It Happened One Midnight (PG8) (31 page)

You need to care about something,
Violet had said to him, to his outrage.

And now he understood with humble stark clarity what she meant. There were degrees to caring. And depths to his heart that might have very well been left unexcavated for an entire lifetime, if not for Tommy.

“Thank you for coming,” he said to Reverend Sylvaine. Because somebody needed to say it.

“If I helped, I’m glad,” Reverend Sylvaine replied simply.

“Drink?” Jonathan asked.

His father slowly looked at him then, a habitual warning. One doesn’t feed and water one’s alleged enemies was what the expression was meant to convey.

Jonathan didn’t care. Adam Sylvaine might be an Eversea cousin but he’d shot out of bed in the dead of night to pray over his sister, and whether he’d helped at all, Jonathan would be
damned
if he couldn’t give the man a drink.

And furthermore he’d just wed the most improbable woman imaginable, crushing the dreams of a legion of women in Pennyroyal Green and Greater Sussex. And Jonathan understood now something of the courage this must have taken.

He saw Adam hesitate. “Thank you. Brandy, if you have it.”

“We have everything.”

Adam Sylvaine grinned. “I suspect everyone will need a little of everything after tonight. And congratulations to you all.”

Chapter 24

T
OMMY WAS AN ISLAND
in the midst of a sea of ambient noise at the salon. Baritone voices swelled and fell in social rhythms, laughing, lilting, arguing. She drifted among the people there not with intent but with instinct, riding the ebb and flow of conversation like a leaf on a breeze. Her smiles and comments were reflexes. She wasn’t trying at all to charm. She didn’t think anyone particularly noticed.

Image fragments returned to her again and again: Jonathan’s face when he’d departed for Sussex—he’d stared down at her as if he was memorizing her, willing him to memorize him. As if it was the very last time he’d ever see her. His hands on her back when she’d wept into his shirt, the tenderness and strength. The surreptitious touch of his chin against the top of her head, when he’d rested it there. The moment where he’d taken his handkerchief and knocked a crumb from the corner of little Sally’s mouth. His instinct was to protect the vulnerable. She sifted through these moments as if they were jewels in a treasure chest, each moment faceted, dazzling.

Because it was all she had of him; she hadn’t seen him in weeks. He’d devoured her with his eyes, and then he apparently abandoned her completely.

“Miss de Ballesteros.”

Argosy’s voice was suddenly sharper. Which made her realize he’d likely said her name more than once.

She turned to him with some surprise, eyebrows raised. She’d listened to him wax enthusiastically about his new high flyer, and then received a compliment about . . . something. She couldn’t recall.

“He isn’t here,” Argosy said gently.

And all at once the bottom dropped out of her stomach. She stared at him, too stunned to speak, and this in itself was quite damning.

“Forgive me, Lord Argosy, but I’m not sure what you . . .” Her voice was too weak. She heard it, and nearly winced.

“Redmond is in Sussex. Or at least, if he has returned to London, I haven’t yet seen him.”

She gave a nervous little laugh. “Forgive me, Lord Argosy, but I still don’t—”

“You keep looking at the place next to me, as if you expect to find someone standing in it, and when you don’t see him, your face quite loses its light. ”

She was speechless. Imagine, Argosy seeing her as a human for the first time. Her feelings must be transparent indeed if this was possible, and that would never do.

The silence between them became awkward. And yet she could find nothing to say.

He saved her with a little half smile. “You could do worse than Redmond.”

She found she was able to produce a reasonably convincing smile. “I think you’re mistaken, Lord Argosy.”

“I’m not,” he said easily.

She was still too stunned to respond properly. A silence more honest than any of the conversations they’d held so far descended between the two of them. And while Argosy looked at her, she looked down at her slippers. And then she stared at his dazzling buttons, saw her tiny face reflected in them. She gazed unseeingly out over the salon, as if it were the sea.

“Do you know that I lost my first love to Jonathan’s brother Miles?” he said finally. Conversationally. Without a shred of melodrama.

She studied Argosy, whose dark eyes were watching her, not without sympathy. With something akin to wryness.

“Surely I’m not your love, too, Mr. Argosy,” she said gently.

He paused. He seemed to be contemplating what to reply. Such a gloriously handsome man by anyone’s standards, and he likely would become more so as he grew older, and yet he moved her not at all.

“No,” he admitted after a moment. “But one occasionally desires the feeling of romance, without the potential pain of it, and you, Miss de Ballesteros, are intoxicating after the fashion of champagne.”

Ah, that word.
Pain
. It was what leaped out at her from that sentence. It frightened her. It seemed so inextricable from “romance,” as he called it. He’d just delivered a strange compliment, and a truth. She was a pleasant diversion, anesthesia, a way for him to forget. She was that for many of the man here, but they likely had mistaken this for desire. Very like the way Prescott had.

Somehow she wasn’t insulted by Argosy’s statement. She liked truth better than she liked illusion.

She wondered if Argosy understood that romance and love were two different things. Love, she suspected, was warm arms wrapped around you while you wept your loss and humiliation into a man’s shirt. Love was a man throwing himself into the Ouse to retrieve a scrap of metal and fabric that anchored you to whatever family you might have.

At this realization, a light seemed to fill her chest. She wanted to close her eyes to be alone with this newly discovered truth.

She wondered if Jonathan knew that he loved her.

Or even if he did know, what difference it could ever make.

She wondered if that’s why he’d disappeared.

She collected herself. “I am delighted I can help keep your flirtation prowess honed, Lord Argosy, until the day comes when
love
finds you.”

She wasn’t sure if he noticed the distinction she gave the word. He quirked the corner of his fine mouth, as if he doubted the day would come. “Regardless, I expect we shall go on enjoying each other as we were, Miss de Ballesteros.”

“Naturally. Thank you, Mr. Argosy. And you are quite mistaken, you know, regarding . . . Mr. Redmond.”

It needed to be said, even if they both knew she was lying, and Argosy knew she knew that she was lying. It quite simply wasn’t something she could or would ever admit aloud.

“Yes. Just as I’m certain you don’t interest him at all.”

She tried and failed not to smile slowly at that.

And another little silence ensued.

“Would it please you to know that your compliments
are
the finest?” she soothed.

He smiled at that, somewhat mollified. “I have you to thank for the inspiration.”

She twirled her empty glass in her fingertips, and looked away from him.

“Does Mr. Redmond know what a good friend he has in you?” Her voice was low.

“He does. Even if it’s all I can do to tolerate his inexplicable need to make money. I do understand it.”

“From what I understand, he possesses a . . .”

A tall gangly figure had just moved into the room. Every muscle in her body went taut. Prescott didn’t look at her directly, not immediately. Perhaps he hadn’t yet seen her. She watched him speak to others present, watched him as he was deferential and charming to the countess.

She would need to make her escape now.

“Lord Argosy, if you will excuse me?”

And for fifteen minutes she was like her father’s campaign medal bobbing in the Ouse, drifting from conversation to conversation just out of reach of Prescott, again and again. But she felt him on the periphery of awareness like an approaching storm. Not that he intended any destruction. It was just very clear that Lord Prescott was quite full of something, some sort of news, some
intent,
that would very much change her emotional weather.

She hoped it wasn’t more suggestions about her potential sexual prowess.

A woman could only drink so much champagne without needing to visit the loo. And if she did, she would need to leave the room, and Prescott would corner her. But there came a time when she could postpone neither for another minute.

And predictably, as she returned from the water closet, Lord Prescott emerged from the shadows of the small parlor that separated the water closet from where the countess’s guests mingled.

“Miss de Ballesteros. May I have a word?”

She halted, a good five feet from him. Just out of reach of his arms. “Lord Prescott. At least you didn’t leap out at me this time.”

“I never mean to startle. I hope you’ll forgive me. It’s difficult to find a moment to speak with you alone.”

How about that. Then my plan is working.

“I shall be brief,” he said. “I have given some careful consideration to what you said the other day, Miss de Ballesteros. And since my fortune is substantial, and I am not constrained by my family’s requirements, I may marry as I please.”

Constrained by my family’s requirements
. A statement that described Jonathan Redmond rather well. And very unusual for an aristocrat not to be constrained by his family’s requirements.

Then the word “marry” knelled in her mind. She was suddenly paralyzed by what she sensed was about to happen.

“And if my name is what is required for me to partake of the pleasures of your body, Miss de Ballesteros, I should be pleased indeed if you would consent to marry me.”

There was a buzzing noise in her ears.
Marry me, marry me, marry me.

The words seemed to echo, double, reverberate in her mind. I’m going to faint, she thought. Surely this was impossible. Of all the things she’d experienced in her life so far, a proposal from a viscount who was a virtual stranger shouldn’t be the one thing that caused it.

He stepped closer to her.

She couldn’t disguise a reflexive flinch.

The ramifications swarmed her mind like bees. She would be Lady Prescott.
Lady
. She would have endless funds at her disposal, a carriage, servants, fine clothing, an allowance. She would forever be a part of the family tree of this ancient title; likely her portrait would be made and would hang over the mantel of his town house, or one of their country homes, Prescott wearing a self-satisfied expression, his hand resting on her shoulder, their gangly children leaning against his knees. She might even be able to persuade him to use his influence politically, to forever abolish child labor.

No more living in a rickety, thumping building. No more living hand to mouth, from day to day.

No more freedom, and no more excitement, and no passion, and no love.

And the only price for immediate comfort and safety was to lie in bed next to this man, and to submit to being touched by him, and to touching him, for the rest of her days.

To bear his heirs.

To marry this stranger with whom she’d primarily shared flattery and witticisms about the king’s many indiscretions. She scarcely knew him. He of a certainty knew her not at all.

She could hear her own swift panicky breathing now.

One man might have offered her comfort and the shelter of his arms in which to weep.

This man offered her forever.

And if Prescott had asked a month ago . . . If he’d asked the day before she’d encountered Jonathan Redmond at midnight outside the Duke of Greyfolk’s house . . .

Ah, but she was a different woman now. One kiss had changed that.

And a ballroom orgasm.

What made Prescott think she was worth it? She longed to ask. What was it about
her,
in particular? She was aware of her beauty, but then, the ton was filled with beautiful women, all of whom seemed to have danced with Jonathan Redmond at that ball. Was it the fantasy of her, that Argosy had described? The desire to win over all the others that every wealthy men seemed to share?

If only her investment in Jonathan and Klaus’s business had paid off by now.

“Lord Prescott.” Her voice trembled. She cleared her throat. “Your offer honors and humbles me. I am quite bowled over and flattered and quite astonished, truly. I beg of you a little time to consider your proposal.”

He exhaled, and his head went back in some surprise. And he was silent, mulling her. Apparently she’d done the unexpected yet again.

“Very well. But bear in mind that I won’t ask again, Miss de Ballesteros. I know I don’t need to explain to you that offering you my name and title truly
is
an honor and not without some risk to my reputation. I shall expect your reply within a month. Surely that is time enough to . . . weigh your other offers.”