Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
One of the worst blunders a negotiator could make was to hurry. Conveying a sense of urgency, even sometimes a false sense of urgency, could be a useful tactic, but to hurry—to ignore details, to rush headlong—was invariably a mistake.
With Alice in his arms, Cam found the self-discipline to treasure the moment and the woman. She honored him with a snug embrace, no missishness, and no mistaking the abundance of her curves.
Untoward ideas galloped around in Cam’s brainbox with a rambunctiousness he’d not enjoyed since his soldiering days. He acknowledged a fleeting sympathy for Dinky, hopelessly enthralled with his wife and heedless of his own dignity.
Over Alice’s shoulder, Cam spied the cat, basking in the warmth before the hearth, flicking her tail lazily. Patient creatures, cats.
Alice stroked a hand down Cam’s back. “Does your version of kissing—?”
He brushed his lips over hers. “My version of kissing involves patience and pleasure.” He repeated the gesture. For such a tart-tongued woman, Alice’s lips were sweet and lush. “Heaps of both.”
She sank her fingers into his hair. “More pleasure, less patience, please.”
Well, then. He sealed his mouth over hers and felt her smile in response. Good. Kissing should be a joyous undertaking for all concerned. He nonetheless kept to a leisurely pace, until Alice’s grip on him had become quite firm, and Cam’s untoward ideas had migrated in a southerly direction.
“You’re good at this,” she said, resting her cheek against his chest. “Maybe too good.”
Whatever did that mean? “If I say you are equally accomplished, will I get my face slapped?”
She patted his chest. “No, because I can tell you in all honesty that my expertise seems to have come over me all of a sudden. Perhaps I excel at kissing only you. We ought to sit.”
They ought to find a nice, comfy bed and put a rainy afternoon to its best possible use. “I notice you aren’t following your own suggestion, Miss Singleton.”
“I’m all in a muddle, your lordship.”
“Cam, or Camden when you are vexed with me.”
Alice loosened her hold and would have stepped back, but Cam gently prevented her. “This kiss happened, Alice. Please don’t pretend otherwise. I would like other kisses to happen, and more than kisses, to put my objective in plain view.”
She perused him suspiciously, putting him in mind of a much younger Alice. “More than kisses?”
“I want to hack out with you first thing in the day, not because I enjoy trotting about at an ungodly hour, but because I long to start my morning with you. I want to walk you home from services—we’ll take a different route from your grandpapa and Mrs. Shorer—and I want you and your grandpapa enjoying Sunday supper with me at the Hall. I want—”
She pressed two fingers to his lips. “Be sensible. A stolen kiss is lovely, beyond lovely, but my reputation will not survive a dalliance.”
No dalliance in Cam’s experience involved walking home together from divine services. “My heart would not survive a dalliance. I intend to ask Thaddeus for permission to court you, if you’ll give me leave.”
Alice slipped free of Cam’s embrace, which was not the reaction he’d hoped for, but then, he hadn’t presented his request in the manner he’d planned to. Forever after, in Cam’s mind, cinnamon would be an aphrodisiac.
“Who is being impatient now, my lord?”
I have waited years for you. “I am being forthright. A different matter entirely.”
Sadness limned Alice’s smile. “You are being ridiculous. Peers don’t wed penniless spinsters.”
Had her mind all made up, did she? “Are you telling me what I may and may not do, Alice? I know of at least one baron who married his mistress, and two of her sisters are leading lights of the demimonde. In your grandfather’s day, the Duke of Chandos acquired his second duchess through the barbarous institution known as the wife sale.
What is ridiculous is a mind closed to happy possibilities. ”
Russet brows drew down. “Then you are being precipitous, at best. Call upon some of that patience you recently cited. I barely know you, and you aren’t even planning to dwell at the Hall.”
And yet, she’d allowed him that kiss. “You know me. When you were fourteen years old, you joined your grandfather’s household, and we became more than passingly acquainted.
You’d started putting up your hair, and you wore it in the same style as your late mother because you wanted to keep her memory close.
Two braids twined in a coronet, no damned snood. ”
Alice sank onto the bench at the table. “I told you that. You caught me playing truant from my lessons, and I… You were playing truant too.”
Cam sat beside her rather than across the table. “My French was already better than my tutor’s. Yours needed work.”
“I was better read than you.”
“You still are, unless we’re talking about the financial pages. Your Latin was surprisingly good.” Humiliatingly good to a boy intent on outstripping his elder brother in at least one subject.
“My father was a headmaster, you’ll recall. He made Latin a game, and there was none of this ‘now you pronounce the letter, now you don’t’ that makes French so beastly. You walked or rode across every corner of the estate, even then.”
“Alex prided himself on his horsemanship. I learned to not compete, and that meant taking my exercise in solitude.” Once Alex had gone off to university, Cam had become beyond competent in the saddle.
Knowledgeable enough to realize that Alex had been given superb mounts, while Cam had been expected to make do with inferior hacks.
Alice regarded him slantwise. “You are very competitive now. You love to best your business rivals and turn a coin where nobody else will dare try.”
Cam very nearly told her that he had half a dozen mouths to feed, that growing boys were bottomless when it came to food, clothing, tutoring, boots, hats… That his own father had taunted him to make something of himself, and Papa’s ghost had not yet been exorcised.
He was competing with shades and haunted by the notion that he might somehow betray the trust the boys had placed in him.
But Alice herself had counseled moderation. Patience.
“In business, yes. I am competitive and, thus far, largely successful at it. I hope I am not greedy, though. You would have no use for me if I were.”
She opened the tin of biscuits, broke one in two, and passed him half. “No use at all. You could house a regiment at the Hall. For it to sit in rural splendor, ignored by the one person who has the right to dwell under its roof should bother you.”
“It does bother me, but I’m not about to let Lady Josephine establish herself at the Hall.” The biscuits were scrumptious. Buttery, fresh, sweet… A bit on the small side, though. “I don’t suppose you’re ready to kiss me?”
“I thought you said… oh. We’re to take turns?”
“Seems equitable. Share the pleasure, share the patience?”
Alice nibbled her half of the sweet into oblivion. “I must give this whole peculiar notion of yours some thought. I did not intend that you…”
“Kiss you?”
She brushed an imaginary crumb from the table. “Involve yourself with me. First, you offer money, and now, you’re bent on this other notion. What if tomorrow you’re away to London and inclined to trade kisses with somebody else?”
A wave of tenderness assailed Cam, followed by a sense of having been brought up short and deservedly so.
He put an arm around Alice’s shoulders and considered how best to reassure a lady who’d lost both parents and her home at a young age.
Who’d been sent off to finishing school, but who’d never found anybody with whom to finish the race to the altar.
All that French and Latin served no purpose at Lady Josephine’s command knitting sessions.
“I must seem impulsive to you,” Cam said. “I was a broody boy, prone to sulks and sighs, but that was half a lifetime ago.” He’d been a miserable boy. Never good enough, never worthy of praise, never even satisfactory.
“You rarely laughed,” Alice said. “I don’t recall that you sulked so much as you were simply quiet.”
“I sulked, pouted, and plotted. But I also learned to govern my impulses. Alice, I am not paying you my addresses out of some passing notion. I am heeding my instincts, applying common sense to my subjective inclinations, and trusting my own judgment.”
She rested her head on his shoulder. “Hard to do when you’re told your judgment is poor.”
What fool…? Lady Josephine, of course. “Hard not to do when I’m the one who must live with the consequences of my decisions. Will you let me walk you home from services?”
She straightened. “No. I need time to consider this… this development. I esteem you, Camden Huxley, and I like you, and I find you attractive.”
“But you are entitled to ponder the ramifications and to gather information pertinent to the negotiation. I agree.”
Because his arm was around her shoulders, he felt the tension ease from her.
“I will not be rushed. I’m glad you understand that. The rain has let up. You’d best be going while you can dodge between showers.”
A frigid deluge or two might have been helpful, given the state of Cam’s animal spirits. “I’ll look in on your grandpapa on my way out. You need not see me to the door.” Where he’d be inclined to kiss her, despite the fact that it wasn’t his turn to initiate such festivities.
Cam rose and extended a hand to Alice, who had been getting up and down from kitchen benches unassisted for her entire earthly span.
She squeezed his fingers when he would have offered a bow. “I do like you, Camden Huxley, but my situation is not as simple as it appears. I, too, have obligations, and I must think carefully.”
Alice deserved to consider Cam’s suit at her leisure. He understood that she was citing duty to her grandfather as the pretext for further deliberations, but if she cast a favorable eye on Cam’s courtship, they’d ask the old boy to dwell at the Hall.
Some solutions were both simple and easy.