Chapter 4
Four
By Saints, stars, and sheer madness. What have I done?
Nancy drove her fists into the pillows again, wishing the mattress would open beneath her and swallow her whole so she didn’t have to face Pippa.
It did not. The bed, traitorous object that it was, remained precisely the same—unhelpful, upright, and entirely incapable of hiding her from the morning after her misdeeds.
She groaned and burrowed her face into the fluffiness, but the image followed her there, too. Jeremy’s mouth. Jeremy’s hands. Jeremy’s hair. Jeremy’s heat.
What was she to tell Pippa?
She had not moved on. She had not turned a page.
Instead, she had kissed Jeremy Locke, ruined their friendship, and had possibly become more obsessed with the man than before.
Nancy knew, with terrible certainty, that nothing would ever be the same again.
The extent of that change, however, she couldn’t yet imagine.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
She just wanted to take it all back. Her parting words to him. The look of confusion in those blue eyes . . . Urgh. They haunted her.
“Oh, I am a menace,” she muttered into the pillow. However, even though she wanted to take those words back, she had meant them, which somehow made the matter all the worse. People could take back words they didn’t mean, but they couldn’t take back words they meant, could they?
She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling, mortified anew.
This was intolerable.
And the day had only just begun.
A soft rap sounded at the door, and then Pippa’s head popped through with cheerful determination. “Nancy? Are you all right?”
“No, I might never be all right again.”
“Oh, nothing can be that bad,” Pippa said cheerfully, stepping fully into the room and closing the door behind her. “Tell me what happened.”
“I’m not sure I should ever voice this out loud.”
The bed dipped and Pippa patted her shoulder. “That horrifying? What did Knoxley do?”
“No,” Nancy said at once, sitting bolt upright. “Not Knoxley. Me.”
Pippa’s brows lifted. “You?”
Nancy groaned and flopped back against the pillows. “I have ruined everything.”
Pippa blinked. “Everything is a large claim for this hour of the morning.”
“I kissed Jeremy.”
A breath of silence, followed by a predictable, “You what?”
Nancy dragged a hand over her face. “I kissed him. You know, with my mouth. On his.”
Pippa collapsed beside her. “You kissed Jeremy Locke?”
“Yes.”
“Our lovingly dense, Jeremy Locke.”
“There is, unfortunately, only the one.”
“But,” Pippa’s head turned to her, “I thought you were turning a page.”
“I was.” Nancy groaned, covering her face with her hands. “I intended to. And then Jeremy happened.”
“Well, that does complicate the matter,” Pippa said faintly.
Nancy sat up again, pointing at her friend. “Precisely. I’ve circled back to the same chapter and set it on fire.” She fell back onto the mattress once again. “What am I going to do?”
“You could try talking to him? Perhaps even confess.”
“I already confessed,” Nancy admitted. “And got rejected.”
This time, Pippa shot upward. “What? When? Where?”
“Your wedding.” The most humiliating moment of her entire life.
Pippa stared at her eyes wide. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
“You look like a gaping fish,” Nancy pointed out.
“Nancy!” Pippa spluttered. “You confessed at my wedding and never told me anything?”
“Well, who would want to relive rejection like that?” she added when she sensed her friend about to scold her further, “It’s done, all right?”
“It’s done? Are you sure? You kissed him last night. Your actions suggest ‘dramatically unresolved’.”
“It was a goodbye kiss,” Nancy muttered woefully. A ruinous goodbye kiss.
“And he . . .?”
“Kissed me back,” Nancy muttered. “Enthusiastically. Which frankly makes this worse.”
Pippa pressed a hand to her chest. “I need a moment to process.”
Yes, well, Nancy had been processing since the wedding, and all it had accomplished was last night.
“What,” Pippa asked slowly, “exactly did he say to you when you confessed? I mean, a well-meaning, infuriating block of wood at times. Could you have misunderstood him?”
Could she have? No. “Well, first, he blinked at me,” Nancy continued bleakly, “as though I had begun reciting poetry in Greek.”
“And then?”
Nancy sighed. Those words had been etched deeply into her heart. “What do you mean, Nancy?” she recited, deepening her voice to mimic Jeremy. “Have you been reading romance books again?”
Pippa winced.
Right. Nancy couldn’t have winced better herself.
“Lord, what a clodpoll.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
Pippa scoffed. “You’re not much better since you kissed that clodpoll.”
Do not remind me.
The taste of that kiss still crackled on her lips. Her soul. Nancy groaned and reached for the pillow again. How was she supposed to move on from him, to turn the page, if her head, her heart, and her mouth, couldn’t forget? “There’s nothing for it. I shall now have to hide, forever hide.”
“Do not hide,” Pippa said briskly. “You kissed the man. You may now face the day.”
“I truly wish I had been swallowed by the mattress,” Nancy muttered.
“Yes, well,” Pippa said, standing. “Life rarely offers us such kindness.”
Nancy sighed. “I know.”
He had made himself clear at the wedding, and last night she’d simply startled him into reaction. She might misunderstand many things, but not this: he had not fought to understand her in any way. Not fought for her period.
The time had come.
She needed to turn the page, and Jeremy Locke could not follow.
Nothing in Jeremy Locke’s life had ever been so clear.
Not the conversations he replayed long after they ended.
Not the decisions he weighed and reweighed until they dulled into habit.
Not even the certainty with which he had always believed he understood Nancy; her wit, her patience, her infuriating habit of biting down on the corner of her lip whenever she was scheming something mischievous.
But the damn kiss . . .
He could recall the kiss step by step. His body had committed every torturous detail to memory before his mind ever had the chance to interfere.
The moment her fingers closed on his lapels and then the unmistakable press of her mouth against his, so decisive and entirely without hesitation.
He had imagined this—God help him, in his deepest fantasies he had—but the imagining had done nothing to prepare him for the reality of those dreams ever coming true.
The way she fit against him as though she had always belonged there.
Her sweetness persisted, familiar and unfamiliar all at once.
Dangerous.
Friends didn’t kiss like that. That crossed the line of friendship into something else entirely. A relationship beyond the boundaries of friends. He didn’t have to be an expert to know this could destroy the bond he shared with his closest friend.
What was his fear there?
He couldn’t imagine a life without Nancy Byrne.
I’m in love with you, Jeremy Locke.
The soft whispering of those spoken words in his dream came back without invitation, settling into his thoughts with implacability. Jeremy groaned, dragging a hand through his hair, his head dropping back to the chair he occupied in Chatteris’s study.
She was so close.
So deuced close.
Above him somewhere.
He couldn’t bring himself to call for her, so he’d settled here. Of course, Chatteris chose that moment to enter.
Jeremy groaned. “What are you doing here?”
“This is my study. What are you doing here?”
“Reflecting on my life choices.”
“Go reflect somewhere else,” Chatteris said, crossing over to his desk and settling in the chair.
“I can’t.”
“Why the devil not?”
Jeremy stared at the ceiling. “Because if I move, I might do something irreversible.”
“Such as?”
“I can’t rightly answer that.”
Chatteris sighed.
Jeremy groaned again. “Talk to me, Chatteris.”
“Why? We’re not even friends.” Chatteris paused. “And you won’t even tell me what happened.”
“You’re the husband of my friend, which now makes—”
“Don’t finish that sentence. I am not your friend. What’s this even about?”
“I kissed . . .” Jeremy glanced at Chatteris, once again questioning his sanity. I kissed your sister. He could not, however, admit that to this man. Chatteris would call for pistols at dawn. “A woman.”
The man arched a brow. “What’s so shocking about that?”
Heh. Would he still say that if he knew it was his sister? “This woman . . . She’s mad at me.”
“Not shocking either.”
That was the problem. None of this was shocking. Wanting her was not shocking. Kissing her was not shocking. What terrified him was everything that might follow. He could endure rejection. He could endure longing. He could not endure a life without Nancy Byrne in it.
Such a life would be hollow and empty.
Jeremy’s head fell back to the chair. “I’m in agony.”
A sigh. “Go be in agony someplace else.”
“Chatteris.”
“Bloody hell.” The man lifted his chin and bellowed. “Williams!”
A footman appeared at the door.
“Where’s my wife?” Chatteris demanded. “She usually deals with,” he gave him a faintly distasteful glance at Jeremy, “whatever this is.”
“Pippa,” Jeremy bemoaned.
“Christ.”
“Her ladyship is out, my Lord,” the footman said. “With Lady Nancy, my Lord.”
Jeremy shot upright, a strange foreboding prickling all over him. That same feeling of restlessness from the night before. “Pippa and Nancy went out? Where?”
“Lady Ashcombe’s tea party.”
Perfectly respectable. Perfectly ordinary.
Knoxley wouldn’t attend tea parties, would he?
Jeremy shot to his feet, a sharp sense of urgency tightening in his chest. He tugged at his cravat, the thing suddenly intent on strangling every breath he tried to draw, images of Nancy and Knoxley flashing through his mind.
This was going to drive him mad.
“Silverton?” Chatteris called after him.
Jeremy had no patience to spare him a reply, his feet already carrying him through the door.