Chapter 2 #2
And came right up against the aching need for a drink of her own in the still too-slender form of her father. The first time she’d seen him in six years. He was a little bowed, a little grayer, his skin thinning and creased and so unlike the man she remembered.
“Tessa!” Her father sounded surprised. “I… We did not know you would be here.”
That her greeting. After six years. To think there’d been days, most of her life, really, when his lips had formed a song as he’d looked at her, when his eyes had held stars, and his words had been full of…
She wouldn’t cry.
“Father, it’s lovely to see you.” She sounded much too formal and stiff. But that’s what they were now. Formal. Stiff. Strangers. “Is Mother here?”
“Yes.” He nodded near the bookshelf by the fireplace where her little mother with flyaway orange curls stretched an arm toward a tome much higher above her head than she could reach. “I should go help her.”
“Of course.”
“You should… stay here. And, if you do not mind, stay out of her line of sight.”
Tessa bit her lip, nodded. “I—” Too high. She cleared her throat. “I will.” Better. At least she’d sounded better.
There was a high wavering wail no one could hear but her, though, and it made the room shift beneath her like the boards of a ship. She clutched a fist near the stone heavy in her belly. She wouldn’t cry, and she wouldn’t be sick.
But she would watch her father as he stepped backward, as he turned, as he walked away. She watched hoping he’d turn back, that the gravestone firmness of his mouth would give way, just once—a tiny crack—to allow the corner of his mouth to grin. A sign. A little message that he still loved her.
But it never did.
And with a half hour until dinner, and her stomach empty as a hip bath awaiting water—except for that stone—she moved once more toward Remmy in the corner.
And once more found herself waylaid, a too-loud conversation bringing her to an abrupt stop.
“Do you think Mr. Ives,” a young woman Tessa didn’t recognize said, “is as scandalous as the Brazen Belle says?”
“Pardon me?” Tessa slipped slightly between the two women. When they blinked at her she asked, “Who is the Brazen Belle?”
The women shared a look.
One said, “You do not know?”
The other said, “Everyone knows the Brazen Belle.”
“I have been abroad.” Tessa tried not to sound as indignant as she felt.
“She writes The Rake Review,” the first woman said. “A scandal sheet about—”
“Rakes?” Tessa guessed.
The other woman nodded.
“And Mr. Ives,” Tessa asked, “has been lately discussed in this publication?”
The first woman said slowly, carefully, “She doesn’t name him exactly. She never does. But we all know anyway. And June’s rake is Mr. R. I.”
The first woman tapped her chin. “It could be Richard Islington.”
“Oh, it might. That makes sense, too.”
“Islington?” Tessa asked.
“Another theatre owner.”
“Ah.” Things began to make more sense now. “It must be Islington. Mr. Ives is no rake. He’s hardworking and steadfast. And sweet and…”
The women had slipped into heavy silence. They exchanged a look.
One of them pushed a bit of paper toward her. “Decide for yourself.”
Tessa took the paper and read it.
Naughty hands… loudmouthed lothario… bared skin… Remmy?
Tessa shoved the paper back at them. “This is not Mr. Ives.”
Another look shared, then a pointed one at Remmy, at the two buxom women draped across him.
Curse those women. Tessa knew well what it looked like, but there had to be a reason for them other than… Other than…
“Mr. Ives is not a rake!” Tessa insisted.
Her voice rose on a wave of irritation that had been pinching her since she’d discovered how many moles Brawly’s backside possessed.
First that bit of information, then she’d learned she was soon to lose her position, then the suggestion of marriage, then her father and—now she was trembling—her mother, and now this!
Her friend, the sweetest man in the world, maligned by that…
that brazen belle! “He cannot be the man the Brazen Belle wrote of!” She was speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear, collecting startled looks and worried stares, a few chuckles, whispers behind fans. “He is nothing like the Belle paints.”
“Miss King.” Her name wrapped up in a deep voice, rich and warm as chocolate, that brushed warm across the skin of her neck. She knew that voice well.
She turned. “Do you hear what they are saying about you, Mr. Ives?”
“I do indeed.” His usually mobile mouth was pinched into a thin line.
“I won’t let them. Do not worry.” She cleared her throat, raised her voice even higher. “Mr. Remington Ives—”
“Tessa,” Remmy grumbled.
“—is not—”
“Tessa, stop,” he growled.
“—a rake!”
“Good God,” he groaned.
But she didn’t stop. Why in heavens would he want her to? “And I will take exception to anyone who says otherwise. I’ve read the June article, and I assure you, it cannot be about Mr. Iv—ack!”
Remmy’s hand banded around her upper arm. “Oh dear. It seems Miss King has fainted.”
“I have n—mmmph.”
He pressed her to his side, shoving her head into his armpit and accepted someone’s smelling salts as he dragged her to his corner.
What was she supposed to do? Wriggle like a fish caught in a net? How undignified.
So she went entirely limp and made him work for this little farce. He grunted and sank several inches toward the floor under her limp weight.
“Help me move your body, King.”
No use answering. She’d fainted, after all.
“This would be easier,” he said, “if you stop playing dead.”
“I’m in the middle of a swoon, you boot brain. I cannot control my muscles.”
“Good God.”
He plopped her onto a sofa in his little corner of the room, and one of the buxom beauties pulled a fan out of her pocket and offered it.
Tessa shook her head. “As you can see, I’m not truly fainted. Thank you, though.”
“I knew.” The woman put the fan back in her pocket. “Your acting’s not that good, miss.”
The other buxom woman snorted.
“You may go,” Remmy said. “I believe that’s Jonathan looking in at the window. He likely wants his wife back.”
The top half of a man’s head was bobbing above the windowsill. One of the beauties giggled and they both made haste for the exit.
Remmy loomed over Tessa, scowling. “Boot brain?”
“Noun. A man whose brain is like an old boot, both empty and odiferous.”
“Only men?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
He whistled, seemed a little dazed. “Tessa. Proper noun. She who is without mercy.”
“Oh, do stop with the compliments. And tell me what you’re up to. Who are the women hanging off you like a coat? Why is there a husband named Johnathan peeking in at the window?”
“Johnathan is Peg’s husband.” He kept his voice low so only she could hear. “And Peg, as well as her twin sister, Meg, are my employees at the Folly. I’ve hired them to play my… paramours.”
“And what role are you playing, Remington Ives?”
“One I’m quite suited to.” He pulled up taller, something in his face shifting, a mask falling away. “Hell. Here are my parents.”
A stately older couple had stepped through the doorway. The man had Remmy’s head full of thick hair, but it was steel gray. The woman had Remmy’s warm blue eyes, like sunlight spilling across the clear sky. Remmy had come by his dramatics the honest way—through birth.
“Welcome, everyone!” the Earl of Crossvale said. “I am honored you have all gathered to help me celebrate my sixtieth birthday. I hope to honor you with the best dinner the country can serve tonight. Shall we take ourselves to the dining room?”
The crowd began to line up in the proper order, and Remmy stood to rummage through a nearby cabinet. When he turned back around, he held a bottle of wine and a crystal decanter filled with amber liquid. “Good evening, Miss King.”
He was dismissing her, striding for the back door, bottles in hand.
As the room emptied, she followed him through a back door that led into the garden, rushing to catch up. “I want to know what you’re up to.”
“Getting foxed.”
“No! The earring. The women.”
“Being me. You’d better turn back now or risk ruination.”
“No.”
“Then be useful.” He shoved the wine bottle at her.
She took it, sipped a bit as the gravel of a garden path crunched beneath her feet. She breathed deeply in the fresh evening air. It felt good to run off with him like this. Always had. The garden was summer wild around them. She’d have to sneak out here early tomorrow morning to paint it.
“I do not want company, King,” Remmy said, walking backward and pointing the decanter at her.
“I do not particularly care, Ives.” She lifted her skirts to catch up.
She drank deeply from the wine bottle as they rounded the back of the house, washing away the sight of her mother’s back, and followed him all the way toward the woods behind Crossvale Court and down the path that led to the lake.
On one side of the lake, the woods extended, curving and hugging the edges of the water, they followed the curve without a word.
When she saw flashes of gray through the trees, she knew where they were going.
The last place she’d been here before leaving.
Sitting on that rock six years ago, she’d felt lost, powerless.
She was neither of those things now, no matter her changing circumstances.
She shot off ahead of him, lifting her skirts and leaping on top of the large rock they’d claimed as their own decades ago.
She spun around to face him, holding her arms out wide. “I claim this continent for Tessa King!”
“You can have it,” he said, lifting one boot to the top of the boulder and leaning toward her. “A welcome home present.”
She swiped his brandy and gave him the wine. She uncorked the decanter and drank deeply from it, too.
He lifted a brow. “You drink spirits?”
“When it pleases me.” As it did now. She took another large swallow.
If only figuring out what future pleased her was as easy as choosing a drink.
Brandy or wine? Wife or companion? Neither seemed to fill her up or make her quite as giddy as the brandy did.
At least she had her friend by her side to help her through it, the same as he always had been.