And Then Comes Marriage (3 page)

It was odd how being alone with oneself was so much less tedious than being alone with others.

Her year of true mourning was long past, and her year of half mourning had ended a month prior. She still wore her lavenders and grays, but that was only out of habit.

The hack pulled onto her square. Miranda’s gaze, unable to meet Mr. Worthington’s, went with relief to the neat, respectable facade of her own address.

Satisfaction slowed her pulse, calming her. It was her house, her very own, where she might do precisely as she pleased. When she died, she supposed the property would revert to Gideon’s family, if there were Talbots left by then. Constance was twenty years Miranda’s senior and she had no children, maintaining her rigid spinsterhood with pride, as though loneliness were a virtue.

Miranda didn’t think loneliness was virtue. She thought it a great bloody waste of existence, when the bright world beckoned to anyone brave enough to take it.

With a series of brief glances, she contemplated the man seated across from her.
If only I dared.

She wasn’t bold, not really. Gideon had chosen her because she was timid, had preferred her timid.

Yet she didn’t wish to be, not in her dreams, not in her mind—and not in the recent and delightful company of Mr. Worthington.

Now, shutting the door firmly on her past marriage, Miranda contemplated her current freedom with serenity and even some eagerness. No one owned her. Her parents were naught but sketchy memory, her harsh, overbearing grandmother gone on to her long-desired reward.

She ran the tip of her tongue over her lips.
I am a widow of means. I can do anything I like.

And I like Mr. Worthington.

Chapter Three

It was, without a doubt, the fastest bath Miranda had ever taken in her life. Without Tildy to oversee the right and proper sequence of scrubbing and shampooing, Miranda found herself in and out of the tub in mere minutes.

Dressing was not much of a challenge, for she’d dressed herself all her life until recently. She dithered a moment between one drab half-mourning gown and another, finally decided that they were both equally awful, and chose the one that did the most for her finally adequate bosom. She pulled her still-damp hair up into a loose knot, thrust a few tortoiseshell pins into it, and declared it good enough.

As she ran full speed for the stairs, she reminded herself that ladies didn’t run down halls, ladies didn’t pound down the stairs, and most important, ladies did not arrive at the parlor door breathless and red-faced.

Smiling demurely while attempting to control her panting, she opened the door to see that Mr. Worthington had waited for her.

Her butler, Twigg, had assisted Mr. Worthington when they arrived. Now Miranda could see that his coat and trousers had been sponged and brushed and that his hair curled damply over his collar.

And she’d thought her bath was a swift one!

At her entrance, he turned from peering at the array of truly horrible ceramic dogs squatting on the mantel and smiled warmly at her.

*   *   *

Cas was surprised at how young the pretty widow looked, all freshly scrubbed and pink from her bath. She’d seemed rather more withdrawn on the way home in the carriage and he’d wondered if she regretted allowing him to accompany her here.

He was a bit astonished that he’d wanted to, and not simply out of duty to see to her well-being. Furthermore, he’d found that he wanted to remain, to wait for her to bathe and change.

Looking at her now, her eyes bright and her cheeks pink, clearly happy to see him still present, he felt a strange sensation in return. She was obviously a bold creature, inviting a strange man back to her home—although she was not the first widow in Cas’s extensive acquaintance to do so!—so he’d half formed an intention to call on her for mutually nefarious purposes.

Yet as she smiled shyly at him and took a seat on the settee, waving him to the chair opposite her, he wasn’t so sure.

He ignored the chair and settled next to her on the settee. She only sent him a startled glance and then leaned forward to tend to the covered tea tray that sat on the table waiting for them.

Widows had a great deal of freedom, as long as they were fairly discreet. Cas had indulged many an appealing lady with an afternoon here and there.

Yet this creature was something else altogether. She seemed entirely disinclined to flirt. Where was the coquettish giggle? Where were the knowing glances that traveled up and down his body? Where were the parting of full lips and the widening of dark-lashed eyes?

She straightened with a cup of tea in her hand, preparing to hand it to him. When she glanced up to see the intensity of his gaze on her, her full lips parted and her dark-lashed eyes widened.

Aha.
Testing her a little, Cas leaned closer, then closer still. She did not back away, but she blinked in surprise and a tiny pink tip of her tongue flicked out to dampen her lips.

Something warm and tender bloomed in the vicinity of Cas’s middle when he saw that vulnerable motion. He backed away, although he was not usually known for his mercy.

He was wrong. She wasn’t bold, not really. He found himself confused—and Cas had not been confused by a female since the age of fifteen. Who was this creature, this sweetly bold, shyly tempting goddess in widow’s weeds?

“Mrs. Gideon Talbot,” he said softly. “Where did you come from?”

She blinked again. “I have always been here,” she said faintly. “It is you who have just arrived.”

He laughed. She was quite winning, in an off-center way. “So I have. Am I welcome?”

She shook her head and laughed at herself. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Worthington. Of course, you are a welcome guest.”

Miranda returned to pouring the tea. Pity there were not twenty cups to fill, for she could truly use a moment to think!

Excitement and confusion twined through her belly. Mr. Worthington had always been so … so gentlemanly! Calm and respectful and really, truly, irritatingly circumspect!

She thought she’d done her part. She’d always smiled warmly. She’d tried to do interesting things with her hair. She’d made sure that every afternoon, there was a plate of lovely things for tea.

Wasn’t that how one caught a man’s attention?

What had she done today so differently to make him behave so familiarly? Why was he unexpectedly leaning in close enough that she could feel the warmth of him on her cheek?

Perhaps it was simply that he’d come to know her and to think she was a bit attractive, and now when she’d very nearly given up hope, he was finally longing for her as well.

“I am longing…”

Startled by his warm voice near her ear, Miranda dropped the sugar tongs on the carpet beneath the table.

“… for a little milk.”

“Oh!” Embarrassed, she rose quickly to snatch them up—just as Mr. Worthington himself bent to fetch them for her.

To avoid knocking heads, she stepped back swiftly, catching her heel on a wrinkle in the rug. As she lost her balance, she also lost all hope of Mr. Worthington thinking her anything but a complete ninny.

Every embarrassing, clumsy moment of her girlhood paled in comparison to the sure conviction that she was about to flail into the tea table and land right on her shattered dignity.

A single strong hand reached out to wrap sure fingers about her elbow. She regained her balance, and calm descended once more. She let out a breath of relief and raised her gaze to meet Mr. Worthington’s amused and sympathetic one.

His green eyes twinkled. “Bloody carpets. They constantly trip one up.”

She raised a brow at his insouciant vulgarity, but she couldn’t help the smile that tugged at the corners of her mouth. “You are most gallant, sir. I fear I would have looked most ridiculous on the floor!”

His gaze heated. “You,” he said huskily, “would look lovely on the floor.”

Shocking! Tawdry!

And entirely riveting. She stared at him as the breath left her lungs and her heart pounded. Then, swallowing hard, she managed to tear her gaze away. She sat once more, blinking down at the tongs that had rematerialized in her hands. “Sir, I—”

Her not-so-very-forceful remonstrance went unsaid, for he leaned forward quickly to press his mouth upon her parted lips.

Her heart stopped, failing her entirely, as her body erupted in a steamy explosion that outdid the one in the alley.

To be kissed—at last, at long, aching, forever last!

*   *   *

The hot jolt that had pierced Cas’s gut had no name. It was something other than want, something other than simple masculine need for a willing female partner. It was the feel of her soft, vulnerable mouth beneath his—or possibly it was her soft squeak of astonishment that vibrated against his lips.

No, it had to be the way that her sweet, tea-flavored mouth melted into his, as if he were the answer to a lifetime of aching lonely dreams.

The jolt hurt. It expanded within him, blazing like wildfire, threatening his carefully constructed walls, which turned out not to be stone after all, but dry and brittle as driftwood, more than ready to be burned down.

No. Such an invasion was unwanted and unnecessary and quite frankly to be avoided at all costs in the future.

Cas pulled his lips reluctantly from the astonishing mouth of the rather pretty, strangely shy, highly tempting widow.

With all his will, he removed his hands from where they had somehow slid up to caress the silken skin of her upper arms. He stood abruptly and stepped away, his fists closing over the last sweet warmth of her flesh on his palms.

“My apologies, Mrs. Talbot. I—I just realized that my time is in much demand today. I really must bid you good day.” There was somewhere else he ought to be. Now.

He started to rush from the room, but a glance at her confused, crestfallen expression held him at the door for a moment. “I truly am glad you came to no harm today,” he said softly.

Then he ran for his life from the confusing widow with the astonishing lips and the wide, sea green eyes.

*   *   *

Miranda sat very still on the settee, wondering why the cushions were shaking. It wasn’t the stuffed velvet upholstery at all. It was her hands, her knees, and her assumptions.

Mouths were for talking. Lips … well, lips were for no more than smiling, were they not? Tongues.…

She shivered, remembering the way Mr. Worthington’s hot mouth had parted and his tongue had escaped just long enough to trace the seam of her lips and to dip ever so slightly between. Nothing forced, just a soft, slick, quick invasion that had shattered her like a battering ram.

She pressed trembling fingertips to her lips, which were now for so much more than simply talking. A good thing, too, for she’d been rendered utterly speechless by the wave of liquid heat that had flooded her veins at the taste of him. Even now, her body shimmered with a new, sweet awareness of the man she’d thought she knew.

How could a simple press of mouth on mouth convey so much? How could she feel his hidden heat? His secret need? And, shockingly—and surely born of her imagination flamed by her own isolation—his buried loneliness?

Was that the real man, the man underneath? Was she mad, to think that she could understand someone’s inner thoughts just by the touch of their mouth on hers?

She dropped her hands to her lap and clasped them there, her grip more desperate than firm.
Pull yourself together! So your very nice friend has decided to see you as a woman at last.

What of it?

I am in such trouble here.
No, nothing so minor as trouble. Danger. The promise of catastrophe only made it all the sweeter. Danger and risk and sweet, delicious possible reward.

Perhaps she was mad, or had at least been driven temporarily insane. Or perhaps she was merely completely mistaken.

It had been her very first kiss, after all.

*   *   *

Cas waited in the smallish—for a palace—receiving room he’d been shown into by a white-and-gold-liveried servant who had sized him up and labeled him with perfect accuracy with one lift of one brow.

Not titled. Not moneyed. Not politically significant. Yet has an appointment for a quiet moment with the Prince Regent.

Therefore, old acquaintance. Possible drinking companion, or worse. No need to be respectful. No point in being rude.

Cas just grinned at the man and blew him a kiss.

When the servant bowed and left the room, Cas inwardly chided himself for his cheeky act, then shrugged off his concern. He had come to speak to Prinny about something that was so important to him, he’d not breathed a word about it to another living soul. Even Poll knew nothing of the idea that had been swirling about in Cas’s mind for months.

The time had come to take action. Enough fiddling about with toys and gimcracks! If he and Poll were ever to be taken seriously as inventors, they must put their combined ingenuity on one path and pursue it like rational—or at least coherent!—men of science.