Chapter Five
Rochelle
He says it and then he stops, which is the most maddening thing about him.
Nester shifts her weight and puts more of herself into my lap, which is a considerable amount of dog. I go on stroking her ear because it gives my hands somewhere to be. The tiles are cold through the blanket.
“Which time?” I ask.
There’s no hesitation. “Both.”
“You'll have to do better than that.” I keep my voice pleasant, because if I let it out of the pleasant register it will go somewhere I can't steer it. “You’ve had four years reach out to me. To say what you just said.”
He is quiet long enough that I think he might get up and leave again, and honestly it would almost be a relief, a return to known conditions.
“I was twenty-eight,” he says. “I'd had the title for two years and I still didn't know how to sit down in my own dining room. Everyone in the house that night was watching me to see how I was managing. My mother, my uncle, the Fitzhugh’s.
Cassia was twenty-two and she'd only just stopped crying about losing our father.” He reaches over and strokes Nesters slender nose.
“I wanted to return your shoes. You made a joke about the big bad duke, and I had spent eighteen months in that position, and for a second, I just wanted to be me.”
I shake my head softly. “That's a nice speech.”
“It isn't a speech.”
“It's very well organized for something you're making up on a laundry floor.” Nester's tail thumps twice, agreeing with me. “Go on. You kissed me and then you decided something. What did you decide?”
“That I had nothing to offer you past that night.”
“There it is.” I look at him properly for the first time since he sat down.
He has his jacket off and his sleeves turned back.
“Do you hear it? You decided. Not us. You had an entire conversation with yourself in the time it took for you to kiss me. Then you walked out and left me there without any explanation.”
“Would it have been better if I'd stayed and said it out loud?”
“It would have been kinder. I'd have had something to help me understand. To help me know this wasn’t because I was some terrible person or terrible kisser.” I move my hand from Nester's ear to the flat of her ribs, which rise and fall slowly under my palm.
“You know what actually did it? Not the leaving. Breakfast.”
He looks at me.
“You came down at half past eight and passed me the toast rack, then asked whether I’d be leaving before midday as there was going to be snow.
” I can still see the toast rack. Silver, with a hunting scene on the end of it, and my hands not steady enough to take it cleanly.
“I sat there eating scrambled eggs on toast opposite a man who had kissed me like I meant something and I thought, oh.
It didn't happen. He's decided it didn't happen, and now I have to eat this egg.”
He is looking at Nester but I see the way my words affect him. “I’m sorry.”
“Then you weren't at Cassia's birthday, or Easter Banquet, or the engagement party, or either of the last two Christmases.”
“No.”
I shake my head from side to side. “Go on. Say the rest of it.”
“I arranged not to be.” He says it evenly but there's a thread pulled tight underneath.
I laugh before I can help it, which is annoying, because I wanted to be formidable for at least another minute. “The spa,” I say.
“What?”
“Cassia's birthday, two years ago. I booked us into a spa forty miles from here because I couldn't face coming here. And the bed and breakfast by the lake, that was my idea too. I've been managing my own diary around you like a woman with a restraining order.”
He smiles. “Cassia told me about the scones.”
“She tells everyone about the scones.”
Nester groans and stretches out one enormous back leg until it presses against Lucas's thigh, and he puts his hand on it without appearing to notice he's doing it. We sit there for a moment, the two of us and the dog, in the yellow light of a lamp somebody carried in from the boot room.
“Last night,” I say.
“Last night I told you to go up to bed.”
“You did. But it was the tone of your voice that upset me. You talked to me like I was beneath you. Which I suppose I am.”
His head snaps up. “No,” he says. “I know exactly what voice I used.” He looks at the door, and then at me, and this time he doesn't dress it up. “If I had stayed on that floor another second, I would have carried you upstairs. And in the morning, I’d have to lie to everyone that I was single so that you didn’t get dragged over the coals. ”
“So you were protecting me?”
“Yes. At least, I thought I was.” He frowns now, his eyes dropping back down to Nester.
“Lucas. You keep making decisions about my life and then handing them to me like a bill. I'm a grown woman. I've been organizing other people's disasters for a living since I was twenty-three. I can decide for myself whether I can handle what’s to come.”
He takes that. He doesn't argue, which surprises me, and he doesn't apologize either, which surprises me more, and I find I prefer it.
“Elsie came to find me before dinner,” I say. “In a state. She said she'd been sent to move my things to the yellow room, and then unsent.”
“Yeah,” he sighs as he says it. “I was so angry.”
“Why?”
“Because the blue room is yours.” He says it like a fact of the estate, like the drainage or the date over the stable arch.
“Who wanted the room?”
He doesn't answer straight away, and everything in me attunes to him the way it does on site when a supplier says ah before a sentence.
“My mother wanted it for Delphine Corvain,” he says. “She arrives tomorrow. Our families go back quite some time and my mother thinks it would be a good match.”
“And what is she to you?”
“Nothing.”
My eyebrows flicker. “Nothing doesn't get your mother's second-best bedroom four doors from yours.”
He shrugs. “I genuinely barely know her. I know as much as you do probably from whatever gets published on the gossip sites. I don’t know what she is like in person. The last time I saw her was a charity event in the city.”
“I’m going to be transparent with you,” I tell him, “because I don't think anybody ever really has been.
I want the whole thing. I want a wedding, and children, and a man who is proud to be my husband in front of other people.
I'm not embarrassed about wanting it. I've wanted it since I was small and I've never once gone off the idea.” Nester's head is heavy on my thigh, warm through the cotton of my pants.
“So if what's happening here is just for this week or even less than that, tell me now and I'll be perfectly nice to you until Sunday, and then I'll go home and get on with my life.”
“It isn't a one off.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don't know yet.” He turns to me, and his voice comes down low and rough in a way I've never heard from him.
“I know that I have thought about you every day for four years.
I know that I came looking for you tonight and found you sitting on a cold floor with somebody else's dog, and I have never in my life wanted anything the way I want to be allowed to stay right here with you.”
I move Nester's head off my lap and onto the folded blanket, gently, apologizing to her under my breath. Then I get up onto my knees on the tiles in front of him and take his face in both hands, and I kiss him.
He makes a sound into my mouth. His hand comes around the back of my neck and holds me there like he thinks I might change my mind, and he tastes faintly of the port they had after dinner. I’m not thinking about breakfast, or bedrooms, or a woman I don’t know arriving tomorrow.
Bootsteps come down the back passage, unhurried, accompanied by whistling.
We come apart. Lucas puts his forehead against mine for half a second, which nearly finishes me off, and then the door swings wide and Peregrine is standing in it with a camping stool under one arm, a thermos, and a paperback.
“Ah,” he says, delighted. “How lovely of you to watch over my pupper. Things certainly do seem to be imminent…”