Once and Always (13 page)

She turned up the oil lamp on the table and settled down in the chair, forcing herself to open the book. A sheet of pink, perfumed notepaper slid out and drifted to the floor. Victoria automatically picked it up and started to put it back, but the first words of the torrid little note, which was written in French, leapt out at her:

Darling Jason,

I miss you so. I wait impatiently, counting the hours until you will come to me. .. .

Victoria told herself that reading another person’s letter was ill-bred, unforgivable, and completely beneath her dignity, but the idea of a woman waiting impatiently for Jason Fielding to come to her was so incredible that Victoria couldn’t bridle her amazed curiosity. For her part, she would be more inclined to wait impatiently for him to go away! She was so engrossed in her discovery that she didn’t hear Jason and Miss Kirby coming down the hall as she continued to read:

I am sending you these lovely poems in the hope you will read them and think of me, of the tender nights we have shared in each other’s arms. . . .

“Victoria!” Jason called irritably.

Victoria leapt to her feet in guilty nervousness, dropped the book of poetry, snatched it up, and sat back down. Trying to look absorbed in her reading, she opened the book and stared blindly at it, completely unaware that it was upside down.

“Why didn’t you answer me?” Jason demanded as he strolled into the library with the lovely Miss Kirby clinging to his arm. “Johanna wanted to tell you good-bye and to offer her suggestions if you need to buy anything in the village.”

After Lady Kirby’s unprovoked attack, Victoria couldn’t help wondering if Miss Kirby was now implying that Victoria couldn’t be trusted to choose her own purchases. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you call,” she said, trying to compose her features so she’d look neither angry nor guilty. “As you can see, I’ve been reading, and I was quite engrossed.” She closed the book and laid it on the table, then forced herself to gaze calmly at the pair. The look of revolted disgust on Jason’s face made her step back in alarm. “Is—is something wrong?” she asked, fearfully certain that he somehow remembered that the note was in the book and suspected her of reading it.

“Yes,” he snapped, and turned to Miss Kirby, who was\ staring at Victoria with an expression similar to his. “Johanna, can you recommend a tutor from the village who can teach her to read?”

“Teach me to read?” Victoria gasped, flinching from the scornful pity on the brunette’s beautiful face. “Don’t be silly, I don’t need a tutor—I know perfectly well how to read.”

Ignoring her, Jason looked at Miss Kirby. “Can you name a tutor who would come here and teach her?”

“Yes, I believe so, my lord. Mr. Watkins, the vicar, might do it.”

With the long-suffering look of one who has already been forced to tolerate too many insults and will not endure yet another one, Victoria said very firmly, “Oh, really, this is absurd. I do not need a tutor. I
know
how to read.”

Jason’s manner turned to ice. “Don’t lie to me ever again,” he warned. “I despise liars—particularly lying women. You can’t read a word and you damned well know it!”

“I do not believe this!” Victoria said, oblivious to Miss Kirby’s horrified gasp. “I can read, I tell you!”

Pushed past endurance by what he perceived as her flagrant attempt to deceive him, Jason took three long strides to the table, grabbed the book, and thrust it into her hands. “Then read it!”

Angry and humiliated at being treated this way, particularly in front of Miss Kirby, who was making no attempt to hide her enjoyment of Victoria’s plight, Victoria snatched open the cover of the little book and saw the perfumed note.

“Go ahead,” he mocked. “Let’s hear you read.”

Deliberating, Victoria slanted a speculative, sideways glance at him. “Are you absolutely certain you want me to read this aloud?”

“Aloud,” Jason said curtly.

“In front of Miss Kirby?” she questioned innocently.

“Either read it or admit you can’t,” he snapped.

“Very well,” Victoria said. Swallowing the laughter bubbling in her throat, she read dramatically: “Darling Jason, I miss you so. I wait impatiently, counting the hours until you will come to me. I am sending you these lovely poems in the hope you will read them and think of me, of the tender nights we have shared in each other’s ar—”

Jason jerked the book out of her hands. Raising her eyebrows, Victoria looked him right in the eye and blandly reminded him, “That note was written in French—I translated it as I read.”

She turned to Miss Kirby and said brightly, “There was more, of course. But I
don’t
think this is the sort of reading material one ought to leave lying around when there are gently bred young ladies about. Do you?” Before either of them could reply, Victoria turned and walked out of the room, her head high.

Lady Kirby was waiting in the hall, ready to leave. Victoria bid both women a cool good-bye, then started up the stairs, hoping to escape Jason’s inevitable wrath, which she was certain he intended to unleash upon her the moment the ladies left. However, Lady Kirby’s parting remark caused an explosion in Victoria’s mind that obliterated everything else. “Don’t feel badly about Lord Fielding’s defection, my dear,” she called as Northrup helped them into their cloaks. “Few people actually believed the betrothal announcement in the paper. Everyone was certain that once you had actually arrived here, he’d find some way to cry off. The rogue has made it plain to everyone that he won’t marry anyone—”

Charles pushed her out the door under the guise of escorting her to her carriage, and Victoria halted and swung around on the stairway. Like a beautiful, outraged goddess she stood trembling with wrath, staring down at Jason. “Am I to understand,” she enunciated furiously, “that the engagement you said was ‘off’ was
our
engagement?”

Jason’s only answer was a tightening of his jaw, but his silence was a tacit admission, and she glared at him with blue sparks shooting from her eyes, heedless of the servants who were staring at her in paralyzed horror. “How dare you!” she hissed. “How dare you let anyone think I would consider marrying you. I wouldn’t marry you if you were—”

“I don’t recall
asking
you to marry me,” Jason interrupted sarcastically. “However, it’s reassuring to know that if I ever took leave of my senses and
did
ask you, you’d have the consideration to turn me down.”

Perilously close to tears because she was losing her composure but could not shake his, Victoria passed a look of scathing scorn over him. “You are a cold, callous, arrogant, unfeeling monster, without respect or feeling for anyone— even the dead! No woman in her right mind would want you! You’re a—” Her voice broke and she turned and ran up the stairs.

Jason watched her from the foyer, where two footmen and the butler stood riveted to the floor, waiting in frozen dread for the moment when the master would unleash his fury on this chit of a girl who had just done the unforgivable. After a long moment, Jason shoved his hands in his pockets. He looked round at the stricken butler and lifted his brows. “I believe I have just received what is commonly called ‘a crushing setdown,’ Northrup.”

Northrup swallowed audibly but said nothing until Jason had strolled up the stairs; then he rounded on the footmen. “Attend to your duties, and see that you don’t gossip about this with anyone.” He strode away.

O’Malley gaped at the other footman. “She fixed me a poultice and it cured me sore tooth,” he breathed in awe. “Mayhap she fixed his lordship something to cure his temper, while she was at it.” Without waiting for a reply he headed straight to the kitchen to inform Mrs. Craddock and the kitchen staff of the amazing incident he had just witnessed. With Monsieur Andre gone—thanks to the young lady from America—the kitchen had become a pleasant place to pass an occasional moment when Northrup’s eagle eye was focused on someone else.

Within an hour the well-trained, perfectly regimented household staff had all paused just long enough to listen in disbelief to the tale of the drama that had occurred on the staircase. Within another half hour, the story of his lordship’s unprecedented lapse from icy dignity to warm humanity in the face of extreme provocation had spread from the house to the stables and the gamekeepers’ cottages.

Upstairs, Victoria’s hands shook with pent-up anguish as she pulled the pins from her hair and stripped off the peach gown. Still fighting her tears, she hung it in the wardrobe, pulled on a nightdress, and climbed into bed. Homesickness washed over her in drowning waves. She wanted to leave here, to put an ocean between herself and people like Jason Fielding and Lady Kirby. Her mother had probably left England for the same reason. Her mother. .. Her beautiful, gentle mother, she thought on a choked sob. Lady Kirby wasn’t fit to touch the hem of Katherine Seaton’s skirts!

Memories of her former happy life crowded in around Victoria until the bedroom at Wakefield was filled with them. She remembered the day she had picked a bouquet of wild flowers for her mother and soiled her dress in the process.
“Look, Mama, aren’t they the prettiest things you’ve ever seen?”
she had said.
“I picked them for you
—
but I soiled my dress.”

“They’re very pretty,”
her mother had agreed, hugging her and ignoring the soiled dress.
“But you are the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

She remembered when she was seven years old and sick from a fever that had brought her near death. Night after night, her mother had sat at her bedside, sponging her face and arms while Victoria drifted between wakefulness and delirium. On the fifth night, she had awakened in her mother’s arms, her own face wet from the tears running down her mother’s cheeks. Katherine was rocking her back and forth, weeping and whispering the same disjointed plea again and again:
“Please don’t let my little girl die. She’s so little and she’s afraid of the dark. Please, God
...”

In the plush, silken cocoon of her bed at Wakefield, Victoria turned her face into the pillow, her body shaking with wrenching sobs. “Oh, Mama,” she wept brokenly. “Oh, Mama, I miss you so. . . .”

Jason paused outside her bedroom and raised his hand to knock, then checked himself at the sound of her harsh weeping, his forehead furrowed into a frown. She would probably feel better if she cried everything out of her system, he thought. On the other hand, if she continued crying like that, she would surely make herself ill. After a few seconds’ uncertainty he went to his own room, poured some brandy into a glass and returned to hers.

He knocked—as she had arrogantly instructed him to do earlier—but when she didn’t answer, he opened the door and went inside. He stood at her bedside, watching her shoulders shake with the spasms of wrenching grief that tore from her.

He had seen women cry before, but their tears were always dainty and deliberate, intended to bend a man’s will. Victoria had stood on that stairway hurtling verbal spears at him like an enraged warrior, then had retreated to her own room to weep in pathetic secret.

Jason put his hand on her shoulder. “Victoria—”

Victoria rolled over onto her back and jerked up onto her elbows, her eyes the deep blue of wet velvet, her thick sooty lashes sparkling with tears. “Get out of here!” she demanded in a hoarse whisper. “Get out this very minute, before someone sees you!”

Jason looked at the tempestuous, blue-eyed beauty before him, her cheeks flushed with anger, her titian hair tumbling riotously over her shoulders. In her prim, high-collared white nightdress, she had the innocent appeal of a bewildered, heartbroken child; yet there was defiance in the set of her chin and angry pride blazing in her eyes, warning him not to underestimate her. He remembered her daring impertinence in the library when she deliberately read that note aloud and then made no effort to hide her satisfaction at disconcerting him. Melissa had been the only woman who ever dared defy him, but she did it behind his back. Victoria Seaton did it right to his face, and he almost admired her for it.

When he made no move to leave, Victoria irritably dashed the tears from her cheeks, tugged the bedcovers up to her chin, and began inching backward until she was sitting up against the pillows. “Do you realize what people would say if they knew you were in here?” she hissed. “Have you no principles?”

“None whatsoever,” he admitted impenitently. “I prefer practicality to principles.” Ignoring Victoria’s glower, he sat down on the bed and said, “Here, drink this.”

He held a glass of amber liquid close enough to her face for Victoria to smell the strong spirits. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Absolutely not.”

“Drink it,” he said calmly, “or I’ll pour it down your throat.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Yes, Victoria, I would. Now drink it down like a good girl. It will make you feel better.”

Victoria could see there was no point in arguing and she was too exhausted to put up a physical fight. She took a resentful sip of the vile amber liquid and tried to thrust it back into his hand. “I feel much better,” she lied.

A spark of amusement lit his eyes, but his voice was implacable. “Drink the rest.”

“Then
will you go away?” she said, capitulating ungraciously. He nodded. Trying to get it over with as if it were bad-tasting medicine, she took two quick swallows; then she doubled over choking as the liquid seared a fiery path all the way down to the pit of her stomach. “It’s awful,” she gasped, falling back against the pillows.

For several minutes Jason remained silent, giving the brandy time to spread its comforting warmth through her. Then he said calmly, “In the first place, Charles announced our engagement in the newspaper, not I. Secondly, you have no more desire to be betrothed to me than I do to you. Isn’t that correct?”

“Absolutely,” Victoria averred.

“Then why are you crying because we
aren’t
betrothed?”

Victoria gave him a look of haughty disdain. “I was not doing anything of the sort.”

“You weren’t?” Amused, Jason looked at the tears still clinging to her curly lashes and handed her a snowy white handkerchief. “Then why is your nose red, your cheeks puffy, your face pale, and—”