Chapter Four #2
It was always so precious, being this close to Irene.
Half of Society might look at them askance, wondering why exactly her parents permitted her, an unmarried lady, to walk out with a gentleman.
The other half of Society had long known that the Duke of Aynor had a strange but utterly platonic relationship with the Viscount Pernrith’s second daughter.
Not that it excused the two of them flouting the rules in their eyes.
And he…he just knew that one day she was going to fall in love with someone and go off and marry him, and his heart would break.
“Isn’t this marvelous?” Irene said conversationally as they waited at a street corner to cross the road.
Wilfred’s original reply was lost in the rumble of a carriage, so he repeated it. “What, walking about Bath?”
“No, silly,” she said with a laugh. “That we’re friends again!”
“We weren’t ever not friends. And we didn’t ignore each other for very long,” he pointed out, his stomach twisting painfully every second that they had been at odds with each other.
Not that she had to know that.
“No, I suppose not,” Irene said thoughtfully as they stepped off the pavement and across the street on their way to Sydney Gardens. It was where their footsteps always seemed to take them when they were in Bath. “And yet it felt like a long time.”
She could never know how much statements of that sort meant to him. Wilfred tried not to smile, tried not to make it too obvious that he was swelling at the idea that she had missed him.
“I like that we are such good friends that we can easily forgive each other,” continued Irene. “It would be terribly unfortunate if we were to truly fall out. Don’t you think?”
Wilfred had never allowed himself to think of such things. It was painful, the idea, cutting into his gut and ripping out his innards. Not something that he wished to experience.
“I suppose now Jessica is married, my parents will be hoping to marry me off,” said Irene lightly.
Wilfred almost tripped over his own feet. “Wh-What?”
“Honestly, where are your manners, Wilfred?” Irene teased with a laugh in her voice. “Who taught you to…”
Her voice trailed away as her mind caught up with her words. For the second time that day, her cheeks pinked.
Wilfred held open the gate into Sydney Gardens and tried his best to console her. After all, she clearly had not meant to blunder into such a topic. In fact, it was rare indeed that it even came up between them.
“You do not have to worry,” he said gently, squeezing her arm this time. “I can speak of my parents quite easily. You know that.”
“Still, I should not have said it,” Irene said awkwardly. “I mean…you were just a child when they died. That terrible carriage accident.”
“It was a miracle indeed that I was not in it with them,” Wilfred said breezily, desperate to put the woman he loved at ease. “You must not concern yourself. I can speak of them quite calmly.”
He could now, at any rate.
Irene had been right. He had been just a child, just seven years old. The sudden jerk into loneliness had been so rapid, he could hardly understand it at the time. One moment, they had been there, and then the next…
Irene removed her hand from the crook of his arm and Wilfred would have protested—at least, he would have protested completely silently and without an iota of expression in his face—but she instead slipped her hand in his, entwining her fingers around his own.
“You miss them,” she said lightly.
Wilfred swallowed. He did miss them, but… “How can you miss something you can barely remember?” he said, far more lightly than he felt. “How can you miss a memory that has faded and faded like a cushion in the sun?”
He need not have bothered. Irene glanced up with a severe expression. “You don’t need to pretend to speak all light and jubilation when it hurts, you know, Wilfred. You can always be honest with me.”
His shoulders slumped as they turned a corner along the garden path. “I know. And I miss them. But I hardly remember what to miss.”
Perhaps it was a common experience for all children who’d lost their parents at such a young age. Perhaps it was not only he who struggled sometimes to recall his father’s face.
Oh, there was a portrait of them in the hall in his London townhouse. The thirteenth Duke of Aynor and his duchess. They stood there, regally, his father holding the lead of a dog and his mother holding a small scruff of a child in a blanket. Him.
But without the portrait, would he still know that he shared his jaw with his father and his eyes with his mother?
Without the painting, would he have known they’d had a dog?
He could recall no such animal. Or was the painting not wholly truthful, a vision of what their lives could have been but without the accuracy he’d presumed?
A squeeze of his hands. Wilfred looked at Irene, who smiled.
“I lost you for a moment there,” she said quietly.
The idea was so repellent, he swiftly spoke against it. “You will never lose me.”
“Good,” she said briskly. “Because I am your family now, Wilfred. Me, and my parents and siblings. We are your family.”
A swell of emotion threatened to overwhelm him.
Because she was right. The Chances, particularly the Pernrith Chances, were his family. What they did not perhaps realize was just how true he wanted that to be.
“Come, let’s sit down and observe the passersby,” Irene said, pulling him toward their favorite bench.
Wilfred hardly wished to argue with her. Besides, sitting on a bench like this was another wonderful opportunity to find himself pressed up against the beautiful woman without her suspecting just how much he was enjoying it.
He crossed his legs hurriedly. Damn and blast it, the potency of her presence was getting worse and worse. That, or he was starting to lose control more easily.
What sort of a gentleman couldn’t control his—
“Ah, look,” Irene said quietly. “Look, over there.”
Wilfred obediently looked. He saw a lady in a navy pelisse and matching bonnet, arm in arm with a gentleman a few inches shorter than her but with a top hat that more than made up for it.
He was speaking to her in a low, hurried tone, which did not carry along the path, and the lady’s eyes were downcast—though there was pink in her cheeks and a smile hinted at on her lips.
“Courting lovers, I would say,” Irene said cheerfully, leaning back against the bench, her hand still entwined in Wilfred’s.
“Oh, really?” he said as calmly as he could, as though his pulse was not pulsing so loudly he wondered why she couldn’t hear it. “Without a chaperone present? Wouldn’t you be more likely to assume they’re already husband and wife?”
“More and more women are thinking as I do,” said Irene stiffly.
“That we are perfectly trustworthy to maintain our own virtue. Whatever Society may say. I mean, why is a simple exchange of vows, a couple of signatures on a piece of paper, what a man and woman must go through to enjoy a walk on a beautiful day together?”
A simple exchange of vows. A couple of signatures on a piece of paper.
Marriage was so dispassionate a topic in her eyes.
“I suppose some old woman sitting on a bench somewhere could be the lady’s chaperone regardless.
Perhaps my neighbor, Mrs. Brown.” He winked through the thundering of his heart and Irene softened.
“And what about them?” He did not point, but rather gestured with a nod of his head at a pair of people walking along the path toward them.
Irene turned to look at them, and Wilfred took advantage of the moment to look at her. Long, dark lashes, and pink in her cheeks surely because of the cold, and the curve of her lips he knew so well. Had memorized. Knew by heart.
“Them?” Irene murmured as the lady and gentleman passed them. “Lovers, of course.”
Wilfred tried to breathe, cough, and speak at the same time. It did not go well. “Y-You mean—”
“Oh, I don’t mean they have—I mean, they are courting,” Irene said with a laugh, though the pink in her cheeks might have been a tad darker.
“Courting lovers, like the first pair. I can spot them a mile off. And you’ll be pleased to note there’s a maidservant following a few steps behind this time.
Some intrepid mama has done her duty by making sure her girl is under another woman’s eye at every waking moment of the day. You may rest easy.”
Wilfred swallowed.
And what, he wanted to ask, do you think people see when they look at us? Here we are, you and I, seated in a public garden on a bench, hand in hand. Do you not think that they presume we are courting? That we are in love?
That you are ruined because your pretend chaperone is always just “out of sight”?
His soul wrenched. It was painful at times, to be so in love with a person when they had absolutely no idea that you were so besotted with them.
Sometimes it was like an injury to his side, twisting with sharp agony.
Sometimes it was like a dull headache that lasted days: always there, and though you managed to function almost the same as any other day, it was exhausting, draining your energy.
What was he supposed to do?
“You know,” Irene said happily, snuggling up to Wilfred and placing her head on his shoulder, “I shouldn’t wonder that some people look at us and presume the very same thing.”
Wilfred’s heart stopped.
“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” Irene murmured.
Wilfred’s heart started beating again, though in a way, he wondered why it bothered if she was just going to break it every time he saw her.
“Ridiculous,” he managed.
What he should have said was “No, it is not ridiculous. Why would it be ridiculous that I would fall in love with you? You, so beautiful and so charming. You, with that scrunch of your nose when you’re about to laugh and you don’t think you should.
You, and that family of yours, who call dogs ‘dragons’ and who welcomed me in like a son, like I could be a brother to you. ”
But he didn’t want to be a brother to her. Wilfred tried not to do it, knew he would only be torturing himself, but apparently, he could not help it.
He turned his head and looked at Irene. She was so close, her eyelashes fluttering shut as she seemed to enjoy his shoulder.
Her lips were right there, mere inches away.
A small movement, just a few inches, and he would be kissing her.
Finding out, finally, what she tasted like.
Discovering for the first time whether the need in him was matched by the need in her.
Wilfred swallowed. It would be utter madness. He shouldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it.
And yet the temptation was excruciating, twisting his insides in knots as his manhood jerked with desire, and then need for her. The need for this agony of uncertainty to be over was so strong that for a mere pulse, he leaned forward—
Irene opened her eyes and Wilfred jerked back.
“Having a best friend like you is so wonderful,” she said quietly. “I honestly don’t know what I would do without you. I hope our friendship never changes.”
It would have been less painful if she had just stabbed him directly with a blade.
Wilfred tried to smile, but it was not customary to smile after one had received a mortal wound. “‘Never changes,’ huh? Are you certain about that?”
“Completely certain,” Irene said simply. “I never want this to change, Wilfred. Never.”
Could she know—had she guessed? Is this, Wilfred’s mind thought wildly, a subtle way of her attempting to let me down gently, to remind me of my proper place by her side?
A friend, a brother, and never a lover?
“I will never change,” he promised her.
It wasn’t what she had asked him, but it was all he could commit to her.
No, Wilfred knew he would never change. His affections for her were eternal and he would never be able to remove her from his heart, even if he had wanted to.
But if these were the terms to which he must agree so that they could remain close—if it was true that she did not wish for him to be any more than that, though he would never stop loving her—then Wilfred thought this was probably the best compromise they could find.
“So,” Irene said briskly, lifting her head from his shoulder and beaming as though they had not just shared one of the most important conversations of their lives. “Shall we go to the market and see if there are any trinkets for sale?”
Wilfred smiled weakly. “Anything for you.”