Chapter 19
“My husband kissed me on our wedding night, and I spent the entire carriage ride home wondering whether his valet had fed him raw onion as a practical joke.”
Lady Caldwell said this rather suddenly, her voice ringing out clearly. The drawing room at Lady Ashton’s received it with the collective gasp and immediate laughter of six women who had been drinking sherry since half past nine.
Oliver should not have been listening. He was standing in the corridor outside the drawing room, waiting for Sebastian, who had gone to retrieve a book Lord Ashton had promised him and was taking an unreasonable amount of time about it.
The door was ajar. The ladies had gathered after supper while the gentlemen lingered over port, and by the time Oliver had passed on his way to find Sebastian, the conversation had progressed well beyond any territory a gentleman ought to overhear.
He should have walked on. He knew this. Instead he stood with his shoulder against the wall and his glass in his hand, because Lady Caldwell had just said the word kiss, and Louisa was in that room, and the combination of those two facts had rooted him to the floorboards.
“You are too cruel, Lady Caldwell.” That was Mrs. Fenton, her voice warm with sherry and amusement. “Lord Caldwell is a perfectly agreeable man.”
“Lord Caldwell is an excellent man. I would lay down my life for Lord Caldwell. But he kissed like a trout surfacing for a fly, and I refuse to pretend otherwise at this stage of my earthly existence.”
More laughter. Oliver pressed his glass against his mouth to stop his own from escaping.
“What about you, Mrs. Fenton?” Lady Caldwell carried the dangerous brightness of a woman who had decided the evening required confessions. “Your Mr. Fenton. Was the first kiss everything the poets promised?”
“Mr. Fenton kissed me behind my father’s stable when I was nineteen. It was brief, competent, and he tasted of peppermint, which I found considerably more romantic than onion.”
“A low bar, and yet he cleared it. Well done, Mr. Fenton.” Lady Caldwell’s sherry glass clinked against the table.
Laughter again, warmer this time, protective, pulling the moment away from exposure and folding it into the shared humor of the evening. The conversation turned toward safer ground.
Sebastian appeared at the far end of the corridor, book in hand, and paused when he saw Oliver standing motionless beside a closed door.
“What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you.”
Sebastian looked at the door, then at Oliver, then at the door again.
“The ladies are in that room,” he observed.
Oliver pushed off the wall and walked toward Sebastian with a stride that was, by any reasonable measure, too fast for a corridor. “Have you got the book?”
“Indeed.” Sebastian fell into step beside him. “I have also got the distinct impression that you heard a thing you were not intended to hear, and that it has rearranged the furniture in your skull.”
Oliver did not answer. They returned to the dining room, where Lord Ashton was holding forth on drainage to a diminishing audience. Oliver sat. He poured more port.
* * *
Four days later, Oliver walked through the garden at Ashford House with Louisa beside him, and the words were still lodged beneath his sternum.
The borders along the south wall blazed with foxgloves and delphiniums, and the bees moved between them with the single-minded industry of creatures unburdened by self-awareness.
Louisa walked with her bonnet pushed back and her shawl trailing from one hand, pointing at plants and asking the names of those she did not recognize.
“That is a peony,” she said, stopping beside a bloom the size of a soup bowl.
“That is a rose.”
She shook her head. “It cannot be. It is enormous.”
“It is a Damask. Mrs. Aldridge guards them with the ferocity she applies to her cabbages. I am permitted to admire them from a distance of no fewer than three feet.”
Louisa laughed. She had been laughing more freely since Wiltshire.
“I must tell you,” she said, trailing her fingers above a lavender spike without quite touching it, “that Lady Caldwell’s conversation the other evening has stayed with me.”
Oliver’s stride shortened by half a pace. “Which conversation?”
“You know precisely which conversation.” She glanced sideways at him. “The kissing conversation. I saw your shadow beneath the door, Oliver. You were listening.”
She stopped walking. They stood beside a stone urn overflowing with trailing geraniums, red and insistent against the grey Portland stone. The garden wall behind them held the afternoon heat and radiated it back into the air between them.
“I have been thinking about it,” she said. “I am twenty-two years old. Frederick is very likely going to propose before the end of this Season. And I have no idea what a kiss is meant to feel like.”
Oliver swallowed wrong and covered it with a cough that convinced neither of them.
“You will find out,” he said, aiming for lightness and landing closer to strangled. “When the moment arrives.”
“That is what everyone says. When the moment arrives. As though the moment is a public coach that will collect me on schedule regardless of whether I have packed.” She sat on the edge of the stone urn.
A geranium petal drifted onto her shoulder.
“I am not afraid of the kiss itself. I am afraid of not knowing whether it is right. I will have nothing to measure it against.”
“You are overthinking this,” he strangled out.
“I overthink everything. You have told me so yourself.” She pulled the geranium petal from her shoulder and turned it between her thumb and forefinger. “You have kissed women before.”
“I am not discussing this.”
“Is it different each time? Or is it always the same?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. She sat on the edge of the urn with a petal in her fingers and waited for him to answer a question that had no answer he could safely give.
“It is different,” he said. “Every time.”
She nodded. She dropped the petal into the gravel and stood, brushing her skirt.
“Thank you. I was curious.” She smiled, bright and uncomplicated, and asked about his plans for the rose border, and they walked the rest of the garden discussing Mrs. Aldridge’s vendetta against the rabbits, and by the time her carriage arrived Oliver had almost persuaded himself that the exchange had been unremarkable.
He persuaded himself through dinner, even attempted to read a chapter or two of a book.
Then the persuasion failed, and what remained was the image of her on that stone urn with a petal on her shoulder, telling him she had never been kissed, and the understanding, quiet and absolute, that he wanted to be the one who changed that.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
This was not the arrangement. This was not commerce, or strategy, or the careful, transactional bargain they had struck in Hyde Park with a handshake and mended gloves.
He was lying in the dark wanting to kiss a woman who trusted him entirely, who called him a friend, who was moving toward another man’s arms.
He turned onto his side. The elm outside the window threw its shifting shadow across the ceiling, the same pattern it had cast when he was nine years old, lying in this bed, making promises he had believed were unbreakable.
Sleep, when it came, offered no improvement. He dreamed of geraniums, and the outline of her lips.
With morning came their next meet-up. They were in the library at Ashford House, the room he had told her about in Wiltshire.
She had traveled quietly, with him having sent a carriage to pick her up in the shadow of dusk.
For Oliver, it had become comforting to have her there, even in silence. This, he knew, was not part of the arrangement. The meetings were clandestine, and his loyal servants, as expected, kept their eyes averted.
She stood by the window with a volume of Cowper she had pulled from the shelf. He sat at the desk, pretending to review estate correspondence while watching her read in the afternoon light. She turned pages slowly. Her lips moved over certain lines. Twice she smiled at passages she did not share.
“Oliver.”
He looked up at the sound of his name on her lips.
“Yes.”
“I need to ask you for a favor, and I need you to hear the whole of it before you answer.”
He set down his pen.
She closed the book. Her fingers stayed pressed against the cover, holding the pages shut as one holds a door against weather.
“If Frederick proposes, he will kiss me. It may happen at the proposal itself, or shortly after, and I will not be prepared.” She looked at him. “I would like to know what it feels like. Beforehand. So that when the moment comes, I am not standing there like a woman who has never been touched.”
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. Beyond the window, a gardener raked the gravel path in steady, rhythmic strokes, a sound belonging to a world where people did ordinary things without consequence.
“No,” Oliver said immediately, his heart starting to race.
“You have not heard the whole of it.”
“I have heard enough. No.”
“I am asking you as a friend.”
“And I am refusing you as one.” He stood. The chair scraped against the floorboards. “You are asking me to kiss you so that you are better prepared to kiss another man. Do you hear how that sounds?”
“I hear how it sounds. I also hear that it is practical, and sensible, and that you are the only person in my life I would trust enough to ask.”
He walked to the window. The gardener had moved on to the far border. A blackbird sang from the copper beech, its voice absurdly sweet against the tension filling the room.
“Louisa.” He turned. She stood by the bookshelf with Cowper pressed against her ribs, her chin lifted, her gaze level. “If I do this, it changes things. You cannot undo a kiss. You cannot put it back in the box and pretend the lid was never opened.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because I am telling you now that you may regret asking. When you are standing in front of Frederick, and the memory of this sits between you, and whatever he offers, you may wish you had left the question unasked.”
She did not look away. “I trust you.”
He stood at the window. She stood at the bookshelf. The library floor stretched between them, lined with the books he had filled these shelves with, the rebellion bound in leather that he had built against his father’s memory.
“Then come here,” he whispered.
She set the book on the shelf and crossed the room.
Her steps were steady, but he could see the pulse at her throat, rapid, visible above the lace of her collar.
She stopped in front of him, close enough that the lavender water she wore reached him, faint and clean, a scent he had memorized without intending to.
He lifted his hand, and his fingers found her jaw. Her skin was warm, impossibly soft, and the contact sent a tremor through his wrist that he could not disguise. He tilted her face upward. Her eyes were wide.
“Slowly,” he said, and was not certain whether he was instructing her or himself.
He kissed her softly, barely more than the press of his mouth against hers. A question, not a declaration. Her lips were warm and still beneath his, and for one suspended second the kiss was exactly what she had asked for: a lesson, a rehearsal, a careful, measured thing offered between friends.
Then she leaned into him.
Her hand rose to his chest. Her fingers curled into the linen of his shirt, and her mouth softened, opened, and the careful measure of it shattered. His hand moved from her jaw to the back of her neck, drawing her closer.
The clock stopped ticking, or he stopped hearing it.
The gardener’s rake, the blackbird, the distant clatter of the household all fell away.
What remained was her mouth against his, her fingers twisted in his shirt, the warmth of her body close enough that he could feel her breathing quicken and catch.
When they separated, the distance came slowly. His forehead rested against hers. Their breath mingled in the narrow space between them. Her fingers were still in his shirt, gripping the linen as though letting go required a decision she had not yet made.
He opened his eyes. Hers were closed, her lashes casting faint shadows on her cheekbones.
She opened them. They looked at each other from a distance of two inches, and Oliver at once understood, with the cold, absolute clarity that he was in love with her.
That he had been in love with her for weeks.
And that the arrangement they had built to protect them both had just become the most dangerous structure in London.
“Oliver,” she whispered.
He stepped back. His hand left her neck. The air between them filled the space his body had occupied, cool and insufficient.
“Now you know,” he said. His voice held, though it cost him everything in his possession to keep it steady. “What a kiss feels like.”
She stared at him. Her hand drifted from his chest and hung at her side. The library was silent. The clock resumed. The blackbird sang on.
She collected Cowper from the shelf and walked to the door. She paused with her fingers on the handle, her back to him, and for three seconds neither of them breathed.
Then she left, and the door closed behind her with a sound so quiet it should not have been able to break anything at all.
Oliver stood at the window. The south lawn stretched below him, green and endless, and beyond it the copper beech held its branches against a sky turning pale with approaching evening. He pressed his fingers against his mouth. Her warmth was still there, fading.
He loved her. The knowledge sat in his chest, undeniable, immovable, as permanent and as useless as the portrait hanging in his entrance hall.
He loved her, and she was going to marry someone else, and the kiss that proved it was the same kiss he had given her so that she could.