A Delicate Deception

by Cat Sebastian

  For a moment Sydney considered retreating. Perhaps he could slip away and she’d never know he had been there. But if she did happen to look up and see his retreating form, she might think he had followed her and was lying in wait. So there was nothing for it but to keep walking towards her.

  “I do beg your pardon,” he said by way of greeting once he was close enough to be heard. Too late he realized he ought to have donned his coat and hat.

  “Oh!” She looked up with a start, but then immediately recovered herself, transforming into the woman he had previously encountered. She jumped to her feet and snapped her fingers for the dog, who promptly positioned herself between Sydney and the woman.

  He raised his hands, palms out, and took a step backward. “I didn’t mean to intrude upon you. I only—” He stopped, acutely aware that telling her he did not mean to attack her would be the opposite of reassuring. “I’ll be on my way now,” he said, taking another step backward.

  She was still looking up at him with an unreadable expression when the dog sprang at him, its teeth sinking into his calf. Sydney remained utterly still, partly because he was stunned, and partly to avoid further provoking the dog.

  “Nan! Heel, you bad dog,” the woman said. “Heel right this minute.” The dog gave a confused whimper and slunk off behind the woman’s skirts, darting betrayed looks over her shoulder at her mistress.

  “She did her job,” Sydney said, striving to sound normal despite the pain shooting up his leg. He looked down to assess the damage. His calf had been protected by the sturdy leather of his boot, but he suspected he was bleeding anyway. “Don’t scold her.” He fully resented whatever antiquated feudal instinct led him to want to reassure this woman.

  “I’ll scold her as much as I please, thank you,” the woman said with acid sharpness. “She’s not supposed to attack every man she dislikes. She’s not supposed to attack anyone. She probably thought you were a goose out to steal her sandwiches. She’s not even my dog.”

  Sydney did not try to make sense of any of this, but instead pulled his boot off and dumped the contents of his flask on the bite, wincing. Then he unwrapped his neck cloth and tied it around the small wound before replacing the boot. “There,” he said. “I’ll be off.” He started to tip his hat and then remembered she objected to that gesture. He stuck his hands in his pockets instead.

  “You will not,” the woman said in a tone Sydney generally heard from foremen commanding their workers. “You’ll sit down until you’re certain your leg isn’t too badly off. Then you’ll give me the address of your bootmaker so I can arrange for a new pair to be sent to you.”

  His bootmaker? Sydney didn’t have a bootmaker. When his boots started to look shabby, he had them repaired. When absolutely necessary, he demoted his old boots to the status of second-best and bought a new pair at whichever bootmaker happened to look most sensible in whatever town he happened to be at that moment.

  “I’m afraid I’m in between bootmakers,” he said gravely, suppressing a mad urge to laugh.

  “Then tell me where to send money. Two pounds?”

  Two pounds? Two pounds? Did she think his boots were made from cloth of gold? “I assure you that won’t be necessary,” he said, reminding himself that guillotines were against his principles. “These boots are fine, you see.” He indicated his leg.

  She peered doubtfully at the marred but unbroken leather. “Regardless,” she said, waving an airy hand, “sit.”

  Quite before he realized what he was doing, Sydney sat. “I really don’t wish to bother you,” he said.

  “What would bother me would be if you came to harm on your way home. It would be my responsibility and I’d spend the rest of my days feeling guilty. I have quite enough of that already, so I’d like to spare my future self the trouble, thank you.”

  Sydney opened his mouth and snapped it shut again, knowing that whatever came out would be uncivil; he might not have the knack for making himself agreeable, but even he knew that he should not deliver a lecture on how women of at most five-and-twenty who thought boots cost two pounds couldn’t possibly have anything of substance to be troubled about.

  “Come, Nan,” the woman said, “be a good girl and show the man that you aren’t a ravening beast.” The dog snarled. “I’m afraid her poor brain is a mass of confusion. She thinks you’re a sheep rustler intent on stealing me. Here, give her a morsel of cake.” She produced a cloth-wrapped bundle from her basket and handed it to him.

  And that was just too much. It was utterly typical of a woman of her class not to have the sense to keep herself alive. “No,” he said, realizing a moment too late that it had come out rather gruff. “You mustn’t train your dog to befriend me. I could be any variety of villain.” I might tip my hat to you, he thought.

  She narrowed her eyes, something like approval flashing in their gray depths. “True. You eat the cake.” He began to protest—he was not going to sit here and have a picnic with a woman who not three days earlier had expressed in no uncertain terms a desire never to share so much as a cattle path with him. But she made a disapproving sound, cutting him off. “Eat the cake. What if you go into shock? However would I get you back to Heatherby? I would have to leave you here while I got help, which I assure you I would find tedious in the extreme. It would take three strong men to carry you, and I wouldn’t know where to find two strong men, let alone three. So eat the cake.”

  He ate the cake, if only because it would keep his mouth too busy to tell her what he really thought. It tasted lemony and rich and exactly like the sort of cake a woman who thought boots cost two pounds would have on her person. He didn’t even want to think about where the sugar came from. Meanwhile, the woman had turned back to her book and was ignoring him. Since the moment he stepped into this clearing he was reminded of the time Andrew had convinced him to ride in one of the Durham tram cars as it went down a slope—confused as to his destination and then regretting everything that had led him to agree to such a venture in the first place.

  Their positions, she with her back against a standing stone, he sitting on the ground a few feet away, gave him an unobstructed view of her profile. She appeared younger than he might have supposed from the way she ordered him about. And not just ordered him about, but did it competently, as if tending to dog bites and replacing boots and bossing about strange men were all part of her ordinary day. This, he reminded himself, was a regrettable result of class distinctions and not a quality he admired.

  The hair that escaped her bonnet was curly, a rusty shade too red to be called auburn, too dark to be called copper. She had no small quantity of freckles, which stood to reason if she spent her mornings out of doors. She was plump in a way that suggested softness, and beneath the cotton of her gown he could see the roundness of her stomach and the heaviness of her breasts. He dragged his gaze away.

  “How did you know I’m staying in Heatherby?” he asked when he finished the last bite of cake. He wasn’t surprised that she knew where he was staying. He had enough experience with country life to know that word of new arrivals traveled fast. But he wanted to learn how much of his identity was common knowledge.

  She blinked at him, as if she had forgotten he was there, and he wished he had remained silent. She closed the book, but kept her place with her finger. “You’re in the county on business, so it’s unlikely that you would be staying in the home of a friend. Therefore you’re staying at an inn, and probably one very near to my house because your path took you past my lane at an hour too early for you to have walked very far. The nearest inn to my house is the Swan in Heatherby.”

  She was right that he was staying at the Swan in Heatherby, but wrong about everything else. Correcting her would entail forcing his entire biography onto a stranger. It would mean speaking aloud the truths he preferred not to even voice within his own mind. He rose to his feet, dusting the cake crumbs off his trousers. “Thank you for your courtesy. I had no intention of bothering you today—”

&nb
sp; “I know you didn’t,” she answered, tilting back the brim of her hat as if to get a good look at him. “I’m aware that after I spoke to you, you altered your path to avoid meeting me. Why? You said yourself that you believe you have every right to walk there.” She spoke those words bold as can be, no trace of hesitation or a blush, as if he owed her an answer.

  “Common decency,” he said, vaguely affronted that she thought him the sort of man to force his presence on a woman.

  “Piffle,” she retorted. “Many people take a positive delight in doing things they believe they have a right to, especially if it annoys someone else. Don’t pretend not to know that. You don’t seem like you’ve led a sheltered life.” Her gaze raked up and down his form, as if she could read his years of experience in the length and breadth of him. His face heated.

  Of all the times to form an ill-advised attraction. But, heaven help him, he had always had a weakness for people with sharp tongues and a tendency towards imperiousness. Speaking of which: when he got back to the inn he would need to ask the ostlers if they had heard of any carriage accidents, or perhaps bad weather to the south, or any mishap that might explain Lex’s delay.

  “You’re a young woman alone in the countryside,” he said, striving for patience. “I have about ten inches and five stone on you. I try to be conscious of that sort of thing.” Not only was he large and tall, but had frequently been told that he looked perpetually cross, that in particular his eyebrows gave him a look of grave disappointment and imminent anger. His clothing was serviceable but not fine, his hair was always in need of a cut, and he seized upon any excuse to avoid shaving. All told, he did not look much like a person any right-thinking woman would relish the prospect of meeting on a secluded lane. He tried to present a less threatening aspect by tipping his hat and wishing her good day, but he was very much afraid this had produced the opposite result.

  He had thought it entirely reasonable for her to be wary of his presence, yet now when he thought of it, she hadn’t seemed precisely afraid. She certainly didn’t seem afraid of him now, even with her dog asleep in the sunshine. Her reaction to him that day she scolded him on the path had been one of frustration, he now thought. Not fear.

  “All right, then,” she said, closing her book and rising to her feet. As she stepped into her boots, he caught himself trying to get a glimpse of what a two-pound pair of boots looked like, but they seemed a perfectly ordinary pair of stout brown half boots. He looked away as she tied them. “Let’s get you back to your inn.”

  He shrugged into his coat and slung his satchel across his chest. As they walked along a path that hewed close to the brook, he resisted the urge to give her his arm or to insist on carrying her basket. She was only being fastidious in walking him back to the village, and he knew she walked these hills daily. She didn’t need his assistance. He forbore from making any conversation, not wanting to presume on her, and also not having the faintest idea what to talk about.

  “What are you surveying?” she asked after they had walked in silence for some distance.

  It took him a moment to remember that he had told her he was in the area as a land surveyor. A decent man would inform her that she was speaking to her landlord, that he owned the land they stood on, Crossbrook Cottage, and the ruins of Pelham Hall. After two years he surely should be used to Andrew being gone and all Andrew’s worldly goods now being Sydney’s own. But he hadn’t, and was vaguely ashamed of this failure on his part. So he grit his teeth and told another lie. “A tramway,” he said, because that was what he and Andrew had been mapping out three years ago when they had first been assigned to Derbyshire. And, true to the nature of these projects, the first rail on that line hadn’t yet been laid and perhaps never would; he and Andrew needn’t have come here in the first place. “I plan routes and I design engines,” he added, almost desperate to say something honest.

  She blinked, and he had the impression that she was riffling through her mind for another conversational gambit; surely young ladies with expensive taste in footwear did not care to hear about hydraulics or steam engines. She would steer away from engines and instead ask where his people came from, whether he knew some cousin’s wife’s vicar, or how he found the weather. But instead her eyes flicked up to meet his. “What kind of engines?” she asked. Across her face flitted the same expression Andrew used to have when sneaking a lemon drop out of their father’s pocket. It was a look of barely concealed longing. It was, to say the least, not the expression that usually accompanied polite inquiries about engines.

  Granted, he had been out of civilized society for some time, living in a make-do sort of way among engineers and tinkerers, occasionally making reluctant forays into more refined company to curry the favor of railway shareholders and promoters. Perhaps at some point in the past few years engines and tramways had become all the rage among whatever rarified circles this lady traveled in. He doubted it, though.

  “Steam engines,” he said.

  “Well, obviously,” she said with undisguised frustration. “I hardly thought you were building siege engines. I meant what are you doing with them? Where are these engines going? Looms? Pumps? Ships?”

  “Well, yes,” he said, flustered.

  She stared and made a prompting on with it sort of gesture with her hand.

  “Mostly railways and tramways at the moment,” he added, not certain why she was staring at him but finding it disconcerting.

  She licked her lips. His face flushed with mortifying promptitude. He stumbled over a tree root and only barely regained his footing. Served him right for looking at young women’s lips like he had never seen a pair of them before. He tried to get some control of himself.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, thinking that if she could be frank and forthright about their previous meeting then so could he, “but three days ago you didn’t want me on your property. Now you seem eager to hear about steam engines. On the one hand I feel certain I ought to remain silent so as to spare you the burden of conversing with me, but on the other I don’t want to be silent and churlish. I’m afraid I’m quite at a loss.” This, he knew, was too much honesty. People didn’t care for that. He expected a chilly silence, perhaps even a rebuke. Maybe he even wanted that, just to get it over with, just so he’d know where he stood.

  To his surprise, she let out a ripple of laughter that might have been deemed a snort in someone with any other accent. “Believe me, sir, if I could begin to explain the inner workings of my mind I’d be a very happy woman. The fact is that I’m—” She hesitated long enough for Sydney to turn his head, seeing her furrowed brow and pursed lips. “I don’t do well with people,” she said slowly, as if weighing each word. “I’m something of a recluse.” The hesitation in her voice reminded him of the way he thought about being the owner of Pelham Hall—a reluctance to give voice to an unwanted truth. “So it came as an unpleasant surprise to see you at a time when I wished to see nobody. But when my dog—excuse me, a dog who thinks she’s my dog—attacks a man, I rise to the occasion. And when I have the chance to learn about something that’s unknown to me, I can’t resist.”

  She spoke those last three words as if speaking of a pleasure more carnal than machinery. Sydney ran a finger under his collar and kept his attention on the path before him until they reached the place where the lane diverged towards Heatherby and the inn in one direction, and Crossbrook Cottage in the other.

  “Good day, sir,” she said, her face tilted up towards his. “I wouldn’t object to seeing you on my walk in the future.” With that, she nodded her head at him and walked away.

  Really, he shouldn’t be so flattered by a person announcing that she wouldn’t dread encountering him. He watched her progress along the lane to her cottage for a full minute before he realized that if things went reasonably well, there would be some message from Lex waiting for him at the inn, and he wouldn’t ever see this woman again.

  That would be for the best. Sydney remembered what happened the last t
ime he had met a young lady with a moneyed accent on these hills.

  “Georgiana!” Amelia cried upon entering the cottage. “I met a person unexpectedly, spoke to him, and it wasn’t terrible!”

  She already knew she was able to make sufficiently unremarkable conversation. Her years in London had been nothing if not proof that she could talk to virtually anyone without disgracing herself, regardless of how she felt about it. Occasionally, when she had been able to talk to people who had ideas and learning, she had been able to lose her self-consciousness in the thrill of actually talking about something interesting. Those moments had been rarer and rarer with every season she spent in London, as the weight of apprehension crushed any joy she might have once felt.

  Furthermore, she was far from unused to men. Amelia’s mother had firmly believed in demystifying the entire gender, and had therefore allowed her daughters to attend dinners and salons far in advance of their official debuts. Amelia had been making conversation with gentlemen since she could string together a sentence. And even though she was far from a sparkling conversationalist, she could get the job done.

  “Georgiana?” she called again. “I think I’ve discovered the solution to all that ails me. The trick to graceful social intercourse is to wait until after one’s dog has attempted to murder one’s interlocutor. Do you think they’d let me do that at Almack’s?” She knew she was being absurd, but the fact that she had managed to comport herself in a somewhat social situation, without wanting to run screaming away made her think there might be an end in sight. Perhaps her mind was reverting to something like normal. “We’ll be in London before Christmas, or as soon as I’ve trained up a pack of dogs to do my evil bidding. Georgiana?” But there came no response. She remembered belatedly that Georgiana had taken the pony cart into Bakewell to purchase some things for the house.