming over her.
She tilted her head back to look up at him. For a moment, the sensation of falling overwhelmed her. Then the back of her head touched the firm wooden door, and she quickly reached back to assure herself she was still standing, still upright. The pounding of her heart was as foolish as any gothic heroine’s.
“I’ll willingly take whatever you give me, Tasha,” Marcus said, reaching out. His gloved hand was cool on her neck but as he moved closer, the heat of his body warmed her. “And then,” he was close now, too close, and she knew he would kiss her, “I’ll ask for more.”
At the first touch of his lips, Natasha tasted honey, velvet, chocolate, silk, emeralds, and pearls, all the indulgent luxuries that had always come with his kisses. There was also his scent—his scent and an unfamiliar citrus blend. Yet even that fragrance, too, she was coming to associate with Marcus, with this Marcus, the man who was older, more handsome, more self-assured and relentless. The Marcus who claimed his daughter and claimed to love Natasha herself.
She sighed against him and felt him take that release as surrender. She lost herself in the world between his hand and his mouth, his desire and his will, and it was full of hot, spring colors that had nothing to do with the blustery winter outside the door at her back. He tasted melting, spicy, and she wanted more. She pushed her hands against the wall and then let go, using the momentum to lean up into his kiss, to wrap her arms around him and press her hips forward and lift her leg just slightly so she could nestle his thigh between her legs to press against where she was hot and awake and yearning and––
She quickly pushed away, but he didn’t let go, and she knew she had to move before her need clouded her mind again. She had been his mistress once. But that was ages ago, when she was young and foolish, when she was willing to lift her skirts and lose her morals all in the name of an ephemeral love.
Now––now her daughter could walk in at any moment. Now she wanted something more than a jewel-strewn bed and a passion-clouded life.
Marcus was asking for marriage.
And Natasha was beginning to think that she might be shockingly amenable to the idea. A strange lightness filled her. She was scared to examine the sensation, to discover what other weakness in herself she had just uncovered.
“Marcus,” she said, his name barely louder than a breath in the sliver of space between their lips. She pushed at his chest, and her protest seemed to register with him.
He finally stepped back and released her, but he looked jubilant, as if he knew what her thoughts had been, as if he knew he had won.
Which reminded her that he hadn’t. They had a past, and that past was as bitter as it was sweet. Yet for all that they had shared and still continued to share, they were strangers.
“I should bring Leona back in before she freezes to death.”
…
Marcus heard Natasha speak through the fog of his desire. She moved through space like a living painting––pale, rosy skin, golden cloud of hair, dark, intense eyes. Even the fabric of her plain, woolen dress seemed to take on the chiaroscuro of the masters as she moved, creating more contrast and more depth. He watched her slide around him and then followed her through the hallways of the house toward the back. They passed through pools of candlelight and shadow until finally they stepped out into the winter day and blinked in the white light.
A dot of blurry red movement was the first sign of Leona. Marcus blinked again and he made out her small form, bundled in so many layers, lying in the snow, her arms and legs arcing back and forth as she worked on a snow angel.
Then she caught sight of her mother and jumped up, her heels kicking at the snow, and the hard work of her impression was lost.
“Come along, Leona,” Natasha called.
“Do you see my angel?” Leona yelled back. Then she turned, pointing at the ground. Marcus could see only the corner of her chin, but he knew when her face crumpled. He strode out into the snow, letting the frozen day cool his previous ardor.
“It is lovely,” Natasha said from a step behind him. The unidentifiable impression was anything but lovely.
“You’ll simply have to make another one,” he said to Leona. “Of course, it is much easier to do when you have a fresh area of snow. Let’s move over here.”
Still trembling on the edge of tears, Leona followed him the three yards to where the snow was still untouched. He felt Natasha’s gaze on them and despite the snow, despite the presence of his child, heat flooded his body.
He helped the girl make a snow angel, the impression deep and clear, and then before she could propose that he too lie down on the ground and soak his clothes with the damp, he suggested a snowman.
“I really think it is time to go inside,” Natasha insisted.
“Do we have to? I’ve never built a snowman before,” Leona exclaimed. Natasha said nothing and the girl looked back to him. “How much snow do we need, sir?”
“As much as we need to make it at least as big as you.” Marcus began packing the snow into one large ball, bemused at the two small hands in their red mittens that worked beside him.
“Could we make a Cyclops? Mr. Duncan said that the Cyclops only have one eye.”
“That sounds frightening.”
She nodded. “But I can’t read the story yet because I have to learn Greek first.”
“Ah, Greek.”
She nodded again. “And before Greek, I have to learn Latin.”
“Yes, and here is a bit of Latin you should learn,” Marcus said as he pushed more snow onto the growing mound. “Fortitudo fideles vocat.”
“Fortitudo fideles vocat,” the girl repeated, her voice high and babyish, rendering the foreign language nearly unrecognizable to him. “What does it mean?”
…
Courage calls the faithful ones. Natasha knew those words because they were Marcus’s family motto. She stood there impotently, watching her daughter and her daughter’s father make a snowman––no, a Cyclops––together. The moment seemed unreal to her. But then, her whole life, from the first moment she had entered Marcus’s bed, had been an avalanche of events.
“It’s my family’s motto,” Marcus was telling Leona. “Our family actually.”
Our family.
During her pregnancy, she had dreamed of Marcus finding her, apologizing, and begging her forgiveness. She had dreamed of a family. She had never truly thought of herself as a mistress. Not until that last day when he had called her a whore.
And only minutes ago, she had let him kiss her like that––had fallen into his arms as if she didn’t care, as if there weren’t Leona to protect, as if there weren’t her own broken heart to keep from shattering further.
She was confused and she knew it. The confusion anger
ed her. How could she let him come into her life now, as if the past five years hadn’t mattered? How could she let herself forget?
Watching him with Leona was an extra dagger to the heart, because her daughter, while cautious, was curious about him. And she turned away from her mother’s hugs and stared at her with eyes full of accusation. It was unfair.
Life was unfair.
“It’s too warm to build a snowman.” Natasha marched forward to take Leona’s arm. “It’s time to go in and wash up.”
“But…”
“I said it is time to go in, Leona.”
“Go on, do as your mother says,” Marcus said. “She’s right. Our Cyclops’s stomach is melting already.”
It was a great exaggeration, but Leona nodded as if it were evident and ran into the house. Wordlessly, Natasha followed her. And though she didn’t look, she knew that Marcus followed as well.
Chapter Nine
After his visit the day before, Marcus knew Natasha would eventually say yes. He had never really doubted that. They had been apart due to his foolishness and cowardice, and now that he had found her, they could be together as they’d been meant to be.
When the carriage rolled to a stop outside the church, Marcus descended. A handful of villagers stared at him.
It made him long for home, for Sussex with its familiar towns and neighbors. Even long for London, where in that bustling international metropolis, everyone and no one was a stranger.
The rector was by the door, greeting people as they arrived. His stare was far less welcoming than the last time they had met. Duncan clearly saw himself as a rival for Natasha’s affection. Although the rotund parson hardly seemed much competition.
Just when Marcus thought they would stay stuck at the congested entrance to the church forever, making strained chitchat with his supposed rival for Natasha’s affections, the arrival of more of the congregation eased their way forward. As his party made their way to the first pew, he found no sign of Natasha inside.
Where was she? If she was now as pious as she seemed to claim, surely she would be there. A handful of parishioners entered, followed by the closing of the heavy church doors and the rector’s steady steps up the aisle. With a prickling of sensation in his skin, Marcus realized she would not be coming. He felt at a loss, empty, and the four walls of the church became a prison. There existed, as always, the possibility that she had fled. But the memory of her near submission the night before was strong within him. More likely, as he knew she had no carriage, it was the still difficult conditions of the roads that kept her home. Surely his man would have come to find him if she had taken flight.
Lord of Regrets Page 6
