Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Andrew took several minutes to come to full awareness. He opened his eyes and began to smile. The smile froze, and his heart stuttered.
“Tears? Dear one, I am so sorry, I—”
“Don’t be a damned fool. It was wonderful.” She sniffed adorably.
He hadn’t intended to kiss her. Harley’s performance, Jamie’s presence, his preemptive verbal strike, and the solitude of the study all discomforted her exactly as he intended.
He forgot to watch his flank. Her very presence had discomforted him more than he anticipated; it overran his common sense.
Here they were, and he knew it was his fault they were in his bed and she was crying. What a muddle!
He could not understand the workings of her convoluted female mind. Foolish woman. She wanted freedom. He offered his heart on a platter. All she had to do was take it. He watched her quietly for a few seconds too long–long enough for her to hear pots banging and voices below.
“Jamie!” She leapt from his bed.
She ran about his room gathering the remnants of her clothes, and he lay back to enjoy the sight. She was adorable and quite astonished when she turned to see Andrew stretched out on the bed in his nakedness, not moving an inch.
“You’re amused? But Jamie!”
“Too late, love. This house is too small to mask the kinds of noise you make.”
“I don’t! I do? Odious man. You are laughing again.”
She slipped into her gown and turned so he could lace it. “Oh, do hurry.” Another laugh escaped him; his hands caressed her back, and his lips brushed the back of her neck. “If you insist.” He began to dress.
She put on her shoes and recovered her pelisse from the floor of his study, when a thought struck her.
“Was it?” Her eyes were remarkably wide.
“Incredibly pleasurable? Yes.” He fastened his waistcoat.
“Not that.” She colored brightly. “The work. Was it really good?”
“‘Is’ not ‘was.’ It is quite good.” He stopped with one arm in his jacket. “Haven’t you read it?”
“As printed? No. Too angry.”
“Angry. Months of work and you were too angry to even read the blasted book? Five hundred copies sit in Bailey’s storage waiting for your decision, but you are too angry to read it.
I think it is I who should be angry. It’s your work Georgie, and it’s damned good. Thank you for allowing me to share it.”
“But?”
“But nothing. The work felt good. It’s over.” He shrugged into the jacket, letting her stew about it.
Tears welled in her eyes. He hoped she wept in sorrow that the work, their partnership, had ended.
The sound of voices at the bottom of the stairs brought alarm to her expression.
She breathed very deeply, turned her back to him, and approached the stairs, the very picture of a vengeful warrior princess.
“Oh, no you don’t!” He reached her in a quick movement and hopped on one foot to ease the cramp it caused. “If the fox truly is in the hen house, we’re going down there together.” She turned a look filled with a mix of emotions to him. He thought he saw gratitude among them.
“Easy now, head high,” he whispered behind her as they descended the stairs. “That’s my lady.”
Two steps, three, and they were blinking in the bright sun of the sitting room.
Two expectant pairs of eyes, Jamie’s vastly amused and Harley’s sardonic and knowing waited for one of them to say something.
There, by the door, stood another visitor.
Geoffrey Dunning had a look of total shock on his face.
Georgiana had neither maid nor chaperone; she was utterly compromised.
Andrew certainly hoped she understood that.
She opened her mouth; what came out resembled a croak.
Andrew gently urged her toward the door, his hand on her upper arm.
“Lady Georgiana can’t stay to visit this afternoon, I’m afraid. She has reading to complete.” He watched the back of her neck turn scarlet.
“Yes, I, that is, I didn’t intend to stay. My conveyance is waiting.”
Stayed rather longer than she intended, he suspected. Her eyes looked large and unfocused; he had to pick up her hand and place it on his proffered arm in order to escort her out.
He handed her into a hired carriage and spoke softly into her ear as he did.
“No partnership, Georgie. I don’t make love to business partners.
You have to decide what it is, this, this thing between us.
” He made sure she didn’t see his smug smile when he turned away, but he couldn’t disguise his sense of triumph.
She was his. He knew it. He just needed to help her admit it.
* * *
“This thing? Thing? He calls our relationship a thing?” The smug tyrant! She nursed anger almost through dinner. Dining alone, however, makes one vulnerable to disordered thoughts. Anger gave way to morose introspection.
“What would you call it then,” a voice in her head demanded. “Can you give it a name suitable for a London drawing room? I image Dunning could give it a name, but it wouldn’t be suitable.”
“We’re partners.”
“I think not.” The voice grew sardonic.
“He may not think so, but I say we are.” I don’t make love to business partners.
Internal voices, luckily, don’t make rude noises. They do conjure images of clean linen sheets, disheveled black hair, and laughing ebony eyes.
The afternoon shook her badly. Jamie knew.
Richard’s eyes and ears, Jamie, knew. Worse, Dunning knew.
Will he tell his grandmother? She didn’t think he was a gossip, but he was very close to Edwina Potter.
How she would look to the people of Cambridge, a woman alone with her books, when rumors about her relationship with Andrew became painfully clear.
“You think he’ll stay in Cambridge after this?” Internal voices do ask uncomfortable questions. It was one thing to make a pariah of herself and another to ruin his reputation.
She slammed down her hand. Damn it. Men aren’t ruined by a discreet affair. They are congratulated! That may be so in London, in her parents’ world. She wasn’t so sure about Cambridge with its inbred social structure and middle-class values. She had already sullied his scholarly reputation.
And if Jamie runs to Richard, what then?
She looked down the length of gleaming mahogany, empty save for a grotesquely ornate silver candelabrum and her half-empty wine glass.
She thought of Andrew’s house, full of his friends, his warmth, and his laughter.
Soon Helsington and its splendors will be gone, sold to Colonel Warrington who brought a new bride to this place.
Perhaps the Warringtons would give this silent mausoleum life.
Georgiana pushed away her dinner, half eaten. Soon she would eat her solitary meals on a smaller, rougher table. She wondered if solitude felt less oppressive when it occupied less space. Yesterday the little house on Sheep Street meant freedom. Tonight, it just sounded empty.
“Do you plan to spend the evening leaning on your chair? You can’t avoid the book that way.” The voice again.
Georgiana pretended not to notice William who pretended not to watch her.
He’d be gone in a week along with the candelabrum and the mahogany table.
Her maid had left for her sister’s in Surrey the day before.
It didn’t matter. Her servants were too well trained to invisibility to provide any sort of human comfort.
She began to pick up her plate, but William was too quick for her. As long as he remained at Helsington, she wouldn’t carry her own dishes.
Georgiana ran out of excuses. She climbed the steps with feet of lead to the book waiting in her sitting room where she had left it the day before, her life’s work in a leather-bound package.
“What are you afraid of? Mockery?” The voice sneered at her now. “It is a book, fool.”
She wasn’t afraid. Fear was nonsensical.
Gilt letters shown up at her: “An English Lady of Scholarship.” It seemed as if her life amounted to nothing else but what could be encapsulated in that neat turn of phrase. The leather-bound volume represented her adult life. What if it is terrible?
She picked it up and caressed the smooth cover.
“The assistance of A. Mallet.” Andrew. They had done this work together; it was part of both of them. She saw with sudden clarity why she avoided reading it.
Grief terrified her, not failure. Failure could be faced. When they had the work, Georgiana understood what lay between them. She held the finished product, their creation, in her hand. She didn’t know what they shared now that they had finished it.
Georgiana brought her solitary candle and the book to her bedchamber. She placed both on the table next to her bed and began to undress. She picked up the book and slipped between the sheets alone.
* * *
“Your intentions?”
Black eyes radiated death in the general direction of Major Lord James Phineas Heyworth.
“Honorable,” Andrew snapped.
“And?” Jamie continued.
“She won’t have me.”
“It didn’t seem to me that the lady lacked interest.”
The look of death intensified.
“Am I correct in my assumption that our Georgie is utterly compromised?” Jamie went on.
“Only if she chooses to be,” Andrew replied. It came out as a growl.
“Or if word were to get out,” Jamie pointed out.
“It won’t. Not from me, not from Harley, and not,” Andrew spat, “from you. I would see you dead first, slowly and painfully.”
“You would too. Do you plan the same fate for Dunning?”
Mallet’s curses would have been at home on the docks of any Mediterranean port.
He had tried to overlook the detail that Geoff, though not a malicious gossip, was careless.
Georgie couldn’t avoid this. She would have to marry him.
Still, Geoff had come at the very end. He saw that they had been alone, but perhaps he thought they were working.
Fool! The truth was clear all over Georgiana’s face.
Andrew felt as though a large pole had hit him over the head.
Jamie looked more amused than sympathetic. “Banns on Sunday?”