Just months ago, he might have scoffed at that idea. But since his arrival here, he’d come to—and he couldn’t believe he was admitting this, even to himself—like his work in the garden. He liked working with the living things, liked the smells of the grass and the flowers and the trees. He liked creating something that would last for more than just a few hours. Something that would change and grow of its own accord.
“If she’s not considered this area, perhaps this is a chance for us to do something special for Lady Elizabeth,” he mused. “Make this a surprise for her.”
Lancaster nodded, and Morgan could see he liked the idea. If the servants accepted Morgan, they adored Elizabeth. Her name was said in hushed reverence and he was certain at least three footmen were half in love with her. How could they not be?
“What do you have in mind?” Lancaster asked.
Morgan shut his eyes, drawing out what this corner could be in a few broad strokes. And connecting it to Elizabeth, as well. When he thought of her, the scent of her skin was one thing that sparked his memories, and he smiled as he looked at the older man again.
“Do we have access to orange trees?” he asked.
The corner of Lancaster’s mouth quirked up. “I think it can be arranged.”
“Good,” Morgan said, stepping forward and sweeping his arm in a semicircle along the wall. “I think we could plant them here. And then let’s talk about a fountain…”
Lancaster pulled out a small notebook and began scribbling as Morgan lost himself in something he never would have guessed could draw his attention. Not just the garden, but the woman who had inspired such a change, and such a desire to create something as a gift for her. He only hoped she’d like it when it was finished.
And that he wouldn’t reveal too much of himself while he was making something that was just for her.
Lizzie stared into her teacup, her mind leagues away from the parlor. It had been three days since that searing kiss with Morgan in the library. She’d tried to minimize it, but she couldn’t lie and say something like that didn’t matter. She’d tried to forget it, but that was impossible too. She still sometimes tasted Morgan’s lips on hers. Being in the same house as he was made it impossible to just lock that memory away.
And so she was left with the thoughts and the distraction and the questions that hatched in her mind. How had they come to this? Would he ever do that again? Did she want him to?
“Do you want to, Lizzie?”
She blinked as Charlotte repeated the very question in her own mind. When she looked up, she found Amelia, Katherine and Charlotte all staring at her with equal expressions of concern and expectation. Her distraction had yet again caused her trouble.
She forced a smile. “I’m sorry. I have such a flighty mind as of late. What are you asking me?”
“We were speaking about London,” Katherine said, tilting her head as if to examine Lizzie more closely.
“Yes,” Charlotte said. “Amelia was talking about getting all the duchesses together and having a private showing of Madame Lorraine’s newest fashions for winter. Do you want to be part of that?”
Lizzie shifted. “Madame Lorraine does make the most beautiful clothing, but…”
“But?” Amelia pressed.
“It’s hard to make plans for London when we are here in Brighthollow, isn’t it?”
“Well, we aren’t staying here forever,” Amelia said with a light laugh. “The remainder of the Season is to be had, with friends to be met and balls to attend.”
Her sister-in-law sounded so hopeful that Lizzie wanted to slither to the ground and roll beneath the settee to hide from her expectations. After all, she didn’t want to go back to London. She didn’t want to leave her home. To leave Morgan.
No, not Morgan. She shook her head at the wayward thought. Her reasons for wishing to stay in Brighthollow had nothing at all to do with her brother’s man of affairs.
“Your pale cheeks worry me,” Charlotte said, pursing her lips. “My dear, surely the idea of the Season doesn’t cause you this much distress.”
“It…does,” she squeaked. “I so appreciate the thought to include me and the desire to see me participate in what comes naturally to all of you.”
“Not all of us,” Charlotte assured her gently. “Ewan has always been uncomfortable with the city. With practice he has become more at ease, but I know he doesn’t care for these things any more than you do.”
Lizzie drew in a long breath. Ewan had been mute since birth. He had been treated badly by his family and sometimes by those in Society. She felt the accusation in Charlotte’s comparison, as if she shouldn’t feel apart when she’d always had a place in the world she shunned.
“I just don’t know,” she began, but before she could try to explain herself better, there was a light knock on the open door behind them.
The group as a whole turned, and Lizzie caught her breath as she saw Morgan standing in the entryway, his gaze trained on her and a broad smile on his handsome face.
“My apologies for the interruption, Your Graces. I am about to go see the progress in the garden and I wondered if Lady Elizabeth might wish to join me and see the headway the workers have been making on the gazebo.”
Lizzie pushed to her feet, smoothing her suddenly damp palms on her skirt. “Yes, of course. I’d love…I’d like to do that, if my friends don’t mind me so rudely abandoning them.”
Amelia’s brow wrinkled and her gaze slowly shifted from Lizzie to Morgan and back again. “We don’t mind at all,” she said, her voice soft. “I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what you two are cooking up back there.”
Lizzie was already moving across the room to join Morgan at the door. She cast a quick smile of farewell to the duchesses before he swept his arm forward as if to tell her to take the lead.
She did so, feeling the weight of his presence beside her as they strolled up the long hallway together. This was their first time alone since their game of piquet and she felt…shy. The world had shifted between them, after all. How was she to behave normally when she knew what his mouth felt like when it pressed to hers?
“Mr. Banfield?” Masters called out before they could reach the exit to the terrace and the stairs there that led to the garden.
Morgan gave her an apologetic nod and turned back. “Yes, Masters?”
“A missive just arrived for you from London, sir,” he said as he held out a note.
Morgan’s brow wrinkled and Lizzie immediately saw the flash of concern on his face. He took the note with a quick nod and glanced at her. She could feel he was torn between being polite to her and seeing what the letter was about.
“Of course you should look at it if you believe it might be important,” she said.
He looked down at the missive a second time and then said, “Come, we’ll step onto the terrace, at least. Might as well not waste a perfectly beautiful day.”
They exited into the sunshine and Lizzie stepped away a fraction to allow him some privacy in his letter. Or at least, that’s what she should have done. Only she couldn’t help but glance at him from the corner of her eye as he broke the seal on the folded sheet of paper and let his gaze drift across whatever had been written to him.
His mouth tightened and his shoulders stiffened. He stared at the letter a moment, then folded it and stuffed it in his pocket.
“Do you need to—to handle that?” she asked.
“No.” His tone was gruff, dismissive, and she found herself moving even further away from him. He’d been all friendly regard, and then this wall had been erected with just one single word.
And it reminded her, in a flash of awful memory, of Aaron Walters that horrible night her brother had found them on the road to Gretna Green. Her lover had been sweet, kind, and then cold as steel as he dismissed her and all they had shared. That moment where she realized she’d been played for a fool was one she often thought about.
She shook off the memory and thrust her shoulde
rs back. She and Morgan had kissed, yes, but there was certainly nothing that connected them beyond that slip in judgment. She couldn’t fool herself that there was.
“Well, then I think you should lead on, Mr. Banfield,” she said, retreating back to formality because it felt safer. “Show me what you wanted me to see.”
He nodded and they went down the stairs together. A few turns through the garden, and as they came around the last corner, she saw it. The frame of the new gazebo, just as her mother had designed it in her plans all those years ago.
Lizzie couldn’t help her excitement. She clapped her hands together with a gasp of glee. “Oh, Morgan!” she burst out as she pivoted to face him. He was standing just behind her, and she rested her hand on his chest to steady herself.
He stared down at her and then the corner of his lips tipped up in a half-smile. “I’m glad you like it.”
“I do,” she whispered, but she was no longer looking at the gazebo.
His smile faded and his pupils dilated. Slowly he lifted a hand and brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. The brush of his bare knuckles against her skin made her shiver with sensation. What did this man do to her? How could he so easily wrap her up in these desires she’d feared for so long?
He bent his head and all her pretense of putting up a wall between them fell away. Even though she knew it was folly, she found herself lifting to him. Their lips met and her hand gripped into a fist against his chest as she parted her mouth and let him in. He cupped the back of her head, tilting it so he could deepen the kiss. She sank into the feeling, letting her guard drop as she finally got the thing she had been dreaming of for days.
But just as quickly as he’d drawn her in, he stepped back, steadying her before he dropped his hands away from her. “You told me no before,” he said, his voice thick and raspy. “My apologies, Elizabeth.”
She stared at him, shocked that he even remembered she’d told him this was something they could not do, let alone honored the request. One she regretted in this heated moment.
“Don’t apologize,” she said, shoving her shaking hands behind her back. “I know this isn’t a good idea…probably. But…but…”
His smile returned. “Oh, Elizabeth, better not say but or I’ll kiss you again.”
She laughed at his gentle teasing. The tension between them faded a fraction, though she still wanted that damned kiss more than ever.
He offered her his elbow. “And now, I want to show you something else.”
She blinked. “More than the gazebo?”
His eyes danced with excitement. “A surprise. Come along.”
He drew her away from the framed outbuilding and down a winding path through the garden. They twisted and turned in companionable silence until they reached a corner of the garden that had once been a mass of rosebushes her mother had planted before Lizzie was even born. They had been touched by a frost a few years before and never fully recovered, no matter how Lizzie or the expert gardeners under her brother’s employ tended them.
But now all those half-dead plants were gone. They’d been replaced by a little half-circle of orange trees that surrounded a bench. There was also the base for a small fountain opposite the bench that hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t complete, but she could see how charming it would be in a short amount of time.
Had this little circle of protection existed in any other garden in the world, Lizzie would have been enchanted. She loved orange blossom—she even had her soap infused with the scent—and the sound of the trickling water was soothing and happy, indeed, and she could picture it here.
But this wasn’t her garden. It was her mother’s garden. And now the late duchess’s dead roses had been removed and their intended place had been filled by something…different.
Tears stung her eyes and she pulled away from Morgan’s arm with a shake of her head. “I-I told you we were to remain firm to the plans I discovered, Morgan! Why did you do this?”
She didn’t wait for his response, but turned away and rushed from the little corner, fighting tears and a looming sense that she had done something wrong, both by allowing this to happen…and by loving what Morgan had created for her.
Morgan stared at Lizzie’s retreating back as she hustled away from the corner of the garden he had specially designed for her. He was utterly confused. She was always so gentle, so bound to please others, even to her detriment. But the moment he changed anything in her mother’s garden, something deep within her snapped.
He saw where she had gone and for a moment he longed to follow. Then he pushed his hand into his pocket and felt the folded missive he’d shoved there earlier. He didn’t need to look at it to know what it said.
You can run, but you can’t hide. I know where you are.
Morgan shook his head. The note was a stark reminder that his life did not, could not, mesh with a woman such as Lady Elizabeth. He should just let her be angry and leave it at that, for both their sakes.
Only he couldn’t. He smashed the letter down deeper in his pocket, as if that could push the past further away, and then he marched toward where he’d seen Elizabeth go. The place where he’d originally found her here days ago, the Persephone corner, as he’d begun to call it.
He entered the space and found she had sunk onto her bench and was staring at the statue of Persephone, her expression blank. At least she was no longer crying.
He took a step closer.
“I’m sorry,” she said before he could speak. She glanced toward him, her expression filled with an expectation that she would be chastised. Only he didn’t want to do that. He just wanted to understand, even though it wasn’t his place to do so.
“You needn’t be.” He slowly sat down beside her on the bench. It was narrow, so it forced them to be close together, closer than he’d imagined when he thought to join her. But it was done now, and he would just have to ignore the fact that her knees brushed his and it made him so aware of her presence.
“You must think me a fool,” she whispered, and her head bent.
He shook his head as he tucked a finger beneath her chin and lifted to force her gaze back to his. “No, not a fool. I admit I don’t understand the strength of your reaction when it comes to this garden, though.”
Her breath came short as she stared up at him, and he could see her running equations in her head. Ciphers to determine if he was honorable enough to share something obviously private and painful. He found himself leaning forward, wondering if he’d be found worthy. Wondering how a woman like her could ever find him worthy.
At last she worried her lip and whispered, “I suppose you shared something of your past with me, didn’t you? About your mother, in fact. It is only fair to do the same.”
“You don’t owe me something just because I told you about my mother,” he responded. “Tell me if you wish to do so, not because you think I expect a quid pro quo.”
Her eyes widened in surprise and then she clenched her hands together on her lap. “No, I-I want to tell you. So you’ll understand. So someone will understand something.”
His brow wrinkled. She was so close to her brother, he hadn’t expected that Elizabeth would say something that indicated she felt…isolated. Misunderstood. He certainly related to that, no matter how far apart their worlds might be otherwise.
“Take your time,” he encouraged, and didn’t stop her when she got up and paced away to the statue of Persephone. She reached out and traced the lines of the stone woman’s face and then shook her head.
“I was eight when they died,” she began. “It was an accident. One moment I had parents, the next I was orphaned. A blink that changed everything about my life.”
“That must have been frightening,” he whispered, trying to picture her as a little girl, grieving and afraid.
“It was, at first,” she admitted. “But Hugh stepped in. I knew he’d be a good duke—he was always so clever and even-handed. But he turned out to be so much more. Despite how young he wa
s, only twenty-one at the time, he embraced the role of father with great aplomb. I was lucky to have him, I still am.”
“Still, you must have missed them.”
“My real father was…” She sighed. “He was not a very nice man. He refused to allow any weakness from us. He had little use for me, as I was not his heir, nor qualified to be a spare. He spent all his time and energy and cruelty on Hugh. So when he was gone, I felt little except for a regret that he could not have been…better. But my mother?”
She turned away and her hands clenched at her sides. “I did miss her, terribly. I still miss her. I long to tell her about my small triumphs. And when terrible things happen. Things like—”
She cut herself off, and Morgan straightened. There was that hint again, that little whisper about something that had happened to this woman that no one wished to reveal. Every time it came up, he found himself wondering more and more about it.
“Well, I just wish she were here to advise me sometimes.” She forced a smile as she looked at him again and he saw the false brightness on her face. “Not that I don’t appreciate the relationship I’ve developed with Amelia or the kindness of the other duchesses.”
“But they aren’t your mother,” he said. “No one could ever ask you to take any other relationship and pretend it could replace that one.”
“I suppose not. I’ve always longed for ways to connect with her.” She gave a soft chuckle. “For the first year after she died, I used to stop by her portrait in the gallery every night. I’d drag a chair across the room and climb up to kiss her cheek. Once I fell and nearly broke my head. The servants went into a panic and Hugh found out what I was doing. Then he gave me a miniature of her for my own bedside. I talked to it for years and years. But I never felt quite so connected to her as I did after I found the garden plans last winter.”
The Love of a Libertine Page 10
