Like No Other Lover (11 page)

And yet he wanted to go somewhere to hoard the lingering sensation of Cynthia’s hand upon his arm.

He began to move in the reel, reflexively. Cynthia seemed happily immersed in her conversation with the lordling; she was smiling. Argosy’s laugh could be heard over the music. A pleasant enough laugh. Certainly not like Milthorpe’s.

Nevertheless, it grated over Miles’s sense like a hoe dragged over cobblestones.

“You dance very well, Mr. Redmond,” Georgina said. As he’d forgotten to speak.

“And you lie very prettily,” he said. “I dance passably at best. I’m much too large.”

“Oh!” Georgina colored adorably, and he was momentarily charmed and distracted. “Forgive me. I only meant to compliment you. I am no expert on dancing.”

“Forgive me. I should not have teased you. And I
was
teasing you.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. And he’d told his father he could make himself agreeable to a young woman. He
could
, in fact, given fertile ground for flirting: a sparkle in the eye, a tilted head, a clever word—tinder to his match, if you will. And yet he’d felt less like a suitor than a tutor today as they strolled through the grounds of his home.

A girl with her handsome face and appealing bosom ought to be able to flirt, for God’s sake.

He heard Argosy laugh again.

For some reason it made him want to rush over and kick the man.

Pulled like a compass needle, his head turned. He saw Cynthia’s back as she rotated with Argosy touching her. Her dress fell in fluted Doric folds. Her hair was swept up high, leaving a rectangle of luminous bare skin exposed above the line of her dress, which was closed in the back with tiny buttons. He imagined what it would be like to touch his tongue to each pearl of her spine, to touch his lips to the nape of her neck and see the gooseflesh rise, to know her nipples were peaking—

Mother of God.
He sucked in a breath.

“Your home is very beautiful, Mr. Redmond. I’d forgotten just how beautiful.”

With a Herculean effort, he returned his eyes to Georgina. He stared at her. It seemed impossible that someone should be saying something so politely banal to him while Lord Argosy was touching Cynthia Brightly. “How long has it been since you’ve last visited Redmond House?”

“Five years, three days last spring.” She added with unconvincing nonchalance, “I believe.”

“Ah. I remember now. Your hair was in a braid down your back.”
Not wound up like a henge
.

“You remember!” She went pinker. “You raced your brothers across the park on horses. You came in second. Lyon was first. Your horse was brown with white stockings.”

“Ah. Did we race?” He was bemused. He’d been forever racing his brothers then. Coming in second sounded about right.

“Yes. You rode so
well
.”

She said this with such baffling fervor that he didn’t know what to say after that. It occurred to him that she was awkward because her father had ordered her to view
him
in a new context. Or perhaps she
already
viewed him in that context. This was an intriguing possibility.

He really ought to teach the girl to flirt.

Argosy laughed again.

Miles jerked his head in that direction as violently as if the man had struck him.

He blinked when he met a pair of brilliant blue eyes aimed straight at him. Held them for a second.

They both whipped their heads back to their partners.

Lady Middlebough worked out her impatience over the keyboards, thumping them soundly. Never had a reel been so very passionate and expressive.

He would go straight to her after this dance and be between her thighs before midnight. He felt his mood begin to ease.

“I find I am very interested in ledibopreta, Mr. Redmond.” Georgina sounded a trifle desperate.

Miles was startled into giving her the entirety of his attention. He’d never heard that particular word in his life.

Ah. Then he understood.

“Lepidoptera?”
he guessed. Perhaps she’d had wine with her dinner? “Butterflies?”

“Yes. Lep-i-dop-te-ra.” She gave every syllable careful attention. “Butterflies.” Her eyes were aglow. “You spoke of them today at the picnic. A common blue came by.”

It was undeniably pleasant to be looked at by glowing eyes. If a little puzzling.

Certainly this was a place to begin flirting. “Oh, they’ve
beautiful
butterflies in the jungle, Georgina.” His voice acquired an intimate storytelling timbre. “Bigger than your fan. Brilliant as”—
Miss Brightly’s eyes
—“summer skies, or rampion in bloom.”

She giggled helplessly.

He almost sighed. If he could compare Georgina to a butterfly, which one would it be? Not a tropical butterfly: it would be an English one. A dingy skipper, or a brown argus. Uniform in shade, ideally designed to blend into their woodland surroundings.

“My father is terribly interested in all of these things, too,” she said.

Miles was acutely aware of this. “Your father is a man of great intellect and discerning tastes,” he said shamelessly. If only he could teach the man’s daughter to
flirt
.

“I saw a butterfly in our garden the other day and I could not identify it, and nor could Papa. I thought perhaps that you could.”

Argosy laughed again.

Miles’s vision focused on Argosy’s hand on Cynthia’s arm. An unpleasant sensation sizzled along his spine. Like a flame touched to a fuse. He felt a metallic taste in his mouth.

“Perhaps you could describe it to me?” Miles said, scrupulously polite.

Georgina opened her mouth to reply, but Lady Middlebough ended the reel with a great crash of passion then.

Miles didn’t even bow. He left a startled Georgina and strode across the room straight for Lady Middlebough.

And then, to his own astonishment and hers, and to anyone else who witnessed it, he walked right past her and kept walking until he was out of the front door of the house.

“He…might be feeling unwell,” Violet said quietly to the few who inquired discreetly. “The tropical fever returns now and again, you see. He’ll be right as rain soon, straight away.”

The fever hadn’t done anything of the sort in the entire time Miles had been home in England, but everyone nodded sagely and sympathetically. If one was to be unwell, one might as well have a glamorous complaint.

And then Cynthia and Violet went up to bed, and Jonathan, Argosy, and Milthorpe convened over billiards—Milthorpe having assured Cynthia that he’d discussed the target shooting party with Miles.

She hesitated on the threshold of her room. Then ventured over to the window and peered into the corner of it. She knew a peculiar relief that the web was still there and still intact.

Such a fragile way to sustain a whole life: on a web one weaves for oneself.

Then again, it wasn’t much more certain than the way she’d built her own.

She blew gently on the web; it fluttered. The spider scurried forward and then stopped and waved two arms at her, like a gentleman hailing a hackney or a shopkeeper railing at a thieving urchin.

“Sorry to disturb you, Susan.” It pleased her to give the spider a pretty name. “Good night.”

Susan the spider quieted and seemed to regard her for a moment. Then she backed up into her corner and perhaps nodded off. It was difficult to know, given that she was a spider.

Mr. Redmond would likely know.

Cynthia had watched him stride from the room that evening, and she’d felt it almost physically, as though he were pulling her along with him. She pictured him today, steering people away from that grand web.

And she went still, breathless with a rush of understanding: she suddenly saw that Miles Redmond saw the world as little worlds
within
worlds. Everything—spiders, people, plants that ate animals—were both separate and connected, living the intricacies and beauties and violence of life, woven together like a web.

And this, too, was why, even when he was quiet, when he was still, he seemed to contain worlds. To feel
vast
.

Because
everything
matters
, he’d said.

Before he’d abruptly left her.

Cynthia gave her head a toss to scramble him from her thoughts. He’d no right to pry, no right to be angry, no right to touch her as though she was something precious and wondrous and
aflame
, and she couldn’t allow her body to long for him, for she was proud and that way lay disaster, the end of her dreams.

By way of disciplinary action, she went to the wardrobe and took out her reticule. She gave it a shake: it still, of course, scarcely jingled. She reached in her hand to finger her last few pounds.

It was a very effective way to strengthen her resolve.

She squared her shoulders, sat down upon the bed, and like a general reviewing plans for a campaign, trained her thoughts upon Argosy and his fortune and eagerness and flawless good looks and their plans for a visit to the Gypsies, and Milthorpe and his fortune and sincerity and his bray, and considered the shooting party she unfortunately had somehow managed to inspire.

They were scarcely a day into the house party, she thought optimistically. There were almost two entire weeks left. Surely she could captivate
one
of them. She’d captivated Courtland, after all. The richest prize of all.

And because she’d been good and strong, she surrendered to a moment of encroaching weakness.

She closed her eyes and savored for a moment a particular man’s hands on her in the dance this evening, angry and intimate, devastatingly gentle, precise and wondering. She suspected everything he was, everything he thought, everything he felt, was in the way he touched her. In the way he’d kissed her.

Oh, God.

She rested her hand on her own smooth shoulder, as if to recreate the warmth of his hand there. To feel what he might have felt. She felt her eyes burning with a want she’d never before known, and knew she could never, ever afford to indulge.

She took her hand away from her shoulder gently, as surely as if it were his.

Then got into her night rail and burrowed beneath the blankets.

She suspected she had no hope of sleeping the night through.

He’d crunched his way in the dark over the vast circular drive, generous enough to accommodate a battalion of carriages—his mother had visions of the ball to end all balls when Violet was finally wed, and in his youth he’d seen the drive filled before with all manner of conveyances: a ball held for his parent’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, a ball held in honor of Lyon’s majority. Coats of arms of the finest families lined up as far as the eye could see, carriages and cattle washed to a gleam for the occasion, a rainbow of livery on the attending footmen.

There would no doubt be another such ball when he wed Georgina.

He looked up: the rain clouds had dumped their contents and were now parting like curtains on a stage, revealing an achingly clear blue-black sky and a tipped saltcellar’s worth of stars. He thought instantly of brilliant blue eyes gone midnight dark with anger, and a net studded with tiny sparks laid over a dress, and a homely gray cloak and a curtain opening on a performance. Hers.

Every
bloody thing made him think of her.

He gulped in the air, hoping it would be cold enough to hurt and to distract him. Whenever he thought of Cynthia Brightly, breathing became both a struggle and a piercing pleasure.

He spared a thought for Lady Middlebough now, but he couldn’t make his thoughts linger there, because he was on a mission driven by a compulsion he didn’t understand, and he was a man of singular focus.

It was a long walk to the outbuildings, and his valet would cluck over the condition of his boots when he returned, because the pounding rain had turned the earth to mud and he’d track much of it back with him. The stables were, of course, dark. Soft stable boy snores chuffed in the tack room; one of them must have dozed off over the rubbing of oil into saddles and halters. A spaniel—spotted, this one, not liver-colored—that should have barked upon his approach remained stretched like a small snoring rug on the straw between rows of stalls.

It sensed him, lifted up its fine head, thumped its feathery tail cheerfully three times, and flopped again with a contented sigh.

Miles was terribly glad he was so terrifying.

He gave the dog the benefit of the doubt and decided he’d been recognized; he was here just this morning, after all. He thought of Milthorpe, and Cynthia’s kindness to him, and then shied away from the thought, because it made him feel unaccountably fierce and tender.

He decided the dog could earn his keep tomorrow.

He felt about at the stable entrance for the oil lamp he knew hung from a wall hook. With a flint, he lit the wick; it flared instantly into almost too lively a light. He cupped a hand around to filter it and keep the stable boys asleep.

Ramsay whickered softly. Miles raised the lamp to illuminate his horse’s delicate head, those soft wide-set Arabian eyes; he offered a whispered greeting, gave his smoke-colored coat a pat. But he wasn’t here for a midnight ride.

It was the loft he was interested in.

Because of his height, he needed only scale two steps of the ladder steps to peer into the loft. He stared at the heap of straw, and then did what he did best: waited patiently, and listened, and observed. Miles was brilliant at waiting, brilliant at watching, brilliant at listening. The most fascinating things happened when one was quiet and simply watched without appearing to watch. He often saw falling stars, for instance. He saw animals and insects conducting the quiet business of their lives, learned their habits and customs. And he’d once seen an expression—so fleeting he could have imagined it but knew he did not—on his father’s face when he’d glanced up at Isolde Eversea in church. She was the mother of all those other Everseas, including Colin, who’d nearly been hung of late for allegedly murdering the cousin of a Redmond.

The expression had been so like pain.

It had confused Miles then. He thought he understood it now.

At last he heard rustling. He stopped breathing; held his body very still and scanned for the source of the sound. For a time the world was just his breathing and the breathing of the animals below and the dark.

Until at last he saw the faintest stirring of straw.

He leaned forward and parted the straw gently with his hands. Peered. And smiled.

He reached into the crackling nest and lifted out what he’d come for.