Like No Other Lover (26 page)

She was staring up at him, eyes wide. Mouth parted in astonishment. Listening raptly.

“But this doesn’t mean you can
use people
simply because you’re afraid. And that means Milthorpe, or Argosy, or Goodkind, or anyone. Your fear doesn’t justify it.”

Her head jerked back; her eyes wide. “I’m
not
afraid.”

“You
are
,” he corrected firmly. “And you’ve every right to be. Anyone would be in your position.” He said this relentlessly. “You’re so afraid, in fact, you’re willing to deny
every
other part of yourself in order to ease your fear. You’re hurting yourself, don’t you see? And by God, you’re
proud
.”

His anger had infected her. “Proud! Interesting thing to say to a kettle, Mr. Pot.”

This was so nearly whimsical he stopped speechifying at once.

“What about Lady Georgina, Miles? Do you think you will be happier with her than I would be with Goodkind? Or with Milthorpe?
You’ve
just had the convenience of having all the work done for you. Your father chose her, didn’t he? Brought her right to your door. And with her comes all of your dreams.”

“I’ve centuries of family honor and a missing brother and a duty to people who
need me
. I can’t just abandon it.”

“I do understand. I do. I don’t begrudge you any of it, I swear to you. But it doesn’t make what I said less correct. It doesn’t make you better than me.”

He conceded this with abrupt silence.

“What would you have me do?” Her voice was harder now. “I
shall
have what you or Violet has. I want it. Why shouldn’t I have a
good
marriage, and money, and a home? I’m suited for nothing else. I won’t take money from you, Miles, so don’t offer it. I want a
life
. A family. What would you have me do instead?”

Stay with me forever. Be my mistress. Make love to me every night as long as we’re able.

She read it in his eyes, and he read in hers that she was tempted.

“Don’t say it,” she said softly.

He sighed. “I wouldn’t ask it of you,” he assured her softly.

They let a silence go by. Animals in stalls shifted their hooves, and somewhere a bird sang out its joy in sunshine.

“Just…see people, Cynthia, first in terms of
who
they are. And then in terms of what they have. Not as twenty thousand pounds. Or a dour second son.”

It was out of him before he could stop himself.

She froze.

And then:

“Oh.” It was a gasp. Her face went blank with the sort of astonishment that arrives with a sudden blow to the stomach. “Now I…Oh, Miles. You heard me. At the ball. When you first saw me. Malverney’s. My blue dress. My…face. You heard me talking to Liza. About you.”

“Ah. So you do remember what you said.” He said this lightly.

Her face went closed and stoic. She said nothing for a moment. “As I said, I’m not good.”

“But I understand now why you said it.”

She was finding it difficult to meet his eyes. “It…wasn’t a nice thing to say.”

“I won’t disagree with that.” He said it with gentle irony.

“How you must have hated me.”

“I have never,” he said with quiet fervor, “
ever
, hated you.”

She looked up at him then, searching his face again like a jeweler with a loupe, ensuring that she saw every gradation of meaning in his words, deciding he wasn’t angry.

“You weren’t meant to hear it,” she offered.

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” he said dryly.

A ghost of a smile touched her mouth.

Another moment of silence.

“I didn’t mean it,” she tried.

“You
did
mean it.”

She sighed. “Very well. I did mean it.”

And they were quiet together, remembering that evening.

She asked the question he’d already once asked himself. That terrible question: “And if we had danced that evening Miles…if we had spoken, or been introduced?”

“This is what I know now, Cynthia,” he said decisively, because he did know it, and she sounded so afraid. “It would not have made one bit of difference. Even if we had danced, you would not have truly seen me. And I would not have truly seen you. We were different people then, and we are different people now”

Because of each other
, he didn’t say.

Her gaze dropped. He noticed worn toes on her slippers as well as worn heels. Her circumstances touched chill fingers to the back of his neck, and made him feel restless.

He wanted her eyes back on his face, so he said, “You’re correct, Cynthia. I suppose I am proud. The Redmond heritage, and all that. I imagine I didn’t enjoy being overlooked. And I suppose my pride is in part what made me lie to you about Goodkind. I wanted to prove a point.”

She looked up again. Blue, blue eyes. My heart is blue, he thought absurdly.

“But your pride is what made you kiss me the very first day of my stay here,” she said softly.

Ah, clever girl.

The word “kiss” arrived, like a waft of opium. They both drifted on possibility for a moment. He could close the inches between them by simply bending his head, touching his lips to her soft lips. He’d cup her beautiful kitten’s face in his hands, and with his mouth and tongue and hands, he would make her forget everything. He would slide his lips to her throat, drag his hands around to cup her soft breasts inside that soft and warm muslin…

“Are you sorry that I did?” he asked, his voice hoarse with emotion now.

His grip tightened on her. He saw her pulse beating in her throat, felt it beating in her wrists. She looked stricken.

He didn’t know why he’d asked the question. No answer could possibly satisfy either of them.

So he gently released her wrists. Slowly.

She took them back as if he’d given her a gift. She touched her fingers absently to where he’d touched her.

“Did I hurt you?” Her hand went out as she asked, as if to smooth his chest where she’d thumped her fist; she stopped it before it could touch him. It was an echo of the first time he’d kissed her. That hovering uncertainty. He remembered the wrenching pain that came with thinking she might push him away.

Her hand dropped back to her side.

“You did,” he said, bemused. “A little.” He put his hand over where his heart beat for her. Because she couldn’t touch him. Because she wouldn’t now, and shouldn’t now.

The corner of her mouth twitched. “Good.”

They were quiet together. Standing just a foot, but now an eternity, apart.

“Cynthia. I’m sorry about Goodkind. I swear to you I’ll make it right.”

“Well, it’s rather too late to make it right with regards to Mr. Goodkind,” she said practically. “He…said things…and fled. Don’t smile,” she warned.

“You really aren’t going to tell me what you said?”

She sighed. “Oh, very well. I might have said something about how I am sympathetic to dramatic differences between people in physical
needs
, shall we say, and that I was not averse to sharing my wardrobe with a man, should he take a fancy to something in it. I might have mentioned that I would happily sew a large garter. You may smile now.”

Miles already was. “Did you mean it?”

“Why shouldn’t I be sympathetic, provided he’s discreet?” she said, sounding puzzled.

He paused. “Of course. Why shouldn’t you?” he repeated softly. She probably
would
have been sympathetic. Or at the very least, pragmatic. She wasn’t the sort to collapse in the fit of the vapors if she caught her husband attempting to slide one of her satin garters up his own thigh or trying on one of her bonnets. They would have sat down and discussed it.

A tropical jungle would pose no real challenge for Miss Brightly.

“If you must know, it was very funny,” she conceded. “I wouldn’t have thought you capable of the inspiration.”

He gave a shallow nod. “You were my muse.”

She smiled genuinely at this. Color of the healthy sort was returning to her face.

Oh, but
he
was in hell. Discussing the men who would have her for the rest of her days seemed too much to ask of him. His hands had gone cold and numb; in the pit of his stomach was a strangely familiar hollow feeling.

She wasn’t to know it. He would never let her know it. He would do anything to take away her fear, to restore the color to her face, to ensure that she slept peacefully at night and never wanted for anything for the rest of her days. And he wouldn’t allow her to regret it.

“Argosy!” Fear crept back into her voice. “Have you—did you—”

“No. No. I swear to you. I’ve not tampered with the facts there,” he told her. “Everything I’ve said about him is true.”

“But the Gypsy girl told Argosy I was a minx, and shouted something about pistols and blood. And ever since then I think he’s been uncertain about me.”

“Hard to see why.”

She laughed. “She’s unnerving. Martha, her name is. Her mother, Leonora…now,
she
said I’d marry very soon.”

“Helpful of her.”

“I thought so.”

“If you had to choose between Milthorpe and Argosy, Cynthia, who would it be?”

He managed to say this calmly. It was like swallowing knives.

Her hands twisted nervously in her skirt. “Argosy, I suppose.”

“Consider it done.”

“Miles—”

“You know you can trust me.” The words brought back the night before. He’d meant them to, which was unfair, but it was how she knew she
could
trust him.

She jerked back and stared up at him.

“Trust me, Cynthia,” he repeated softly, when she remained silent, her cheeks hot, her eyes dark with memory. “I have
never
in my life failed to do what I set out to do.”

“Very well. I trust you.”

The words were a gift: her trust.

And there was nothing else to say, and yet there was everything. And Miles found he couldn’t allow her to leave just yet, because there was something he needed to say. And yet he had no vocabulary for what had happened to him since he’d met her. He faltered; he tried.

“I want you to know…that you’re wrong on one count, Cynthia. I
have
a heart. I have only…recently discovered this. Ironic, isn’t it? Given that I’ve made rather a life out of discovery. And I wish to God I had a choice. I wish to God I could…because if I could…”

“Don’t.”
She bit off the word. She backed away from him. Her face was white again. “That…
that
…isn’t cricket. And you know it.”

She turned so quickly her dress whipped her ankles, and she was rushing from the stables on her worn slippers.

And to do all of this, he reminded himself that he was a man who could view with fascinated detachment a rodent-eating plant the height of his younger brother. He would wonder at its genus, its history, its diet, and draw it, in detail and never fear it or exalt it. Everything, he reminded himself—awe, fear—had component parts and an origin. Could be understood when examined, demystified.

Feelings
needn’t enter into the equation at all.

No one need ever learn that he’d discovered he had a heart. He wasn’t about to deliver a paper to the Royal Society about that particular discovery, after all.

No objective in his life ever felt more urgent, and he had scarcely a week to accomplish it.

Then again, as he’d said before, there was nothing he had failed to do once he set out to do it.

He started his campaign that very evening.

“Didn’t you have your fortunes told by the Rom while they were here?” he asked Jonathan and Argosy idly over billiards.

They were surprised, but pleased enough, to have him about.

“Why, yes, we did,” Argosy told him. “
Eerie
, it was. They know things, those Gypsies.”

Jonathan snorted. “Ten children!” he muttered resentfully. “Poppycock. A man would have to be
mad
. I paid good money for that dukkering, too.”

“
I
paid good money for that,” Argosy corrected idly. “Take your shot, Redmond.”

“You’re going to have ten children, Jonathan?” Miles was genuinely surprised by this.

“No!”
His brother was appalled.

“Was Mrs. Heron’s looby of a daughter present?” Miles asked as he stood by the table, waiting for his brother to shoot.

Argosy turned to him a bit defensively. Then again, Miles was something of an authority on all things as far as the younger men were concerned, and so he hesitated to object too strongly.

“I’m not certain at all she was a looby, old man. She seemed to know a good deal that seemed true.”

Miles snorted. “Oh? Tell me, did she happen to shout something about a ‘duck’?”

Argosy’s face was a wonder to behold. Brilliant with astonishment. “How did you
hear
? Did someone tell you?”

Miles was all amusement. “She
always
bellows that when her mother reads fortunes. From what I’ve heard from those in Pennyroyal Green, anyway. I’m not certain she can control the impulse. It’s something that comes right out of her. She’s touched in the head.”

“
Does
she always shout that?” Argosy was both disappointed and relieved. “‘Duck,’ is it? But she said the duck was
empty
.” He made an emphatic gesture with the last word. This seemed to be meaningful to Argosy.

Cynthia had said nothing about an empty duck. Miles realized he would have to improvise.

“Precisely,” he said, and took his shot, a clean and true one.

The ball smacked so hard Jonathan and Argosy winced.

“An empty duck,” he continued. “When I first heard her say it, I thought it had something to do with a hunting decoy. Very odd. But then one must be sympathetic to the ravings of a madwoman. Her mother, on the other hand…her mother sends chills up my spine with the accuracy of her readings.”

Jonathan was staring at his brother as though
he
was the looby.

“How much have you had to drink, Miles?” he asked suspiciously. Dukkering wasn’t something that would interest Miles at all, apart from its potential to be mocked, or its anthropological appeal. “And haven’t you known Mrs. Heron and her daughter for years?”

“I’ve naught to drink.” Miles yawned indolently. “Which reminds me. Where is the brandy, anyway? What did Mrs. Heron tell you, Argosy? Now, anything
she
might say I would entertain quite seriously. She told me I’d go on a long voyage.”

She’d done nothing of the sort, but this impressed Argosy. As Miles most certainly had gone on a long voyage.

“She told me that I would be wed soon. To a charming girl with many admirers. And that I…I’d best act quickly lest I miss my destiny.” He actually flushed.

He feels something for Cynthia, Miles thought suddenly. For some reason, the realization struck him like a billiard cue in the solar plexus.

But why shouldn’t he feel for her? She was remarkable. Argosy just would never be able to truly
know
her.

“
Int
eresting.” Miles enunciated every syllable drawlingly. He fixed Argosy with his see-everything look.

And then he found the brandy decanter, turned his back and poured. “Where’s Milthorpe got to?” he said while his back was turned. “I wanted to have a word with him about my next expedition.”

“Sorry. Couldn’t say, old man,” Argosy said idly.

There was a
pock
as a shot was taken. “Ah. Now I recall.” Miles held up a finger in recollection. “He is having a chat with Miss Brightly in the salon. I believe they have come to a decision regarding what manner of dog she might have. I do think Milthorpe might want to have his palm read as well. I believe I heard he was looking for a wife. Seems everyone is in the market for a wife. Most of us at the house party, anyhow.”

Argosy went rigid with alarm. He had probably never seriously entertained Milthorpe as a rival, and was suddenly reviewing him in a different light entirely.

“She’ll be gone from Sussex in a few days, too. Miss Brightly. So I’m told. By Milthorpe.”

Argosy was distracted from that point on and lost badly at billiards, which meant Jonathan and Miles won a good deal of money from him.