Chapter Thirteen What Mary Beth Wants
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
What Mary Beth Wants
Mary Beth found Ambrose at the western culvert with mud to his ankles and a pencil tucked behind one ear.
He was standing on the bank while two of his men levered a dressed stone into position beneath the widened arch.
Water ran brown and quick through the temporary channel beside them.
The afternoon had cleared after a gray morning, leaving the fields bright beneath a low sun and every green branch edged with moisture.
Ambrose saw her coming and handed his measuring rod to one of the men.
“You have the wrong shoes again.”
Mary Beth stopped six feet from him.
“Benedict asked me to marry him.”
The amusement disappeared from Ambrose’s face so completely that she regretted the bluntness for perhaps half a second.
Then she remembered that Ambrose had not been inside the drawing room with Benedict and could not know what had just passed between them. She regretted nothing.
One of the men in the culvert struck stone with a mallet. The crack carried sharply across the field.
Ambrose removed the pencil from behind his ear.
“Today?”
“Three minutes past four.”
“You timed him?”
“There was a clock on the mantel. I required something to watch while he explained my future to me.”
Ambrose’s mouth moved, but the almost-smile failed before it formed.
“What did you say?”
Mary Beth had walked from the house intending to tell him everything: Benedict’s careful settlement, the separate Blackthorn accounts, the promise of influence, the expectation that Ambrose would finish his work and leave before an engagement was announced.
She had imagined Ambrose angry, relieved, perhaps even pleased in the reckless way he sometimes became pleased when she did something society would call unwise.
Instead his face had gone guarded.
She suddenly wanted to know what he believed before she told him what was true.
“What do you think I said?”
His gaze shifted toward the men below them.
“This is not the place.”
“It was the place when you wished to tell me my culvert was badly designed.”
“Stone has fewer ears.”
He climbed the bank and started toward the line of sycamores beyond the work. Mary Beth followed, irritated by the length of his stride and more irritated that he shortened it when he realized she was keeping pace.
They stopped where the trees screened them from the men.
Blackthorn Manor rose beyond the fields, pale stone catching the last of the afternoon light.
From here the house appeared composed and permanent.
Mary Beth knew how misleading appearances could be.
A wall could stand for forty years while water hollowed the earth behind it.
Ambrose turned to her.
“Did you accept him?”
He had not asked whether she wanted the proposal or whether she was happy.
Only the practical question, delivered in the same tone he might have used to ask whether she had approved another wagonload of gravel.
“Would it trouble you if I had?”
His jaw tightened.
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Mary Beth.”
“You asked whether I accepted him. I am asking whether the answer matters to you.”
“You already know it does.”
“I know you enjoy telling me things matter and then behaving as if that gives you no claim on what happens next.”
His eyes narrowed slightly.
“What did you say to him?”
“Perhaps I said yes.”
Ambrose went still.
She had meant to provoke him. The result was not satisfying.
For a moment his face showed nothing at all. Then he rubbed one thumb across the edge of the pencil, leaving a gray mark on his skin.
“Then I hope he keeps his promises.”
The answer struck her silent.
“That is all?”
“No. It is what I can say without making this worse.”
“Try making it worse.”
He gave a short breath that carried no humor.
“He can give you what you said you sometimes want. Rooms where no one whispers when you enter. Credit that does not vanish because a merchant has heard a story. Committees that take your money and let you sit at the table afterward. He can make Blackthorn easier to defend.”
“How generous of you to remember Benedict’s arguments for him.”
“They are not false simply because I dislike hearing them.”
“And what do you think he wants in return?”
Ambrose’s attention settled on her face.
“You.”
“No. He wants a version of me that consults him before spending my own money, leaves the tenants to his steward, replaces whichever servants displease his mother, lives where he prefers, and sends my engineer away before anyone can wonder whether I have been enjoying him between drainage meetings.”
The pencil snapped in Ambrose’s hand.
They both glanced down.
Half of it had fallen into the grass.
Mary Beth might have laughed if she had not been so angry.
“He said that?”
“Not with the word enjoying. Benedict has better manners.”
“Did he name me?”
“Very clearly.”
Ambrose bent, found the broken half, and placed both pieces in his coat pocket.
“Then perhaps he is right about one thing.”
Mary Beth’s temper, already warm, caught flame.
“Which thing?”
“That I should finish the work and leave.”
She took one step toward him.
“You have become remarkably eager to arrange my life since breakfast.”
“I am arranging mine.”
“By deciding I would be better off with another man?”
“By recognizing what happens if I stay.”
“Tell me. I should like to know.”
Ambrose glanced back toward the culvert. The men were still working. No one faced them.
When he spoke again, his voice had dropped.
“People will know eventually. Perhaps they know already. At the dinner last night half the room watched you move your place card. If I remain after the contract, there is no professional excuse left. Benedict can marry you and shut half the county’s mouths.
I stay, and I give them a new reason to open them. ”
“You think I have spent four years wishing for quieter mouths?”
“I think you told me yourself that sometimes you want the door open.”
“Yes. Open. Not locked behind me once Benedict decides I am safely inside.”
Ambrose’s expression hardened with frustration.
“There are worse things than being protected.”
“By whom?”
“A husband who has the power to protect you.”
“I had a husband once.”
He flinched, and she knew the blow had landed where she intended.
Mary Beth did not soften it.
“He was not cruel. He did not strike me. He did not keep a mistress beneath my nose or gamble away the roof. He believed a wife should be comfortable, respectable, and grateful. He also believed every significant decision in her life naturally belonged to him. I survived that marriage without hating him. I will not volunteer for a more elegant version of it because Lord Sablehurst has excellent credit.”
Ambrose dragged a hand through his hair.
“Then do not marry him.”
“You just told me perhaps I should.”
“Because I am trying not to be selfish.”
“You are doing it badly.”
“I know.”
The quick admission interrupted her next sentence.
He faced the fields instead of her.
“I know,” he repeated. “I have spent weeks telling myself that if I care for you properly, I will not use what is between us to narrow your choices. Then Sablehurst offers you the one choice that makes every practical difficulty smaller, and I discover I hate him for it. I hate that he can walk into your drawing room and offer you a name that opens doors. I hate that I can build a bridge strong enough to carry a locomotive and still cannot build you that.”
“I did not ask you to.”
“No.”
“I have not asked you for a title.”
“No.”
“I have not asked you to rescue Blackthorn.”
“Mary Beth—”
“What have I asked you for?”
He finally turned back.
She could see the answer reach him before he spoke it.
“To stay.”
“Yes.”
The wind moved through the sycamore branches overhead.
Mary Beth folded neither her arms nor her pride around herself. She simply waited.
Ambrose’s voice was rougher when he continued.
“And if I stay, I will want more.”
“You have warned me of that so often I could have it embroidered on a cushion.”
That startled a laugh out of him, brief and unwilling.
“You are impossible.”
“You are avoiding the question.”
“There was no question.”
“Then I will make one. What do you want?”
His amusement vanished.
A few feet of damp grass separated them, and Mary Beth became acutely aware of every inch of it.
“Do not ask me that unless you want the answer.”
“I have spent most of my adult life surrounded by men who preferred deciding what I wanted before I spoke. I am unlikely to become frightened because one man finally answers me honestly.”
Ambrose’s eyes held hers.
“I want to finish that wall because I gave you my word I would. I want to see whether the north field drains properly in the spring. I want to know why you pretend not to like marmalade and then steal it from my plate. I want to hear you argue with merchants who deserve it. I want to wake in your bed often enough that the maid knocking at the door becomes an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.”
Mary Beth’s throat tightened.
He continued before she could speak.
“I want to stop counting the days until my contract ends. I want to take work near here when I can and come back when I cannot. I want a place in your life that does not disappear the moment a gentleman with a better name decides I have stayed too long.”
“That sounds very much like more.”
“It is.”
“Anything else?”
He gave her a warning glance that would once have amused her.
This time she could barely breathe beneath it.
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
Ambrose’s mouth tightened.
“Loving you does not give me the right to ruin your life to make mine easier.”
Mary Beth heard the words and understood each of them, yet for several seconds the sentence refused to become real.
“What did you say?”
He closed his eyes once, briefly, as if a man might retrieve a sentence by refusing to see its consequences.
When he opened them, there was no retreat in his face.
“I love you.”
Behind Ambrose, the men kept setting stone as if nothing had changed.
Water continued through the cut, and somewhere beyond the hedgerow a rook complained from an elm.