by Mary Balogh
Lydia had not heard any of this from anyone in the village, though a number of people understandably talked about him, wondered about him, and speculated. Most people here could remember him as a boy, son of the Earl of Riverdale, being brought up to take his father’s place one day. People remembered his mother, the countess, with respect and affection. They remembered him and his sisters in the same way. And it had always seemed to Lydia that they held Major Westcott in the same high esteem now as they had always done in the past even though he had lost everything, even his legitimacy. But no one, she suspected, knew many inside details of his life now, even though they frequently met him at various social events.
She felt touched, privileged, at what he had told her. He must trust that she would not go about the village blabbing to their neighbors. For despite his friendliness with everyone, he kept himself very private and well hidden behind that mask of cheerful amiability. Though it was not really a mask. There was nothing false about it.
She knew all about masks from her own experience. Nobody here—or anywhere—really knew her. Even her new women friends. Even her father and her brothers. She knew what it was like to project an outer image—quiet, self-effacing modesty in her case—and keep almost everything that was her to herself.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I must be sounding very self-pitying. And very self-absorbed. It is your turn. One thing has been puzzling me since last evening. You told me how protective your father and your brothers were as you grew up. You told me how your late husband came to your house at the invitation of your older brother, and how he courted you and then married you. You mentioned that a few other potential suitors had come there before him. But why is it, since you are the daughter of a gentleman of property and fortune who is therefore, presumably, a member of the ton—why is it you were never taken to London for a come-out Season, Lydia? Or were you?”
“No,” she said. “My father and brothers love nothing more than to reminisce about the bold exploits of their youth and the wild oats they sowed, though I suppose I only ever heard strictly expurgated versions of those stories. However, it was those very memories that worked to my disadvantage. They were united in their determination not to expose me to all the wickedness that existed in the world beyond our doors—and they knew all about that wickedness. It was all really quite funny and quite horrible for me. I must be kept away from London and the dangers of a Season there at all costs. One would have thought from listening to them that the balls and parties and masquerades and such for which the spring Season is known were absolute cesspools of vice. They were positively frightened for their dearest Lydie.”
Harry laughed, but he tipped his head to one side and regarded her with what looked like sympathy too.
“They were terrified I would fall prey to rakes and scoundrels and fortune hunters,” she said. “They were not even consoled when my aunt, my father’s sister, offered to bring me out under her sponsorship and supervision. My father quarreled with her years ago when she made what he considered a rash marriage with an unworthy man. I daresay he was afraid she would encourage me to do the like, though on the only occasion when I met my uncle, I liked him considerably and it seemed to me that he and my aunt were happy together. In any case, I had no come-out Season.”
He was leaning back in his chair, one hand playing idly with his cup. “Were you very disappointed?” he asked.
She hesitated. It seemed disloyal to complain, especially when she had never doubted her father’s love for her or that of her brothers. But—he had been honest with her.
“Bitterly,” she admitted, smiling ruefully. “I begged and wheedled. I wept and sulked. I may even have had a tantrum or two. I know I almost made myself ill. I hated them all heartily for a long while and told them so on more than one occasion. None of it did any good. There is no shifting my father when he has once made up his mind on a subject, and my brothers are not really any different. Sometimes, Harry, it is downright painful to be loved.” She laughed softly, though the memories were not amusing ones.
“I know,” he said. “But I am sorry you were deprived of the pleasures of a London Season. It happened to my younger sister too, though for a different reason. Our illegitimacy was discovered just as she was preparing to make her debut. I believe I might have coped with my own situation much better if my mother and my sisters had been saved from suffering. I wish you had not been made so unhappy, and all in the name of love. You must have been full of youthful hopes and dreams.”
Oh, she liked him, Lydia thought suddenly. She had found him attractive for a long while, but she had not really known she would like him too. She did, though. He was a vulnerable man, a fact that made him seem more approachable. He was also a kind man. He seemed to care about other people’s sufferings more than he did about his own. And if there had indeed been some self-pity in his reactions to his own sudden loss all those years ago, it was something he had quickly recognized and fought against. Now her long-ago disappointment over her lost Season saddened him even though it seemed trivial when compared with what had happened to him. You must have been full of youthful hopes and dreams. Ah, and so must he have been.
“It must be lovely to have sisters,” she said, surprised by the wistfulness in her own voice. “Tell me about yours. But please do have some biscuits. I made them specially for you.”
“Since they are ginger, my favorite, I will,” he said, putting two on his plate. “Did you really make them just for me?”
“I did.” Lydia fetched the coffeepot and filled his mug again. “Because you had come here to chop wood just for me.”
Was that a fond look he just gave her? If it was, it passed too quickly for her to be sure. “Camille is older than I am,” he told her when she sat back down. “She used to be the most stuffy, self-righteous, joyless person you could possibly imagine, and she was betrothed to a man who was all those things and more. He dropped her after what my family refers to as the Great Disaster—capital letters, I would have you know. She is now married to an artist and schoolteacher, and they live in a big house in the hills above Bath, running a sort of artists’ school, live-in retreat from the world, performance center, party venue, name it what you will. They have nine children, six of them adopted, three of their own. Camille always looks ever so slightly disheveled and has a tendency to go about barefoot with a child astride one of her hips. The latest adoptees are twin baby girls whom no one else was willing to adopt together. She is as happy as it is possible to be. And more vividly beautiful than she ever was before, I might add. Joel, her husband, is equally happy. If what happened to us was a catastrophe, then it worked out remarkably well for my elder sister.”
Lydia smiled. How wonderful Camille’s life sounded. Chaotic, perhaps, but also wonderfully . . . giving. And it sounded as if she must have a close partnership with her husband.
“And the younger of your sisters?” she asked. “Is she younger than you?”
“Abigail. Yes,” he said. “I am in the middle. Abby married my fellow officer and closest friend in the church here shortly before the old vicar retired and you came with your husband to take his place. It was a marriage of convenience made in haste to enable Gil to get his daughter back from her grandparents, who had taken her just before his first wife’s death while he was away, fighting at the Battle of Waterloo. They were refusing to give her back. The marriage quickly turned into what is now very obviously a love match. They have two sons of their own in addition to Katy, the daughter for whose sake they married. They live in Gloucestershire, where Gil has turned, quite improbably, into a farmer. Abby informed me while I was visiting them after Christmas that she considers her life as close to perfect as it is possible to be. I believe her.” He paused in thought for a moment. “I cannot say I have always considered it lovely to have sisters. I often thought them the world’s worst pests when we were growing up. But I am extremely fond of them now.”
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nbsp; He took another biscuit off the plate. “These are exceedingly good,” he said. “You really need to hide the rest of them, Lydia, or at least move the plate out of my reach.”
Instead she pushed it a little closer to him, and they both laughed.
“Temptress,” he said, but he took yet another before he got to his feet, scraping his chair back over the stone flags of the kitchen floor as he did so. “I must go outside and tidy up and then bring in some wood for your wood box. I see it is almost empty. I will need to get going then. I have promised to accompany my steward to the home farm this afternoon to adjudicate a dispute over whether we need an additional barn or a mere extension to the existing one. I have a hard life, Lydia.”
“You do not need to do anything more here,” she assured him. “You have already done a great deal.”
But he smiled at her and did it anyway. By the time she had cleared the table and washed up their few dishes, all was neat and tidy beyond the window, and he was approaching the house with an armful of wood. She held the back door open as he carried it inside, and then she hovered in the kitchen while he washed up outside again, drew on his coat, and came back to take his leave.
“I do not know how to thank you,” she told him.
“You already did,” he said. “The toast and cheese were just what I needed, and your ginger biscuits are delicious. And you are going to knit me a scarf. But no hat. Please.”
“I promise.” She smiled back at him. “Thank you, Harry.”
He stood just inside the back door, ready to take his leave. Snowball was sniffing his boots. There was a moment when he might have left without further ado, but he hesitated that moment too long and ended up setting his hands on her shoulders instead and brushing the sides of his thumbs along her jaw.
“Shall I return this evening?” he asked her, his voice suddenly low and husky, his eyes very direct on hers.
She felt her smile drain away as she swallowed and licked her lips. Say no. This must not go any further. Say no.
“If you wish,” she said.
“I rather believe I do,” he told her, and his eyes held hers before dipping to look at her lips. He tipped his head slightly sideways and drew her a little closer. Her heart felt as if it were about to beat right out of her chest—and her ears. He looked into her eyes again and then shut his own as he closed the distance between their mouths.
It was a soft, light kiss with closed mouths and no attempt to make anything more sensual of it. A kiss of friends? Lydia felt it all the way down through her insides to her toes as she set her hands on either side of his waist.
Then he was looking back into her eyes, his hands still lightly clasping her shoulders.
“Sometime soon,” he said, “perhaps this evening, I will kiss you properly, Lydia. Or perhaps, in the spirit of independence, you will kiss me.”
It seemed strange that last evening when he had asked her to invite him inside and she had tacitly agreed by leaving the gate open and not looking back, she had expected to go to bed with him. Yet now she felt everything was moving along much too fast. He was so much more . . . masculine than she had expected. So much more . . . real. And so much . . . lovelier. And oh goodness, what had happened to her vocabulary? He was so very . . . likable. What a very weak word.
But could she bear having this man as a lover? When she had conceived the idea, it had been entirely in the realm of dreams. She had wanted a balm to the ache of loneliness that seemed to be a part of her very being. She had wanted something to bring some vividness into her life. She had wanted to live at long last. Yet the dream had been essentially impersonal, perhaps because she had known it stood little to no chance of coming true. She had not known how, in the world of reality, she would feel in his company or when he spoke to her and smiled at her. And touched her and kissed her. It had not occurred to her that the reality would so far exceed the dream that she would be unable to cope with it. How could she have known? She had done so little living despite the fact that she was twenty-eight years old and a widow. Almost all her living so far had been done in the interior world of her dreams.
Could she bear to step beyond dreams into reality?
She was terribly afraid that something would be irrevocably lost if they did become lovers—not only this specific dream but her ability to dream at all. And the tentative friendship that seemed to be growing between them would be lost too, this mutual sympathy and understanding. This very precious something she had never known before with either a woman or a man.
Oh, she had opened some sort of Pandora’s box a little over a week ago and had no idea what she had unleashed.
“Perhaps,” she said. Perhaps she would let him kiss her tonight, she meant. Perhaps she would kiss him, though that at least seemed unlikely. She would not know how to go about it—strangely, when she had been married for six years.
She liked his grin. It came slowly now. It was so much more boyish than a simple smile. It set his eyes alight and showed just where laugh lines would settle into their outer corners as permanent wrinkles when he grew older.
“Until this evening, then,” he said, releasing her and turning to the doorway. “Snowball, why are you growling now of all times? I am leaving.”
“I think it must be for that very reason,” Lydia said. “She is sorry to see you go.”
“I have made a conquest of at least one of the ladies in this house, then?” he said. “And, heaven help me, it is the dog.”
Lydia laughed as he stepped outside and strode around the corner of the house on his way out. She hoped very much that no one would see him cross the road. Had anyone heard the axe all morning? It would surely have been very obvious to anyone who had that she was not the one doing all that chopping.
She wandered outside to eye the neat pile of chopped wood with satisfaction and stooped to pick up one small stick he had missed when tidying. It was as she was straightening up that Snowball began dashing along the line of the back fence again, yapping. Two hands clutched the top of it, and a head from the nose up appeared between them, peering over and down at the woodpile.
Both face and hands disappeared in a hurry. But they did not vanish before she had identified the intruder.
Jeremy Piper.
Annoyance at his cheekiness, however, was soon replaced by a feeling of enormous relief that he had not come slinking by any earlier. Five minutes ago, for example, when she had been standing just inside the open door being kissed by Harry Westcott.
Take warning, Lydia. Oh, take warning. You are playing with a terrible danger.
Seven
By the time Harry returned from the farm late in the afternoon, having settled the dispute over the barn by suggesting that repairs be made to the loft to allow for more storage space and agreeing to an addition larger than originally suggested being added to the back of the building to make more room for the livestock, he felt both sticky and grimy and sent word to his valet to prepare a bath for him. While he waited for the water to be heated and carried up to his dressing room, he went into the library to look through the day’s mail.
There were two personal letters, one from his cousin Jessica, whom he had not seen since her marriage two years ago to Gabriel, Earl of Lyndale. He had been present for their wedding when, quite coincidentally, he had been making one of his rare visits to London to be measured for a new coat and boots after his valet had warned him that the old ones would simply fall off from sheer old age one of these days. The other letter was from Aunt Matilda, Viscountess Dirkson, his father’s eldest sister. He sat down behind his desk to read.
Jessica’s letter was full of enthusiastic descriptions of her life in the north of England. She was a few years younger than Harry. She and Abigail had always been very close friends. As essentially an only child—Avery, Duke of Netherby, her half brother, was years older—Jessica had always adored all three of her cousins, and
they had been dearly fond of her. One paragraph of her letter was devoted to details about Evan, her one-year-old son. They were going to London soon for the parliamentary session and the Season, she reported. Was Harry going to be there too? Jessica hoped so. She had missed seeing him at Christmas.
He had missed her too, Harry thought as he folded the letter and set it aside. And the rest of the Westcott family also, much as he had been relieved not to have to go to Brambledean for Christmas. But no, he was not going to London. Not this year. He knew what would almost surely be awaiting him there if he did—thirtieth birthday celebrations, for example. No, thank you, Jessica, he thought.
Aunt Matilda and Viscount Dirkson, her husband of four years, had just been on a visit to Gloucestershire to see three of their grandchildren, whom they had missed dreadfully over Christmas, though it was perfectly understandable that Abigail and Gil had wanted to spend the holiday in Bath. Gil Bennington was Viscount Dirkson’s natural son. The two had been estranged through most of Gil’s life until a few years ago but had edged warily about each other for a while after Abby and Gil’s wedding and during the court case over the custody of Katy. Father and son seemed now to be cautiously fond of each other, due in large part to the influence of Abby on the one side and Aunt Matilda on the other, Harry suspected.
Everyone was well and thriving, his aunt reported, though of course Harry would know that since he had seen them all for himself very recently. Both fond grandparents—and totally unbiased, of course, Harry—were agreed that Ben was the most gorgeous baby ever, while Seth was the most gorgeous infant and Katy the loveliest little girl. Harry chuckled. Aunt Matilda had married late in life and was very obviously extremely happy. Even exuberant. Who could ever have predicted it?