Like No Other Lover (32 page)

“Miles. How did the house party—”

“Good morning, sir. I thought I should tell you that I intend to propose to Miss Cynthia Brightly.”

His father’s entire body—his face, his hands, everything—went
alarmingly
still.

Miles waited. He wondered whether this what it looked like when one’s internal organs congealed in shock.

He was about to step forward to touch his father, to make sure he was still alive and not just about to tip over face first onto the carpet, when Isaiah suddenly moved. Quite fluidly, as though the alarming frozen second had never occurred.

He’d absorbed the shock and formulated a response. His breathing resumed. His father was extraordinary, really.

“Well, this wasn’t precisely what we’d planned, is it, Miles?”

Cold, wry and detached, calculated to intimidate: ah, the Redmond aplomb. They all had it in one form or another, but no one demonstrated it more profoundly than his father. He’d had decades to hone it. “What of Lady Georgina? The daughter of a very wealthy man and dear friend of this family? The man who will happily fund your expedition?”

“I shall find my own funding for the expedition. I imagine Lady Georgina is taking breakfast at this very moment. She’s a lovely girl.”

He’d done very badly by Georgina. Still, they never would have suited. He would find it in himself to feel ashamed later. Other things seemed urgent now.

“She is that. And yet you…you couldn’t manage…” His father couldn’t finish the sentence.

Miles was resolved. “I should like you to know that I don’t take any particular pleasure in shocking or disappointing you, sir.”

“
Such
a relief to hear.” No alteration in tone accompanied those words.

“I have no choice with regards to Miss Brightly.”

“You have no
choice
?” Isaiah’s voice was contemptuous and incredulous now. “For God’s sake, Miles. Did you get the wench with child? Are you doing this out of
honor
? She scarcely warrants such extremity of reaction. A little money ought to—”

“Not a wench.”

Quiet, implacable, sinister as a garrote, his words. Miles had never felt such black anger.

Isaiah’s head went back a little with the force of the shock.
No one
ever spoke to him that way.

He studied his son. Green eyes glass hard.

“I beg your pardon, Miles?” the words were silky and dangerous.

Miles got the words out through a jaw that threatened to lock from tension.

“To clarify, Father: I must insist that you never again refer to Cynthia as a ‘wench.’ I intend to make her my wife.”

“You’re…insisting?” His father’s voice had gone deadly. The
s
’s hissed with impressive snakelike sibilance.

Interestingly, his father’s disdain merely gave Miles strength. It banked his anger and resolve. “Yes. I’m insisting. I intend to make her a Redmond. As such, I cannot allow
anyone
to refer to her with anything other than respect in my presence, and I best not hear of anyone referring to her with anything other than respect
outside
of my presence. Are we understood?”

His father’s stare was arctic. And then he smiled, and the smile was miniature and nasty.

He said nothing for a time.

“Where is the…” The pause was deliberately insulting, implying that if he couldn’t call her a wench, there were simply no other words available to describe her. “…
she
…now?”

“Gone,” Miles said simply.

His father clearly hadn’t expected this answer. He watched Miles. “Why?” he asked after a moment.

Miles thought about this. “Honor, I believe.”

Isaiah gave his head a shake. This clarified nothing. “Where did she go?”

“I don’t know.” Miles felt pressure welling in his chest, urging him to be off, to go. The longer this conversation took, the longer she would be gone.

“Then how are you going to—”

He stopped when Miles made an impatient noise.

He stared at his son, puzzled. “Didn’t she have Lord Argosy on the line?”

Well, then. Imagine his father knowing such a thing. More likely, he’d been informed, by his mother, who had probably been informed by a servant. His mother loved almost nothing more than gossip, unless it was fashion and her children.

Miles was silent. He wondered what Argosy’s lip looked like today.

“She sank her line for a lord, and came up with a Redmond instead?” His father’s voice was still quietly contemptuous. “Is that what you mean by honor? She decided to leave because she cuckolded Argosy?”

He supposed he’d learned cold, cold silence from his father. But he was only now learning how very effective it was. And it prevented him from doing the unthinkable, and losing his temper with his father.

Isaiah was finding Miles’s silence difficult to penetrate. It was rather like doing battle with one’s reflection.

“And what will you do now? Go after her?” He made this sound like Miles intended to mount a broomstick and fly, or spin straw from gold: as though it were ridiculous and fanciful.

His father was brilliantly testing him. Little did Isaiah know that Miles was enjoying his own fury and finding it downright nourishing.

“Yes.” A clipped word. Miles gave it no intonation. “I have accomplished every single thing I’ve ever set out to do. I can’t imagine how this will pose any difficulty.”

Miles noticed then that his father was holding his own body very still.

He
had
been dealt a blow, Miles reminded himself. And Isaiah Redmond was attempting to come to terms with it. But he was still coping with the consequences. His father wasn’t young.

“What
happened
, Miles?”

It was Miles’s turn to greet his father with incredulous, furious silence.

“Oh, for God’s sake. That isn’t what I meant. I don’t want
details
. I’ve seen the girl. It’s not as though she hasn’t the goods to cause any red-blooded—”

“You’d best not finish that sentence…sir.”

His father wasn’t the only one who could make a point with an insulting, insinuating pause.

A fleeting, black fury darkened his father’s face, and his hand twitched, as though he would have enjoyed laying the flat of it against his son’s cheek. But Miles had to admire the control. It was gone then, the emotion. Isaiah’s face cleared again.

And then he looked at his son.

Really
looked at his son. Green eyes studying him.

There was another silence. If he could have fallen in love with Lady Georgina, Miles thought, he would have willingly done it. If he’d never met Cynthia Brightly, his life would be different today. But he knew he could not undo anything.

He’d spoken truly: he took no pleasure in disappointing his father. He took no pleasure in creating a fissure. He suffered. But he knew what was right. And now that he knew what love was, what it did to his world, he could never, never give it up.

Miles quieted his voice.

“I understand your anger, Father. I don’t question your right to it, and I don’t take pleasure or pride in it. I can assure you this is something I never set out to do, but I have never in my life done anything rashly. I speak truly: I feel I have no choice. But I can also assure you that if you come to know her, you’ll see that Miss Brightly will only be a credit to the family. She has spine and wit and intelligence and pride and integrity and…”

When he was young, his father routinely used his brilliant green eyes as flints to strike fear from the hearts of his misbehaving children. Miles was used to the stare; he’d found it quite effective when he was younger, and had never been on the receiving end of it as an adult.

But it wasn’t the stare that gave him pause.

It was the fact that at some point his father had stopped listening to his words. And was instead absorbing all that his words contained.

And before Miles’s eyes, something seemed to ease out of his father’s posture. Out of his face, out of his eyes. And he saw there something like…peace?

“All of that, is she?” His father’s voice was inexplicably gentle. He sounded amused. And—if he wasn’t mistaken—

Relieved?

The expression on his father’s face was, in fact, reminiscent of Violet’s a few moments ago.

Miles now felt
officially
disconcerted. Deprived of his anger, of his righteousness, he was suddenly at a loss.

Isaiah Redmond strolled over to the table near the window. He used a finger to slowly trace the complex whorls of the polished wood. Perhaps he was using its polished surface to scry his future, the future of his son and heir. Or tracing it like the road he would have preferred Miles to travel.

Miles waited. He’d said all he meant to say.

Isaiah turned around to face him again. “There are three things I’d like you to know, Miles. Are you listening?”

“Yes, sir.”

“First: I simply cannot and do not condone a match between a Redmond, any Redmond, and Miss Cynthia Brightly. This means you will
not
receive another shilling from me while I’m alive should you choose to marry Miss Brightly. You will, however, be welcomed in our home by your mother and me; the rest of the family will be free to receive you as well. But you and your…may not live in Redmond House. You are not welcome at the Mercury Club. You will not become a member. I will not fund any of your endeavors. I shall not revoke this. Are we understood?”

The punishment was severe; Miles was certain Isaiah meant every word, and would be inflexible in enforcing it.

But it was not as severe as Isaiah was capable of meting. It was, he supposed, just.

He would have time to absorb what it meant to him later, or if it would mean anything at all to him. Nothing mattered at the moment but Cynthia.

Miles inhaled, nodded.

“The second thing?” he urged his father curtly.

“The second thing is this…”

Miles watched in fresh amazement as his father’s lips drifted upward into a smile that bordered on the rueful. It was, in fact, very nearly affectionate. It was decidedly
amused
.

“It’s not absurd, is it, son?”

It took a moment, and then Miles remembered.

Miles was difficult to stun. He was stunned now.

What did his father know about love? Was his mother the love of his life? Had he correctly interpreted that look his father had sent Isolde Eversea so many years ago?

And…no. Love might be humbling, miraculous, hilarious, and necessary, transcending. It required everything of him. In fact it was…everything.

Everything, that is, except absurd.

“No, sir,” he conceded firmly. “It is not.”

And then his own mouth rebelled: it twitched up into a crooked smile. The other side of his mouth wouldn’t commit to the smile.

But he supposed that was a place to begin knowing his father: this tentative exchange of smiles after a cold battle of words.

And all of this was Cynthia’s fault. Miles contemplated all the many ways in which Cynthia Brightly had managed to upend his life, split him open, show him vistas he’d never dreamed existed—he who had wended his way through jungles, sweated through fevers, peered through microscopes, and tasted exotic pleasures of the flesh.

The real frontier, apparently, was inside him…and in front of him. In the form of his family. In the form of his father.

In the form of his future with Cynthia.

He was now free to spend the rest of his life in discovery. This was interesting. And of course, he loved “interesting” more than anything in the world.

His father gave a crisp nod of satisfaction.

A silence bordering on awkward ensued. The only other awkward moment involving his father that Miles could recall was when Isaiah Redmond had shouted out “
Son of a
bitch!” when Colin Eversea hadn’t been hung as scheduled.

To this day Miles wondered why Isaiah had been at
all
surprised. Colin was an Eversea, after all.

“The third thing, Father?” he asked gently. He struggled to keep impatience from his voice.

Miles wondered if the long pause that followed indicated his father’s indecision about what he might say. But in the end, Isaiah finally said it:

“I admire you, Miles.”

The mild surprise and reluctance with which he delivered the words were hardly flattering. But the words stopped Miles’s breath. Not:
I’m proud of you, Miles.
But the infinitely better,
I admire you.

Isaiah had carefully chosen the words to acknowledge that he deserved no credit for who Miles had become, and to ensure that Miles knew another formidable man—a man Miles admired—found him worthy of admiration.

What
specifically do you admire?
he suddenly wanted to know.
My achievements? Or my choices? My ability to
make them irrevocably? To risk everything I know for the one thing I need?