by Eloisa James
Lavinia spent every day of the next week in the sewing room. When possible, she joined the family for the evening meal, trying to avoid Parth’s eye, trying to stay awake, thinking through the progress they’d made.
On the tenth evening, she sent everyone away at twilight before she sat down by the window and examined every stitch of the sewing done during the day. She fixed a ruffle, and sewed in an extra spangle.
Annie came and implored her to come dress for dinner, but Lavinia sent her away so she could finish tightening the thread holding an amethyst to the center of a rose. Standing up, she realized that one rose was slightly off-center, so she sat down again. She was biting off a piece of thread when she heard the door open.
“Annie, I told you—” she began, and looked up.
It wasn’t Annie.
Parth was standing in the doorway. As she blinked at him, surprised, he entered the room and closed the door behind him. “Am I likely to find you here at all times of the day and night?”
“Certainly not,” she said. But her voice was uncertain.
He reached out and carefully took the length of silk she held, part of the wedding dress’s hem, and let it fall. It slid back to the floor with the luscious sound of thick silk.
“Please,” she said. “I—”
He drew her to her feet, and the rest of the sentence died on her lips. There was a look in his eyes . . .
“Did you return in order to tell me how beautiful the wedding gown is? Because you unaccountably forgot to mention it the last time you visited this room,” she said, babbling.
“It’s exquisite,” Parth said, his eyes on her, not the gown.
Lavinia chose to be amused by his intent expression, because the other option was to be unnerved. “Let me guess,” she said lightly. “Lady Knowe sent you to fetch me for dinner.”
“Dinner is well under way. Ophelia is overseeing a rip-roaring discussion of the virtues of something called Syrup of Capillaire, which Aunt Knowe considers a fountain of youth, and the duchess believes to be useless. The younger set is arguing over the relative merits of a play called The Road to Ruin. Jeremy is getting drunk. Again.”
He turned down the Argand lamp and pinched out the candelabra she’d lit for close work. “We don’t want your gorgeous confection to catch fire.”
Gorgeous confection?
Their eyes met as he turned back.
“Do you really consider the gown beautiful?” Lavinia asked, her voice rasping as she realized just how much she had longed for his approval.
“You took my pedestrian lace and used it to create a work of art. Those spangles are genius.”
Lavinia’s smile came from her heart. She had taken two hours to choose spangles with a rosy tinge rather than a silver one.
Parth leaned down and bumped his nose against hers. “That magnificent wedding dress is North’s announcement to society. It will inform the world that Diana is not a governess, but a lady.”
She leaned back and laughed. “Did you just rub noses with me?”
“It’s a family habit.” His eyes were so dark that she couldn’t see his expression now that most of the candles were extinguished. “When I first arrived at the castle, I was unsettled, and Aunt Knowe taught me how to rub noses.”
“How old were you?”
“Five. That afternoon, she taught me, North, Alaric, and Horatius to bump noses and by the end of the first hour, we were brothers.”
“I understand that feeling,” Lavinia said, quirking a smile. “Willa joined our family at age nine, and I was never happier.”
“We are both fortunate.” He slipped a hand under her arm and drew her toward the door. “Time to eat.”
In that instant, an overwhelming fatigue descended on Lavinia like a heavy woolen blanket. Even her head felt heavy, as if it might fall from her neck. “I fear I am too tired to join the family this evening.”
“You haven’t joined us the last four nights,” Parth observed. He glanced down at her, and walked faster. “I’m taking you to the Solar.”
“The Solar? What is that?” Lavinia stopped. “I’m not a substitute for Elisa.”
“You are not a substitute for anyone.”
“You know what I mean,” she said, her protest sounding feeble even to herself.
“No, I do not.”
Before she could collect her thoughts, he began moving forward again.
“The Solar is not far. It’s at the top of a tower constructed by a Wilde ancestor back in the 1400s. The castle was simply built around it.”
Lavinia cleared her throat. “I’d prefer—”
“If I allow you to return to your room, you’ll fall onto the bed and not wake until morning.”
Lavinia saw nothing wrong with that idea.
“Don’t bother,” he said, when she opened her mouth. They reached the end of the corridor and he pulled open a heavy oak door, carved so that it rounded outward, matching the curve of the stone wall.
Lavinia walked through and Parth bent his head to follow.
“Watch your feet.” A flickering lamp attached to the wall illuminated shallow stone steps that spiraled upward.
Lavinia sighed, looking up. Then, feeling a movement behind her shoulder, “No, Mr. Sterling, you have done enough carrying of me for one lifetime.” She began to climb.
Parth was that sort of man. One who rushed around picking ladies up, who summoned doctors and barked about lung infections. “Too protective for his own good”—wasn’t that what Lady Knowe had said?
They reached a small landing, with an arched doorway on the left and the steps continuing on the right.
“Keep going,” Parth said when Lavinia paused. Her head was starting to throb and her limbs were heavy.
“No,” she said, turning around.
He looked at her.
“I want to go to bed. I’m exhausted.”
“Lavinia, please allow me to feed you?”
She shook her head. “I appreciate the thought; it is very considerate of you. But I simply cannot climb another spiral of stairs. It’s making my head ache.”
His mouth curled into one of those reluctant smiles that he offered so infrequently.
“Why don’t you smile more often?” she asked impulsively, too weary to guard her tongue. “It suits you.”
This time his smile was slow and deliberate, but the gleam in his eyes was anything but amused.
Lavinia shook her head. “Forget I said that. Now I really must go to bed, Parth.”
“Appalling Parth,” he said.
“No, Kindly Parth.” She moved to the side. “You join the others, and I’ll just slip away. You will give them my apologies, won’t you? I’d love to see the Solar tomorrow.”
“I’m feeling appalling tonight,” he said. The thoughtfulness in his voice made her narrow her eyes at him, just as he scooped her into his arms.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” she cried.
He paused and bounced her in his arms, as one might bounce a colicky infant. “You are still too slight. I remember exactly how you felt in my arms two years ago when I first picked you up.”
“Oh,” she said, disconcerted. “Put me down, please.”
“I return to the memory at night, in my bed,” he said in a conversational tone, and continued upward. And, without pausing for breath: “Once you’ve seen the Solar, if you wish to return to your chamber, I’ll take you there.”
He thought about her at night? About her in his arms? Lavinia held her breath, hoping that the shock she felt wasn’t reflected in her eyes. Abruptly, she wasn’t tired at all. Every sense prickled alive. Parth smelled of fresh rain, and his coat caressed her cheek with its slightly rough texture.
His words hung in the air, punctuated by the sound of his boots striking ancient stone as he climbed. She had to say something. But what? I thought of you at night too?
Absolutely not. She wanted to look up at him, but for almost the first time in her life, she found herself in
the grip of a paralyzing bout of shyness.
Parth kept climbing, as steadily as if she weighed nothing. She closed her eyes, just for a second, enough to luxuriate in the power of the arms around her. Slowly she let herself relax against his chest. It felt like heaven. Too heavenly. His body was warm and solid.
Her mother’s illness left her with a longing for security. That was the only reason she was so drawn to Parth. It wasn’t the first time she’d told herself that, and perhaps it wouldn’t be the last.
The steps wound around again, and they had reached the top. Soft light poured through an open door.
“Put me down,” she whispered. “I don’t want anyone to see.”
“No one will see,” he promised. “My family is still in the dining room.”
Now she thought about it, the Wildes could always be heard if they were gathered nearby, like a parliament of squawking ravens, whereas the tower was silent.
Parth carried her through and set her on her feet, then said nothing, giving her time to take in their surroundings. They stood in a circular stone room on whose halls hung eight narrow tapestries, at least ten feet tall. Each glowed a clear celestial blue, and each blue expanse was strewn with snowflakes.
She wrapped her hand around Parth’s arm. “It’s snowing, but in wool and silk!”
The smile on his lips was reflected in his eyes. “Take a closer look.”
Lavinia went to the nearest tapestry and looked more closely.
“These are among Lindow’s greatest treasures.” Parth’s deep voice came from behind her shoulder.
“I thought they depicted falling snowflakes,” Lavinia whispered, awed. “But they are angels. This is a work of art. The most beautiful tapestry work I’ve ever seen.”
She looked up and around the room. The angels hovered and rose and floated around them. Like snowflakes, they swirled alone, in pairs, in small eddies.
“It’s unbelievable,” Lavinia breathed.
Parth crossed to the fireplace. “May I introduce you to some particular angels?”
He had moved a lamp to the end of the mantelpiece. When she joined him, he gave her a lopsided smile and gestured toward the tapestry. To the left of the mantelpiece were two angels, hand in hand.
She bent closer. One of the angels had dark eyes instead of blue, and his—her?—skin was golden rather than snow white. “My parents,” Parth said softly.
“My mother,” he added, a finger gently touching the angel’s halo. “I suspect that Aunt Knowe achieved that effect by dabbing her face with tea, though I have never inquired.” Then, after a pause, “Though I have a miniature of my parents, I don’t truly remember what my mother looked like.”
Lavinia’s heart turned inside-out at the expression on his face: rueful and loving. She reached out and wrapped her hands around his.
“Aunt Knowe brought me here after the news came that my parents had died, a couple of years after they sent me to England. They had died of a fever.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, tightening her fingers.
“I was seven. I decided that if I’d been there, I might have been able to save them.”
“Oh, dear,” Lavinia said, remembering his penchant for doctors.
Parth’s mouth twisted with recognition of the thought she hadn’t spoken. “It mucked with my head and turned me into a pain in the arse, or so Aunt Knowe says.”
Lavinia nodded and decided that if there was a next time, she’d allow Parth’s doctor to listen to her chest, even if she was perfectly well.
“She brought me here the following day and told me that two angels had appeared where no angels had been before. These two.”
Lavinia felt giggles rising in her chest. “I adore Lady Knowe.”
“As do I. It took me years before I questioned why my parents had chosen to predict their angelic fate on a hundred-year-old tapestry.”
“Were you an only child?”
He grimaced. “I had a younger brother who died with them. I suppose if he’d made it to five years old, he would have been sent here as well.”
“I am so sorry,” Lavinia said.
He moved restlessly. “I lost a brother I never knew—and never shed a tear for—and then lost Horatius, an adopted brother. I still have an occasional self-pitying wallow when Horatius comes to mind. He was impossibly arrogant, but he was ours.”
Lavinia obeyed impulse and stepped up to him, leaving whatever happened next up to him. She was offering silent consolation, but given his nearly married state, she couldn’t kiss him.
Perhaps “nearly married” was an exaggeration.
Yes, definitely an exaggeration, because Parth proved himself to be the sort of man who seized an opportunity.
One arm closed around her back and drew her close. A breath of warm air touched her cheek before their lips came together, as if kissing was something they had practiced with each other.
They kissed as if they had practiced this kiss, this silent kiss that had a taste of lost brothers, a note of sorrow and love tangled together. They kissed until sorrow was lost in a slow bubbling of desire. And they didn’t stop until her breath was ragged and her body was trembling all over. Still, he didn’t let her go.
They took breaths now and then, their eyes meeting, and then, silently deciding not to address it, eyes closing as they dove back into the kiss. This kiss had nothing to do with their kiss in the rain, or the one in Vauxhall.
This one was slower and somehow more in the body. Lavinia felt everything, the slide of Parth’s tongue, and the way his hand clamped on her back, the faint rasp in his throat, the fact that she wasn’t the only one trembling.
When he finally pulled back, she leaned toward him, her brain having dissolved into a hungry fog.
He rubbed his chin, staring at her. At some point in the last thirty . . . forty minutes, his mouth had wandered from her lips and stroked her jaw. Her throat. Her cheekbones. Her ears.
She could feel a faint echo, a prickle, in all those places. The room was quiet but for the crackling of the fire. He couldn’t be marrying Elisa. Surely he would ask Lavinia for her hand—
“Are you hungry?”
“That’s your question?” Lavinia blurted out. She felt a wash of pink spreading over her cheeks.
Parth’s gaze moved over her face, and a gleam of laughter shone in his eyes. “Have I made a faux pas, in that kisses are to be followed by proposals?”
Lavinia twitched. He made it sound as if she’d experienced any number of kisses and proposals. Which she had, but none of them was . . . that. That sort of kiss.
No man had ever jested about the proposal either. Typically, they had followed a kiss by looking deeply into her eyes and imploring her to marry them. Parth was breaking that mold. She was being teased, not cruelly, but with a touch of humor.
“I accept proposals only between seven and nine o’clock in the morning,” she said. “Kisses affect my judgment. One wouldn’t want to make a decision on the basis of something so . . . inconsequential.”
Hopefully, she sounded nonchalant, even indifferent. Not as if she’d felt that kiss to the ends of her toes. Before he could react, she moved to the other side of the fireplace and seated herself at a small table set for supper.
She lifted a domed lid and found a tender side of chicken. Under another, carrot pudding. Green beans, a dish of potatoes. How much investigation of their supper could she do without seeming more of a fool than she already did?
Wine was poured into glasses. She watched through her lashes as he seated himself.
“I said that ineptly,” Parth said, as Lavinia placed a heavy linen napkin, embroidered with the Lindow insignia, onto her lap. Like a coward, she still hadn’t met his eyes.
Parth Sterling, appalling or not, would never kiss her like that if he meant to marry another woman.
Impulsively, in the rain, in the grip of fury, perhaps. Slightly less impulsively, in a dark lane in Vauxhall? Less likely, but . . .
Her
e? He had compromised her. They weren’t in the open now: not in the rain or a pleasure garden. He had kissed her in a private chamber, with no one within earshot.
Whether he proposed now, or at seven in the morning, he would do it. Lavinia’s chest tightened, and she curled the fingers of her right hand around the seat of her chair. She’d have to tell him about her mother’s thefts—
She couldn’t.
“Breathe,” a deep voice said, from the other side of the table.
She gulped air, flustered, her thoughts jumbled.
“You look terrified, and yet I didn’t propose marriage,” Parth said, amusement threading through his words.
Lavinia sipped her wine. “You did so silently.”
He laughed. The sound was so unusual that she looked across the table before she stopped herself. He was just so . . .
He was beautiful.
That was the problem. If he hadn’t been so beautiful, all cheekbones and raw masculinity and that chin, if he hadn’t been beautiful, she might have kissed him once or even twice, and gone her way.
A fork bumped her lips, warm chicken. “Stop worrying.” A whispered order, but an order nonetheless.
She took a deep breath, and Parth used the opportunity to slip the chicken into her mouth.
“You’re hungry, and you need to eat. When I’m deeply involved in a new project, I forget to eat. I become suddenly, tyrannically angry.”
She raised an eyebrow, grateful for his light tone. “Something to look out for, then.”
His smile was satisfied, almost smug. “Yes, loss of appetite is a warning, like a red sky at night.”
They were acting as if . . .
“I haven’t accepted the proposal you haven’t offered,” she stated, needing to assert herself.
“I know that. Eat.”
There was nothing conflicted in his eyes, whereas Lavinia felt as if her stomach was a mass of twisting emotions.
“Please.”
So she did. She put down her head and avoided his eyes, and ate chicken, carrot pudding, and a small salad of baby leaves, lightly seasoned.
