If a Lady Lingers

by Anna Harrington

  She arched a brow and corrected, “A common weed for a common woman.”

  “Not at all.”

  He crawled across the blanket to sit beside her. In the golden sunlight that fell onto her shoulders, she was more than lovely. She was breathtaking. Not because her features were beautiful, although they were, but because he knew how lovely she was inside, how brilliant and creative, how loving.

  But all he could find words to say was, “You’re special, Daisy.” Her eyes widened at that affectionate admission, and worry pierced him. Had he overstepped this time? So he added with a grin at himself, “After all, I don’t have picnics in the park with just anyone.”

  She relaxed, her slender shoulders easing down as the tension seeped out of her.

  He seized the moment and reached over with his spoon to steal what was left of her ice. She fended him off with a quick parry of her spoon that would have done a fencing master proud.

  But then she admitted a bit tentatively to her ice as she stared down at it, “So are you.” She whispered, “Special, I mean.”

  Happiness bubbled inside him. For once, he was at a loss for words. So he reached over to steal her ice again.

  This time, she didn’t stop him.

  He shoved the cold spoon into his mouth and bit down hard on it to keep from blurting out how much she meant to him. Deuces, she was grand! Oh, he’d known since the day they’d met how special she was, how completely wonderful. But he’d had no true idea of exactly how much. She was sweet, kind-hearted, selfless when it came to her family, devoted to her work—brilliant at it, in fact. And for this afternoon, she was all his. He didn’t want to lose a moment of it.

  He scrambled to his feet, snatched up what was left of the bread, and held out his hand to her. “It’s time.”

  That declaration made no sense, he realized, yet she put her hand in his and allowed him to pull her to her feet. “For what?”

  His fingers tightened their hold around her hand as he gazed down at her. Her green eyes were big and bright, her lips parted in anticipation, and at that moment, he promised himself that someday she would love him.

  His lips twisted into a smile. “To feed the ducks. Come on!”

  He pulled her after him, away from the blanket and down to the water’s edge. He broke the small loaf of bread in two and handed her half. Already the park’s resident ducks had noted their intentions and were making beelines straight for the bank where they stood. Daisy laughed, broke off pieces of bread with her fingers, and tossed them into the water where the waiting ducks dove after them to gobble them up.

  “They’re behaving as if they’re famished,” she commented and tossed another piece of bread.

  “Of course they’re hungry.” He did his best to keep a straight face. “After all, they’ve been up since the quack of dawn.”

  She shook her head at that pun, knowing better than to encourage him by laughing.

  But he didn’t need encouragement. He snapped his fingers with a grimace. “If only I’d remembered to buy us a pint a milk!”

  She bit her lip and tried to ignore him, but curiosity got the better of her. “Why?”

  He answered deadpan, “Because then we’d have quackers and milk.”

  She froze, except for her mouth, which twisted into a pained expression. Then she tossed another handful of bread crumbs into the water.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  “No need to thank me.” He popped a piece of bread into his mouth. “I love to tell bad jokes.”

  “I meant for paying my brothers’ tuition. When you first told me what you’d done, I was embarrassed.” She admitted, “There was no accounting error.”

  He’d never thought there was. “Ah.”

  “But I understand why you did it, and I’m grateful that you thought of us. Truly.” She didn’t look at him, her attention glued to the swimming ducks paddling in front of her. “But you really shouldn’t have.”

  “It was no bother at all. Besides, I like to help my friends.” When she tossed away the last of her bread, he handed her his half of the loaf. “And you and I are friends, aren’t we?”

  “Yes.” She smiled at him as she accepted the bread. “We are.”

  What Whitby wanted to be with her was far more than friends, but he’d settle for that. For now. “Then come with me to the Gatewell School so you can meet the boys your father’s building the house for. I’d love to show you the school and all the work we’ve done there, introduce you to the children, let you meet Mrs. Hughes and Mariah and her little daughter Genevieve.” He puffed out his chest with pride. “I’m her honorary godfather, you know.”

  A thoughtful look pulled at her brows. “It would be nice to ask the boys what they think of our plans, to find out what they think the rooms should be like.”

  “Not a work visit, Daisy, but just to see the school and have fun meeting everyone. What do you think?”

  “I think that would be lovely.” She tossed out the last of the bread to the circling ducks. “But I’d still like to ask the children about their ideas for the house, if you don’t mind. It would be the perfect opportunity.”

  He smiled at her. That was his Daisy, all right. Always with plans and designs whirling through her head.

  They fell silent as they stood side-by-side and spent several moments just watching the ducks continue to circle in hopes that more bread might magically appear. The shouts and cries of children playing nearby drifted across the lawn to them, and the warm, afternoon breeze tickled faintly over their skin. The afternoon was perfect.

  Slowly, Whitby moved his hand at his side, just far enough to touch hers as it rested against her skirt, and lightly caressed the back of her hand.

  She trembled but didn’t pull away. Happiness squeezed his chest.

  “So what do you think, Daisy Daring?” As he looked down at her, her face shone with a vibrant intensity that made him nearly breathless. “Wasn’t this a grand day out?”

  “Yes.” Her fingers moved to brush against his and return the caress. “It certainly was.”

  “Excellent.” Knowing not to venture too far all at once, he let go of her fingers and clapped his hands. “Then we’ll do it again tomorrow.” He nodded at her. “See you in the morning.”

  Before she could stop him, he leaned over to give her an impetuous but innocent kiss, catching her completely off guard and surprising her speechless. Just a touch of lips to lips, barely a kiss at all—yet his heart sang with joy, and his soul soared.

  He sauntered away with a bounce in his step. Deuces, he could have skipped! He didn’t have to glance over his shoulder to know that she was staring after him, her eyes wide in disbelief and her hand lifted to her lips. But despite her shock, he was certain that he was making grand progress in his unofficial and completely unknown-to-her courtship. He grinned broadly to himself. After all…

  “She didn’t slap me,” he murmured happily.

  3

  Month Three

  Daisy held up the large sheets of paper in her hands and turned slowly in a circle to take in the construction site around her. Her eyes moved constantly between the plans and the work completed so far. She wanted to jump with pride. “Isn’t it simply marvelous?”

  Swift progress had been made on the house in the short time that the men had been building it. The basements had all been dug, the sub-cellars all done to exacting specifications, including the lead and wooden pipes for the new plumbing system she’d designed throughout the property. The gas pipes had also been laid from the bottom up, and she could see the end of one now from where she stood, jutting out from the half-finished second-floor wall of a future bedroom. The exterior stone walls had been erected, along with the frames for the interior walls and floors, and only the last finishing touches needed to be made before work shifted from the outside structure to the inside.

  As she turned in her circle, she saw all of the house’s promise. Her mind leapt ahead to days of sunlight falling thro
ugh tall windows onto plasterwork ceilings and papered walls. It would illuminate marble fireplaces and columns, large archways to allow people to come and go happily through the house, lovely wall paintings of vines and flowers so that summer would be present even during the bitterest winters—

  Her gaze landed on Whitby, and she stopped. A grim expression darkened his face. He was anything but excited about the site visit.

  And Whitby being anything but excited wasn’t at all like him. Especially about the house.

  For heaven’s sake, he’d practically bounced every time he’d visited her home to learn what new progress had been made, see any new designs, and discuss with Papa whatever problems had cropped up at the house site. Whitby still believed that Elias Daring was overseeing the project, making all decisions, and simply delegating instructions to Daisy to pass along to the builders. On the days when he hadn’t visited—which weren’t more than a handful since the project began—Whitby had sent a flurry of notes, which often had nothing to do with the house at all. So many notes that Daisy had felt he’d been right there in the room with her anyway.

  Whitby had always been overly enthusiastic and exuberant about every detail, no matter how small, right down to the boot scraper on the front step that he wanted to match the door knocker. At first, a part of her thought he was pretending to be excited about the house simply because she was excited about it. But the more she came to know him, the more she realized that being excited was simply Whitby’s natural state. Fish swam, birds flew…Whitby grinned and bounced.

  But today, he wasn’t at all grins and bounces. He simply wasn’t himself.

  Something was wrong. Concerned, she lowered the plans. “You don’t think it’s grand?”

  He rolled an uncertain glance at the exposed studs and beams of the half-finished walls, the floors whose gaps between the planks allowed views all the way down into the basement, the ceiling that was just as open as the floor. His brow arched apprehensively. “I think I’m standing on a bunch of sticks piled over a hole in the ground.”

  “No. You’re standing in your bedroom.” With a reassuring smile, she rested the plans against a section of wall boards and tapped her finger on the sheet. “Right here.” She nodded toward the far wall—er, at what would soon become a wall. “That end of the room is going to be walled off for your dressing room, complete with one of those shower tubs we talked about.”

  That didn’t ease his frown, which bothered her more than she wanted to admit and twisted the tiny muscles in the pit of her stomach. She wasn’t used to Whitby with any other expression except a bright smile, and his behavior worried her.

  “There are no windows at that end of the room,” he grumbled. “How am I supposed to have enough light to get dressed?”

  “With this in the ceiling.” She pointed at the sketch. “It’s called a skylight. We’ve added a false façade to the roof so no one can see it from below, but it’ll let in just as much light as a regular window. We’re putting one here in your dressing room and another over the stair hall to light the center of the house.”

  With a noncommittal grunt, he put his hands on his hips and surveyed what he could see of the house.

  “Just think of it, Whitby,” she cajoled. “In the evenings, after a long day, you’ll be able to soak in a hot bath while watching the moon and stars overhead. Then you’ll go into your sitting room through that connecting door to enjoy the fire and a glass of your favorite brandy before retiring here into your bedroom.” She gestured a hand toward the sitting room, a space that was completely his and off-limits to the boys who would be living with him. However, she’d taken her own initiative to design a connecting door between it and the bedroom on the far side of it. After all, someday he would marry, and that bedroom would become his wife’s.

  Whitby with a wife—an unexpected pang jolted inside her at the thought. Oh, it couldn’t be jealousy!

  She bit her lip. Could it?

  Not daring to let herself contemplate that, she forced her attention back to the plans. “I know it’s hard to imagine what the finished house will look like when it’s still just a skeleton like this, but please do try. We need to start making decisions about the interiors.”

  In the past, when her father had completed his plans for clients’ houses, he’d brought the men and their wives to the sites for visits. He’d wanted them to be part of the process from the very beginning. So it was only natural that Whitby would have his own site visit. She’d brought him here under the pretense that she was only relaying information between the builders and her father, but in truth, she wanted to do what her father had done in the past and show Whitby the progress that was being made. The way a real architect would for a client.

  She was beginning to think that was a mistake.

  “Trust me,” she assured him. “Once you envision the final details, you’ll feel much better about it.”

  The house was still a hollow shell, granted, but it was quickly taking shape. The builders needed to know in which direction to head when they finished the structure, which would be soon, and so Daisy needed to get started on the final touches. The end of the project would be here before they realized it.

  Another pang pulsed through her. This one she recognized. Regret…that the project would soon be over and she’d no longer have reason to see Whitby every day. Heavens! Had anyone told her three months ago that she’d feel this way, she would have said they were mad as a hatter. But that’s exactly what had happened, and the completion of the house would be a bittersweet moment.

  She cleared the emotion from her throat. “So let’s focus on finalizing the details for the interiors.”

  He gazed out the wide opening where a bay window would eventually go, then down through the gap in the floorboards to the hole of the basement beneath them. “Let’s focus on finishing the interiors first.”

  “Unfortunately, we can’t put off making these decisions much longer. You have to decide what kind of windows and doors you want, what finishes, what plasterwork. If you want any built-in shelves, closets, or alcoves. If you want wooden stairs or marble.” She gave a silent sigh and rolled up the plans. Judging from his reaction, she didn’t care about any of that, so she appealed to a higher authority. “I need to tell Papa what you’re asking for so that he can write out instructions for the builders.” She forced a smile. “Otherwise, you’ll have a townhouse without a staircase.”

  His mouth twisted, not swayed by her argument or her attempt at humor.

  “Whitby, you have to trust me when I tell you that the construction is going remarkably well.” She rested her hand on his arm. His bicep tightened reflexively beneath her fingers, and her breath hitched. She had to swallow before she continued, “I know it doesn’t look like much now, but you have to envision the final house and how wonderful it will be.” She flashed him a smile. “Few people have the stomach to see how sausages are made either, but in the end, people love them.”

  “I don’t have a sausage.” He gestured at the nonexistent window and frowned. “I have a hole.”

  “The windows will be put in as soon as—”

  “And I have an architect who’s been lying to me.”

  Slowly, she dropped her hand away and forced a tight smile. “Papa hasn’t lied about the process. You’re just nervous about—”

  “Not Elias. You, Daisy.” He pointed irritably at the roll of pages in her hand. “Elias didn’t do those plans. He doesn’t know anything about the skylights or shower tubs. When I spoke to him yesterday, he didn’t even know that the square was plumbed for both water and gas. That means that Elias Daring isn’t my architect.” He folded his arms over his yellow and white striped waistcoat and leveled a no-nonsense gaze on her. “You are. And you’ve been lying to me about it.”

  She froze beneath his accusation. Her heart pounded brutally against her ribs as the shock twisted through her. He knew…

  Wide-eyed beneath his hard gaze, she forced herself to breathe. That was
why he was acting so out of sorts today, why he wasn’t teasing her and smiling the way he’d always done before, why he was so irritable. He was angry because he knew she and her father had been dishonest with him. Dear heavens…he knew!

  Guilt gripped her at his accusation. She couldn’t find the words to deny it.

  “Be honest with me.” He took the plans from her numb fingers with a grimace. “This is your work. All of it. From the very beginning.”

  “Yes,” she breathed out, blinking away the stinging in her eyes.

  “You’re the one who hired the builders, the one who’s overseeing all the excavation work, masonry, and framing?”

  She nodded sharply. The knot of emotion in her throat clenched too tightly for her to speak.

  “This whole time, you’ve pretended that it was your father who drafted those plans, while you let yourself be relegated to the interior designs.”

  “Interior designs are important,” she argued in a feeble attempt to protect her pride. “They finish a house.”

  “Finish a house? Daisy, you’re building an entire house! And all the while you’ve been hiding the truth from me, which is the worst of all. Because I trusted you.” He tucked the plans into a niche in the unfinished wall beside them, then removed his hat and raked his fingers through his ginger hair. “Why? Why would you dissemble with me about something this important?”

  She knew he didn’t mean the house itself. “Because Papa’s sick and hasn’t been able to work,” she rushed out as the guilt swelled unbearably inside her. She wrung her hands. “The bills were piling up, the tuition couldn’t be paid, the doctors began to demand payment upfront or they wouldn’t examine Papa… Don’t you see? I had to do the projects, collect the commissions—” She choked off as a look of pity tightened his face, and an expression of worry that he’d now cancel the project surely darkened hers. Desperately, she assured him, “But there’s no need to cancel the project. You’ll have a wonderful house in the end, I promise you. Exactly what you wanted, what the boys need—I promise you!”