Season For Desire (7 page)

By all rights, she should have been the one to work on and open the box. For so many years, it had been hers. But if she were to work endlessly upon a project, Giles suspected she would rather work on her own, something to do with her telescope and all the notes she took.

“Are we the only ones left to pursue this mystery to its end, then?” Audrina asked once Sophy had departed in a flurry of sniffles.

“Looks like it’s just us, yes.” Giles found a light tone difficult at the moment. The last time he and Audrina had been alone together, they’d been in the corridor away from family, away from Llewellyn. This felt even more alone, standing aside with others near, yet out of earshot. They could say anything, a hidden secret, and all would appear proper.

She was a brave creature, this English princess. She could not possibly want to be here, in York with near strangers, yet she managed to smile.

She was smiling now, a wry twist of red lips. “I hope you will not give me stale bread this time.”

So she was thinking of it, too. A strange sort of intimacy to bind them. “Probably not necessary, since we’ve all just had luncheon. For my part, I hope you won’t dart off to talk to a dangerous young man.”

“That’s not necessary either. You are the only young man here.”

“Are you implying that I’m dangerous, or simply convenient?”

“I cannot think of a man who brought me bread as dangerous, nor a man who saw me in such distress as convenient.”

“What about a man who saved you from a terrible situation?” he blurted, then forgot to breathe in again.

“It required several people to do that, Mr. Rutherford, including my father and Lady Irving. So I am not sure whether to consider any of you dangerous, but I am convinced none of you thought of me as convenient.”

Across the tea table they faced each other, the golden box between them. She was as much a mystery as the contents, he now thought. He’d been inclined to regard her as gilded yet empty, but she had proved him wrong almost at once. What she was truly made of, though, he had no idea. She was too proud to give any hint, and he was too proud to ask.

Above the room’s marble chimneypiece, a sprig of mistletoe was clutched by the hands of a sly-faced stone angel. What if Giles drew Audrina to the fireplace, to kiss her beneath the excuse of those waxy green leaves? Would she forget her cool façade, or the fact that she didn’t want to be here?

Not that he had meant to spend so much time in England himself. If they both had their way, they wouldn’t be anywhere near each other.

That was not a thought he liked at all, even though it was inevitable. By all rights, the Atlantic and a few blue-blooded centuries of haughtiness would separate them.

Besides that, there was the matter of his hands. A reminder he carried about with him, every moment, always, that there was no time for romance in his unwinding life. That he needed to be efficient and vigilant with the time he had.

Which meant, for now, that he needed to shake the numbness from his fingers and the ache from his wrists, then turn his attention back to the puzzle box. It was the only thing holding together their party of travelers. “Our stay in England has brought many inconveniences, princess. But you can hardly expect me to tell you if you’re one of them, can you?” He looked up for a flicker, just long enough to see her dark brows draw together, then returned his gaze to the puzzle box. “Not even an American would be capable of such rudeness.”

“Mr. Rutherford, I’ve no idea of what Americans are capable. They seem not to be capable of opening puzzle boxes, though.”

Giles shot her a filthy look.

“A persuasive argument,” she said. “Very articulate and well-reasoned. I’ll get a paper and pen so we can begin to make note of your attempts.”

Off she glided, soundless over the deep pile of the carpet. She moved with such grace, the confidence that whatever she did must be utterly right. Such confidence seemed too deep to pile up in one lifetime, instead collecting over the course of generations like coats of shining lacquer.

“Sleigh bells would be wonderful!” Richard’s low voice rang from the end of the room, and Giles straightened up to regard his father. “Shall we hang them from the back of the door? Every time someone enters, he will be greeted with a pleasant jingle.”

“Pleasant once, maybe.” Lady Irving tossed aside a bit of garland. “After that, I shall stick a poker in my ear to be spared the din.” Her hand drifted to her turban, and she granted, “Well, maybe not a poker. No sense in wreaking permanent damage.”

Giles grinned. While Richard made it his life’s work to be agreeable to everyone, Lady Irving seemed determined to be the opposite. “Perhaps someone stuck a poker in
my
ear, your ladyship,” Giles called. “Because I’m sure I can’t have heard you correctly. Did you really retract a threat?”

“As it was only a threat against myself, you needn’t start frothing at the mouth with excitement, young man.” With a sniff, she turned back to Richard. “Sleigh bells would be . . . not horrible.”

Richard placed a hand over his heart, his tanned features falling into the familiar lines of a smile. “It shall be my slogan from this moment forward,” he said. “‘Richard Rutherford: His decorating decisions are not horrible.’”

“If you plan to set up shop in Ludgate Hill, Father, you’ll need a more persuasive slogan than that.”

Lady Irving snapped her fingers in Giles’s direction. “Young Rutherford—yes, you, with that vulgar Irish hair of yours. If you want to chatter, you might as well make yourself useful by hanging up some more garland. But no fa-la-la-ing while you do it, or I’ll see to it you break your neck.”

 

 

By the time Audrina located an ancient bottle of ink and a few quills in the pigeonhole of a writing desk, the drawing room had rearranged itself. The tea table was abandoned, the puzzle box winking like a forgotten gift. Lord and Lady Dudley had eased themselves onto a velvet-covered settee that, like every other piece of furniture in the room, bore the claw marks of canine enthusiasm.

And Giles Rutherford stood atop a dark-upholstered side chair before the fireplace, hanging a bit of garland over the hands of a stone relief sculpture of an angel who already had a fistful of mistletoe to go with her smug smile.

“Move the garland to the left,” said Lady Irving. “No, that’s too far. Back to the right again.”

“He mustn’t cover up the mistletoe,” said Richard.

“Go find yourself a sleigh bell to play with, Rutherford,” barked Lady Irving. “I’ll handle this.”

“I’m going to fetch the dogs back from the stable,” decided Lady Dudley, rising with some effort.

From his perch on the chair, Giles Rutherford grinned down at the clamor. A dimple carved itself into his right cheek, giving the hard lines of his face a soft place for the eyes to linger.

Since he wasn’t looking anywhere near Audrina’s corner of the room, there was no harm in letting her eyes linger. And wander. And . . . and wonder. How did one get him to smile like that? He would have to admire a person first, she supposed; something he would never feel for Audrina after seeing her at her most shaken and low.

When he stretched to loop the evergreen garland over the hand of the angel, his plain wool coat hitched up—revealing that, though his gray trousers were loose-fitting in the leg, they hugged the taut curve of his arse closely.

Proper English ladies would no more look at a man in that way than they would visit the kitchens to learn how bread was made. Yet men looked at women in that way all the time. Evaluating them. Deciding whether they were worthy of desire.

Was she?

Llewellyn wanted only the money Audrina represented; her father only cared whether she reflected well on him. Here in Yorkshire, she was alone and pallid in the color of half mourning. Her fists were full of stained quills and a black vial of ink. Her hands were dirty.

Maybe this was why every gluttonous gaze at Giles Rutherford came twinned with wariness. Because he had been self-possessed when she was drugged and sick and folded into a ball in a strange corridor. Because her father was helping him find a treasure he didn’t even believe in, when Audrina would be satisfied simply to have her life returned to normal.

And, just a little, she resented him for not looking ridiculous atop that small wood-framed chair, his large boots almost covering the dark seat cushion. The drooping sprig of mistletoe fell from the angel’s hand, jostled by garland, and Giles picked it up from the mantel with careful fingers and tucked it gently back into the angel’s grasp.

She resented the mistletoe, too.

The next day brought snow to brighten a long morning spent in the drawing room. Clouds shook a fine frost over the ground, just as Audrina shook sand over page after page of ink-dark notes.

Page. After page. After page.

She and Giles had met after breakfast to work at the puzzle box again, while Lord and Lady Dudley shuffled from room to room accompanied by their pack of doting hounds, servants with arms full of garland, an eager-to-help-decorate-the-castle Richard Rutherford, and an eager-to-criticize Lady Irving.

Swiftly, she and Giles Rutherford had developed a process. They had assigned a number to each panel, and a list of notes unspooled in a neat line of cursive as different attempts were made:

 

 

. . . and so on. And on, for an hour and a half, as cups of tea cooled at their elbows. Pale light reflected off of clean new snow, slanting higher and higher through the tall drawing room windows as the morning drew on.

“You don’t have to work on this with me.” Teeth gritted, Rutherford tugged at P17. “This is my father’s mission, not yours.”

“Don’t be arrogant, Mr. Rutherford. This is my father’s mission, too. Do you not recall whose plots and schemes directed you here?”

P17 gave a squeak of distressed wood, and Rutherford released it at once. “He directed you here, too, for that matter.”

“I did not mean to imply anything to the contrary.” She smiled, all the more brightly when Giles Rutherford looked suspicious. “Come now, Mr. Rutherford. You must have seen enough of England by now to know that a proper English lady would never contradict a gentleman.”

“And do I count as a gentleman?”

“That is for you to decide. But I am quite sure I count as a lady.”

Usually. For now. With the help of Lady Irving’s maid, she had pawed through her trunk until she found a gown to her liking: a thin, drifting muslin printed with sinuous vines, its bodice of deep green sarcenet that set off her eyes—should anyone care to look at them. For the first time since leaving London, Audrina felt properly assembled, as though she had put on all of her armor. Even if no one wanted to fight her, she felt more protected.

“I’m quite sure you do, too,” he replied. “Though I’m not sure what name I ought to apply to the sort of person who drags a lady to a city against her will.”

Audrina turned to look out the window. In the distance, a bird flew and swooped like a tossed stone. “I should call that ordinary.”

“Vulgar, then, as Lady Irving would have it.”

“I would never contradict a gentleman,” she said again.

“So you do think of me as a gentleman.” He sounded pleased, his words tightly corralled by hard consonants.

“I do not think of you at—” She cut herself off before she could utter a lie. Or a contradiction. “Panel seventeen was next, was it not? Have you tried shifting it first of all?”

He didn’t reply, and after a silent few seconds she was forced to look back at him. Hands lightly clasped atop the table, he had set aside the puzzle box and instead turned his scrutiny to Audrina.

Rather unnerving. “Panel seventeen?” she prodded, lending a cool lift to her brows.

“You’re not as proper as you pretend to be, princess.”

The curve of his mouth might as well have been a sickle, so much did those small words wound her. Fortunately, she had a deal of practice hiding her true feelings. “Everyone pretends. For example, you could not truly hold little hope about this quest for some forgotten treasure of your mother’s, or you would never have agreed to leave your work and travel to England.”

“My work is with my father.” His lips pressed together in a hard line, making the thin scar through his upper lip stand out paler against his skin. “I notice you don’t protest anymore when I call you ‘princess.’ Why not?”

“A matter of the propriety you think I do not possess.” Audrina brushed fine-grained blotting sand from her fingertips, noting that her right hand had become speckled with ink. She had learned a neat script, but the process of writing always left her a bit untidy. “I told you it was not an appropriate name to call me, yet you insist. I can only conclude that you are too foolish to remember, in which case it would be unkind of me to remind you of your incapability, or that you wish to give offense, in which case it is unkind of you, and I should not pay you any heed.”

Gently, his thumb traced one gilded panel of the puzzle box. “Beautifully reasoned. Can’t argue with a bit of that. Though there’s one possibility you didn’t account for.”

“Oh?” She watched his thumb slide over the smooth wood. Low in her belly, a wary warmth trembled.

“I thought you ought to have a nickname.”

“Oh?”

“You also didn’t tell me you didn’t like it. You only told me it wasn’t appropriate.”

“Oh.”
Really, Audrina? One syllable? Come up with something more impressive than that.
Her mind blank, she pulled a sheet of paper toward herself, then folded over a vertical strip. Sliding her nail along the edge to weaken it, she tore off a thin strip. Then another.

The smooth actions helped order her thoughts. “No, it is not appropriate, but it might be all right. Why do you think you must nickname me? Is it to belittle me or to create a bond between us?”

“I’m not sure which is the right answer,” he replied. “To be honest, at first I expected you to be selfish and spoiled.”

“Such compliments will give me the vapors.” Smoothing her strips of paper, she began pleating them into a little spring. If her hands trembled a little, he would not notice.

“Only at first, when I thought you’d run off to Scotland and made your family worry.” Pushing back his chair, he rose to stand before the window. “When you told me you’d been carried off against your will, I realized I’d wronged you. You must have been afraid, but you didn’t break down. You were—well, like I imagine a princess would be.”

“Oh,” she said again. “You managed to turn that into something resembling a compliment. Well done, Mr. Rutherford.” Under her crisp words, her heart stuttered; she was both dismayed and flattered at being seen so clearly.

“Now I feel as though I’m being condescended to.” He turned, a silhouette against the window. “Won’t you call me Giles, my lady? If for no other reason, it’ll be more efficient when my father is around. No more having to specify which Mr. Rutherford is the object of your scorn.”

Audrina set aside her pleated paper spring. “Your father seems like a nice, well-mannered man. I should never scorn him.”

He laughed. “One little piece of a truce at a time, I guess.” With a nod, he indicated her paper spring. “What’s that you’ve made?”

“I like to make things,” she said. “It was just paper before, and now it is different.” She compressed it, then let it go, smiling as the folded paper popped out to its full length. “But it’s useless. I should have left the paper alone.” She scooped it up, ready to crush it in her fist.

“No!” Giles lunged for the table, catching himself on the edge. He cupped Audrina’s hand in his as gently as he had plucked up the fallen sprig of mistletoe the day before. “Don’t destroy it. It’s interesting.”

Surprised, she went still. He looked a little surprised himself. “That is—it might be good for something, even though we don’t know what yet.”

“You truly think a paper spring might be good for something?” She tipped it into his hand, drawing back her own to a safe distance.

“One never knows.” He brought his hand close to his face, studying it. “I like that pleated shape. Almost like a bellows, don’t you think? I would never have thought of making such a thing out of paper.” His gaze roved the sweeping ceiling, the span of the room. “A bellows. I wonder whether one could be fitted to the fireplace to drive the warm air inward. If—” He shook his head. “Well. That’s far outside of my ability to design. I’m a brick-and-board man. Or—a gold-and-stone man.” He dropped the spring on the table before Audrina.

“Stone? Do you mean precious stones?”

“Jewelry. Yes. Remaking heavy old pieces into modern fashions. It’s my father’s dream to be a jeweler, you know.” His words were clipped, his smile tight.

“I know.” She took a sip of tea from the cup at her elbow. It was bitter and strong and cold, but it gave her a reason to pause before saying, “Giles.”

He lifted his brows. “Well, now. That wasn’t so difficult.”

She ignored this reply. “What would you like to design?”

He repaid her by ignoring the question. “Do you want to hang garland? Look, Lady Dudley left a pile of it behind. I could only put so much of it onto one mantel.”

“Giles,” she said again. “What would you like to design?”

She wanted, very much wanted, to know the answer to her question. She had never wondered about a man’s occupation before. The roles of the men she knew were no mystery, because theirs were the same as hers. All of them were part of a long line, and the weight of tradition and legacy rested on their shoulders.

Absent such a heritage, would one feel lighter? It seemed not. In one generation, a father could bow a son to his will.

In one generation, a father could bow a daughter.

Almost.

“Once I hoped to design buildings.” He stretched out a hand to her, drawing her to her feet. Just a quick clasp of hands; then he strode to a walnut sideboard on which now-dry evergreen garland had been heaped. “Philadelphia took a beating the last time our countries fought. I can’t say I wanted to be a soldier since I had so many siblings to take care of, but I did want to help my city rebuild. I went to university to learn anything I could about mathematics. Geometry. I talked to people who draw up building plans as a profession. Architects.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing.” Dry needles fell as he lifted a garland. “The war killed Philadelphia’s shipping industry. These last few years, everyone wants to ship through New York City. Safer, I guess. Money’s leaving Philadelphia, and no one needs to build grand new homes or warehouses there.”

She began a phrase of sympathy, but he spoke on. “They do need paper, though. So there’s the paper mill to oversee. Paper milling was never my father’s dream, but it supported his family. Now he’s on a mission. A quest. Whatever you want to call it. And at the end of it, he’ll have the life he ought to have had a generation ago.” He dropped the garland. “So he hopes.”

“For now, he has given you his dream?”

“So it seems. All that geometry allows me to design a marvelous brooch. That’s . . . worthwhile. I suppose.”

“Of course it is. The world needs beauty. And if you have a son one day, then maybe you could turn him into an architect,” she said lightly.

He did not seem to want to look at her, so she picked up a garland of her own. The dry needles poked her hand; hissing, she dropped it to the pile. “These branches will shed themselves bare in a day. I don’t think we can do anything with them.”

“No, I suppose not.” He had retreated behind a wall of folded arms and averted eyes. He had told her more than he intended, maybe.

Not literally, of course. Only figuratively.

Right. So there was no reason to imagine those broad shoulders flexing as he tugged a shirt over his head, nor to wonder whether he was freckled anywhere besides his cheekbones.

None at all, except for the fact that—he was honest, and that was a quality more heady and attractive than she could possibly have imagined.

Also, his shoulders
did
look uncommonly fine. In his close-fitting coat of dark-blue wool, no padding made excuse for flaws of form.

He nudged a few fallen needles into a neat pile atop the sideboard, then stretched out a hand. “More puzzle box? What do you say?”

“All right.” Quickly, she grabbed the needles again, letting them stab her into coherence. Then she trailed back across the room after him. “You really are fortunate,” she said as she dropped into her chair. “To know that your father is pleased with you and that he trusts you. I cannot say either of those things.”

Audrina had been raised with only one goal, one occupation: to marry well and make her family proud. The two were linked and inextricable. Without the former, she could never accomplish the latter.

On her own, she was not good enough. And so she had failed.

“Don’t let yourself get too envious.” Giles sat and sifted through her closely written notes, squinting. “My father is proud of me in the way a man might value a dependable employee. He knows I’ll do what I say I will. I’ll do what I’m asked even if I don’t want to.”

“For example, if someone asks you to stop a wayward carriage?”

“Something like that.” Dropping the stack of notes, he flattened his hands atop the table and stared at them. “My mother was ill for years before her death. Pain, constant pain. My father traveled often for business, and I had five younger siblings at home. Who else was to take care of them?”

“So you became the man of the house.”

“Nothing so respectable. In your language, I was the governess and the bootboy and the footman and—”

“The cook?”

“Thank God we had one of those. My family would have gone hungry relying on me. But I
was
the valet.” His teeth closed on the hard
t
, lingering on the sound, and he rubbed at the thin scar on his lip. “I taught my younger brother to shave. Not well enough, though. When he practiced on my face, he left me this memento.”

His light smile granted Audrina permission to laugh.