Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
Francesca
14 June 1983
HG back from Scotland today. Shot two more stags than allowed but terribly proud as always. Ortham wanted to hang them from the walls, but I gather his fiancée won’t have it. Chap doesn’t seem very happy with his betrothed. Not if he’s trading a honeymoon for a hunting trip.
They’ll go again next month for three full weeks after the wedding. Rupert does enjoy leaving the work for others to do.
I chuckled and took another sip of sparkling water. For whatever reason, I could not get enough of Coconut-flavored La Croix these days, despite never liking it before now. Especially when drinking it with dill pickle juice.
Ah, pregnancy. Intermittent nausea, insatiable sex cravings, and really weird flavor combos. What joy.
Said joy was currently being experienced on my couch while I watched the autumn leaves fall from the dogwood in the backyard and flipped through another journal from the stack Xavier had brought me on his most recent trip back from London. Since becoming a shockingly free woman two weeks earlier, I’d been steadily making my way through most of the stewards’ journals from the twentieth century and was finally getting into more recent stuff written by Henry Parker, Xavier’s uncle.
Which meant I’d be getting into stuff about Xavier.
Call me curious, but I wanted to know what the estate had really thought of the duke secretly marrying his cook. That was the kind of scandal that drove many a Regency novel onto the bestseller lists.
Mostly, though, I was trying to make the best of my new status as a lady of leisure.
I was upset about losing my job. Really, I was. But maybe not as much as I had thought. So far, it wasn’t bad, having my ducal chef ex-boyfriend living in my basement.
Most of our days passed pleasantly. We took turns dropping off Sofia at preschool in the mornings, then Xavier worked out of an office he’d rented in Tribeca while I pieced together income doing online tutoring. He had insisted on paying rent for the basement apartment, which I transferred directly to Matthew despite his protests otherwise.
Meanwhile, I hadn’t had to refill my fridge once since Xavier moved in. The errant duke was happily cooking for Sofia and me almost every night, and I was more than happy to inhale the leftovers for lunch, with him sitting across from me occasionally, watching me enjoy every bite.
It was nice. Safe.
Almost like we were a family again. A nice platonic family.
Which I might have appreciated more if my hormones hadn’t been playing awful, horrible tricks on me.
Like on this pleasant late fall day, for instance.
The birds were chirping.
The sun was shining.
And I was making myself read about the hunting patterns of the gentry in Northwest England to avoid memories of the way Xavier’s perfectly round butt had looked last night while he made Sofia and me his famous cod roe udon noodles.
And the way his blue eyes had gleamed with slightly lascivious pleasure when I couldn’t help but moan at the first bite.
And the way his lush, full lips had pursed every time he sucked a tender noodle between them.
The man really could…eat.
I groaned and forced myself to stare at the journal’s page, reading and rereading the same sentence about red stags at least twelve more times.
This was embarrassing. Like I wasn’t a grown, almost twenty-eight-year-old woman fully in control of her faculties, but in fact, a teenage boy desperate to dirty up a tube sock. It happened almost overnight, too. As soon as the baseline nausea of the first trimester faded away and that thirteen-week mark hit, it felt like clouds disappeared overhead and a bright light primarily composed of sex hormones beamed down on me from above.
Here , said God. Having a baby out of wedlock again? Enjoy the taste of sin.
Divine providence as sexual torture.
Now, from morning to night, all I wanted was it . And it didn’t help that I had a walking tower of sex living in my apartment, begging to be climbed. The way he watched me, it was as though Xavier knew I was inches from breaking. The Xavier I knew couldn’t wait longer than five minutes for fast food, but this one was the soul of patience. A big black-haired panther tracking its quarry, waiting for weakness so he could pounce. He was biding his time, wearing tight T-shirts and gray sweatpants, ready for me to crack under pressure.
But I couldn’t go there. Not again. There were more important things to think about besides Xavier’s utterly sexy mouth and the fact that my vibrator was unequal to the task.
Suddenly feeling hot, I flipped the page to finish the entry, which seemed to be about Xavier’s father’s hunting prowess.
Venison for dinner this week in honor of Father’s birthday. He always did like a good roast, and now he’s Duke, Rupert seems determined to be just like him. For better or worse, I suppose.
It would be nice if he cared as much about the mines up north as his next hunting trip, though.
Henry wasn’t given to flowery prose, but he did enjoy a casual dig at his brother. Unlike some of his predecessors who penned overblown adulations of everything from blooming roses to sunrises (His Grace the ninth Duke of Kendal simply adored “crystalline rays of angelic light”), Henry wrote with a familiar shorthand that championed brevity. It had taken me a minute to track the abbreviations he used for common people (HG for His Grace the Duke of Kendal, i.e., his brother, VO for Viscount) and get past his tendency to write in incomplete sentences, but I soon found a good bit of wry wit inserted between dry observations.
21 June 1984
VO’s wedding today. HG couldn’t be bothered. Morning suit for me, then. Reasonably small affair in the village. M wore a pink dress. Excellent fruit cake.
“Well, well, well, Henry. Got a bit of a girlfriend, do we?” I murmured as I turned the page to read about the Viscount of Ortham’s wedding. Whoever M was, she figured a lot in these pages. Henry apparently couldn’t keep his eyes off her.
Lamb for dinner. Odd taste. Mrs. Colson tells me there’s a new assistant cook—a Japanese student from town looking for summer work. I’ve told her the students never stay long, but she won’t listen. Shan’t interfere. Too many cooks in the kitchen and all that.
I sat straight up on the couch as I finished the last paragraph. There was no one else it could be—Xavier’s own mother was making an appearance in the journals at last, which meant Xavier himself probably wasn’t far behind. I flipped back to the date—it was a little early, since Xavier wasn’t actually born until 1986.
But this was when it started. Holy crap.
As if the pages themselves called him, a door slammed downstairs, and I could hear a pair of big feet stomping over the vinyl floors.
I checked my watch. Xavier was almost never home during the day, not to mention he never used the basement entrance. And to be coming back at not quite one in the afternoon was odd, to say the least.
Determined not to pay attention to the disturbances below, I continued reading through the next several entries.
14 July 1984
Ordered new landscaping for the back pond. Looking to restock with fish for fall. HG wishes to return to uni. Postgrad work, apparently. Am rather shocked.
06 Aug 1984
HG in the garden with new cook and VO. Must say unsurprised. M is lovely. No doubt the boys are having a field day fighting over her. Would that Rup could keep his quill in the pot. We may lose another cook.
I stared at the words. They weren’t exactly clear, but this was pretty obviously referencing Xavier’s mother and father’s relationship. If I was reading this right, it also sounded like both Rupert and the Viscount of Ortham, his next-door neighbor, might have been fighting over the girl—even more of a scandal if the newly married viscount was somehow involved.
“Masumi, you saucy minx,” I murmured, searching the rest of the page for any more clues. “Are you writing with two quills, you little jezebel?”
“Quill in the pot” made Henry sound like a seventeenth-century writer, not the young twenty-something he was at the time. He probably thought he was being subtle. He probably didn’t realize these would be read by an anglophile who loved historical romance more than anything in the world.
I continued to read through the rest of the journal for the next hour or so, and when I didn’t find anything more, I decided to bring what I’d found down to Xavier. If anything, he might get a laugh out of it. Or maybe a smirk. He might like knowing that at one point, Masumi had not one but two noblemen wrapped around her little finger.
Or maybe you just want to see him, you horn dog , Kate’s voice rang clearly through my mind.
Oh hush , I told my pretend-sister silently, even as I crept down the stairs to the basement entrance.
Before I reached the bottom, however, the conversation Xavier was apparently having on the other side stopped me.
“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” Xavier’s voice rumbled on the other side of the door, still open from this morning. “I’m doing everything I can, you know? Trying to be patient. Trying to be caring. But it’s like she doesn’t care. But she still loves me. I know she does. She can’t hide a bloody thing on her face, you know.”
“Does she know you feel that way?” A woman’s voice purred through the room with an English accent.
I frowned. Who in the hell was he talking to? Oh my God, it wasn’t Imogene Douglas, was it?
Terror seized my gut. Followed by outright rage.
OMG, jealous much? This time, it was Joni’s singsong taunt that floated through my brain.
Not at all , I answered as I took several deep breaths.
I was not jealous. We weren’t together. He could talk to whomever he wanted. Even if it was a snooty English hussy who tracked him like a bloodhound. It shouldn’t matter.
Should it?
I was too busy backing away from the door to listen to whatever Xavier said next but still flustered enough that I ran right into the coatrack he had in his hallway and knocked the whole thing down with a crash.
“What the fuck?”
To my horror, Xavier’s footsteps sounded. A few seconds later, the door opened, and he found me standing over a mess of jackets and the fallen rack, trying for all the world not to look like I was eavesdropping.
Which I had been. Completely.
He wore the remnants of a dark blue suit, with navy pants and a lighter blue shirt that made his eyes shine the same color, and a paisley tie to match. A business day, then, not a restaurant day—not particularly his favorite.
Instead of irritation, however, worry colored his carved features. And then, once he realized I was all right, it was replaced by humor.
“You’re shit at hide and seek, Ces,” he told me with a wry half-smile. “One second.”
He disappeared, and I heard him sign off with his companion.
“Next week, then,” he told the woman, who responded in kind before Xavier returned to where I was already picking up jackets.
“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” I told him resolutely now that I had picked myself off the floor, though the look on his face said he absolutely didn’t believe me.
“Never said you were,” he said. “Out of curiosity, though, how long were you standing there?”
“Not long.” Just enough to know you’re upset about a woman. “Not long at all.”
He studied me for a moment, well after I was finished rehanging his jackets. One was a trench coat. The other three were varying Arsenal hoodies. A cashmere overcoat I recognized from last winter.
It was everything I could do not to lean in for a whiff of his clean, masculine scent. And then everything I could do not to rip the shirt he was wearing off his body for the same reason. Lord, his tattoo was peeking out on his forearm, and I wanted to lick it. I wanted to lick him all over, feel the smooth texture of his skin under my tongue, taste that salty residue of his skin…
And my mind was back in the dirt.
Dammit.
“Something on your mind, babe?”
That deep voice was like a direct conduit to between my legs. Even more, when I looked up and found those blue eyes watching me knowingly, a black brow perked over the left one, like he knew exactly what tawdry ideas were floating through my mind.
I shivered. “Er—I thought you might want to see this.”
Xavier’s gaze fell to the journal I was holding out, and he sighed.
“It was Henry’s,” I said. “From 1984. He—he mentions your mother.”
Again, Xavier examined me, like he could sense the tension and desire underlying even those innocuous words. A mountain of questions lay between us, as always. Questions like, Why do you even care? and Do you still care about me? and Could you care about us again?
He cleared his throat, took the book from me, then turned on his heel and walked back into the living room, letting me follow at my leisure.
“Does this mean you’re doing it?” Xavier asked as he sank onto a leather couch he’d bought two weeks ago.
I perched uneasily on a stool by the counter. Lord, I could smell him from here. Damn olfactory overdrive from the baby. And oh, he smelled good. Like brine and water and the very best liquor and smoke…
“Ces.”
I blinked. “Huh?”
Xavier tipped his head, causing a black lock to fall forward. “I asked if you’d made a decision about school. Does the fact that you’re reading these mean you’re going back to study?”
Something in his voice made me pause. He was acting nonchalant, but I thought I had heard a note of excitement in his voice.
“Maybe…” I said. “I still don’t want to leave New York, though.”
“Of course not.”
“And I don’t want to leave Brooklyn either. We’re not moving to some fancy townhouse in the Village just so I can be closer to Bobst Library.”
There was a light chuff, but Xavier didn’t argue.
I sighed. “But, um, yeah. I suppose it does. Pending my acceptance. And funding, of course. And a new renter downstairs once you leave. But if you’re willing to help more with Sofia’s costs, and the baby’s?—”
“Done,” Xavier interrupted eagerly. “Honestly, Ces, it’s not even a question. We’ll get a nanny for the times and whatever else you need.”
I looked at him, curious. “Why—why would you do that? For me or for them?”
Xavier looked irritated at the question at first, then put the book down on the table. “Mum spent her life barely scraping two pence together. And my dad was rich, but his life was all about what was expected of him. When I struck out on my own, I didn’t have anyone to look at to show me how it’s done.” He blinked. “I don’t want our children to ever doubt that they can do what they want. And I want them to know that because they watched their parents do it too.”
I blinked across the room. Whatever I’d been expecting him to say, it wasn’t this. All summer long, while he’d encouraged me to do what I wanted, he’d never had a real sense of what that was. He’d seemed to think I was fine being a lady of leisure, even when I said I wasn’t.
This was different. He was addressing one of my actual passions. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
So I just nodded. “Several of the programs request a research plan. I could give them my old graduate work as a sample of something to expand, but I want it to be something new. Something worth working on. I do think your family’s journals fulfill that brief. If you’d let me work on them.”
Xavier studied me a moment more, then stood up and made his way across the room until he was standing directly in front of me, close enough that my knees brushed the sides of his thighs. Another step forward, and he’d be wedged between them. A quick lift, and I’d be sitting atop the counter, legs wrapped around his waist or maybe his head, while he devoured me the way only Xavier Parker could.
I inhaled deeply. Wrong move. That signature scent of fire and brine wrapped around me like a foggy dream.
I couldn’t think. I could barely see. Right now, the only thing I could imagine was grabbing his tie and dragging him down to heaven with me.
Or maybe it was hell.
“Here.” His deep voice pulled me out of my waking dream as he held out the book. “What’s mine is yours.”
I shivered again, and this time couldn’t ignore the way his eyes latched to my lip as I took it between my teeth.
Crap. I needed some space before I lost it all completely.
“Who were you talking to?” I blurted. “Imogene?”
“What?” Xavier stiffened as I wriggled off my seat and moved around until the kitchen’s peninsula counter was safely between us.
“I didn’t hear much. Just that she was English.”
Yes, that was better, even if the idea that Xavier was talking to Imogene made me physically ill.
When I looked up, though, he looked about the same.
“No,” he said evenly. “I was not talking to Imogene Douglas. Nor would I be. I was…inmrphmpy.”
I cocked one ear toward him. “Come again? I didn’t quite get that.”
At that, he took his own seat on the stool. “I said I was in therapy .”
I gaped. “You have a therapist?”
Whatever I’d expected him to say, it wasn’t that.
He gave me a long, morose look, not unlike a basset hound. “Yes. I’ve been talking to a bloody headshrinker. Happy now you find out I’m crazy?”
“Oh,” I said, all sense of joking evaporated. “Oh, I don’t think that at all. Xavier, I think it’s great you’re in therapy. I think it’s wonderful .”
“Do you?”
He looked so childlike for a moment that I forgot my intent to put space between us and rounded the counter quickly so I could take his hand in mine and squeeze it so he would feel my enthusiasm.
He didn’t squeeze back, though. Not right away. His hand lay limply, its heavy weight dependent on mine to hold it atop his knee. Like he wanted my hand to stay there and keep him functioning. His scent curled back around me like a blanket, but instead of soothing, it set every nerve I had on end.
As if it was responding to the two palms meeting, my heart gave a strong thump.
Eventually, though, I had to let go. I gave his palm a friendly tap on the knuckles, then stepped away. It was like the air was made of molasses.
“I think it’s great,” I repeated. “Is it helpful?”
He watched me for another long second, then sighed. “It’s hard. I don’t like talking about my feelings, and that’s all she ever seems to want to do.”
I stifled a chuckle as I sat down in my own armchair. “Well, isn’t that kind of the point?”
He gave me a dirty look. “The point is to be a better man. For you, for Sof. For that little one.” He gestured toward my belly. “For my family.”
I hated the way my heart warmed at the term. No matter how hard I tried to fight, it did seem more and more like that’s what we were. A strange little family, built across an ocean and stacked between floors of this little townhouse. But a family, nonetheless.
“I hope it’s not just because I told you to?—”
“It’s not,” he said quickly. “If you must know, I started just after you left England, before Henry died.”
I cocked my head. That was a surprise. “Why then?” I wasn’t so arrogant to believe my sudden fleeing the country was the catalyst for that kind of growth. If anything, it should have stymied it. Right?
He looked up then, his blue eyes sparkling. “You called me a bully, remember?”
“I…” I frowned. I had, but that was months ago now. He was still caught on that?
“I don’t want to be a bully,” he said quietly. “I don’t want my own family to be scared of me, Ces. I don’t want to be like him .”
I took it he meant his own father. Rupert Parker.
“The way you looked at me that day…and then later, running away…”
When he shrugged, his big shoulders tugging at the material of his shirt. Xavier leaned forward to balance his forearm on his knees. A lock of black hair flopped most charmingly onto his brow again. I had to lean against my hand to stop from pushing his hair back in place and stroking the furrows out of that typically smooth skin.
“I don’t ever want people I care about to look at me like that again,” he said softly. “When I found out you’d gone. That you’d left me in that house with those people, I knew it was because of that, really. I know you saw Imogene kiss me, but you didn’t even want to talk anymore. You’d given up. And after I was done raging—and I did rage, Ces. Tore my fucking office apart, right along with your bedroom and half the library—after I was finished and I had to look at all the damage I’d done, all I could hear in my stupid head were your words, ringing like a bloody bell.”
I sucked in a breath. It was only too easy to imagine that scene. Although I’d never actually had to watch Xavier unleash his full strength on anything larger than a punching bag—and maybe my brother, come to think of it—I knew he had a penchant for letting his emotions out in violent ways. His office must have been trashed. The bedroom was probably in ribbons.
“I don’t want to be someone who hurts others just because I’m hurting, deep down,” Xavier continued. “It was all I could hear after you left. That in the end, you couldn’t trust me to put your needs above my own impulses. That you believed I’d just keep using you again and again to feel better.”
He shook his head and then swiped his thumbs under his eyes to wipe something out of them.
Tears?
I held my breath. But still had no idea what to say. Or do.
Before I could figure it out, though, the alarm on my phone burst into the air.
I yanked it out of my pocket. “Crap. Time to pick up Sof.”
Xavier just gave me a crooked smile in return. One of his hands rose and hovered near my cheek. But he didn’t touch me. And I didn’t ask.
“Great,” he said. “I’ll start dinner before you’re back.”
“Oh—okay,” I said, wondering if I imagined the other promise hidden behind his words.
And then we’ll talk some more .