Chapter Seven #2
He thought about the conservatory. The orange trees, the lamplight, the taste of her mouth and her gasp when his hand found her breast and her fingers holding him through his breeches, steady, certain, not pulling away.
He thought about Devlin asking for a report and the word surprised leaving his mouth before he could stop it, and how the word had told Devlin everything while meaning to tell him nothing.
He thought about Frost’s question, sitting on the room like a stone dropped into still water, and the rings spreading outward from it, and the fact that he had not denied it.
He had not denied it. That was the thing. Frost had asked him if he had fallen in love with the girl and Ash had laughed, and neither of them had needed the right words after that.
The street was full of men going about their mornings, hatted and purposeful, men with appointments, obligations, investments and daughters to marry off.
Ash walked among them with his head bare, no destination at all, and the aimlessness of it felt more honest than anything he had done in years.
He was not performing. He was not calculating.
He was walking down the street thinking about a woman who read French novels behind potted palms and who had held him in her hand without flinching.
Then the silence of her departure had been louder than any speech, and he was still hearing it, and he suspected he would go on hearing it for a very long time.
He thought about the wager. The five thousand, the chestnut, the deadline at the end of June and the betting book at White’s where Devlin had presumably recorded the terms in his neat, careful hand.
The thought of the betting book made him stop walking, physically stop, in the middle of the pavement outside Berry Brothers and a man in a tall hat was forced to step around him.
The betting book. Her name in that book.
Miss Imogen Goodall, written beside a sum of money and a horse, reduced to a line item in a ledger of men’s entertainments, and the thought of it was suddenly intolerable in a way it had not been intolerable six weeks ago.
Because six weeks ago she had been a name on a page but now she was a woman who gasped when he touched her and who held him in the dark.
He was beginning to understand, with the slow grinding inevitability of a conclusion he had been resisting since the morning room, that she was the only person he had met in eight years whose company did not feel like work.
He reached the end of the street and paused at the intersection, glancing left toward St. James’s and right toward the park, unable to choose.
Neither way led anywhere he wished to go.
The only place he longed for was a narrow street in Mayfair, where a woman was likely sitting in her morning room, reading, and not thinking of him at all.
Except that he knew she was thinking about him. She had held him in her hand, and her heartbeat had been hammering against his knuckles; a woman whose heart hammered did not stop thinking about the man who had caused it, not in twelve hours, not in a day, not in a week.
His body reminded him, unhelpfully, that it was also still thinking about her.
The walk and the coffee at Frost’s had not dimmed it.
Standing in the full glare of a London morning on the most public pavement in the city had not dimmed it.
His member was not hard, not quite, but the memory of her hand was sitting on it like a claim.
He turned toward the park, walked without destination and even when the watch ticked in his pocket, he did not take it out.
He did not yet have words for what was happening to him.
He had words for desire, because he had been desiring women for a decade and the vocabulary of desire was familiar and manageable and did not require examination.
He had words for performance, because performance had been his primary mode of engagement with the world since he was two and twenty and the vocabulary of performance was extensive and well-rehearsed.
But what was happening to him now was neither desire nor performance.
It was something that contained both and exceeded both but could not be managed by either.
The only word Frost had offered, for it was a word Ash was not ready to say, and the not-saying was becoming, with every hour that passed, less a choice and more a delay.
***
He went home eventually, ate something, slept for three hours in the afternoon and dreamed of orange trees and her hand on him.
He woke up hard, aching and furious with himself for dreaming and lay in bed staring at the canopy until the dream released him and the aching subsided to something manageable.
He wrote to his steward at Ravenhurst Park that evening and instructed him to prepare the east wing guest rooms for a gathering.
The blue bedroom for Miss Goodall, the rose bedroom for Miss Cordelia Goodall, the yellow suite for Mrs. Margery Goodall and chambers for Miss Bethany Mercer.
He wrote the names carefully, as if the careful writing were a form of attention the Goodalls deserved and had not previously received from anyone in his household.
He wrote separate instructions for the rest of the guests and for the library, which was to be aired and stocked with fresh candles because the library was where Imogen would go.
Imogen always went to libraries, and he wanted it to be ready for her.
It was the most domestic thought he had ever had about any woman, and domestic thoughts were not part of the wager.
***
The Goodalls left for Ravenhurst Park at the end of the week. Having Imogen at his country estate had seemed like a strategic move, and not the act of a man who wanted her under his roof because the alternative was continuing to sleep alone in a house that was too large, too empty and too quiet.
He watched the Goodall carriage arrive from the window of his study on the first floor.
The carriage was a hired one, not their own, because the Goodalls did not keep a carriage, and the fact that he had not thought to send his own to collect them struck him, belatedly, as an oversight that would have appalled Collins and that Imogen would probably have refused on principle.
Cassie climbed out first, bright-eyed, delighted, an eighteen-year-old who had never been a guest at a ducal estate and who was looking at Ravenhurst Park as if it were a novel she intended to read from cover to cover.
She turned a full circle on the gravel, taking in the facade, the gardens, the line of servants assembled near the front door, and her face was so openly happy that Ash found himself half-smiling from the window before he caught himself.
Aunt Margery followed, anxious, adjusting her bonnet, her eyes traveling up the front of the house as if she were counting the windows and calculating, probably correctly, how many servants were required to maintain a building of this size and how many years of her household budget each window represented.
She clutched her reticule tighter as a footman approached to take her traveling case, and the clutching was a gesture Ash recognized, because it was a gesture his mother had never made and his father had never understood; the gesture of a woman for whom other people’s wealth was a landscape that could not be navigated without a map.
Imogen climbed out last. She was wearing a traveling dress he had not seen before, dark blue, simple, and she stood on the gravel for a moment before looking up at the house.
She looked resolved. Not nervous, not excited, not anxious as Aunt Margery was, or delighted as Cassie was.
She looked as if she had made a decision sometime in the past week that he had not been present for, and the decision had settled into her face.
Whatever the decision was, it had changed something in her, and the change was visible even from the first-floor window of a country house she had never visited.
She looked up and found his window. She saw him standing there watching her, his hand on the sill, his face no doubt showing everything he was failing to hide, and she held his eyes for a long second before smiling at him.
Not the polite smile. Not the composed smile. A small, private, certain smile that arrived on her face and stayed there and said, more clearly than any words could have: I have decided, and I will not pretend I did not.
He stepped back from the window, leaned against the wall, closed his eyes and pressed his hand flat against his stomach, where something had just turned over at the sight of her smile, warm and heavy and impossible to ignore.
He was in love with her. Frost was right.
The question was answered. The only question that remained was what he was going to do about the wager that was still on the books at White’s and the man who had proposed it, who was arriving at Ravenhurst Park tomorrow with the rest of the set and whose amusement had curdled into something colder the night Ash had said the lady had surprised him and walked away without explaining.
He did not have an answer for that either.
But she was here. She was standing on his gravel in his courtyard looking up at his house with a smile that had nothing to do with dukes or wagers or potted palms, and for the first time since the night at Aurelie’s, the absence behind his ribs was not absent.
Something was there, something small, warm and terrifying.
He went downstairs to meet her.
The front hall at Ravenhurst Park was impressive, the staircase wide, the portraits of dead Hambridges watching from the walls with the particular expression that all dead Hambridges shared: a blend of entitlement and vague disapproval that suggested they had opinions about the living and were not impressed.
His father’s portrait was placed at the first landing, but Ash passed it without looking at it, because looking at it would have required him to think about what his father would have said about the wager.
He opened the door himself. The butler, Hargreaves, who had been reaching for the handle, stepped back with the faintly scandalized expression of a man whose professional territory had just been invaded by his own employer.
Imogen was standing on the bottom step, her traveling case beside her, her dark blue dress catching the late afternoon light. When she saw him in the doorway, her face did the thing it had done on the gravel: the quiet resolved smile that was not performed and not polite but was genuine.
“Your Grace,” she said. “Your house is very large.”
“It is,” he said. “I have never particularly liked it.”
“Then why do you keep it?”
“Dukes do not choose their houses, Miss Goodall. Their houses choose them. I am merely tolerated.”
She smiled again, wider this time, and the width of it undid something in his stomach that the window had only loosened.
He stood in the doorway of his own house and looked at the woman he was in love with and thought, very clearly: I am going to have to tell her about the wager before Devlin does, and the thought was cold and necessary, but he pushed it aside.
The wager could wait one more day, just one more day, and after that he would find the words.
He offered her his arm, and they walked into Ravenhurst Park together, without saying a word and ignoring the dead Hambridges who were watching from the walls.