Chapter 15
It would be a complicated path from this moment of bliss to one where he could trust Sofia wouldn”t flutter out of his life like an autumn leaf, taking his overzealous heart right along with her. He would concentrate on placing one foot in front of the other until all the brambles and bogs were behind them.
Already, she was becoming tense in his arms. He could almost feel her shake off the softness and pleasure she had found with him, so he would let her go. But only because she wished it, and he could only convince his body to do so in tiny increments. First he lifted his head, then he untangled his fingers from where they had nestled into her curls. The palm of his other hand slid down her shoulder and arm, following the warmth of her body along her hand and fingertips… until he ran out of Sofia to touch.
“Play a game of billiards with me while you explain exactly what I can do to help.” He folded his hands behind him to keep his fingers from seeking the comfort of her skin. “Do you know how?”
“Si, un po. Jeremy is teaching me. Smashing one ball into the other and getting them into those holes earns me points, yes?”
“There is no smashing in billiards, and don’t play with Jeremy—he cheats.”
Handing her a cue, they strung for break. He won.
“Yellow.”
“Well, it does suit you,” she said.
He resisted the urge to raise the topic of Oliver, taking his first shot instead. Banking the red ball off three sides, it slid neatly into the corner pocket. “Three points.” Another shot to the red ball and he pocketed his cue. “Another three.”
“Will I be playing this game anytime soon?”
Christopher smirked but didn”t take his eyes off the table. He was lined up for a cannon and took the shot without responding. “Two points.”
“I”d rather play with Jeremy. He lets me win, even if he does look down my bodice.”
Christopher missed his cue entirely. “Not anymore he doesn”t.”
“He’s a harmless pup,” she responded.
“He’s a harmless pup who’s going to be demoted to emptying chamber pots.”
Sofia lined up to take her shot, closing one eye.
“No, don’t close your eyes, and not like that. Here.” Moving behind her, he repositioned her body. She still missed by a substantial distance.
“Leave Jeremy alone.” She glanced over her shoulder. “He’s taken a fancy to one of the kitchen maids but she wants nothing to do with him. He’s heartsick.”
“Well, he can damn well wallow with his eyes directed elsewhere.”
She sighed, and the game continued with Christopher landing another sequence. With every stroke of the cue stick, he felt the subtle shift in Sofia’s attention, her thoughts drifting further from the game and into a place that loomed decidedly darker. He steadied himself for what was to come, determined to keep the conversation and his responses casual.
“My brother needs to be watched at all times until he is well, preferably far away from any alcohol.”
Christopher nodded slowly, outwardly maintaining his attention on the game as if her request for help was not monumental.
“Only a man should be asked to watch over him. Someone sturdy. When he drinks, he isn’t himself. He doesn”t know his own strength and he can be… careless.”
Christopher strangled his cue stick but gave another curt nod.
“Lately, he is even worse when he isn’t drinking.”
Christopher’s eyes slammed shut and they remained so as he silently nodded his understanding, nauseated all over again at the bruises he had pretended not to notice. He allowed his rage to burn inside of him for several seconds before forcibly quashing it.
He looked up, watching her across the interminable distance of the billiards table. Her head was bowed, her fingers restlessly worrying one another. He wanted to crawl across the table and fold her into his arms. She looked small, defeated, so unlike Sofi that he had to check himself from stomping down the hallway and screaming his frustration into her half-conscious brother”s face.
“Anything else?” he asked with all the lightness he could muster, planting his feet to the floor.
“Anything else?” she echoed back in a high-pitched, slightly hysterical tone. “I think that is quite enough, Christopher. Perhaps I wasn’t clear.” Her hands were shaking now and she hid them in the folds of her skirts. “I’m asking you to put yourself and others at risk to play nanny to my barbarian of a brother while he reduces everything within arm’s reach to splinters. I’m asking you to set aside time from your duties and your friends for a man who will loathe you and threaten you in return for your kindness.”
Her voice trickled away to a whisper. “I’m asking for too much.” Her chest was heaving, her eyes wide and helpless. “But I can’t do it on my own. And I can’t leave him to drown in his drink. And I have no one else.” A sob escaped, and she covered her mouth with her fingers. “No one else to help me. I do not want to ask this of you. I wish Oliver and I were far away from here where we couldn’t possibly harm you or anyone on the estate. I wish we had never?—”
The cue stick dropped from Christopher”s lax fingers with a clatter, rolling across the floor. His first steps matched the urgency that roiled through him, but then he forced his feet to slow.
“There is a gamekeeper”s cottage nearby, close enough to be convenient but not so close that the sounds of breaking furniture will attract attention. It’s desperately in need of a remodel, but demolition is exhausting work so it’s been left to crumble on its own. The table in the cottage was built there, and it’s far too large to carry out the door in one piece. With any luck, Oliver will rip off a leg or two and take out the westward-facing wall in the process, as it’s beginning to bow. If Oliver destroys the place, it will be helpful unpaid labour. In fact, I”m not sure my conscience will allow his physical exertion to proceed without compensation.”
Christopher had stopped a mere twelve inches away. Near enough for her to close the distance between them effortlessly, but far enough that she could keep her distance if she needed to. He silently begged her to take that last step. To muster up whatever courage remained after laying herself bare.
“Jeremy owes me a few shifts with your brother for his inappropriate leering,” he continued. “No one in this house is unaware of my affection for you, him least of all. A man doesn”t haul a fifteen-foot-tall fruit tree up the side of a balcony to garner a woman”s notice because his feelings are tepid.” His boots shifted an inch closer. “My feelings are not tepid Sofia. And what you view as an immoderate request, I welcome as an opportunity to remind you of that fact. Oliver, with his twenty-one stone of volatile feelings, is just another pear tree. I would grow you an orchard, Sofia… if you would only let me.”
He held her gaze, daring her to ignore the vehemence of his words and the raw honesty in his eyes. “In a few days, when he is stronger, but before he is well enough to start causing mischief, we’ll move him to the cottage. In the meantime, it may be wise to remove any objects from the cottage that might tempt him to test their missile capabilities. Once he’s there, we can take shifts keeping an eye on him until he is through the worst of it. Then, as he recovers, we’ll engineer a way to keep him busy… some kind of fulfilling work.”
“We need to move him today, Christopher. And soon. When I checked on him this morning, he had already found and consumed a bottle of something that smelled expensive.”
Sofia sounded miserable, and her cheeks pinked with embarrassment. Having regained enough self-control to be certain that touching Sofia would not lead to crushing her against his chest, Christopher reached out and cupped her face in his hand, swiping his thumb across her heated skin. The pad of his thumb tingled where he touched her. What an idiot he was. The desire to pull her close had, in fact, not abated. He doubted it ever would.
“Enough of that now. This isn’t your fault, Sofia, and I won”t have you bear the shame for his misdeeds. Come, let”s see what makeshift arsenals await us.”
Christopher had not exaggeratedthe shabbiness of the cottage. The floors sank and creaked beneath layers of dust, and strips of faded, curling wallpaper drooped from the walls dramatically. A brown moth-eaten coat hung from a peg on the wall, and a wooden toy boat sat in the corner beside a miniature hammer. All around her, the cottage was littered with belongings, as if whoever had lived there had disappeared in the middle of the night. She had the eerie feeling of being pulled into someone’s memories from long ago.
“Will His Grace mind you using this space?” She picked up a woman’s shawl from where it hung across a chair. It was simple homespun but embroidered with obvious care. Her fingers traced the loops of stitching, absently trailing across a cluster of pale pink flowers.
“He won’t mind. The people who resided here are long gone.”
Broken bits of glass crackled beneath Christopher’s boots as he walked the length of the room. Pulling a pen knife from his coat pocket, he crouched and used the blade to lift a loose floorboard, then retrieved a small tin box from the darkness beneath it. For a long moment, Christopher just stared at it, running his fingertips through the blanket of dust that covered its surface. He looked fragile. Vulnerable.
One at a time, he lifted the objects up into the single beam of muted sunlight that broke through the grime-coated windowpane. Two toy soldiers, a handful of jacks, a fishing lure, and a crude wooden whistle. He placed each of them back into the tin box reverently, closed the lid, and stood.
His home, then. His toy soldiers.
Christopher said nothing. Instead, he simply turned away, opened a cupboard, and began sorting through a pile of cookware. He looked so alone. So forlorn. She didn’t want to intrude on his privacy, but the urge to comfort him nearly overwhelmed her. And the more she tried to crush the impulse, the larger it became. To distract herself, Sofia folded the shawl she’d found and gently placed it at the bottom of an old cedar chest in the corner. Then she tucked a discarded sachet of dried flowers into the folds.
When she turned, Christopher was staring vacantly at the chest. His chin quivered. “There is no need for that. It’ll be quicker to make a pile outside and burn it all.” Then his eyes flicked back to the wooden boat in the corner. His boat. She was almost certain of it.
If this was Sofia’s childhood home and her feelings were popping up like wild onion sprouts, she would frantically rip them from the ground before anyone could see the imperfections in her garden. In the billiards room, Christopher had known that about her and given her exactly what she needed. He had spared her the indignity of weeping on his shoulder, feigning blindness to her helplessness and wounded pride. He’d deflected her unease with humour until the world felt sturdy again beneath her feet.
But that wasn’t what Christopher needed.
His back was turned as she approached, an old wooden spoon resting in his hand. Sliding her arms around him, she flattened her palms against his stomach, fingers splayed wide, and squeezed. Sofia held him tightly, her cheek pressed to the soft wool of his jacket, offering the sort of comfort she herself was too broken to accept.
Christopher’s taut muscles unfurled in her embrace, and a wash of contentment settled into her bones at being the source of his comfort. She ran her thumbs experimentally up and down his abdomen in what she hoped was a soothing pattern. He let out a long breath.
“When my sister and I would cry over silly things, my mother used to chase us around the house, giggling and trying to scoop up our tears with this spoon. I honestly don’t know the point of it to this day, but it made me laugh and usually stopped the tears… I suppose that was the point.”
“She sounds like a lovely mama.”
“My seven-year-old heart thought her incapable of causing anyone the slightest hurt… our whole family believed that. I’m not sure which of the three of us adored her most. My papa was the sort who could never hold back any part of his heart. Never wanted to.”
His smile drifted away from his voice like a passing cloud, an almost unbearable silence taking its place for the space of several heartbeats. “And then he caught her in the woods with another man. And when my papa confronted her, asked her to choose, she left him. Left us all. Walked out as if our life here was nothing… as if we were nothing. She wrote after, but I could never bring myself to open the letters. Eventually they stopped.” Sofia tightened her grip though her arms felt insignificant compared to the magnitude of his hurt. His hand slid to rest atop one of hers, and the rightness of it struck her squarely in the chest.
“My father nearly lost his mind from the grief. Broke things, sobbed. We moved into the servants’ quarters that very night, and, stricken by heartache, he wouldn’t allow my sister or I to take a thing. Not a stray sock nor favourite toy. Everything we owned carried too much of her, and he could not survive the slightest reminder. The following week, with a clearer head, he encouraged Charlotte and I to fetch our things, but we didn’t wish to cause him further pain. My papa was a selfless man and a devoted papa. Crossing through the doorway would have felt like a betrayal of him, and he had already lost too much. That may have been the worst part. Despite everything, I still loved her. Missed her.”
He let out a long breath. “I miss her still. For years, I wondered if there was something I could have done to make her stay. I’d seen them in the woods, my mama and her lover, the week before. But I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.”
Christopher turned in Sofia’s arms and looked down at her. His eyes were wet, but he made no move to wipe his tears away. Only stood there, letting himself feel what his heart needed to feel. Wrapping her fingers around the spoon still in his hand, she lifted it to his cheek and pretended to scoop away a tear with the splintering wood. Before she could wither away from embarrassment at her impulsive action, laughter rumbled in his chest. Then he kissed her soundly on the mouth.
Every time their lips met, it felt like exploring another side of Christopher Keene, and she already liked far too much of him as it was. He pulled away before either of them could become swept away, but he held her gaze with those puddle-grey eyes.
“Thank you.” Christopher slid the spoon from her hand, then crossed the room and placed it beside his mother’s shawl.
He paused on the way back, studying a half-finished needlepoint sampler, a crooked grin tipped about the corners of his mouth. “Charlotte always did hate needlepoint. I should leave this one out for Oliver to destroy.” Despite the declaration, he tucked the shabby childhood memorabilia away with the other relics from his past and continued sorting odds and ends.
Occasionally, he interrupted their work with a story about his childhood or a light-hearted comment, but for the most part, they worked silently, side by side. Within a few hours, anything worth keeping had been packed snuggly into the chest or moved to the carriage house, and the cabin was reasonably clean.
When Christopher wastwelve years old, he had stood outside that cabin door on his mother’s birthday with his fingers wrapped around the handle for what felt like an age. That morning, he’d woken up and thought about her, and to his despair, he couldn’t recall the details of her face. He could feel the calluses on her hands when she whirled him around the kitchen humming a made-up tune. He could hear the sound of her laughter. But when he’d looked into his mind’s eye, the shape of her mouth, the exact shade of her eyes, the expression on her face when she kissed him goodnight… it had all felt just out of reach, stolen by time.
He had known that if he stepped through that door, walked in for even a moment, it would come back. But a face and expression he could still recall perfectly—his Papa and the torment in his eyes when he’d realised she was leaving—bludgeoned into his thoughts. Christopher’s hand had slid from the handle and he’d walked away.
When he was eighteen, riding onto the estate for the first time in years, he and Gabriel had passed the cabin. Christopher had slowed his horse, staring at the lush overgrowth of grass where the gardens had once thrived, then nudged his horse into a trot and forced his gaze forward.
He was a man now, he’d told himself. He wouldn’t indulge in the melodramatic fiction that anything he did or didn’t do had caused his mother to walk away. Yes, he had seen her with her lover the week before and said nothing to her or Papa. Perhaps if he had spoken to her, the rest of his life might have looked different, but it was not the responsibility of a child to mend the broken marriage of his parents.
He had suffered enough for his momentary inaction. His childhood fears and his feelings of inadequacy because he couldn’t make her stay had shaped the man he’d become. There was always that jangle in the back of his mind, that compulsion to make himself indispensable so the people he loved would not walk away.
He knew how painful it would be to rip open those memories. But then Sofia had needed a safe space for her brother, and he had one at his disposal. Nothing else mattered in that moment. She who relied upon no one and asked for nothing, had reached for him.
He had done a poor job hiding his shock upon walking through the door, but as he held each of his boyhood treasures up to the light, expecting to topple beneath the onslaught of loss, what struck him most was how very young he had been when his mother left. He hadn’t felt small at the time, with his ambitious plans for the future and the fearlessness of childhood, but the fingers that had covered those tiny whistle holes had been so very small.
And when his tears had come, they had been caused by relief as much as by melancholy. He had experienced a great unspooling of guilt upon holding tangible evidence of his childhood smallness. It didn’t matter how clever or capable or determined he had been, his parents’ failing marriage was far beyond the scope of what he could prevent. Even his most effective interventions would have been the equivalent of holding his hand above his papa’s head to protect him from the rain.
Now, with the shadows that had long loomed over his heart wafting from view and Sofia’s arms wrapped around him, the life he wanted felt blissfully possible. He was a grown man now, and when rain had threatened Sofia, he had provided a roof.
“I’ll fetch some sheets to make up the bed after luncheon, and then we can figure out how to get your brother relocated. I want to stop by and speak with Hamish McKenna. He’s a great hulking Scotsman and is generally good natured enough to be talked into lending a hand.”
“A servant I haven’t met?”
“No. He is Violet’s closest friend. They were childhood chums with her late husband, Nathan. Hamish is a tenant farmer on the duke’s land. Has quite a few sheep. Between Hamish, Jeremy, and me, we should be able to keep your brother safe and out of trouble.”
Reaching down, he laced his fingers through hers like they’d done it a thousand times before. “But first,” he said, pressing his forehead against hers, “I would very much like to pass a few leisurely moments kissing you.”
She lifted up to her toes and pressed her lips against his.