Chapter Fourteen
This felt right. Whenever Jasper had imagined bringing Fleur to Rosefields, it had been just like this: walking with her through the grounds at sunset, the June evening wreathed in the violet and pink remnants of long midsummer daylight, the famed white roses in full bloom, their scent wafting on the air of the garden.
‘The roses are legendary. They date back to the Plantagenets,’ he told her as they walked.
‘The white rose of York?’ She smiled.
‘Yes, exactly so. Meltham sided with the House of York. It was in the early days of our title, so I am told. The white roses also symbolise purity and innocence.’
He stopped and plucked a rose from its stem to ensure there were no thorns. ‘May I?’ He tucked the bloom behind her ear, securing it in the depths of her auburn tresses. She’d changed into a pink gown for supper and the colour looked extraordinary with her hair. ‘I didn’t think redheads wore pink.’ He gave the bloom a last adjustment.
‘We can if we’re brave enough and our dressmakers are smart enough,’ she replied with a laugh. ‘I have a gown in a blush pink, too. It’s one of my favourite colours to wear. This is the first time I’ve actually worn this one. I’d bought it before...’ Her voice trailed off. They both knew what before signified. ‘And then it wasn’t exactly something I could wear last year.’
No, he didn’t imagine this bright, pure pink would have been appropriate during mourning. He was touched that she’d worn it for him. He was the only man to see her in it. This dress was his alone, something that didn’t belong to Dead Adam. ‘You match the sunset,’ he complimented.
The comment obviously discomfited her a bit, this usually confident woman who always had something to say. Perhaps she was rusty at receiving them, another sign that she’d been alone too long. She quickly recovered, a teasing flare in her green eyes. ‘By matching the sunset, surely you mean stunning, fiery, blazing.’
He shook his head and covered her hand where it lay on his arm. She was trying to downplay the compliment and by doing so the sentiment that went with it. ‘Those adjectives describe the sun. I am talking about the sunset: calm, quiet, serene. You can be those things, too, Fleur. You needn’t be fiery all the time.’
‘Needn’t I? I beg to differ. I think I would be eaten alive.’
‘So you must be the fire? The consumer?’ He gave her a thoughtful look. ‘I feel that way, too, when I’m in London. I must protect the family, even myself. There is always business to take care of. I must always be on guard. Everybody wants something from me: money, time, patronage, an introduction, an acknowledgment. But not here. When I’m at Rosefields I am entirely myself. Certainly, there is work. Managing land and people always requires work, but there is also time to be me, to be quiet and still, to lay down my guard and rest.’ He gave her a long look. ‘I want Rosefields to be that for you as well while you’re here.’ There was a shadow in her eyes that confused him. Had he not been sincere? Had he not just laid the best gift he could conjure at her feet in a token of his goodwill?
‘It is an impossibility, Jasper. Here is the place where I can lay down my guard the least. This is your ground. Not an inch of it is mine. In London there was at least some parity, some neutrality.’ Restaurants and ballrooms were neutral territory. Theatre boxes and ballrooms were public. Homes were not.
‘Do we need that neutrality?’ he asked quietly in the gathering darkness. She did not trust his overture and it stung because it meant that she’d agreed to their alliance last night even though she hadn’t fully believed him, trusted him. ‘You are safe with me.’
She gave him a long, searching stare. ‘But I shouldn’t be. You have much to lose and yet you’ve brought me to your sanctuary.’
Jasper sensed she meant the words to put him off, to remind him of their circumstances. Fleur loved to fight. It was her protection. But the words did not rouse argument within him, only sorrow. This past year had done more damage to this woman than she knew. It was not only grief she carried with her, but suspicion and mistrust of everything and everyone in her world. Was there truly no one she could turn to?
He knew that feeling. A marquess must, by the nature of his position, be somewhat alone. He was alone except for his brother, a few close friends and his mother. Despite her ceaseless matchmaking, his mother was a bellwether for him, a compass. And he had Orion. He relied on them both. Who did Fleur have? Her husband was dead. Her best friends had remarried and left England. Her board of directors seemed more like sharks than supports and her aunt and uncle had deserted her.
‘You say I have much to lose and you marvel that I’ve invited you here. But I say the reverse is true. You also have much to lose and still you have come,’ he ran a thumb gently over the back of her hand in a soothing gesture. ‘Contrary to your conclusion, I think my invitation and your acceptance of it indicate that there is indeed trust between us, not suspicion.’ The shadow did not diminish from her gaze. She was wary even now. Good lord, how deep did her hurt go? How did he reach someone that far adrift, that heavily protected by the walls they’d built to hide the damage of loss?
‘Are you not afraid of what we might find here?’ she asked. It was the first time she’d ever used that word ‘afraid’. In the beginning he’d never have associated such a word with her. She was bold, daring, but not afraid. Now, he saw those things as decoys.
‘Yes,’ he confessed. ‘I am concerned about what we might find. However, I am not afraid of how we will respond. I have every confidence that you will handle the information with discretion and professionalism, that you will understand the gravity of how that information might affect people. Likewise, I have every confidence in myself to respond fairly. Our intentions come from a place of goodness. You believe it, too, or you would not have come.’
At least not with him. She might have come alone eventually, an avenging angel with a flaming sword looking to prove herself. A position of anger was not the way he wanted her to approach this fact-finding mission.
The spring moon had risen above the garden and the night birds had begun to sing. He led her to a low stone bench set amid a bower of white roses. ‘You can see the stars from here as they come out. Look, there’s the beginning of the Plough.’
He heard her sigh, felt her gaze follow the arc of his hand as he traced the sky, his finger connecting one star to the next. She shifted on the bench as she spoke, her voice soft in the dark, the weight of her head leaning against his shoulder as it had in the carriage this afternoon. ‘The country is beautiful. It is so quiet out here. A person can hear themselves think. It’s not like that in London. London is all busyness and schedules and moving from one activity to the next. It’s a good day if I can go to sleep with my list completed. I’m not sure a completed list should be the mark of a good day.’
He could feel the rise and fall of her breathing, deep and slow, relaxed. He took comfort from that. She did trust him a little even if she’d not admit to it. He said nothing, waiting and wanting her to speak again. He’d been telling stories all day in the hopes of putting her at ease and in the hopes that she’d share stories of her own. Eventually, she did.
‘I haven’t spent much time in the country since I made my debut. It’s hard to believe that was over ten years ago.’ Her hand was idly picking at his sleeve. He liked her touch on him, casual and soft.
‘Do you not have a country property?’ A man with her husband’s wealth could have afforded to buy an estate and many did, thinking it another notch in their belts to show the world they were someone.
Fleur rolled her head on his shoulder. ‘No, we lived in London year round. Adam didn’t like being too far from the Tribune offices. Whenever we left London it was to go to the other papers: Bristol, Leeds, York, Sheffield. We did stay a few times at Antonia and Keir’s or Garrett and Emma’s places. They had estates not far from each other in Surrey and not far from London. Adam felt he could get back quickly enough if there was trouble.’
Dead Adam was starting to sound like a selfish bastard, Jasper thought, but he knew he was biased. The man had had this incredible woman as his wife and his first thoughts had been whether or not he lived close enough to his work. Admittedly, Jasper recognised he knew little about the lives of businessmen. The concept of going to work, of keeping hours, and meeting deadlines was entirely foreign to him in some ways.
‘And you worked at the paper as well?’ he asked idly, careful not to scare her off with too much prying. This was the most she’d ever spoken of her previous life. His arm had tired of tracing the stars and had gone around her. Lord, this was nice, holding her, talking in the darkness, watching the moon. No London evening could be finer.
‘Yes, I did. I wrote feature stories for the Tribune. I went in every day.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Otherwise, I wouldn’t have seen Adam at all.’ Aha! Jasper thought. Dead Adam was indeed a selfish bastard. But then her next words deflated his sense of private victory.
‘We were very lucky. We enjoyed our work together. We spent our days together. Some couples become strangers with no shared interests, the wife going one way with her charities and ladies’ teas and the husband going another with his work and clubs. Soon, they’re two different people living in two different worlds.’ She gave a light sigh and snuggled closer. ‘It’s not necessarily their faults. I think the world sets people up to fail when it divides responsibilities, women to the private sector of the home and men to the public. There’s not much opportunity for sharing or for paths to cross.’
Jasper ran a hand up and down her bare arm in a languid pattern. ‘I suppose that’s one way to look at it. Being at work all day doesn’t leave a lot of time for family, though.’ It was a dangerous question. He knew it the moment he asked it. He felt her tense where his hand ran down her arm.
‘Adam did not wish for a family. He felt he was too old. He turned fifty the year we wed and he felt we should have some time to ourselves before we contemplated adding children in the mix. He believed it was important that we get to know each other.’ She gave a little laugh against his chest. ‘Ours was a whirlwind courtship.’
‘Yes, you’ve mentioned that,’ Jasper said wryly. He couldn’t forget it. One kiss from Dead Adam and she’d fallen for the much older man. ‘But once those years of settling in passed, surely children would be a natural progression to a marriage.’ It would be for him. He wanted to be a father, not just for the duty of the marquessate, but for himself. He wanted to give to another what his father had given to him. He yearned for it, but he wanted children with the right woman, not simply any woman.
‘By then Adam felt he was too old. He said he didn’t want to die and leave behind a half-raised child.’ She’d talked a lot about what Dead Adam had wanted. What did she want?
‘But you felt differently? Did you want children?’ Did she still want children?
‘Yes,’ she breathed the answer quietly into the night. ‘It was a point of contention between us, the one thing we never agreed on.’ Ah, so she and Dead Adam had fought. Argued. Had unresolved issues. Children. Time in the country. She’d given up a lot for that marriage. Did she see that? With Griffiths’s fortune, she could have spent her days any way she chose: shopping and charity work, decorating and redecorating the town house. Instead, she’d chosen to spend it working at the Tribune in order to be close to her husband. Perhaps she’d understood the risk of not doing so—the risk of losing him, the risk of watching her marriage disintegrate.
Something potent, part admiration and part envy, stirred in Jasper. Fleur Griffiths was loyal to the bone. To be the recipient of that loyalty, that devotion, would be the honour of a lifetime. Such dedication should not be given idly to just any man or woman. A person would need to be worthy of it, would need to earn it. Sitting here in the moonlight with her, he realised he would like to be worthy of it, even if only for a short time.
‘What of you? Have you ever been in love?’ she asked. She was deflecting and exacting a little quid pro quo. But wasn’t this also a sign of trust, proof that she’d meant it last night when she’d said she cared for him?
‘I thought I was once. I was young and foolish, though. It didn’t work out, obviously. Hence, my mother’s need for a list. I am more cautious these days.’ He’d not truly understood how attractive a title could be for ambitious young ladies in those days.
She elbowed him in the ribs playfully. ‘And yet you’re here with me. That doesn’t sound like the cautious choice.’ There was nothing cautious about Fleur Griffiths, it was what he liked about her. She was bold but vulnerable, brave but scared. But despite the vulnerability and the fear, she did not hold back, did not let those things stop her.
He felt her draw away from him and some of the magic went out of the evening. He was losing her. ‘I should not have said that. It was very leading.’ She rose and shook out her skirts.
He rose with her, a hand at her arm. ‘It was very bold. You know I like that about you. You admit your feelings. You speak your mind. Don’t ever change that. Not for me, not for anyone.’ Perhaps that had been the appeal of Dead Adam besides his kisses. He’d allowed her to speak her mind. Few men would. Fleur was a lot of woman to handle. No, not to handle. No one handled Fleur Griffiths. He’d do best to remember that. ‘You may be as you please here, Fleur. We may be as we please.’ He let his eyes linger on hers, his gaze conveying the unspoken message of his words. Rosefields could be their sanctuary. Here, they could be Jasper and Fleur until it was time to return to London. Did she understand?