Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Fitz prowled down the garden path from shadow to shadow, ears alert to any sound, scanning his surroundings for movement, but after the hue and cry of the past few hours, all was quiet at last.
When he’d returned to the house with a stricken, silent Lord Alfred and Lady Quick, they had discovered that Caroline had not come back. Her mother appeared worried, but reassured everyone that Caroline simply needed some time alone, and she would no doubt reappear before supper.
Fitz, who had seen Caroline’s wide, shocked eyes and trembling mouth before she’d run off, had his doubts. But he also had an idea of where she might be.
So he’d slipped away from the house while everyone was changing for dinner and now he was stealing through the cold, manicured walkways of the estate’s formal gardens, under the imposing eyes of the enormous topiary menagerie—the only menagerie currently kept by the Duke of Thornecliff, as it happened.
As he approached the orangerie at the back of the garden, he studied the large glass windows carefully for any hint of light inside, but all was darkness. Undeterred, Fitz tried the door.
Stepping inside the brick building, with its south-facing wall nearly entirely of glass and the great domed glass ceiling arcing overhead, was like stepping from the dead of winter into the middle of summer.
The air was humid and warm, heavy with the scent of orange blossom and banana leaf.
Outside, the garden still slumbered through the last of the cold, but in here, there was a palpable sense of growing things. Of life. Of awakening.
Or perhaps that was just Caroline, stirring restlessly from her sleep on the chaise in the sitting area along the back brick wall.
She sat up, her pale hair in a thick braid that had come loose from its pins and lay over one shoulder. She’d shed her pelisse in the warmth of her refuge, leaving her in a brown high-waisted dress with long, unadorned sleeves. Her sensible half boots lay, unlaced, beside the chaise.
Warm and rumpled from sleep, her cheeks flushed, Caroline watched Fitz’s approach through the rows of fruit trees with a distant wariness that wrenched at his heart.
“How did you find me?” she asked woodenly, curling her stocking feet under her skirts.
“I remembered what you said about the dinner table centerpiece being the only thing that interested you. You said you wanted to see where they were grown.”
Her lips twisted. “You’re always paying attention to me.”
“Not always,” Fitz said heavily, dropping down to sit beside her on the end of the chaise. “I’m sorry about this afternoon, sweet.”
Her downcast eyes flashed up to his for an instant, then away again, like the flicker of a bird on the wing. “Your father was awful.”
Anger flared to life, a hot coal in his chest when Fitz thought of his father, but it cooled when he remembered the look on Lord Alfred’s face when his youngest son finally told him what he could do with his inheritance.
Fitz had felt trapped for so long, aimless and worthless, it was hard to believe he’d taken his first fumbling steps out of the cage of his father’s expectations…
but he had. And with even that small bit of distance came a bit of understanding.
“I believe Father is under a misapprehension, or several, and that is what’s causing him to behave badly.
Our parents’ situation is not what we had thought. ”
She sighed. “I understand why you were angry with your father. I was angry with him too. But you said a lot of things that didn’t make sense to me.”
Fitz’s heart rolled over in his chest. He hated that he’d made her unsure of herself. Unsure of him. “I know, and it’s not how I meant it to be.”
“Oh, I know you didn’t mean it. Of course not! Do not worry for a moment on that score. I know how you get when you argue with your father; you barely even know what you’re saying.” She huffed a little laugh, not a happy sound, and pulled her knees up to wrap her arms around them.
Fitz paused, struggling for the right words. He felt the need to approach with caution; she was like a skittish deer, ready to spook and run at the first wrong move.
“I’ve made a complete hash of this.” He looked down at his hands, fisted upon his knees, and made a conscious effort to relax the tight clench. “But I’ve come to put things right. I have a new scheme to propose, one that I believe will solve all our problems.”
“Another proposal?” She was watching him with wide eyes, dark and velvety as midnight. “Will I be allowed to respond this time, or is my inclusion in this proposal still entirely incidental?”
Fitz rubbed at his chest over his heart, where he felt the hit. “That is fair. I’m sorry, again. And yes, I am very interested to hear your thoughts on this proposal.”
“I’m not at all certain I care to see my mother marry your father, at this point,” Caroline cautioned. “Misapprehension or not, I cannot encourage Mama to tie herself to someone who would speak to and about his own son in such an unfeeling manner.”
The mulish cast to her lush mouth sent warmth all through Fitz, sweet enough to rival the perfumed air of the orangerie. Even in the midst of her own upset caused by Fitz’s bungling, she was still so angry on his behalf.
No one had ever defended him quite like this. It was rather like being wrapped in a warm, soft blanket and cuddled close, safe from the world. If Fitz hadn’t been certain before, he would be now.
“Our parents must sort things out on their own, from this point forward,” Fitz promised.
“And I vow I will stop allowing my frustrations with my father to make me act like an arse. My proposal does not concern our parents. It concerns us. Now, your original problem was that you did not wish to force your mother to return to Scotland with you, and you did not wish to remain here. Well, I propose that she would be perfectly happy to let you gallivant off to Scotland without her, so long as you were in the company of…a husband.”
Her mouth went flat. “So rather than trapping our parents into matrimony, you would trap me?”
Fitz controlled his flinch; he’d known going into it that Caroline would not be an entirely receptive audience. But somehow it still surprised him, the shaft of pain that went through him at hearing her describe marriage to him as a trap.
“It’s not a trap if we both walk into it with our eyes open,” he pointed out. “And with certain agreements in place.”
She sat bolt upright as though he’d stuck her with a pin in an unmentionable place. “We! You mean I should marry you? I thought you said that wasn’t what you’d meant, earlier!”
Damn, he wasn’t precisely clearing things up here, was he?
“Yes, me,” Fitz confirmed, a bit raggedly. He swallowed hard. “I think you should marry me.”
Caroline exploded off the chaise to pace before him, her sharp movements lacking their usual economical grace. “I told you from the beginning, I don’t wish to marry anyone. You agreed! You feel the same!”
“Ah, but I’m not anyone—I’m your…your friend, remember?
” Fitz watched her stalk back and forth, her agitation kicking out the skirts of her drab gown to flutter around her legs.
Every muscle in his body ached to go to her, to stop her frantic motion and soothe it with a kiss, but he forced himself still.
“I wouldn’t be the sort of husband who would demand things of you or try to stop you doing what you like.
I promise not to interfere with your work—in fact, I’d like to help, in whatever capacity I can. ”
“You would…you would leave London?”
She sounded bewildered. Fitz ached. “I hate London, actually. Always preferred the countryside, as I told you. I haven’t traveled much but if we were married, well, whither thou goest, as they say—I’ll go whither so ever you like. Scotland, the Alps. Timbuktu.”
“Why are you saying all this?” Caroling was shaking her head, her voice wobbling precariously. “Why would you offer to marry me when I know you’ve no wish to ever be married?”
This was the sticky bit. Fitz wanted to be honest, but the thought of saying it, right out loud, made his insides shrivel with panic.
It had taken him a stupidly long time to even realize what it was, but once the word occurred to him, he knew it was true.
And he knew he ought to have courage and tell Caroline the truth.
She deserved to know all the facts before she made a decision.
If he could face down his father, the most powerful man in his life, surely Fitz could look Caroline in the eye and tell her how he felt.
While Fitz quietly panicked, Caroline was pulling herself together. “I see what I am meant to get out of this arrangement. Freedom to work, companionship, et cetera. But what do you get?”
The way she said it, as though even with her sparkling intelligence she could not conceive of a single reason why anyone would wish to marry her, made the words bypass Fitz’s brain to rush straight from his heart to lips.
“If you marry me, I’ll have a wife whom I love.”
Caroline froze, her face shadowed under the starlit night sky visible through the glass roof. In the silence that followed, Fitz heard the echo of his words, reverberating through the greenhouse and scraping him raw.
This is what love is, the darkest part of his soul snarled. This is all it’s ever been. It’s you, alone in the dark. Pathetic and weak, whining like a dog left out in the cold.
Breaking the deepening void of silence, Caroline’s voice was a frail lifeline pulling him back up from the depths.
“You have to stop,” she whispered harshly. “Stop saying these things.”