Chapter Three #2
She realized he’d said something that she had missed. “I beg your pardon?”
“I asked what your sisters’ names are.”
“Bridget, Aoife and Niamh.”
“They are beautiful names, as is Maeve.”
“Thank you.”
“What does Maeve mean in Gaelic?”
Her face heated with a flush. “It means ‘she who intoxicates.’”
Mr. Nelson cleared his throat. “Well, the name certainly suits you.”
She couldn’t bring herself to look at him, even though she desperately wanted to.
Instead, she moved on to scrub the bird refuse from the silk wallpaper.
That was easier than confronting the yearning Mr. Nelson inspired in her.
Not for the first time, Maeve suspected something was wrong with her.
Why did she feel things so intensely? Why did her body betray her by wanting things that were bad or wrong or destined to cause trouble that she didn’t need?
It had always been that way, from the time she was a young girl and the careless slights of other children would sear her heart.
Children could be awful to each other, and while others let the painful moments roll off their backs, Maeve carried those scars with her to this day.
Her propensity to feel everything had the potential to ruin this new life she’d made for herself, and she couldn’t let that happen. She was here to work and only to work.
If she kept telling herself that again and again, perhaps she could reverse the downhill slide into the kind of emotional upheaval that had been the hallmark of her troubled existence.
She simply didn’t have the fortitude to go through that again, not when she’d risked everything to start a new life in America, far away from the pain of the past.
“Miss Brown?”
Jolted again from her thoughts, she looked up to find Mr. Nelson looking at her with concern etched into his handsome features. Tingles ran up and down her spine. This was not good. Not good at all. “Yes?” Her voice wavered.
“You’re scrubbing a hole in the wallpaper.”
She shifted her gaze to the spot she’d been scrubbing while thinking about all the reasons she could not—would not—be taken in by the charming son of her employer.
Sure enough, the bird refuse was long gone, and she’d nearly succeeded in creating a hole in the priceless wall covering. “My apologies.”
“No need to apologize. I admire your dedication to your duties.”
She tried to ignore the charming smile that accompanied the compliment, but she couldn’t ignore the tingles or the flutters. “I can finish in here if you’d like to tackle your father’s rooms. They didn’t fare much better than your mother’s.”
“I’ll take care of removing the items that need to be added to the bonfire we shall have later. And then I’ll venture into town to see what I can do about finding us some more help.”
“Very good. Thank you for your assistance.”
“I’m happy to help you, Miss Brown.”
The formal way he said her name sent new tingles down her spine.
This wasn’t good at all.
After clearing the fouled bedding and furniture from his father’s rooms and hurling it out the window to the growing pile below, Aubrey went into his own room to bathe and change his clothing.
The tepid water in the tub went a long way toward cooling his overheated body.
Cleaning was hard work, especially when dealing with the kind of mess that had befallen Paradis Trouvé.
That name . . . Aubrey and his siblings had tried to compel their parents to give the house a less pretentious name, something like Sea Swept, which had been his suggestion.
But his parents had loved the French name given to the home by the preeminent architect Richard Morris Hunt and had rejected all their children’s suggestions in favor of keeping the home’s pedigree intact.
Hunt had designed and built most of the palatial cottages that lined Bellevue Avenue, nearly all of them fashioned after a European home of similar distinction.
The Nelson house, like the others in the neighborhood, was filled with Aubusson rugs, priceless artifacts shipped from France and Italy, paintings by the Old Masters and Louis XIV chairs so fragile that one risked one’s own life by sitting on them.
A guest last summer had chosen to sit on the hearth rather than take a chance on destroying the priceless piece.
Aubrey leaned his head back against the cast iron tub.
So much had changed since his father’s company had begun working for the railroad.
He barely recognized his life anymore and knew his siblings felt the same way.
They’d gone from the relative anonymity of the upper class to the expectations that accompanied enormous wealth.
So many demands, customs and rules—and the socializing!
Dear God, the balls, soirees, house parties, lawn parties, parlor games, clubs.
It never ended. The best part had been the new friends he’d made, particularly those in London.
He was eager to see Derek, Catherine, Simon, Madeleine and Justin again and looked forward to their arrival.
As long as he thought about his friends and his social obligations, he could avoid stewing over his unprecedented reaction to Miss Maeve Brown.
His mother would have an apoplexy if she had the first inkling of his attraction to the housekeeper.
She’d go out of her way to make sure he never saw the delightful Miss Brown again, so he could never, ever, ever let on that he fancied her.
His mother would ship her off to Siberia so fast his head—and Maeve’s—would spin.
No, he would have to be very careful indeed.
He’d disappointed his parents by not making an aristocratic match in London.
Aubrey was fully aware that they’d begun to despair of what would become of him and the Nelson family legacy with none of their three sons inclined to marry and ensure the continuation of the Nelson name.
His older brothers seemed to have no interest whatsoever in marrying, so all his parents’ focus had turned to Aubrey.
Despite that enormous pressure, he had made it clear that he would only marry for love—nothing less.
His father had accused him of being a fool.
“Marriage isn’t about love,” he’d said disdainfully. “It’s about power.”
Aubrey had no interest in acquiring power or a wife he didn’t love or even like.
He had held out hope for all this time that he might meet someone who would make him feel .
. . something. He’d seen Derek and his cousin Simon fall madly in love with Catherine and Madeleine McCabe.
His own sisters were happily married to men they seemed to truly like and love.
Surely it wasn’t too much to hope for such a match for himself.
However, in thirty-two years, he’d only ever felt “something” for one woman, the one he’d met earlier that day, one who was completely and totally off limits to him for more reasons than he had time to list.
For starters, the scandal would be epic.
Men of his ilk didn’t take up with the Irish housekeeper, no matter how delectable her neck might be.
It would be better to chalk this odd morning up to travel weariness and the shock of finding the household in such disarray.
That had to be it. He got out of the tub, ran a towel over his body and dressed in clothing more befitting his stature—gray twill trousers, a matching vest, a crisp white shirt that had been ironed by his valet in New York, a necktie and a gray pinstripe frock coat that would make him roast in the heat.
No matter. He needed to look the part when he went searching for the help they desperately needed.
Since the day had become cloudy and overcast, Aubrey decided to walk the short distance into town where his first stop would be at the Newport Casino, an exclusive club founded by James Gordon Bennett Jr., the notorious publisher of the New York Herald.
As the story went, after Bennett’s friend Captain Henry Augustus "Sugar" Candy rode a horse into the rarified confines of the Newport Reading Room—on a dare from Bennett—Candy was thrown out and Bennett, in his outrage, had founded the Casino as an alternative club. This was the same man who’d once, while drunk, urinated into a fireplace during a party at the Fifth Avenue home of his fiancée’s parents, thereby ending his engagement along with his welcome in high society.
The stories about Bennett were the thing of legend, and Aubrey hoped to get the chance to meet the man one of these summers.
Aubrey related to Bennett, who’d refused to be constrained by the expectations laid out by society, choosing instead to follow his own path no matter where it might lead.
While Aubrey couldn’t imagine himself urinating into a fireplace at one of the massive society homes he frequented, he wished he had a fraction of Bennett’s legendary moxie.
He also wished he was the kind of man who could finally meet a woman who interested him and act on the attraction without a care as to the scandal that would ensue.
Perhaps if he spent some time with men like Bennett, their bravado might rub off on him and give him the courage to once and for all stand up to his family’s rigid expectations for him.
How many times had he wanted to remind his mother that he needed to lead his own life, not the life she envisioned for him?
Here he was now at thirty-two years of age and still worried about what his mother might say or do.
Well, things were going to be different after the nightmare the former staff had perpetrated, due to his mother’s mistreatment of them.
It was time to put a stop to her iron rule over everything and everyone around her, including him.