Chapter 15 #2
“Not to be considered,” Jem said, turning away. “It wouldn’t do. People are cruel, and the ton would make a spectacle of her. She’d be a mockery.”
“But perhaps in small situations, like calls, or a drive in the park when—”
“No, Lucasta. I won’t have it.”
He noted the silence behind him and was glad that for once she didn’t challenge him.
Perhaps she was outraged by his use of her Christian name—she’d invited him to use it, but that was in a teasing moment.
He smoothed his expression and moved to a different shelf with the brocaded silks.
The one he selected had a rich ochre background and a delicate pattern of twining golden vines.
“This for evening, a ball or perhaps to be seen at the theatre.” He wrapped the rich, heavy fabric around her shoulders, tempering the harsh tone he’d let enter his voice.
“You really have the most remarkable coloring. This ochre would wash out a pale complexion, but you…” He trailed off, realizing she might find his remark insulting.
“Am not a fair English rose,” she confirmed. Her smile rose higher on one side of her mouth, amused, but not yet ready to forgive him. She lifted her chin. “I’m a Vlach.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My father was Romanian. From Wallachia.”
“Romani?” he asked cautiously, not understanding. “Like the Gypsies?”
“No, Romanian. They’re a different people.”
“And now you will weave me some romantic story about a smuggled prince, raised in exile to return someday and restore his kingdom—”
She gurgled a laugh, her slim shoulders lifting beneath his hands. He smoothed the fabric, tracing the fine weave of the golden sheaves, all an excuse to touch her.
“They were serfs,” she said with amusement.
“My grandfather had an enormous family, they were destitute and struggling, and there was no way they could have bettered their lot in their home country. Wallachia is ruled by the Ottoman Empire, so they escaped to Transylvania, which is controlled by the Habsburgs, and somehow they ended up in Britain. They changed their name from Ludovic to Lithwick to sound more English, and my father converted so he could attend university and be ordained into the Anglican church. He loved being a vicar, but he was always regarded as faintly heretical because he loved Greek and Roman history more.”
“What did he convert from?” Jem asked, fascinated.
“Greek Catholicism.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Your people are serfs. Romanian, Catholic serfs.”
“Yes.” Her smile was dazzling, her eyes dancing with light.
“My grandmother, the Dowager Viscountess Frotheringale, went into an absolute pelter when my mother fell in love with my father. A daughter of the English peerage, setting her cap for a refugee Romanian! She nearly struck my mother’s name from the family Bible.
I think she would have, except my Aunt Patience—”
She faltered, that frown clouding her brow again. “My Aunt Patience, and I’ve never figured out why, championed the marriage. She lived with us for most of my childhood. And the Viscountess approved of Aunt Patience, though she rejected my mother.”
Lucasta stared at the bow window facing the street, and he guessed she looked not at the dim shapes outside but some formidable if distant enemy. “My grandmother never had a kind word to say of Father, and never a thing to do with me. She refers to me, I understand, as the half-breed.”
She said this so lightly that Jem’s chest constricted. He understood. It was no less than what most British would call his siblings.
And he’d felt the cold indifference from the marquess all his life, treated like nothing, or less than nothing, because his father had chosen to marry into a middle-class merchant’s family rather than a genteel but less financially provident member of his own class.
“I know what that feels like,” Jem said softly.
“You said you weren’t raised as a marquess’s heir,” Lucasta observed. She rubbed a corner of the silk brocade against her cheek.
“I wasn’t. I was raised here.” He pointed to the ceiling, indicating the room above their heads.
“Well, not here. The original shop run by my mother’s family is in Holborn, and has been there since medieval times.
I grew up there, and running wild in the storehouse in Cheapside, where most of our fabrics are kept. ”
“It must have been a shock,” she murmured as he took the ochre silk back. “On top of the losses to your family, that is. To find your station so changed.”
“It was,” Jem confirmed, rewrapping the bolt of fine fabric.
“My father is the third son. The eldest and heir, my uncle— He clearly enjoyed his bachelorhood, but the family always assumed he would at some point marry a proper girl and provide the requisite heirs. He got carried away by malaria on his travels before he could.”
“And Bertie’s father became the heir. Earl Payne,” Lucasta said.
He turned away from her, not wanting to let too much of his emotion show. “And Cadmus, her older brother, was Viscount Rudyard. The succession was assured. But then Cad fell ill with typhus, and—”
He stopped, his throat choked with grief. Cadmus had been his truest friend, the one member of his father’s family who never cared that Jem was a draper’s son. When his father died and Cad gained his courtesy title, he had kept Jem and Judith close despite his mother’s feelings.
After Cadmus died, it was only the rage of his grandfather the marquess that could induce Jem to take up his cousin’s title.
Rudyard was Cadmus’s name, a dead man’s name.
Every time he heard Rudyard he felt as if the ghost of Cadmus—like the restless ghost of the unlucky Thomas Cromwell—stood near his shoulder, flinching at every reminder of what had been taken from him.
“What I don’t understand,” Lucasta said, “is how you became Smart Jeremy.”
Her scent drifted past his nose as she let him swath her in another silk brocade, a green background this time.
It was the most expensive fabric yet, green being a difficult color to achieve as it required first several baths in yellow dye, then blue.
Lucasta stroked the silk threads of the design, and Jem’s groin tightened merely watching the caress.
He was going to embarrass himself in a moment.
“That is Clara Bellwether’s doing. She came in here fresh out of mourning and wanting to wear colors again.
I advised her, and within a month the dashing widow had the ton at her feet.
” He rolled his shoulders, shrugging off memory.
“She suggested I could advertise my shop if I showed myself about town in some of my own fine wares. She made it a fashion to consult my taste, as if I am some sort of oracle.”
He pinched the edges of the fabric close beneath her chin, feeling the feathery heat of her breath over his fingers. “I suppose you think me unforgivably mercenary.”
“Strategic, rather, if it enlarges your income,” she murmured. “I shall be a tradeswoman too, or so I hope, when I open my music school. And you have a family to support.”
Her eyes were extraordinary, a shadowy gray green, like a forest veiled in mist. He shuddered at the impact of her gaze, the understanding in it. She didn’t revile him for being a grasping tradesman masquerading as a marquess’s heir.
Jem’s fingers tightened. She took a small step toward him and he realized he was pulling on the fabric, drawing her near. The way he had tried to draw her to him the night of their first dance together.
As if he wanted her in his arms. As if he knew she was meant to be there.
He had to break the moment before he did something ungentlemanly. “Sometimes I think I did better catering to the bourgeoisie,” he said, gazing down into her face. “Aristocrats are terrible about paying their bills.”
Her glowing expression, full of laughter, made heat coil in his gut. “The bourgeoisie seem to be better behaved in many respects. It is why I preferred being plain Lucasta Lithwick. But no, someone insisted on making me au courant.”
The heat twisted and moved downward. He needed to confess. To admit he had meant to make a demonstration of his power, to see how much Smart Jeremy’s pronouncements could do. And win her—and her possible share in the Frotheringale fortune—into patronizing his shop.
He wanted to be real to her, to put aside the facade of Smart Jeremy. But she could do naught but hate him when she learned how truly mercenary he was.
He should step away. But when she swayed toward him, he lifted a hand and pressed a finger to her delicate chin.
Her lips parted. She wanted him to kiss her.
Desire slammed through him. He wanted to kiss her as well.
His scruples vanished in smoke, overcome by the spell she cast. He had dreamed of this night after night, Lucasta Lithwick in his arms. But the reality of her, her scent, her softness, was so much more potent than his mind could have conjured.
“You needed no making. Only for people to take a proper look.” His voice scratched from his throat. He traced her soft, full lower lip with his thumb. “I don’t suppose…you would permit me…”
“I might,” she breathed, leaning toward him, and Jem was lost.
He intended a courtly kiss. A chivalrous kiss. A chaste meeting of lips. But when her lips parted beneath his, the sensation drove all thoughts of courtliness from his head.
He slipped his tongue into her mouth. She tasted divine, like tea and sugar and a hint of chocolate.
She gave a small whimper, relaxing against him, and Jem caught her with a groan, hauling her up against his body as if she could quench the flames.
The brocade rustled, and she made another noise deep in her throat that made him kiss her harder, more deeply, tipping her head back and twining his tongue around hers.