All her.
And she bitterly regretted accepting it.
The backstage door loomed like a beacon. An escape. As tears stained her cheeks and spoiled her make-up, she quickened her pace to get to it.
If only she could escape. From all of it. Go home. Lock all the doors. But she was committed. People were relying on her. Every fibre of her being, all her training and the legacy of her brilliant mother all demanded that the show must go on.
She had to bury the fear. Put on a brave face. Hide the wretched truth at all costs.
Over the hum of the audience came the screech of a violin. A cello. A flute. The orchestra were warming up their instruments ready for the off. Each note like a death knell sealing her fate while feeding the creature in her gut. It flailed against the walls of her stomach, jarring her ribs and robbing her of breath, eating her from the inside until there would be nothing left to escape with.
Or perhaps she could escape? There was still time. Not ten minutes any more, but at least eight. Enough for her to flee down the alley and out into the night. Evan wouldn’t be there waiting but it wasn’t that far away to the inn. Surely?
As her clumsy fingers finally wrestled with the door latch, she knew she was past the point of no return. She couldn’t do this.
She couldn’t! It was all too much.
She hadn’t spent the money yet, so it could all be returned. And Griff would fix it. He was so good at organising everything, she would tell him to make it all right then take her back home where she belonged.
Her reputation and her career in tatters.
A fallen star before it had fully risen.
The lock finally gave and she flung herself out the door, then bent double to retch uncontrollably as she sobbed. Wishing she was more. Wishing she was...
‘Charity?’ His boots thundered on the cobbles as he dashed towards her. ‘Oh, my God, Charity, what’s wrong?’ Strong arms supported her as she lost her supper. A gentle hand held back the ringlets poor Lily had wasted an hour creating. Wiped her face.
‘I can’t do it, Griff! I can’t do it!’ She collapsed against him, grateful that he was there. ‘Take me home. Please.’
‘Shh, love, it’s all right.’ He held her close and rocked her. ‘It’s just nerves, that’s all.’
‘It isn’t. I can’t do this. I can’t!’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘Will you fix it for me?’
He stroked her hair. ‘Of course I will... If that is what you want. But we should probably get you cleaned up first, don’t you think?’
She nodded. It took every ounce of her strength, but as he tried to help her back inside, her knees gave way. Quick as a shot, Griff effortlessly scooped her up, and as she clung to him for dear life, he carried her back to her dressing room, then carefully lowered her on to the sofa.
‘Sit still. Breathe.’ He cupped her cheek tenderly. ‘Everything is going to be all right, I promise. I’ll be back in a minute.’
Charity closed her eyes to stop the room spinning but still struggled to breathe despite feeling calmer. The orchestra were still warming up, the noise from the audience was still deafening, yet despite all that she felt better just knowing Griff was in control.
True to his words, he was back in a flash and pressed a glass into her hand as he sat beside her and guided it to her lips. Instantly she winced as the liquid burned her throat. ‘What’s this?’
‘Dutch courage... Brandy actually. Not very good brandy to be fair but the best I could find in a hurry. It’ll help to calm you down. Try to breathe deeply between sips.’
‘I can’t breathe. That’s the problem.’
‘I’m not surprised.’ Then he slanted her a knowing glance as she tried and failed to sit comfortably. ‘How tight are those stays?’
The heavy silk brocade costume was an homage to Mozart, made especially for Charity from her own design which borrowed a great deal from the era of Marie Antoinette. A fashion which she had always thought romantic and theatrically glamorous, with fluted three-quarter sleeves, padded hip panniers and acres of underskirts. It also had a long, painfully stiff conical bodice which she had had Lily lace her into within an inch of her life to give her the tragic French queen’s exaggerated silhouette. The long whale bones now dug into her hips and constricted her ribs. ‘Perhaps a little too tight.’
He stood and helped her up, turned her briskly by the shoulders, and to her complete surprise began to unlace the back of her gown. ‘What on earth do you think you are doing, Griffith Philpot?’
‘I am saving you from yourself, Charity Brookes, before you pass out.’ Which she had to concede was still a very real possibility. ‘So hold still, you daft minx. You’re trussed up like a ham. It’s a wonder you’re not purple.’
Within seconds, his clever fingers had loosened it all, allowing her to fill her lungs properly for the first time since she had put the garment on. Then, tugging her this way and that, he did it all up again, only this time there was a good inch of breathing space between the rigid bodice and her ribs. To be certain, he briefly slipped his hand down the back of the dress between the laces and her bare skin and created a wave of goose pimples which spontaneously erupted down her spine in the process. ‘Now isn’t that much better?’
She nodded dumbly, too flustered by the strange effect he was having on her to speak.
He helped her sit back down and ordered her to sip the brandy while he poured water into the wash bowl, dunked in one of the soft muslin cloths that she used to removed her stage make-up and then ruthlessly wrung it out. However, instead of handing it to her to allow her to remove it all herself, he knelt before her and gently dabbed her skin in specific places, almost as if he were repairing rather than eradicating all the paint. As the cloth came away with the dark smudge of kohl which had obviously run from her eyes and her racing pulse finally slowed, she suddenly noticed the noises from the theatre were unchanged.
‘Why isn’t everyone leaving?’
‘Because I told the stage manager you were having a catastrophic ringlet crisis and would be ten minutes late. As usual.’
She slapped the washcloth away. ‘You are supposed to be taking me home, Griff!’
‘I am supposed to be looking after you as I promised your father faithfully I would.’ His hands covered her shoulders and he gave them a friendly shake. ‘You don’t want to go home, Charity, not really, and to be frank, I am not going to allow it as I know you’ll never forgive yourself if you did.’ He sat back on his heels and smiled.
‘There are five hundred people out there waiting patiently to hear you sing. They will happily wait all night if they need to because they know it will be worth it and you mustn’t succumb to an uncharacteristic moment of panic and disappoint them. You can do this, Charity.’ He shook her shoulders again, staring deep into her eyes, his face so close to hers she could count every jet-black eyelash that ringed them. Notice the flecks of copper and gold in his dark eyes.
‘You’ve wanted this since you were a little girl. A stage all to yourself so you can show the world what you’re made of. I know you are scared. I know too that you are currently a bit overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of it all, but you can do this, Charity. You were born to do it. And I would never forgive myself if I allowed a silly moment of panic to ruin all of your dreams.’
‘I am not a solo performer. Trying to follow in my mother’s footsteps was stupid.’ Because his brown eyes seemed to see right into her soul, she stared into the brandy instead, ashamed to be so exposed and so helpless yet unable to hide it. ‘I can sing well enough—but I am no Roberta Brookes.’
‘That’s true. You are no Roberta Brookes.’ His finger tilted up her chin and forced her to look at him. ‘You are better. When she sings it leaves me breathless. When you do... I am left entirely undone.’
It was the first com
pliment he had ever given her, and it left her entirely undone too. ‘For a man so stingy with his praise, that was rather pretty, Griff.’
‘I have my moments.’ He grinned. It suited him. It made those dark eyes sparkle and her pulse step up a notch further. ‘Now go patch up your makeup and fix your hair, woman. That’s an order and one your father stipulated you had to obey, remember?’
‘There are five hundred people out there.’
‘Twice as many as you sang to in Stilton, and three times as many as you performed to in Cambridge and you left them all in raptures exactly as you will here.’
‘But what if...?’ His finger touched her lips and they instantly tingled with awareness.
‘You are the indomitable, intrepid, incomparable, infuriating and invincible Miss Charity Grace Brookes. When you walk on to that stage, any what, buts or ifs will become moot because you will own it. Exactly as you always do.’ He tugged her up as he stood and pushed her towards the mirror. ‘You have five minutes.’
He watched over her, arms crossed and foot tapping impatiently as she patted on powder and applied fresh kohl. As soon as the last bit of rouge was reapplied to her lips he grabbed her hand and marched her out of her dressing room and, without pausing, directly to the wings. Then with a nod to the stage manager he spun her to face him, his hands holding hers, his thumbs idly caressing her palms and playing havoc with her pulse.
‘I’ll be right here if you need me—right here, I promise—but you won’t.’ Then he tugged her close and kissed her mouth.
Brief, unexpected and potent.
So brief and swift Charity supposed she shouldn’t read anything into it, but nowhere near brief enough to be brotherly and much too potent to be meaningless. ‘Now go. Blow them away, my darling. Leave them breathless.’
And with a firm push, she found herself walking on to the stage at the exact same moment as the curtains parted and the audience erupted with applause, her fingertips touching her lips where the taste of his still lingered and every nerve ending suddenly alive as they had never been before.
Chapter Six
He shouldn’t have kissed her.
It had been a reckless, impulsive and foolhardy thing to do but at the time he had been powerless to stop it. Griff had never seen Charity vulnerable before. Not once in all their seventeen-year relationship. She had always oozed confidence. Too much, truth be told, even as a child. Even then she had been the risk-taker of the five of them. The adventurous and forward one who would stride into any situation as bold as brass and deftly turn it to her advantage. But seeing her like that somehow made her more human and like a knight of old, and her sworn knight errant he’d had to protect her. Both for her sake and for his. It had felt natural to do so. To step in, keep her safe and see her right. And perhaps he had been doing exactly that since his return too? After another sleepless night of soul searching, made so much worse by the after-effects of that kiss, he was coming to realise he had been inadvertently wandering down this path for quite some time.
If he was being completely honest with himself, which he was because he was of the firm belief he had to understand his feelings to be fully able to conquer them, he had only gone to Sheffield to try to forget her. She had been eighteen then to his two and twenty, and finally old enough to attend all the same social functions. In true Charity fashion, she had burst into society from the outset, effervescent, beautiful and charming, and the men had fallen at her feet. Because of the close family connection, he couldn’t and morally wouldn’t be one of them, so seeing her flirt and dance with all those other men had sent him spiralling into irrational rage at every turn. He knew now that was mostly jealousy, tinged with a large dose of possessiveness which was completely unreasonable, and all of which he’d had to bottle inside.
Except he hadn’t bottled it all inside because those chaotic emotions had been too powerful to contain completely and he had taken them out on her. He’d been judgemental, critical, argumentative and disapproving, and their previous teasing, sparring, playful relationship had deteriorated. And that had killed him. Sheffield had given him a reprieve from all those draining, confusing and toxic emotions and while he had never managed to relegate her completely to out of sight and out of mind, the powerless feelings of anger and misplaced jealousy had subsided.
Since his return, they too had returned with a vengeance and had coloured his relationship with her all over again. In fact, he’d been worse this time around. He could see that now. He could also see that it was unreasonable to be irrationally furious at a woman who was ultimately just being herself and who had no idea that she affected him so.
‘Working again, Griff?’ His head snapped up at the sound of her voice and instantly his breath caught in his throat. ‘Why didn’t you visit the cathedral with the others? Isn’t Sunday supposed to be a day of rest?’
His sister was attending the morning service at the cathedral and was using that as an excuse to explore the soaring Norman edifice which dominated the city after the sermon was done. He had dispatched Lily and Evan as her chaperons the moment he had learned Charity was staying in bed instead, and set up camp in their private dining room, laying out all his work on the table more as a prop than an intention in case anyone saw fit to challenge his motives.
‘I thought I would take advantage of the quiet to finally get to grips with these diagrams.’ A blatant lie when he was standing guard over her again. She had been visibly exhausted beneath the exhilaration of last night’s successful performance, and that too had come as a shock. He hadn’t realised how hard she worked to put on such a show and had never considered the mental and physical toll two hours of keeping the audience in the palm of her hand took. From the stalls and from up in the gods, he had only ever seen the polished final product, but from the wings he could see the work which went into every perfect note and he had watched her smile drop and her shoulders slump as the curtain fell during the interval. Beneath the make-up, he could see the fatigue and the sweat as Lily had bustled on to the stage to assist her off it, taking the weight of the heavy skirts so that the tired Charity could walk off.
Then, while the masses laughed, drank and refreshed themselves awaiting the second half, the performer was redressed and repaired at such speed there was barely time for her to gulp down some water before she was thrust on to the stage again. By the end, she was dead on her feet and surprisingly subdued on the short carriage journey back to their inn, more relieved the ordeal was over than basking in the glory of it as he had expected. She had been pale, drawn and obviously spent.
Vulnerable again and that tugged ruthlessly at his heart strings.
Thanks to the whole morning’s extra sleep, none of that was visible on her lovely face, and without Lily’s ministrations, her golden hair was pinned loose in a simple bun which allowed him to see that without the artful ringlets she usually sported, it naturally fell in soft waves which he decided there and then he much preferred.
‘No practising this morning?’ Every morning without fail on this trip he had heard her ethereal voice drifting down the hallway of whichever inn they happened to be staying in. Strange breathing exercises and noises were always followed by twenty minutes of scales before she sang at least one whole song all the way through and he had wrongly assumed she would have done the same today so he could mentally prepare himself for seeing her.
‘I never practise on a Sunday. Nor does my mother. Signor Fauci is adamant that a voice must be rested at least one day a week—even in the midst of a run of performances. He would kill me if he knew I had defied him.’
‘Who the blazes is Signor Fauci?’
‘Our singing teacher.’
‘You sing brilliantly already and your mother has been doing it for ever, so why on earth do the pair of you still have a singing teacher?’
‘For technique. Essential critique. To correct any mistakes or bad habits and to continu
ally improve. An operatic performance must appear effortless. Every note has to sound seamless no matter how long you have to hold it or how much that hurts. The very last thing a singer wants is to show any exposed cracks in that façade. The audience must be completely convinced by the performance, not what goes on behind the curtains—both literally...and figuratively.’ Her eyes clouded despite her smile and they both knew that she wasn’t just referring to operatic technique. Last night, he had seen a little of the Charity who hid behind the curtain and she was supremely uncomfortable about that. ‘And, of course, practice makes perfect, after all.’
To his ears and eyes, she was already perfect, perhaps more so now that he understood her better. Not that he would mention last night unless she did, and even then he would brush it off to maintain the status quo. That was safer. ‘Surely you can hear any mistakes you make for yourself?’
She covered her relief at his less personal, safer question with a pitying look. ‘The first rule of singing well is to never trust your ears because if you are listening intently to yourself you aren’t really singing at all. Signor Fauci insists that I feel the music as that is a much better gauge.’ At his baffled expression she shrugged and lowered herself into the chair opposite his, far too close for comfort. ‘You feel the sounds, Griff—the way they vibrate inside your head or against your teeth. The way they tug on a particular muscle in your body.’
‘Like the diaphragm.’ His smugness at knowing something about her craft soon disappeared when she shook her head as if he were an uneducated and uncultured idiot and the sanctuary of their status quo was restored.
‘The diaphragm is a breathing muscle, Griff, not a singing muscle. The singing muscles are lower, buried in the pelvis.’ He didn’t want to think about her pelvis because it housed other things alongside her singing muscles and none of them he needed to think about. ‘But I digress...’ Thank God! ‘A singer’s body reacts to different sounds in different ways, so you need to recognise exactly what happens when you are singing at your best. For example, in the final cadenza in “Deh vieni, non tardar...”’
How Not to Chaperon a Lady--A sexy, funny Regency romance Page 5
