It Happened One Midnight (PG8) (32 page)

She stared at him. Well. She’d underestimated Lord Prescott. Or perhaps, more accurately, she hadn’t fully estimated him. Simmering beneath that surface was yet another man certain of getting what he wanted. Because he likely always had.

He wasn’t pleased at being made to wait for a decision as momentous as this.

The men who hold the power are all alike, Tommy thought. Astonished when someone cannot be bought.

She jerked her chin up high.

“Thank you, Lord Prescott. It’s helpful to know that your desire for me will expire by a particular date.”

“Much like the desirability of any woman. You of all people should be fully aware that a woman’s bloom doesn’t last forever. Nor does her ability to bear children.”

Threats! How very romantic.

“Thank you for reminding me. It slipped my mind, temporarily.”

He nodded, smiling a little, acknowledging her little barb. “Good day, Miss de Ballesteros. I am not a man without feeling, and I think I shall depart now, to recover from the decidedly ambivalent receipt of my proposal.”

She smiled a little at that.

“Good day, Lord Prescott. Perhaps I should retire, too, to preserve my bloom.”

He bowed and left her, presumably to collect his hat and coat from the footman.

She backed into a corner to wait for him to leave. She couldn’t return to the salon, not in the wake of this. And she closed her eyes, and counted to one hundred very deliberately to prevent herself from thinking of anything or anyone else at the moment.

And she, too, fled, without saying good-bye, and darted on her labyrinthine path home, lest anyone attempt to follow her, find her, know the real her.

Chapter 25

“T
HANK YOU FOR THE
marzipan raspberries,” was the first thing Violet said when Jonathan was finally allowed to see her alone.

He paused. “Are you delirious?” he whispered.

She gave a weak laugh. His beautiful sister looked as though she’d been dragged along the bottom of the Ouse. Damp and white and exhausted and hollow-cheeked. But her eyes glowed, and there was an inner light to her. A sort of private joy. Imagine, a peaceful Violet. It had only taken nearly killing her to do it.

“Are you truly all right, Vi?”

“Yes, I’m fine, or I will be if I lie still for a few days and allow people to wait upon me, but that’s enough about me for now.”

Enough about me
. Words he’d never heard her say in his entire life.

He was about to ask if she felt different now that she was a mother, but she’d just rather answered the question.

The culprit, the baby, was cocooned in white, and making little clucking sounds, waving fists the size of tea cakes. She was almost as formless as a blancmange, with a tiny little nose and mouth. Tremendously solemn blue eyes looked back at him. A thick fluff of dark hair topped her.

He peered down. “I’m your Uncle Jonathan.”

She waved a fist like a maraca and gazed somberly as a clergyman at him.

He tentatively gave one of those little waving fists a finger and she held onto it, like an anemone.

“What is her name?” he asked softly.

“Ruby. Ruby Alexandra.”

“I like it,” Jonathan replied, as Ruby tried out her new hands and squeezed his finger.

“Ow,” he teased her gently.

“Don’t feel too special,” Violet said. “She squeezes everyone.”

He laughed lightly. He allowed Ruby to hold onto his finger. How silky her skin was. What a dangerous, amazing thing it was to be a baby. He suspected Violet and the earl would be the equivalent of having a lion and lioness for parents. This child would be safe and fiercely loved.
She will break hearts
.

“What was all that bit about children and mills, Jonathan, last night? I wondered if
you
were delirious. You sounded rather . . . impassioned. Almost as if you . . .
cared
about something.”

As if this was a condition he’d never before suffered. She sounded insufferably amused.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. And he wanted to admire Ruby. Or rather he studied her curiously, since, if he was being very truthful, she looked more like something that oughtn’t to have left the cocoon yet.

“I’ll be your favorite uncle,” he vowed.

Violet just watched him and smiled knowingly. “It’s a woman,” she announced. And then a thought occurred to her. “Dear God, it’s not Olivia Eversea, is it? But she’s been seen out walking with Landsdowne.”

He snorted at that. And ignored the question. But he rather understood Olivia Eversea. Almost . . . almost rather wished her well. He sent a silent message to his brother:
Lyon, wherever you are. Your woman is out walking with Landsdowne
.

He wasn’t his brother, and thank God for that.

“Vi?”

“Mmm.”

“I’m glad you didn’t die.”

“I love you, too, Jonathan,” she said.

“Will you promise to stay alive while I return to London? There’s something I need to do there straightaway.”

“Of course,” she yawned.

He believed her.

He lightly touched Ruby’s little nose, because it was like a button, and how could he not?

And then he kissed Violet’s cheek and departed.

T
HUD, THUD, THUD.

Tommy winced as Rutherford walked from one end of the room to the other. London on the whole seemed noisier than usual lately. But perhaps that was because her nerves were abraded since Prescott had issued his proposal, and her thoughts were an almost ceaseless cacophony. She tried to read a horrid novel loaned to her by the Countess Mirabeau, and failed, and stared at the swinging pendulum on her little ormolu clock instead. Perhaps she could be mesmerized into some measure of calm.

It was no use. She almost regretted knowing how it felt to be held by Jonathan, because now it was all she wanted. It was the only thing that would soothe her.

A knock sounded on her door. An urgent one.

She nearly leaped out of her skin.

A fancy one. A long complicated one.

She sprung off the settee and smoothed her skirts, scrambled through the passage and down the stairs, and peered through the peephole.

There really was no mistaking the tall figure that stood out there, despite the fact that she could see only from about his second button to his cravat. She threw all the various locks on the door, and swung it open for him.

They stood in dumb silence, absorbing the intoxicating impact of each other on their senses.

His expression when he saw her was at first startled, then rapt, and then relieved. As if there had been a moment when he thought she might have entirely been a figment of his imagination.

He was strangely pale and a little nervy. He plucked his hat from his head.

“May I come in?” he asked politely. When it seemed neither of them would speak.

She stepped back. “I . . . yes. Of course. You look as though you could use some strong tea. Or maybe a whisky.”

“Tea would be grand.” His voice was threadbare. As though he hadn’t slept in days.

She led him into her rooms, and he followed silently.

Where
were
you, she wanted to demand, when a viscount was proposing to me and warning me about my perishable bloom?

She said nothing. She allowed the silence and the tension to speak for her.

He’d done a somewhat perfunctory job of shaving, she could see, and his eyes were shadowed beneath. But he was staring at her with an undisguised fierceness. She would have called it intent.

As though she was the heart of the target.

Eventually, it stole her breath.

She found her voice. “I’ll . . . I’ll make tea.”

“Tommy . . . wait.”

She stopped.

But he said nothing more. He remained motionless, looking about her rooms as if he’d never seen them before. He didn’t sit.

“Jonathan . . . is aught amiss?”

“Amiss . . . Well, first you must congratulate me. I’ve a new niece. Well, my first niece, really. Her name is Ruby.”

Joy surged in her. He knew how much he loved his sister, and a new baby was quite simply a gift.

“Congratulations! My goodness, she’s early, isn’t she? Is she beautiful?”

“She looks a bit like a worm topped with a quantity of dark hair. A little yelling worm with fists the size of tea cakes. Or rather, they look a bit like crumpets. Nose like a button.” He pointed to his own nose.

She knew him well by now. “Ah, so she’s beautiful, in other words.”

The corner of his mouth quirked. “She has pretty eyes. Blue ones. I expect she’ll arrange to be beautiful. Neither of her parents are homely.”

“Blue is an excellent shade for eyes,” she said softly.

He blinked. And the slow smile he gave her then about buckled her knees.

“I know,” he said.

She laughed, suddenly weightless, and the happiness of being near him swelled her close to pain.

Another little silence passed. During which he continued to stare at her with intent.

“And how is her mother?” she prompted.

And here he was quiet for so long she began to worry.

“They called for the vicar.”

Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Not his sister. Not Violet.

She felt the floor begin to move beneath her feet, felt a real terror that something may have happened to someone he loved.

And now she understood he hadn’t wanted to say it aloud. It made it all too real.

She impulsively took a step toward him.

“And he’s an
Eversea,
the vicar is—well, their cousin, really. That’s how certain they were that she was going to die. It was bad, Tommy. Very bad, indeed.”

His voice was a raw scrape.

Her heart lurched. “Oh, Jonathan. And she . . .”

“She lives on,” he said hurriedly, emphatically, as if the more strongly he said it the more true it became. “She is, in fact, beginning to thrive. I expect her to begin plaguing me again shortly.”

She exhaled. “Thank God.”

“Yes, he may have had something to do with it.”

The relief swept through her. She knew as surely as she knew the beat of her own heart how it would have devastated him if anything had become of his sister. And she wasn’t sure how she could not have borne his pain.

How, in a matter of weeks, had his happiness become somehow inextricable from her own?

There was a silence.

“You ought to sit, Jonathan,” she tried gently. “You look a bit . . .”

“Ill-used?” He smiled faintly. “Oh, yes. It’s hard work, sitting amongst white-faced men doing absolutely nothing but bargaining with God, whilst your sister nearly dies in childbirth. I’ve never felt so useless in my entire life.” A faint whiff of bitterness there.

“
Never
think that,” she said with low ferocity. “If only you knew . . . how important you are. How
good
you are. How necessary you are. To the people who love you.”

To me. To me. To me.

She didn’t say those last words aloud.

But he heard it.

They were silent for God only knew how long. Assessing, thoughtful, watching each other.

“I couldn’t imagine a world without her. It was simply impossible.” His voice was abstracted.

The way he said it she knew, somehow, that what he spoke had everything to do with her, too.

Her heart skipped.

“And all I could think, Tommy, was . . . there are all these children, just cast away as if they don’t matter, used up as if they were kindling to fuel a factory. As if they were just that dispensable. And when you consider what it takes just to
get
them into the world . . . and how Sally has this dimple, and how Charlie is so
quick,
and . . . how . . . how can
anyone
just . . .”

He stopped. He took a swift breath and sighed it out. Steadying his emotions.

“Yes,” she said softly. “They
all
matter.”

“Life is short, Tommy. Short and dangerous. A bit like you.”

She gave a startled laugh.

“Tommy . . .” He drew in a long breath. “Enough. There is something I came here to say.”

Slam. Slam. Slam
. Her heart could compete with Rutherford for thudding.

He seemed to be either deciding which words to use, or gathering courage.

She waited. On the precipice of something.

And the silence stretched.

He breathed in, and exhaled to steady himself.

“I’ve dreamed about the feel of your skin every night since I first touched you.”

“Jonathan . . .” she said softly, startled.

“And what it might be like to feel your cerise hair trailing over my naked body.” He took two steps closer to her.

“It’s not cerise . . .”

“Sorrel then,” he said impatiently. “And I think . . . I hope . . .” He paused. “I hope you feel the same way.”

There was much that was unspoken, and she couldn’t blame him. “Love” was a big and terrifying word.

“No.”

He went utterly still. “No,” she continued softly. “I haven’t thought at all what it might be like to lie completely naked beneath you, my legs wrapped round you. Nor have I lost a minute of sleep wondering what your skin would feel like next to mine.”