Mary Balogh (53 page)

“Don’t fight me,” he said, though she had done no fighting at all. “Don’t fight me.”

She closed her eyes and relaxed against him. He was leaning backward slightly against the tree. Her weight was all thrown forward against him. She breathed in the warmth and the scent of him, and she listened to the wild thumping of his heart.

She did not know how long they stood there thus. Perhaps it was five minutes, perhaps ten. It felt much longer even than that. But in all the time, his hold on her did not relax at all, though his heart gradually quieted.

She did not care how long it was. Although her mind was quite calm and quite rational, she knew only that she was where she had to be, where she was needed—and where she wanted to be. She knew without panic or horror—they would come at some future time and in some future place, but not now—that she loved him. That despite everything, she had to be with him—for now, at least.

His hand behind her head relaxed finally and joined the other at her waist, and she raised her head and looked up at him. His own was thrown back against the tree trunk, his eyes closed. His face was as white as it had been when he first grasped her wrist.

And then pale blue eyes were looking down into hers,
dazed, not quite seeing her until they gradually focused and he lowered his head to kiss her.

It lasted for several minutes. But it was not at all a kiss of passion. It was one of infinite tenderness and need—the need for human closeness and touch. And she gave back gentleness and tenderness and love, holding her mouth soft and responsive and slightly open for him. She set both arms up about his neck and held him warmly.

“Do you know what this is all about?” He lifted his head away from hers eventually and set it back against the tree again, staring off somewhere over her head as she lowered her arms to rest her hands on his shoulders.

“Yes,” she said.

“Ah.” His voice was expressionless. “Then it was no accident. It was planned. And you knew about it, Mary, and did not warn me? But why should you? You must have been privately gloating.”

“No,” she said.

“No?” He ran the fingers of one hand absently through her hair. “And what am I to do now? Run off, dragging you with me? Abduction to add to my other crimes? Would you kick and scream the whole way, Mary? Why have you not been kicking and screaming now?”

“It is time to go back,” she said.

He laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “There is a whole wealth of meaning in those words, is there not?” he said. “You do not mean just to the house, do you, Mary?”

“No,” she said.

“Time to go back,” he said. “We can never go back, Mary. Only forward. There is no point in going back. The past can never be changed. My brother was not Lazarus, nor I Jesus.”

“Sometimes we have to go back,” she said. “Sometimes we have lost the way and need to go back.”

His eyes looked down into hers again. “Is that what
happened to me, my wise, philosophizing, sermonizing Mary?” he asked. “Have I lost the way?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Fifteen long years ago,” he said. “Too long ago. All the highways and byways will be overgrown with weeds so high they will have become forests.”

“Edmond.” She touched his jaw lightly with the backs of her fingers. “You must go back. There is nothing ahead if you do not.”

“Edmond,” he said. “You say it prettily, Mary. Have I made you blush? Had you not realized that you were using my name for the first time? And is my case so desperate? You make me sound like a lost soul.”

“You are a lost soul,” she said.

He smiled at her slowly and lazily. “It cannot be done, you know,” he said. “I cannot be made over into the sort of man who might be worthy of you.”

“I am not thinking of me,” she said. “You need to become a man worthy of your own respect. Don’t smile at me like that.”

He continued to smile. “How do you come to be here with me?” he asked. “Did I bring you?”

“I have the bruise on my wrist to prove it,” she said.

He took her hand in his and ran his fingers over the still-reddened wrist before raising his eyes to hers. “I have done nothing but bruise you in the past two days,” he said. “I should take myself off, Mary, away from them and out of your life. It is what I intended to do on my return from Canterbury.”

“No,” she said. “You must go back. You must.”

“Tell me,” he said. “Were they as surprised as I? Did they know that I was here?”

“No,” she said.

“So my aunt is playing devil’s advocate,” he said. “Well, there is no reason why we cannot all be civil to one another, I suppose. It was all a very long time ago.”

“Yes,” she said. “You must go back.”

“But only if you will come with me,” he said. “My feet will not know how to set themselves one before the other across that lawn if you are not there to hold my hand, Mary. You must come with me. Will you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Holding my hand?” He chuckled. “The leech’s face will turn purple at the sight, I would not wonder.”

“Don’t,” she said. “He is my betrothed.”

He sobered instantly. “Yes, he is,” he said. “But no more worthy of you than I, Mary. At least my crimes are all open ones. Promise me that you will look more closely into his background and history before you marry him.”

“Let’s go back,” she said, trying at last to pull herself upright and away from his body.

But he caught at her waist and held her to him. “Promise me,” he said.

“If there is something about him that I need to know,” she said, “then perhaps you should tell me. But not mere spite, please.”

“Promise me,” he said.

“Very well, then,” she said. “I promise. Let’s go back.”

He released his hold on her and she moved away from him, brushing the creases from her dress and bending to pick up her bonnet. He was still leaning against the tree as she tied the ribbons beneath her chin. His smile was somewhat twisted.

“Do you have any inkling of how hard this is for me, Mary?” he asked. “I feel paralyzed in every limb. I don’t believe it can be done.”

She held out her hands to him and he looked at them, surprised, and set his own in them.

“Yes, it can be,” she said, “because there is nothing else to be done.” She tightened the pressure of her hands in his.

“Well.” He squeezed her hands before releasing them and finally straightening up away from the tree. “Perhaps you are right. And perhaps at some future time, when I have your back to a bed and I am between you and the nearest door, I shall say the same words and you will admit the truth of them as meekly as I have just done.”

“I would not count on it,” she said.

“Let us go and face this unfaceable situation, then,” he said. But when she would have taken his arm, he took her hand in his, laced his fingers with hers, and tightened his hold. “After which I may well throttle my aunt.”

They stepped out from the cover of the trees and began the walk back across the lawn to the house.

T
HE DRAWING-ROOM DOORS
were open and a buzz of sound issued from inside. The guests were partaking of refreshments, though it was far too late for tea, yet too early for dinner.

Lord Edmond Waite fixed a footman standing outside the doors with a steely eye. “Her ladyship is inside?” he asked.

“Yes, m’lord.” The servant bowed.

“Then ask her to step outside, if you please.” His fingers were still laced with Mary’s.

Lady Eleanor appeared no more than a minute later. “Edmond, Mary,” she said brightly. “Where on earth did you disappear to after such a long journey?”

“They are inside there?” Lord Edmond asked curtly, nodding in the direction of the drawing room.

The brightness disappeared from Lady Eleanor’s face. “No,” she said. “They are upstairs. It was as much as I could do to prevent them from calling out their carriage
and loading up their unpacked trunks again.” She smiled fleetingly.

“And you have Mary to thank that I am not twenty miles off by now,” he said. There was no softening in his expression. “Why did you do it, Aunt?”

She looked helplessly at Mary and then back at her nephew. “Because I will be sixty years old,” she said, “in two days’ time. Because I have one brother and two nephews. Does that make sense to you, Edmond? Probably not.”

He looked stonily at her. “Well,” he said, “there is no avoiding the matter now, is there? Let us have it over with, then. Will they see me?”

“They are in my sitting room,” Lady Eleanor said without really answering the question. “Will you come up now, then, Edmond?”

“Now or never,” he said. “This is not easy, you know, Aunt. Did you expect it to be?”

“Nor for me, dear,” she said. “And no, I did not expect it to be easy for anyone. Even for myself. I did not know—I
do
not know—if I am perhaps bringing even worse disaster on anyone. But there is no worse, is there?” She looked at Mary, smiled at her briefly, and turned to lead the way up the stairs.

Mary stood where she was and tried to free her hand, but Lord Edmond’s tightened about it.

“Mary comes, too,” he said firmly. “I will not do this without her.”

Lady Eleanor looked back, her expression interested. “Very well, dear,” she said. “If Mary wishes it.”

“She has talked me into it,” he said, his voice grim. “She had better wish it.”

“Such a gentlemanly way to ask, dear,” Lady Eleanor said, clucking her tongue, but Mary had moved up beside Lord Edmond again, drawn by the pressure of his hand, and was accompanying him up the stairs.

“I will come,” she said quietly.

His aunt preceded them along the upper hallway to her suite of rooms. Lord Edmond did not look at Mary. Indeed, he was almost unaware of her presence at that moment. But he did know that if she once released her hand from his, he would lose all courage. His aunt opened the door into her sitting room and stepped inside. He drew Mary to his side and entered with her.

It was rather like a carefully arranged tableau, he thought irrelevantly. His father stood with his back to the room, looking out of a window, down onto the formal gardens. His brother stood behind and to one side of an easy chair, his hand on the shoulder of the lady who must be his wife. No one was moving or smiling or talking.

“Well,” Lady Eleanor said brightly. “Here is Edmond returned at last, Martin.”

His father turned to look at him. He was so very much the same, even after fifteen years, except that his hair, which had been partly dark, partly silver then, was now completely white. People had always said that Edmond looked like his father—tall, inclined to thinness, the face long and austere, the nose prominent, the lips thin. His father looked the picture of elderly respectability.

Edmond had a sudden image of his father standing straight and immobile beside the bed on which Dick had been laid out the morning after his death. His father’s face had been stern, more like a mask than a face. He had looked across to the doorway where his youngest son had appeared.

“Get out!” he had hissed so low that the words had seemed to reach Edmond by a medium other than sound. “Murderer! Get out of my son’s room.”

The last time he had seen his father. The last words he had heard him utter.

“Sir?” he said now, and he was aware with one part of
his mind of Mary flinching beside him. He eased the pressure of his fingers against hers. He inclined his head into what was not quite a bow.

“Edmond?” His father’s mouth scarcely moved. There seemed to be as little sound as on that morning in Dick’s bedchamber.

“And Wallace is here, too,” Lady Eleanor said heartily. “And Anne. You will not have met your sister-in-law, Edmond.”

They had married almost thirteen years before. Although they had had a big wedding, he had not been invited, of course.

“He called me murderer.” Edmond had staggered to his eldest brother’s room and thrown the door open without knocking. “He called me murderer, Wally.”

“And what would you call yourself?” Wallace had been standing at the window, his hands braced on the sill, his shoulders shaking with the sobs that had racked him.

Edmond had stood there for a few moments, cold and aghast. And then he had left. His mother had been too sick to see him. Or so her maid had told him. But he had heard his mother’s voice tell the maid not to admit him. She never wanted to set eyes on him again.

So he had left, taking nothing with him but his horse and his purse and the clothes he had stood in.

“Wallace?” he said now. “Ma’am?”

“Edmond?” his brother said.

There was something farcical about the conversation, that part of his mind that had learned to look on the world with scorn and amusement told him. But he felt no amusement.

“Edmond?” his sister-in-law said, getting to her feet and coming across the room toward him. She was a little overweight, he noticed, elegantly dressed, rather plain. She held out a hand to him. Her chin was up and
she looked very directly into his eyes. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance at last.”

And finally he had to relinquish Mary’s hand in order to take his sister-in-law’s.

“And I yours,” he said. “Anne.”

Anne smiled and looked a little uncertainly at Mary. Lord Edmond set an arm about her waist and drew her closer to his side. “May I present Mary, Lady Mornington?” he said. “My friend.” He looked at his father belligerently. “And that is not a euphemism for any other kind of relationship.”

His father’s elegant eyebrows rose. “I would not dream of suggesting otherwise, Edmond,” he said. “How do you do, Lady Mornington?”

Mary curtsied. “I am well, thank you, Your Grace,” she said.

“My father, Mary,” Lord Edmond said. “The Duke of Brookfield. And my brother, Wallace, Earl of Welwyn. And my sister-in-law, Anne.”

“Well,” Lady Eleanor said when the civilities had been exchanged, “now that the first awkwardness is past, shall we all sit down while I order up refreshments? I am sure my guests downstairs can entertain themselves for an hour or so.”

And incredibly, Lord Edmond thought, they did sit down. And they conversed on a variety of safe general topics. A little stiltedly, it was true, but nevertheless they talked—all of them. Perhaps the ladies were most to be thanked. Anne talked about her three children, two sons and a daughter, and Mary talked about Canterbury Cathedral, and his aunt talked about mutual acquaintances and the weather. He asked his father about his health and Wallace about their journey. And they asked him about Willow Court.