Chapter 14
Two weeks later, Matilda and Bea sat on the bed in Bea’s chamber and watched the cat carefully shred what appeared to have been a delicately embroidered cushion set inside a miniature chaise longue.
Bea had named her Angelica Kauffman, after one of the two female founders of the Royal Academy, and between the cat and their art, Matilda had made some cautious inroads with the girl.
They’d taken to spending half the day on the beach, in a sheltered cove that Bea favored, painting and talking of technique and salons over the chattering of Matilda’s teeth.
One evening, as they dined on root vegetables in cheese sauce and tiny flaky mushroom tarts, Mrs. Perkins had slipped in with a filet of sole for the enthusiastically yowling Angelica Kauffman. She had informed them all dryly that the cat would need a place to build her nest in the coming weeks.
Christian’s voice had sounded alarmingly strangled. “Her nest? I don’t understand.”
Mrs. Perkins had given him a look of vague concern, as though wondering if he’d come over a bit silly. “Her nest,” she’d repeated. “For the kittens.”
Christian’s face had taken on the single most terrifying glower Matilda had ever seen, and she—
Well, there were limits to the bravery even of a Halifax Hellion. She’d stuffed another bite of mushroom tart in her mouth and run away.
Ever since, Angelica Kauffman and Mrs. Perkins had embarked upon something of a battle of wills. Each time the cat rejected yet another nest that Mrs. Perkins presented, the housekeeper redoubled her efforts. She seemed to take it as a personal challenge.
“She’s going to give birth in your brother’s chamber,” Matilda said gloomily. “I am certain of it. And then he will put me out, and I shall freeze to death on the mail coach back to London.”
The pretense that Christian had selected the cat as a gift for Bea had of necessity been abandoned.
“It seems likely,” agreed Bea, in tones that—to Matilda’s ear—sounded inappropriately chipper when discussing someone else’s imminent demise. “How many kittens do you think there will be?”
“Three or four,” Matilda said, then groaned and flopped backward onto Bea’s counterpane. “Probably eleven. Send a few back to London with my corpse so my brother and sister know I died in the service of animal rescue.”
Bea gave Matilda’s knee a fleeting pat. Though she had begun to come out of her shell, she was still cautious, wary of touch. Afraid, Matilda thought, of asking for too much. “He probably won’t actually put you out.”
Matilda turned her head to gaze at the wall.
As in Matilda’s room, heavy draperies crowded with even heavier furnishings.
The light through the small window was barely enough to illuminate the pattern of turnips and artichokes on the wallpaper.
“If there are eleven kittens, I would consider freezing to death a mercy.”
“He likes you,” Bea said.
Matilda’s heart gave a stuttering leap in her chest. Do not ask. Don’t you dare ask, Matilda Halifax—
“What makes you say so?” she asked, and then groaned inwardly at her lack of restraint.
She felt Bea shift her weight in the bed beside her and imagined that Bea had shrugged. Matilda could not divert her face from its position at the wall to check, however, as she was fairly certain her cheeks were a shade of pink not usually found in nature.
“He let you bring Angelica Kauffman,” Bea said.
“I simply did not permit him to object.”
Bea laughed. “And dinner—we did not dine that way before you came.”
Matilda waited until her face had cooled a bit before turning over to face Bea. “What do you mean? How did the two of you dine before?”
Bea was looking out the small window, the long line of her neck tilted away. “Formally. Six or eight courses. We dressed—well, I was supposed to dress for dinner. Mrs. Perkins tried her best with me.”
Matilda pushed herself upright. “You did not dine en famille before I came?”
Bea turned back. “No. Mrs. Perkins said he sent a note ahead requesting the change.”
Matilda thought about all the dinners they’d had together since she and Christian had arrived together—everything served at once, rather than the formal removes more common at the tables of the aristocracy.
Almond and cream soup and vegetable galettes.
The bowls of fruit, the platters of crudités.
She’d managed to count twelve different varieties of cheese before she’d lost track.
No courses for her to push around on her plate or uncomfortably decline—only platters and bowls and tureens from which she might serve herself.
No questions about what she was eating and why. No game pies served in thick wedges or beef gravy poured atop her potatoes.
Christian had done that. For her. And he had not said a word.
“Bea,” she said, her voice a trifle unsteady, “do you like this bedroom?”
Bea turned back from the window and blinked. “Do I like the bedroom?”
“The draperies. The wall-coverings.” She looked down at the counterpane, which was embroidered with a pattern of pea-green feathers that could best be described as phallic. “The way it is, er, gotten-up.”
A flush worked its way up Bea’s pale throat. “I would not say that I like it, precisely.”
Matilda swung her legs down off the bed, walked over to the window, and gave the green velvet curtains a decided yank.
Nothing happened. They were attached rather powerfully to the window frame. She thought perhaps they were nailed down.
“Matilda,” squeaked Bea, “what are you doing?”
“I am helping.”
“I—I—” Bea blinked rapidly at her. “You can’t simply take down the draperies.”
“Can’t I?” She gave the curtains another tug, and when they remained indifferent to her efforts, groaned under her breath and pushed a heavy chair in the direction of the window. She could climb up and unfasten them from the top.
“You cannot! Christian will—”
Matilda turned the full force of her gaze on Bea, who paused mid-sentence.
“Christian,” she said deliberately, “would want you to be happy.”
And they did not know it, these great fools. They did not know how to show their love, and they did not know how to be cared for. She pulled at the curtain in the window frame, digging her fingernails into the wood.
She could let the light in. She could open a window between them.
Yes, she thought as the drapery came away in her hands. She could offer them that.
Christian pushed open the door to the library, then paused, blinked, and turned back behind him.
Yes, that was the right door. He was not lost in his own home.
But nothing in front of him made sense.
In fact, he supposed, everything about his life had felt incomprehensible for a good long while. He could pinpoint the last time his life had run upon a smooth, even keel, and it had been about thirty seconds before he’d walked into Lord Denham’s sculpture garden and met Matilda Halifax.
He was so damned frustrated he could not work. Matilda had informed him one night after dinner that Bea refused to leave Northumberland, and he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it. He wanted to ask Matilda for advice, but he was afraid to be alone with her.
He scarcely saw her all day, though they lived in the same house.
He counted the goddamned minutes until dinner.
He prayed for her to look away from him so he could drink in the sight of her flame-colored hair, the soft curve of her cheek and the more generous curves everywhere else.
And then when she granted his wish and did not look at him, he wanted her to turn her eyes back.
Not only had she brought a damned cat into his house, she had summoned forth a whole bloody litter.
He could barely think straight. When he wrapped his fingers around his aching cock at night, he imagined he could smell her.
In fact, as he looked around the wreckage of what had once been his library, he thought he could discern that delicate floral scent right now.
“Matilda,” he said warningly, “what in hell is going on?”
The heavy dark drapes had been pulled down and lay in heaps on the floor. The windows in the library were small—relics of the estate’s history as a battle fortification—but even still, weak wintry sunlight poured in.
It illuminated piles of frankly terrifying proportions.
He could scarcely see the books that lined the walls.
Furnishings from all over the house had been shoved together, chairs stacked atop one another, some upside down.
There were at least three stacks of medieval weaponry leaning crazily against one another.
He thought he saw a battle-axe the size of a small hedge. He thought he saw the cat.
He did not see Matilda anywhere, but there was not a single whisper of doubt in his mind that she was responsible for the disarrangement of his house.
The utter disruption of his life. The tangled-up instincts of his body, which shrieked at him alternately to strangle her, kiss her, and wrap her wrists in his hands as he tupped her up against the wall.
“Christian,” she said from somewhere off to his left. Her soothing tone made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “Ah—well. Welcome back. I’m sure this looks—er, a bit startling.”
“A bit startling?” He started to track her voice, but then he paused.
He looked at the library door for a long moment.
And then he shut it. And before he could think too hard about what he was doing, he turned the key.
“If you would but give me a few days,” Matilda was saying, blithely unaware of the very dark thoughts he’d begun to entertain, “I can have everything set to rights. Better, really, Christian, you must see—”
He followed the sound, winding between a set of heavy mahogany end tables stacked three high. How had she even lifted them? “You can have what set to rights?”
“Er,” she said, “your house. The furnishings.”
“What in hell happened to the furnishings?” He was closer now. Her dusky voice grew clearer in his ears.