Thief of Hearts (40 page)

"You love him very much, don't you?"

She looked into Milly's sad, soft face. All she could do was nod.

Brodie joined them a few minutes later. "What's this?" he said and picked up a small sketch from the blanket.

Anna snatched the sketch pad out of his hands. "Another failure." It was a watercolor sketch she'd done of him. Until now her artistic efforts had concentrated on fruits and flowers and tentative landscapes. She ignored his speculatively raised brow and tucked the pad away in her purse.

"I hope this doesn't mean you're going back full-time to the violin." He sat down and planted a noisy kiss on her cheek, laughing heartily at her expression.

She blushed, anything but offended. She loved his teasing. "It would serve you right if I did."

"How are you today, Miss Milly?"

"Very well, thank you. You were in fine voice, I couldn't help noticing."

"I was, wasn't I?"

Anna sat back and listened to their banter, at once delighted by their easy friendship and aghast that her best friend believed Brodie was her husband. The bizarre nature of the situation she'd gotten herself into sometimes seemed almost normal, but right now its unbelievable queerness struck her in full force.

"Uh, Nick, if you could, uh… could I speak to you for a second?"

The shy voice belonged to Max Paisley, Jourdaine's chief engineer. Anna smiled up at him; his Adam's apple bobbed in his skinny throat and he turned bright red. At designing sleek hulls and triple-bladed propellers he was a genius, but people, particularly women, rendered him inarticulate. Brodie scrambled to his feet and the two men walked off together a little ways.

"I'd better go," said Milly. "Thank you for inviting me."

"Oh, but you just got here," said Anna in dismay. "Don't go yet, you haven't eaten or—"

"I really must."

They held hands. "I'm sorry I made you come," Anna admitted, "because it's made you unhappy. It was selfish of me. I just wanted to see you."

"Nonsense, I wanted to see you, too."

"Will you come and visit me?"

"No."

Anna's face fell.

"But you could come and visit me."

"I will! Tomorrow."

"Not tomorrow, silly. One day next week. I'll send you a note."

"Milly
, damn
it!"

Both women's jaws dropped.

Then Anna started giggling. "Nicholas says it sometimes; I've picked it up."

"Good," said Milly. Mysteriously but fervently.

They kissed, and then Anna watched her friend walk away, head high, stylish skirts swaying.

"Christ, Annie, I almost understood what he was saying that time." Brodie shook his head in wonder and resumed his seat beside her.

She smiled. "You should have been an engineer."

"Should I?"

She saw her own sadness flicker for a second behind his pale blue eyes, and touched his cheek with her fingertips.

"Where's Milly?" he asked, more briskly.

"She… wanted to leave. I feel so" She fluttered her hands in frustration. "She's hurting, and there's nothing I can do to help."

"You help by being her friend."

"But people are so cruel. People she thought were her friends have stopped seeing her, John, as if... as if she had a disease."

"Sweetheart." He took her hand and stared at it, lifting her fingers and bending them back and forth, one by one. "If I'd known what it was like for you in the beginning… if I'd had any idea how you live, how the rules work here and exactly what you risk by having anything to do with me at all…"

"Don't say you wouldn't have gotten involved."

"I wouldn't have. I can't stand to think of people treating you the way they treat Milly. Except that, if they knew about us, it would be much, much worse."

She couldn't deny it. "I don't care, though, I wouldn't change anything. No, I would, one thing. I would have come to you sooner."

Brodie looked into her light brown eyes, grave and honest and shining with love. "I wish… " He made a fist of her hand and pressed it against his chest. "I wish I were a gentleman," he whispered. "For you."

She closed her eyes. "Don't you know that you're" She broke off; the rustle of grass warned her their solitude was about to be violated. But she smiled when she saw it was Aiden.

"Hello," he said diffidently.

Brodie set her hand away quickly, guiltily. She sensed his withdrawal and stared up at him in surprise, then understanding. He was protecting her. Protecting what he'd once called in anger her "precious reputation." He cared more about it now than she did. She was moved profoundly.

She took his hand back and held on to it. "John doesn't believe he's a gentleman," she blurted out. "Have you ever heard anything more absurd?"

Brodie plucked at the blanket to mask his confusion. Why would she say such a thing to Aiden?

O'Dunne stuck his hands in his pockets and surveyed them thoughtfully. "I'm a lawyer, I hear all sorts of absurd things. Perhaps that's not so much absurd as ill-informed." They blinked up at him. "What is a gentleman?" he asked rhetorically. "Is it a rich man with a title? Not in my experience. I think a gentleman possesses the old-fashioned virtues, things like loyalty and courage, fair play and good sportsmanship. Honesty. He can acquire them by birth, which is easier but by no means a sure thing, or by behavior, which is harder. In the latter case, he makes himself into a gentleman using whatever tools he's been given, including his own knowledge, labor, and resourcefulness." He smiled, rocking back and forth a little on his toes. "If you're with me so far, John, I think you'll have to agree that you're as much of a gentleman as anyone on this hill today."

After a few speechless seconds Anna cried, "Hear, hear," with quiet fervor.

Brodie felt the flush on his cheeks and fought a cowardly urge to lower his head to hide it. "Thank you, Aiden," he said simply. "I won't forget that. You've been a good friend."

O'Dunne made a deprecating gesture, a suspicion of pink staining his own cheeks. They exchanged a few more words, commonplace, but charged now with self-consciousness and soon he took his leave.

Anna smiled with satisfaction. "Put your head on my lap and take a nap," she suggested.

He quirked one eyebrow. "What?"

"I've always wanted to do that on a picnic with someone. A man."

He grinned. "What about your aunt? She'll think it's indecent."

Anna grinned back. "I know."

He laughed at her, but obligingly settled himself with his head in her lap, long legs stretching out past the blanket to the grass. He closed his eyes. She laid one hand on his chest and tangled the fingers of the other in his hair. They wore identical small, delighted smiles. She felt the strongest, deepest impulse to kiss him on the lips, and only the thrilling certainty that she could do it later, when they were really alone, held her back.

She spied her cousin Stephen across the way, standing with Martin Dougherty. They both had on the same clothes they wore every day to work. They looked stiff and hot and out of place, talking together beside a crumbling stone wall that bordered the stream.

Adjacent to them, her aunt sat in the center of a group of ladies whose husbands and fathers worked for Jourdaine. Most sat on lawn chairs but some, like Anna, the truly debauched reclined on blankets. What would Aunt Charlotte have to say about
that
tomorrow? she wondered incuriously. Most of the women had brought their needlework, she saw; one was reading aloud from an improving book. Oh, but why go on a picnic at all, she thought bewilderedly, if you were only going to keep on with the same tedious occupations you engaged in at home every day and night of your life?

She and Brodie had been going out quite a lot, a new and exhilarating experience. How lovely to be allowed to go anywhere in the city, day or night, to concerts and dances and parties, even slightly risqué music halls, unchaperoned by anyone except the man with whom you were in love! She had never known such freedom, physical or emotional: it was a liberation of the spirit.

She'd never imagined what perfect companions they could be, either, or how complete their compatibility, in as well as out of the bedroom. It amazed her that she felt no guilt, and no real curiosity in the question "Is there something wrong with me?" when she looked at the ladies surrounding her aunt and tried to imagine any of them doing, much less enjoying, the things she and Brodie did in bed. The question had become irrelevant: if there was something wrong with her, she didn't care. It didn't matter.

But in her heart she knew there was nothing shameful or unnatural in their passion, just as she knew that the women she'd heard of who endured lovemaking in a kind of coma, with lights out, clothes on, and teeth gritted, were the victims of a lie more pernicious than any perversion she could think of. It
was
a conspiracy!

But to what purpose? she wondered, nibbling a blade of grass, resisting the temptation to tickle Brodie's nose with it. Why weren't all men like him? Wouldn't they rather their wives enjoyed themselves? It made no sense. And Brodie had told her, with a certainty whose origin she hadn't cared to question, that the same respectable, gentlemanly husbands who, along with their wives, laid down society's laws and enforced them so diligently, those very same husbands consorted on a regular basis with prostitutes. It was as if men had decided to enclose women in two separate and mutually exclusive categories: wives and whores. How strange! And how sad.

She was having an affair. There was no other word for it. It was a shocking, shameful word, one she had never, could never have associated with herself as recently as a month ago, and yet not a bone in her body regretted it. What she regretted was that it couldn't last forever. But that she wouldn't think about. She had made a deliberate choice not to worry about the future, even if it came tomorrow. What she had was now, this glorious present, a happiness she'd never envisioned for herself even with Nicholas, even in the ecstatic first days of their engagement when she'd believed that somehow, miraculously, he loved her and all her dreams had come true. This was different, better, out of the realm of her expectations, and it exposed the paltriness and naiveté of her childish hopes. Loving Nicholas had been the fantasy of a sheltered girl. Loving his brother was the fulfillment of a woman.

"What are you thinking about?"

"You." Always you. "I thought you were sleeping."

He smiled lazily. "Couldn't. I'm finding this particular pillow a distraction."

"Not comfortable?"

"That's not what I said."

They exchanged a slow look, full of meaning. The charm of touching but not touching was beginning to wear thin.

"Is it time to go home yet?"

"We haven't even eaten."

"What did you bring for us?"

"Cold roast beef, salad, some cheesecakes. Ginger beer."

"Mmm." He looked thoughtful. "We could take it home and eat it in bed."

She pursed her lips. "It's possible," she conceded.

"But people would talk."

"Without a doubt."

"They'd guess what we were up to."

"Unerringly."

"Would we care?"

"Not even remotely."

They rose as one and began, with the most unseemly haste, to fold the blanket.