Chapter 8
Christian spent much of the first three days of their journey enumerating the life choices that had led him to this point and regretting each one in turn.
It was, by far, the most productive thing he could think of to do with his time.
Working was out of the question. He had retrieved his spectacles and put them on to read through some reports from his estate managers—and then he had caught a glimpse of Matilda’s face.
Her mouth had fallen open. “You … wear spectacles?” she said faintly.
He glared at her through them. “Yes. To read. Because I am old.”
He had, in fact, worn spectacles to read since he had first learned to read, but he did not tell her that.
She had nodded, her lips still parted, the daft woman.
And then he’d felt the heat of her fixed stare as he’d tried to work.
It was impossible not to feel it. He rubbed the back of his neck, stared blindly at the reports, and then yanked off his spectacles and shoved them brutally into his jacket pocket.
Matilda had let out the tiniest, breathiest sigh.
So. Working was out.
Conversation was likewise impossible. The problem, he had discovered, was that when he talked with her, he—he—
He liked her. He fancied her. He thought she was wonderful.
It was an absolute goddamned disaster.
She liked to plan things. They were absurd plans, half the time, but he enjoyed the way her mind worked, methodical and precise.
She was so softhearted that he wondered at times how she did not simply dissolve into porridge.
She worried about the postboy. She worried about the horses.
At one point on the journey she made them stop and get out of the carriage because she thought a bird had become entangled in the fabric of the post-chaise’s roof.
There was no bloody bird. He had practically hauled her down from the top of the vehicle and then, in an attempt to convince her, had scrambled up to look for himself.
There was no bird. It was ridiculous. He wondered if she had invented the whole thing to make him act the fool, and then chastised himself as soon as he thought it.
She would not do that. She was too damned nice.
She was surprisingly well read, with trenchant observations on everything from art criticism to the novel form.
As he had no interest in social events and lived in Northumberland besides, he spent a great deal of time reading and had many opinions himself.
They had sparred quite agreeably until he realized he was growing increasingly besotted and made himself stop.
When she mentioned that her favorite bookshop in London had refused to admit her when her notoriety had grown, he thought the place might burn down simply from the force of his outrage on her behalf.
He plotted ways to make her tell him the name of the bookshop so he could put it out of business, and then discarded his ideas as the unhinged ravings of a madman.
Unfortunately, not conversing did not seem to help his state. When he did not talk with her, he looked at her instead, and looking was dangerous not to his heart, but to other parts of his body.
He had grown obsessed with the two freckles beneath her right ear. He wanted to put his mouth there, breathe in her floral scent, feel her pulse under his lips.
He wanted to unpin her hair. He wanted to spread it out over her shoulders—would they be pale, he wondered, or freckled?
—and then turn her over and watch all that mass of red and copper and gold tumble down her back.
He wanted to tangle his hands in it, rub one lock between his fingertips and then use it to trace feather-light circles around her nipples.
What things he imagined doing to her, there in the close, heady confines of the post-chaise—and later, too, in his bed, with Matilda asleep one door away and his body taut with wanting.
They were not nice things. They were not the kinds of things one did to a woman with a sweet freckled milkmaid face, but—devil take him—he could not forget what she had told him in the park. He imagined her curvy little body tied, bound, spread before him, and he imagined that she would like it.
He wanted her down on the floor of the carriage, in between his thighs, her bright hair uncoiled and her wrists in his hands. He wanted—
“I’ve been wondering,” she said, “about your sister.”
Christian swallowed. He adjusted the line of his jacket. He had had numerous opportunities, these last few days, to feel grateful for the current length of men’s outerwear, which could be manipulated to camouflage his erection.
“Yes?” His voice sounded composed, thank God. He felt a decided relief that she was not actually a supernatural creature and could not read his mind.
He hoped.
“I noticed, when you brought her up the first time, you said her mother. Do you have different mothers, then?”
“Ah. Yes. My mother died when I was an infant. My father remarried when I was around fifteen—that was Bea’s mother. She—” He caught sight of Matilda’s face and frowned at her. “Do not look at me like that.”
She blinked up at him, her lower lip caught between her teeth. She set it free before she responded. “Like what?”
“I can see the picture forming in your head. Poor motherless child, alone and isolated, wandering the moors—no, don’t try to deny it, I could read it on your face.”
She was blushing, her freckles half-hidden by pink warmth that had risen to her cheeks, and he told himself he was not charmed by the sight. “I’m sure I wasn’t thinking any such thing.”
“Well, you’d have been wrong in any case.” Despite himself, Christian felt his lips curve. “My mother was dead, yes, but I had Mrs. Perkins.”
Matilda’s auburn brows arched up. “Mrs. Perkins?”
“Yes, you’ll meet her. She came with us when we moved to Bamburgh from Devon. She’s our housekeeper, technically, but she was more a mother to me—and then, later, to Bea as well. She chaperones Bea when I am in London.”
“What was Bea’s mother like?”
He thought about Kitty, the flyaway tangle of her hair, her lively hazel eyes.
“I adored her. She brought the whole house to life—music and dancing, for the first time I could remember. I was awestruck and slightly afraid of her.” He breathed out, a little puff of laughter.
“Bea takes after our father, not her mother. She was always shy, even as a toddler. She used to hide behind Kitty, and if anyone dared to speak to her—except Mrs. Perkins—she’d scream like she was being put to the rack. ”
“And you? Could you speak to her without engendering a tantrum?”
It made him smile to think of her—little Bea, her baleful gaze, her thumb stuck in her mouth. “Yes. But I had to bribe her with sugar sticks every time I came home from Cambridge.”
When he looked at Matilda, she had that soft look about her eyes again. Her lips were a little pursed, the lower one full and tempting.
He did not look. He forced his face back into a frown. “I haven’t brought any sugar sticks this time, I suppose.”
“Not at all. You’ve brought her a painter to disport with.”
“Please,” he said, “do not use the word disport in the context of my sister. I find it alarming.”
He found everything about Matilda alarming.
The corners of her eyes were crinkled, but he had not made her smile, not quite. “When did Bea’s mother pass away?”
He drummed his fingers on the firm squabs beside him and then made himself stop. “Twelve years ago. Influenza—it took both our parents. We lived in Devon then.”
“Twelve years ago,” she said musingly, and his heart lurched. Did she recall what he had said in his letter? How he had erred twelve years ago. How he had made mistakes that reverberated through his life and Bea’s and the lives of many others who had depended upon him.
It seemed she did. Her lashes came down, veiling her eyes as she spoke. “That was when you married?”
“Yes.” He did not feel particularly inclined to elaborate. He could remember it clearly enough without putting it into words: his grief over his parents’ death, his sense of his own inadequacy to raising a motherless little girl.
He should have relied upon Mrs. Perkins. He should have done a great many things. But instead he had married Grace, the daughter of the baron on the neighboring estate, and it had cost him almost everything.
“What was she like, your wife?” Matilda stared at her lap, toying with the kid gloves she’d peeled off and stacked there. Her fingers made little whorls around the seams.
Grace had been the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, blond and ivory, all elegance. He’d thought it a marvel of fate that her name so perfectly matched the lovely way she had about her. He had been scarcely able to countenance his good fortune when she had accepted his proposal.
“You really want to ask that?” His voice was harsh, and Matilda’s lashes came up finally to look him in the face. “You know I’m meant to have killed her. Murdered her on the moors, or perhaps driven her to her own death with my cruelty.”
Matilda looked at him impassively. By God, she was so bloody unimpressed by it all—his blackened reputation, his roughness. It almost shamed him, that encompassing blue stare. He almost broke her gaze.
“I do not know of that,” she said. “I do not listen to gossip.”
He scoffed. “You listened well enough to hear about my preferences in the bedchamber.”
A wash of pink started in her cheeks and worked its way down her throat. “Indeed. Well. I had that from firsthand reports.”
Oh for God’s sake. Now he thought he might be blushing. He had not been with so many women, even when he was a young idiot at Cambridge. What were the bloody odds?
“Nonetheless,” she said, “I do not believe for a second that you killed your wife, by your hand or through neglect. You’ve never neglected anything in your life, I imagine. And you are the furthest thing from cruel.”