Chapter Sixteen #2
I flushed. I could feel the warmth spreading from my neck to the top of my head.
He would likely laugh, but it would be mortifying to admit, all the same.
I cleared my throat and raised my chin, meeting his gaze with a confidence I did not feel.
“I told them earning your friendship in such a way was no great chore.”
His lips parted, and was that a tint of pink in his cheeks?
I bit my grin. “Forgive me. I’ve slandered you just as much as I’ve slandered myself.”
He made a funny noise and looked to the side, laughing. “Georgiana Wood. You are . . . dash it all, woman, if that gets out, my mother will have my head.”
I winced, laughing, and he was still reeling enough that I broke free of his hold and stepped back a safe distance. I immediately regretted it.
“The words flew out of my mouth, and I wished I could rescind them. But you said you do not care about Society’s opinions. Do you?”
“I do not care.” The humor in his voice calmed my nerves, but I still felt awful for dragging his name through the mud with mine. Upon our first meeting, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
So strange how fast life can change.
His eyes warmed. He watched me with a serious look from beneath his lashes. “Walk the gardens with me?”
“Now?” I looked around to the cracked open doorway behind us that led outside.
“We are quite alone.” Marlow rubbed his jaw, then tucked his hands behind his back. “And I think it’s best—I do not think I should be left alone with you just now.”
I raised a brow. He hadn’t worried overmuch about propriety before. Perhaps I’d finally worried him with how careless I could be with words. “I’m not sure my reputation can get much worse.”
He gave me a look that shot straight down my spine. “I’m quite sure it can.”
My throat went dry.
“Shall we?” He held out his hand, palm up.
I hesitated. Was this too familiar? Friends walked through gardens together, did they not? I slowly placed my hand in his. He weaved it through the crook of his arm and pushed open the stable house doors.
Rays of sunshine fell happily upon us. A gentle breeze brought sweet, floral scents, and a hint of warm, spiced oranges. We stepped around the stable house and together took in the view.
The grounds were beautiful. The gardens were at the back of the house, down a western walking path that led through a little gate. Marlow pointed out a patch of purple flowers. “I would not recommend smelling those.”
Those were the ones from Hyde Park! “Awful things!” I shook my head. “Nothing so lovely should smell so terrible.”
Marlow laughed. We walked several paces in silence, and I couldn’t help but look back to the house.
What would Maggie say, seeing us together like this?
We were within view. A gardener worked within sight.
But, still, I had an inkling Her Grace would not be pleased, especially after the talk in Town.
“You’re quiet,” Marlow said. “What are you thinking?”
“I am worrying about that gardener over there.” I said it playfully, but Marlow’s brows furrowed. “And wondering who else might be watching us.”
Marlow tsked. “Why do you care so much about what other people might think?”
I frowned at him, and he frowned back. Only he could ask that question, because only he would struggle to understand.
“I do not care what they think, Marlow. I care what they say. And how it looks unfavorably on me. Without Society’s good favor, I am uninvited, forgotten, whispered about. Alone. It is not a good feeling.”
He looked ahead and took a few solemn breaths. “What you seek is not worth all that worry, I assure you.”
“Says a man who could not lose favor if he tried.” I gave him a sideways glance. We walked under a trellis of pink roses, sweet-smelling and full. I looked up and touched a few velvety petals as we passed underneath.
“These people, they are—” He stopped himself, then lowered his voice.
“They are like caricatures. They pretend. They exaggerate. Indeed, I may have their favor, but their company?” He looked at me with something akin to sorrow.
“I can tell you how it feels to have the full attention of the ton. To have their favor, their invitations, their calling cards tossed on my tray by the dozens. It is lonely, Georgiana. Lonelier, perhaps, that having no one at all.”
I loosened my hold on his arm and faced him, measuring his expression only to find him sincere.
Lonely? This man? I could hardly believe it.
He, whose heart was pure gold. A fierce protector of all he loved.
A man who fulfilled his duty to the letter, who worked above and beyond what was necessary, who cared for his family regardless of whether or not they cared about him.
We stopped at a fork in the path. One way led toward the house. The other, toward a lovely green gazebo.
“That cannot be true. You are beloved. Indeed, in Society’s eyes, you can do no wrong.”
“Precisely,” he said with fervor. “And yet they do not know me at all. They have no idea the mistakes I’ve made.
How hard I’ve worked. How I would trade it all and then some just to have one more day with my father alive and well.
” He swallowed hard, and I wanted so badly to pull him into an embrace as he had embraced me.
“I am a fraud, Georgiana, if you want the truth. I make decisions that are far above me, and I hope for the best. But I am no one special. Just a boy born first in line to a man who happened to be a duke.”
I reached out and took his hand. “You do not give yourself enough grace.”
Our fingers laced together, and Marlow’s eyes softened. “Nor do you.”
“You have your cousins. Your family.”
He looked down and nodded. “Sometimes I wonder if they come round only out of obligation.”
“No.” I shook my head firmly. “No, they love you. I can see it in their faces. They’d do anything for you.”
“And your brother?” He squeezed my hand and tugged me toward the gazebo. “He loves you very much.”
I looked over my shoulder toward his tall, quiet house where not a soul was in sight, and leaned in closer.
“I miss home,” I admitted. “I miss the countryside. Peter says I should try harder to befriend the girls there, but they look at me with disdain, and I cannot bear it. And now, I am a burden to him. He has a new wife, a baby coming—”
“You could never be a burden.” Marlow shook his head.
“And if anyone makes you feel that way, they are not worthy of your affection.” He led me up the few steps to the center of the gazebo, surrounded by flowers and buzzing bees.
“And I do not mean to discount your feelings”—he gave me a sheepish look—“but perhaps if you stopped encouraging these rumors, and instead—”
I huffed an annoyed breath, and he laughed.
“—spoke more seriously and showed them all the type of person you truly are . . .”
I pursed my lips at him. “You think I am foolhardy, is that it?”
He froze his expression. He drew in a silent breath, then parted his lips and tilted his head. “I—no . . . this feels like a trick.”
I added furrowed brows to the pursed lips. “You think I encourage the rumors.”
He tilted his head and paused. “What was the phrase? It was no great chore.” His ears pinked, eyebrows raised, with humor curving his lips.
“And what would you have done, had an acquaintance said the same to you? Insinuated that you were a . . . trollop.” Speaking the word out loud almost made me laugh. The absurdity! How positively wretched to call someone such a name, especially without knowing them at all.
Marlow considered a moment, his jaw moving. “I’d have called him out and stabbed him straight through.”
No doubt. “Honorable for a man. But a woman?” I tsked, crossing from one side of the gazebo to the other.
“I do not mean to encourage the rumors, but reason abandons me entirely. I cannot prove them wrong, so why not make a farce of it all?” I puffed out my cheeks and blew out a breath. “Perhaps I am foolhardy.”
Marlow paced the gazebo, then leaned around a column.
He disappeared for a moment, his arm stretched out, then reappeared with a single white daisy in his hand.
He twirled the stem between his fingers as he crossed the stone floor toward me, watching the petals.
When we were an arm’s length apart, he handed it to me without a single word.
I brought it to my nose. Sweet, simple, beautiful. My heart squeezed at the gesture. “Thank you,” I said with feeling.
“You are not foolhardy, Georgiana,” he said. “You are clever and kind. Thoughtful of others’ needs. Your wit is . . . unmatched.” He chuckled, shaking his head as though in private thought. “You are the exact opposite of foolhardy. You are singular. Remarkable. Brilliant.”
His eyes softened, and I felt his words move through me like warm tea, swirling and settling at the base of my stomach. “You do not have to say that.”
“No,” he said, shrugging. “I do not.”
I should thank him. I should tell him that I thought the same of him—that he was just as singular. Just as kind and brilliant. I admired his bravery and ambition to bolster the dukedom.
I would miss him greatly when I left.
His smile. His unruly mess of hair when he was home and unbothered.
His touch.
The way he looked at me—really looked at me—as he did now.
I had a terrible feeling that he felt exactly what I did. That his feet danced in time with mine to a song only we could hear.
“Sit with me?” he asked, meandering over to a little bench tucked between two columns.
I twirled the daisy’s stem between my fingertips and slowly nodded my head.
We talked for an age, knees angled toward each other from either end of the bench. He asked about my family, so I told him about Peter and Amelia and how things had changed at home since they married. Why I felt like I was always in the way, even if it wasn’t true.
He told me about Maggie’s wedding to Thomas. How good of a man Thomas was. How their children had completely changed the dynamic of the whole family but for the better. And how he wanted to be a better uncle to them—more present.
We spoke of regrets, of hopes for the future. We laughed at each other’s foolishness and grinned to think of what might come next.
Marlow walked me through the rest of the garden until the sun started its descent, and the air chilled, and then we took the grand staircase together. He left me at my bedroom door, and we dressed for dinner.
We joined the family—Maggie, Thomas, Gabriel, and Her Grace—around the table.
We laughed until our stomachs ached on stories from times past. Apparently, Marlow had had an affinity for worms as a boy, much to his mother’s distaste, and would attempt to sneak them into the house at all hours.
“Gabriel, the snitch, never let me get away with it,” he laughed.
Gabriel’s face scrunched in protest. “Why couldn’t you have liked butterflies or ladybirds?”
Marlow looked at me and shook his head as though to say, Do you hear this? You would have helped me, wouldn’t you have?
Afterward, we played cards in the drawing room, even Gabriel, retiring only when our eyes were heavy with sleep.
I didn’t let myself worry about the morrow.
I could only hope, for the first time in a long time, that it would come.