Rose (Flower Trilogy) (34 page)

A few more words, a new sapphire ring slid onto Judith’s finger, and she was clearly and truly wed now, Lady Grenville.

And watching that, Rose knew she wouldn’t wed until she found a love as decent and true.

When Lord Grenville lowered his lips to meet Judith’s, Rose smiled through a sudden film of tears. She wasn’t sure whether they were happy or sad tears . . . perhaps they were a little of both.

“Another wedding,” Chrystabel sighed happily many hours later as she closed her bedchamber door.

Her husband wrapped her in his arms. “Another wedding night.” He kissed her thoroughly before his hands went to detach the stomacher that covered her laces. “Will we be celebrating Rose’s wedding soon?”

“I wish I knew.” The familiar fire burning in her already, she hurried to help him out of his surcoat and the long waistcoat underneath, then tugged at the knot in his cravat.

“I’m fairly certain she won’t be accepting Bridgewater, but that doesn’t mean she’ll end up with Kit.”

Having managed to unlace her gown, Joseph slipped it off her shoulders and down to pool at her feet. “You sound worried, my love,” he murmured against her throat. He placed damp little kisses beneath her chin while his hands skimmed her diaphanous chemise, working the hem up ever higher.

“Our Rose is stubborn,” she breathed, her blood racing while her practiced fingers unlaced his breeches. She pulled away long enough to tug his shirt off over his head, sighing as she ran her palms down his chest, hard and muscled from countless hours spent in his gardens.

He whisked off her chemise and stepped out of his breeches, and they fell together onto their bed, blissfully skin to skin. She wiggled closer, and he smoothed a hand over one bare hip. A heated tremor rippled through her as he met her mouth for a long, hot kiss.

She would never tire of this—never. Of course, she and Joseph were only forty-five and forty-six, not yet old and gray, but she planned on lying with him until her bones creaked—and then some.

Drawing back, he skimmed one long brown curl off her face. “What will you do next to push Rose and Kit together?”

“Nothing.” The fire on the hearth threw his face into shadows and radiated heat onto their naked skin. She traced his beloved mouth with a finger. “I’ve done what I can. The rest is up to them. But with any luck, we’ll have another wedding night before too very long.”

“Ah, Chrysanthemum.” He claimed her lips once again while his hands went to work below, making her head spin with delight. “We’ve no need of a wedding to have a wedding night.”

Judith’s wedding celebration had lasted through the wee hours, so the sun was high in the sky by the time Rose awakened the next day, hearing strange noises beneath her window.

Bangs and scrapes and shouts.

Construction.

Kit.

She rang for her maid. “Hurry,” she said when Harriet arrived. “The purple gown—no, the deep green.” The maid pulled it from the wardrobe and helped her wiggle into it.

“Hurry.”

“I’m going as fast as I can, milady.” She laced Rose up the back.

“Tighter.” Rose wanted to look her best.

Harriet pushed her onto a chair and started combing through her tangled curls. “Whyever are you in such a rush?”

Rose gulped down some chocolate and nibbled on some bread. “I’d forgotten that today is the groundbreaking.”

“I see.” The maid twisted up the back of her hair. “I expect you’re more interested in the builder than the building, hmm?”

Rose didn’t care for the sound of that
hmm.
“Mr. Martyn is just a friend. After the lunacy of Court life, I simply crave a sane conversation.” Kit had always been easy to talk to.

Harriet met her gaze in the mirror. “Hmm,” she said again.

“How is
your
love life?” Rose asked to distract her.

The maid’s freckled face lit with a smile as she chose a green ribbon. “Walter has said he will visit. I believe he will ask for my hand.”

’Twas on the tip of Rose’s tongue to protest, to tell Harriet she had no business getting married when she needed her. But she was feeling expansive this morning. “Where will you live?” she asked instead.

“We’ve not yet decided. Does it matter, so long as you’re together with the one you love?”

Rose’s ebullient mood plunged. Even Harriet was in love. Love, love, love. The world was consumed with love.

In that way, it had been easier to be at Court. At least there she wasn’t constantly reminded just how lacking she was in love. At Court, lust ruled the day—no one else at Court seemed to be in love, either.

Except maybe Nell Gwyn. And Charles’s poor, longsuffering queen.

“Are you finished?” she asked.

“One moment.” Harriet tied the ribbon and stepped back.

“You look lovely, milady.”

“Thank you.” Rose darkened her lashes with the burnt end of a cork and slicked on some lip gloss from a little pot.

She considered a patch or two, but hadn’t the patience. In no time at all, she was downstairs and out the door, hurrying through her father’s gardens.

On impulse she paused to pluck a few colorful blooms, gathering them into a makeshift bouquet. Still arranging them, she rounded the corner of the house.

Was there anything quite so masculine as a man in charge, giving orders? The site of the greenhouse looked chaotic, but somehow, at the same time, Kit seemed to have everything under control.

The air smelled of newly turned earth and freshly cut wood. Kit’s raven hair glinted in the sunshine, and a metal T-square flashed as he used it to point here and direct someone there. He’d spread plans on an improvised table balanced across two sawhorses, and he kept looking down at them and back up.

She positioned herself in front of the table, so the next time he looked up, he’d see her.

“Rose,” he said briskly, then looked back down.

“Kit?”

“Hmm?”

She shifted uneasily, then stepped closer. “Are you not going to ask me if I want a kiss?” she asked, trying to tease one of those glorious smiles from him.

“No.” He waved at a man pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks. “Over there,” he directed, pointing with the T-square. Once again, he consulted his plans. “And you’ve no need to worry,” he added toward the neatly inked lines. “I am not going to ask you to marry me again, either.”

She should be relieved, but she wasn’t. Something was wrong. She held out the bouquet. “I brought these for you.”

“What for?”

“I’m hoping to celebrate your winning the Deputy Surveyor post.”

He finally met her gaze. “I lost it.”

“Oh, Kit.” The flowers fell to the ground as she moved around the table to lay a hand on his arm. “Tell me.”

“There was a problem at Hampton Court.” He glanced down at her fingers, then scanned the bustle of construction and sighed, setting down the T-square. “Wait here a moment.”

Rose watched him cross the site, looking confident as ever as he consulted with a short, hook-nosed man. Kit gestured with his competent, callused hands, and she wondered when she had come to prefer them over the smooth, elegant hands of the aristocracy. He ran one of them through his dark hair, and she wondered when she had come to prefer bold coloring over the pale English ideal.

When he returned, he led her around the house toward the gardens. “ ’Twas structural,” he admitted flatly. Their shoes crunched on the gravel path. “I ordered the building torn down. ’Twas destined to eventually collapse.”

“You could have been killed!” She put her hand to her racing heart, staring at his profile as they walked, imagining her life with him gone and suddenly realizing it would seem empty.

When had their friendship come to mean that much to her?

But the gaze he turned on her was sad, not alarmed. “I was never personally in danger.” He stopped beneath the huge tree her father called his twenty-guinea oak. “I’ll still build it,” he said with a half-hearted shrug that didn’t fool her. He was more upset than he was willing to admit. “But I’ll do it right. And there’s no rush anymore, since I’ve no chance to make Charles’s tight deadline.”

“And that’s why you lost the appointment?”

He didn’t have to answer. His hand slipped into his pocket to grip that little piece of his first building—that tiny symbol of his past success—and in the dappled light beneath the tree, his expression said it all.

Her heart broke for him. “I know how much you wanted that post.”

“I wanted the knighthood that went with it. I was hoping . . . never mind.” Looking more defeated than ever she’d seen him, he dropped to sit on the grass, his back against the massive trunk. “ ’Twas my fault,” he said resolutely, and then almost in a whisper, “but it may not have been my mistake.”

She sat across from him, carefully settling her skirts.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you remember my mentioning that the set of plans at Hampton Court didn’t match the ones I kept with me? It could have been my error reproducing them, but—”

“Someone could have made changes,” she finished for him. “Harold Washburn?”

“Perhaps.” He slipped the chunk of brick back into his pocket. “But I should have been there, checking, double-checking—”

“You had too many projects. You couldn’t be everywhere at once.”

“Which just goes to show that Charles was right to test me, because the Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Works would have many more projects at a time than I’ve had these past weeks.” He pulled one long green blade from the ground and chewed the end, looking pensive. “But I’ve been . . . distracted. It could have been my error. And in any case, ’twas my project. My responsibility. Which was why I had to tear it down even though the problem would likely have stayed hidden for years—”

“Years?” She blinked. “Are you saying you could have finished the project and accepted the post—”

“I couldn’t.” At her frown, he tossed the green blade to the lawn. “Can you not see, Rose? When the building collapsed—however far in the future—people might have died. It could have been the mother of Charles’s children— or his children themselves. And even if it didn’t happen until I was long gone—not only from the project, but from God’s green earth—I couldn’t have lived with myself knowing the possibility existed. Better to lose a post than my honor, my integrity, my very soul.”

And suddenly it came clear. Kit—her dear friend, her almost lover—was the most decent man she knew.

How could she not have seen it? How could she have chased after a title when a better man was waiting right here for her? A man who put others’ safety before his own cherished goals? A man who made her heart quicken with a mere glance and her knees melt with a single kiss?

A man—perhaps the only man—she could honestly talk to about anything.

“Will you marry me?” she asked.

A thundercloud swept over his face. “That is damned cruel.” He scrambled to his feet. “Do you know, Rose, I am usually amused by the way you tend to say whatever comes into your head.” Clearly disgusted, he began to walk away.

“But that was just plain cruel.”

She jumped up and ran after him, grabbed his hand, jerked him to a halt. “I meant it, Kit.”

“What?” He swung to her, glaring.

“You’re the best man I know. I want to be your wife.”

He focused hard on her, searching for the truth, perhaps finding it but unable to believe. “I’ll never be Deputy Surveyor,” he said slowly. “I’ll never be a knight, let alone a baron, or a viscount, or an earl—”

“You’ll be Kit Martyn, the man I love.”

His eyes cleared. The tension drained from his face. He took a step closer, and her heart raced.

“No more kissing other men?”

She might have been offended if he wasn’t suddenly looking at her in that way that made her stomach dance.

“None of them were any good at it, anyway,” she said flippantly.

He threw back his head and laughed. “Do you promise to always speak your mind? I do so love that.”

“Will you kiss me, already?”

The next thing she knew she was in his arms, his lips locked on hers.

And nothing had ever felt so glorious.

They stumbled together toward the summerhouse, more Rose’s idea than Kit’s. “Privacy,” she murmured against his mouth, her lips nibbling his with a skill that threatened to drive him insane.

He might have been the first man she’d enjoyed kissing, but she’d taken to it quickly.

“This is not a good idea,” he mumbled, although he kept going. “If we step through one of those doors”—there were four entrances to the round building—“you’re unlikely to come out an innocent.”

She stopped, linked her hands behind his neck, and leaned back. “Are you telling me you cannot control yourself?”

“Yes. I am but a man.”

“Thank God,” she said enthusiastically, making him laugh.

Making him want to kiss her all over again.

She tasted of triumph when his mouth crushed down on hers, a kiss that sang through his veins. They approached the redbrick summerhouse, moving crablike along the path, until finally they bumped up against an arched oak door.

Kit reached blindly for the latch. “Are you sure?”

“Please.” She fumbled with the knot in his cravat—and Rose was not a fumbler. “You cannot make me wait any longer.”

Though he burned for her, he felt more than a little ambivalent. He’d given his word to Lady Trentingham. “Your mother will be furious.”

“Mum will never know.” Having managed to untie the lace-edged fabric, she kissed the little hollow beneath his Adam’s apple, making his heart thump oddly in his chest.

“Besides, she gave birth to Violet barely six months after her wedding day.” Her words vibrated against his throat.

“She doesn’t believe in waiting for marriage.”

“Oh, I think she does. She said—”

She straightened, alarm widening her eyes. “What? You’ve talked to her about this?”

Kit silently cursed himself for a fool. Her mother had warned him not to tell. “Nothing. Just something I overheard her saying, at Court, I believe, that made me think—”

“We’re betrothed now. Everything is different.”

“I have yet to talk to your fath—”