Chapter 6
Matilda stood outside the door of Ashford’s London townhouse and lifted one gloved hand to rap upon it.
She took a breath, dropped her hand, and spun away before she could do anything she might regret.
Was she being ridiculous? She could not tell. Margo was typically the more impulsive of the two of them, as last night’s ludicrous costume drama suggested. Matilda usually thought ahead. She usually planned.
But something had come over Matilda when her twin had come home from Lady Montmorency’s card party and related the night’s events, her hair tousled and her eyes wet with regret.
“I’m sorry,” Margo had said. “I’m so terribly sorry—I—I only wanted to speak to him. I wanted to make sure he was good enough for you. I—I had no idea he would say such things!”
Matilda had not expected it either. Truly, Ashford declaring that he wanted to tie her to the bed and shag her silly would have been at the very bottom of the list of things she’d imagined he might say, just below Let’s get married Sunday next and I transform into a jaguar on the full moon.
She had been so bloody angry at Margo—who might only have spoken to her if she had concerns, not pretended to be her! And angry at Ashford too—for acting as though she were the shameless one when he—when he—
Had he meant he desired her, Matilda?
Had he meant Margo?
She whirled back to the door, and—before she could talk herself out of the ridiculous plan that had crystallized in her mind as she’d stared in horror at her twin—she lifted her hand and knocked.
Christian had considered writing her a letter.
He was still considering it, with a kind of hypnotized horror, as he packed for Bamburgh.
His trousers went into the trunk.
Dear Matilda—so sorry I embraced your sister yesterday. Not to worry, though—it was only because I thought she was you!
Stockings. Smallclothes. His spectacles, which were going to be crushed. Christian considered removing them and decided he did not care to stop his momentum.
Dear Matilda—so sorry I revealed my deviant desires to your twin. I was quite drunk, you see, which obviously excuses everything.
Shirts. Why did he have so many shirts? He had not brought this many down from Bamburgh. Perhaps they had reproduced in his wardrobe.
Dear Matilda—forgive me. No, don’t forgive me. Stay angry for the rest of your life, so long as it keeps you as far away from my presence as possible.
Jackets. Waistcoats. A clothes-brush.
Dear Matilda—I’m an ass and a fool and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
There was a scratch at the door, and Christian looked with some perturbation at the mess he’d made of his garments. “Come in.”
His London butler, Fanning, entered, caught sight of Christian’s efforts, and appeared briefly locked in an internal struggle between outrage and propriety. His bushy eyebrows climbed toward his hairline.
Propriety won, but it was a close call. Outrage still trembled in Fanning’s thick moustaches as he intoned, “I believe the grooms are nearly ready, my lord. But first—you have a caller.”
Christian pinched the bridge of his nose. Probably it was Whitby. He had escaped from Katherine Montmorency’s card party without bidding Whitby farewell, and he hoped sincerely that Whitby did not mean to propose another social event.
Christian thought he might rather die.
“In the drawing room?”
“Yes, sir,” Fanning agreed, and if Christian thought his tone a trifle peculiar, it did not much disturb him.
Until he reached the drawing room.
Until he saw Matilda.
She sat primly on the edge of an armchair, her gloved hands in her lap. She wore a morning dress, he observed, white sprigged with violets, her feet encased in half boots and crossed neatly at the ankles.
God, she looked so—so—
She looked so pretty. And innocent and delicious and unaffected, her gaze appraising, the spray of freckles on her nose and cheeks evident in the late-morning light. There were two more freckles he could see just beneath her ear, on the pale line of her neck.
She had said something, he realized, and he had not attended. He hoped it was something like Good morning, because he nodded dumbly and sat down across from her on the sofa.
If she had said, You are a bounder and a pervert, well, he supposed in that case his nod would also suffice.
“Lady Matilda,” he began, and then paused. All of the words in his head seemed to be crowded together at the back of his throat, with no one phrase breaking into the lead.
She arched one auburn eyebrow. “Ah, you recognize me, then?”
Oh Jesus. Was he—blushing?
It was not tenable. He was eight-and-thirty years old.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you are trying to ascertain my identity before you make advances upon my person. Yes, my lord, I am Matilda.”
“I recognize you,” he managed.
Her eyebrow was still a perfect crescent. “Are you after congratulations? My brother Spencer could distinguish us when he was three. I am not especially impressed.”
“You—no, I—”
Hell, he should have written her a letter. He should have headed off this confrontation before it could occur. He should have invented a time machine, gone back to the previous night, and knocked himself in the head with a stout tree limb before he went to any parties.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I cannot possibly excuse my behavior last night.”
“Good,” she said. “I am glad you are penitent. That will make this easier.”
Christian found that statement extremely worrisome.
“You have acted quite badly,” she said in her low, firm voice. “You have said outrageous things to my sister and forced me to divulge information to Margo that I would have preferred to keep to myself.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, as though repetition might make some difference. “If there is anything I can do to repair the damage I have done, only say so, and I will do it.”
He looked at her, at her neatly pinned hair underneath a pert straw bonnet, at the freckles on her nose. He felt about a hundred years old, and the fact that still, somehow, he could see her and imagine her naked made him want to flee the damned country.
“Repair the damage?” Her gaze rested upon his face, cool and considering. “Perhaps there is, at that.”
“I am at your disposal.”
It occurred to him much later that in the face of her calm self-possession and wide blue eyes, he had forgotten all about the Matilda who had lured him to St. James’s Park in the middle of the night.
“Are you?” she said. “I am very pleased to hear that. I would, as it turns out, like for you to agree to something.” She leaned forward in the chair. “You owe me a chance to right my own wrong. You cannot deny it.”
“What are you asking for?”
But he already knew. This time, at least, she did not take him by surprise. He knew what was coming, and he could not stop it, any more than he could stop the sun from rising on the bay in Bamburgh, the dawn as fiery as her hair.
“Take me with you,” she said, “to Northumberland. Let me tutor your sister until her debut in the spring. Let me make recompense for my errors, and you will be absolved of your own.”
And Christian was doomed.
“I can’t,” he said. A token protest, and she knew it.
“You can.” She leaned farther forward in her chair, and he felt himself lean toward her as well, as if he had been tugged by a string. “You must. You understand now how I feel, I know you do. And you cannot deny me the chance to put things right.”
He could have denied her, he thought later. He should have denied her. But he was an appalling idiot.
He looked into her eyes, blue as the midday sky, and told her yes.