“Were you thinking of making a long stay in the country?” Henrietta asked, unable to stop herself.
“No, I wasn’t,” Darby said thoughtfully. He looked at her in—oh, such a way! Henrietta didn’t know what to make of it. For a moment she thought of asking him why on earth he was flirting with her. But even though she’d spent her adult life trying to be direct whenever possible…this didn’t seem the right moment.
13
In Which Lady Rawlings
Interviews Her New Gardener
Esme only wandered down the stairs when she observed from an upstairs window that her new friend Henrietta and her nephew Darby had left the house together. She came down humming and feeling rather more cheerful than she had in weeks.
Something about Henrietta’s calm acceptance of her unfortunate situation was immeasurably consoling. Henrietta was right to insist that Esme’s babe belonged to no man.
After all, Sebastian had only offered to marry her due to a punctilious sense that he was responsible for her husband’s death. And Miles was hardly a model husband, either, given that he had resided with Lady Childe for the past three or four years. Why should she feel so guilty about either of them?
If Sebastian had bothered to say good-bye to her after seducing her in a drawing room, he would have discovered that she and Miles were reconciling the very next night. Instead, he treated her like the doxy he clearly believed her to be, and simply visited her room the next night as if she were at home to all callers.
A flame of anger lit in her chest. Why had she wasted so many tears on the man? Sebastian Bonnington was a reprobate who didn’t even ask her before he strode into her room in the middle of the night. What did he think she was? A lightskirt, someone available for an easy romp whenever he wished? More fool he. She was not that type of woman. True, she hadn’t been faithful to her marriage vows, but neither had Miles. That didn’t mean she was a courtesan. She hadn’t taken a lover for years, not until the one evening with Sebastian.
And nothing—nothing—in that encounter gave Sebastian the right to assume that her bedchamber was his territory.
She reflexively rubbed her tummy as she stared out the back window onto the flower garden. From now on, no more tears. No more talking about disinheriting her child, either. Henrietta was right. She would never be able to tell whose baby she carried.
Instead, she’d make certain that Henrietta married Darby, thereby ensuring Darby an inheritance more than equal to Miles’s. Mrs. Pidcock had nattered on and on last night about the estate Henrietta inherited from her father, a clear twenty thousand pounds a year unentailed. Of course, Mrs. Pidcock had also blathered on about how Henrietta couldn’t ever marry, given her inability to have children, but Esme thought that was a foolish conclusion. Such things may not be known in the country, but she was well aware of couples who had eschewed having offspring, after turning out the requisite heir-and-a-spare. She herself, before being caught off guard by Sebastian Bonnington, had never risked pregnancy.
There were ways…and she would simply ensure that Henrietta knew those ways. One could surmise that Darby was an old hand himself.
There was a large man moving about the bottom of the garden, which suggested that Darby had hired the gardener sent by the employment agency. Presumably the man could do something with the rose arbor. The old man who had been in charge of the gardens had clearly relinquished control to nature long ago. When she arrived last summer, each rosebush had at most one or two roses. Buds started, but they mildewed without opening, in a distressing way.
She watched the man some more. He was behaving rather oddly. He was definitely doing something to the plants, but what was it? Perhaps he had a cure for whatever it was ailed them.
It took her a good half hour to dress herself warmly and set off down the hill. The lawns at Shanthill House stretched down a gentle slope, and the rose arbor was set at the very bottom. It was Esme’s favorite spot. Some long-ago Rawlings had arched white lath in a long line and then trained roses up the beams. When she and Miles first married, ten years ago, the roses used to crowd together, thick and plump, their wild perfume intoxicating anyone who sat in the arbor. Of course, in the midst of winter the arbor was nothing more than a scraggly tunnel of rose branches and thorns. So what on earth could he be doing to the roses?
She made it down the hill without twisting her ankle and paused at the bottom to catch her breath. Carrying this babe around was far more exercise than she would have thought. Before pregnancy, she had the vague idea that one “carried” the babe until it decided to be born…and that was that. No one warned her of the hysterical crying fits, the swollen ankles, or the inability to walk without rolling slightly from side to side.
The man was about halfway down the arbor. He had his back to her, but she could see what he was doing. He was reading a book.
How very peculiar.
She’d never heard of a literate gardener. In fact, Moses, the man who used to be in charge of the gardens, made it very clear that he didn’t hold with book learning.
But this gardener was glancing from the rosebushes to his book, and back again.
“Excuse me,” Esme said in her nicest lady-of-the-manor tone of voice. “I simply wanted to—”
But her voice died away.
His skin had turned amber brown. He wasn’t dressed with his usual impeccable finesse. He wasn’t sleek and well-groomed and marquesslike.
But there was no mistaking the man known to his intimates as Bonnington, and to the rest of the world as Marquess Bonnington.
And to her as Sebastian.
Whether Sebastian’s friends would have recognized him as quickly as she did was an open question. He was wearing a rough work shirt, open at the throat, and a thick leather apron. He looked more muscular, more vital, and more alive than she’d ever seen him.
Esme recognized him effortlessly. “I’m having a hallucination,” she said in a pleasant, conversational voice, staring at the apparition.
“Please forgive me for startling you.”
The moment she heard that rational voice the blood drained from her head, and Esme’s vision blurred. She swayed and instinctively put out a hand to prevent herself from falling. Her hand brushed a warm body. He was already there, scooping her into his arms, cradling her against his chest. A second later he sat down on the wrought-iron bench with her in his arms.
Esme had never fainted in her life. It simply wasn’t in her nature to avoid conflict. Even in the most distressing moments of her bitter marriage, when it would have been marvelous to stage an elegant faint, she could never manage to do so.
But Sebastian clearly thought she had swooned. He was patting her cheek, and uttering witless commands like “Wake up, if you please.”
She decided to keep her eyes closed. What on earth was Sebastian doing in her rose arbor? She needed to think, even though every instinct told her to snuggle into the strength of his arms and pretend for a moment that the world wasn’t a cold place in which she was a widow with a child.
“Esme!” His tone was getting more urgent. The blunder-head.
She opened her eyes to find his face just above hers. It was lowering to discover that he had just as much power to overset her as he used to. Something about passionate blue eyes and guinea gold hair made her heart beat quickly, shallow female that she was. Just as something about that rigid expression he always wore, and the punctilious manners he practiced, made her long to rip off his clothing and….
Even when he was her best friend’s fiancé. Even then. And even now.
A dismaying thought occurred to her. When Sebastian saw her last, she was a lissome woman. True, she had curves. She’d never been a wisp of a girl like her friend Gina. But those curves had curved in. Now she was just one round ball, all curves and no waist.
The thought brought her fully to her senses.
“What are you doing here?” she snapped, sitting up. He had pushed back the hood of her pelisse in an effort t
o wake her from her supposed faint, and she drew it back around her face. It was her opinion that white fur detracted from the fact that her face was as round as a peach. Perhaps she should get off his lap before he realized just how heavy she had become.
“I came to see you, of course. Ah, God, Esme. I missed you.” He put cold hands on her cheeks and kissed her simply. Sweetly. As if he really cared for her.
Esme blinked. “I told you that I never wanted to see you again,” she pointed out, rather lamely.
“You don’t have to see me. If you stay in the house, I’ll make certain you never encounter me again. I know you hate me because of Miles’s death. I have no expectation that you’ll ever change your feelings.”
A rueful smile touched the corner of his mouth. “It’s just that I found myself in the grip of a similarly unchangeable feeling.”
She stared at him. “I thought you had gone to Italy.”
“I did.”
“Well, why—”
“I had to see you.”
“Here I am,” she said pettishly, resisting the impulse to pull her pelisse even closer around her. She would make sure he never saw her again. At least not until she had this baby and returned to her normal shape. “So why don’t you return to Italy and we’ll both think no more of it.”
“I don’t wish to live in Italy, not while you live here.”
“What you desire is not important compared to the fact that if anyone discovered you were in this part of the country, it would be disastrous for my reputation.”
“No one will find out,” he said. The statement had the calm confidence of all of Sebastian’s pronouncements. He seemed to know precisely the way the world was ordered—and generally it was in favor of Sebastian, Marquess Bonnington.
“I don’t see the reason for your being here.” She frowned. “How could you possibly keep up a pretense as a gardener? What do you know of gardening?”
“Very little. I’m learning, thanks to an inestimable monograph on roses by Henry Andrews.” His tone was cheerful, but his eyes didn’t look happy.
“I just don’t see why you’re here,” she said mulishly. “I’m not going to change my mind and marry you.”
He was looking at her so intently she felt as if her skin was burning. “I am in love with you, Esme. I think I’ve been in love with you since the first moment I met you.”
“You’re cracked!”
He shook his head. “Unfortunately, I’m not the sort of man who does things by half measures.”
“You can’t be in love with me. You are—were—engaged to Gina. We simply shared an unfortunate….” Her voicetrailed off. She wasn’t quite certain how to explain the evening they spent in Lady Troubridge’s drawing room.
“I am in love with you,” he said in his calmly assertive voice. “You, Esme, not Gina. I do not feel that sort of love for Gina, lovely though she is. And she knew it. I’m fond of her, but I love you.” He bent closer until she could feel his breath against her cheek. “And I want you, Esme, not any other woman. You. I realized while living in Italy that I should have just stolen you away from your husband. But I was too attached to my pride and my position. Now I know that pride is hollow and worthless.”
He must be deranged by guilt, Esme thought. That’s why he thinks he’s in love with me. He lost his reason after Miles died.
She cleared her throat. “There is something we should discuss, my lord.”
“You called me Sebastian in the past.”
“That was the past,” she snapped.
By floundering slightly she managed to get her feet on the ground and stand up. He seemed to let go of her reluctantly, although surely he was grateful to have such a great weight off his legs.
There was something so Sebastian-like about the way he sprang to his feet when she stood up that tears almost came to her eyes. Even in gardener’s clothing, Sebastian had the most graceful manners of any man she’d met.
She sat down on the wrought-iron chair opposite and looked in the vicinity of his shoulder. “The doctor tells me that Miles could have died at any time,” she said without preamble. “I know that you must be blaming yourself for his death. I would have written you, but I did not have your direction.”
“Thank you for telling me.” Did he sound relieved? Perhaps he’d already learned about Miles’s weak heart from someone else.
“I was wrong to blame you for my husband’s death,” she said in an offhand way, as if she were excusing herself for a negligible misstep. But the bitter words she flung at Sebastian the last time she saw him echoed in her head: You think I would marry you? The man who killed my husband? I wouldn’t take your hand in marriage even if you weren’t a stodgy—boring—virgin!
“I should not have accused you of killing my husband,” she said again. “Miles could have died at any moment. Apparently he’d had two small attacks that week already.”
Sebastian was silent. Finally, she risked looking at his face, but she couldn’t read the expression there. He was staring at his hands.
Then he raised his eyes and looked at her, and a shock ran through her body. “I would have killed him,” he said quietly. “I would have killed him in a second, if I thought I could marry you.”
The words hung between them in the chilly air.
Esme’s mouth formed a small arc of surprise. “You were engaged to Gina,” she whispered.
“I could have killed him for the way he dallied with Lady Childe in front of you.”
“But we didn’t—he didn’t—”
“Did you think no one noticed? I know you cared, Esme.” His voice was low and fierce. “I saw you flinch when he kissed Lady Childe’s cheek in public. I watched the way you avoided him, the pain in your eyes when you saw him with her.”
“We had an agreement, and it was quite mutual, I assure you,” Esme said, stumbling over the words. “If anyone, he was the offended party. I left him, not the other way around.”
But she wasn’t certain that he even heard her. “Rawlings used to call you over to join him when he was sitting with his mistress, as if you had no feelings at all.”
Esme swallowed, remembering. “It hurt only because Lady Childe had children and I didn’t,” she whispered. “I was simply being a foolish, jealous—”
“I don’t care. I could have killed him for wounding you in such a way. For not treasuring you as he should.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Esme smiled, a crooked little smile. “I’m glad you didn’t kill him.”
He nodded. “So am I. But I cannot pretend to an immaculate conscience either.”
“Darby—Darby told me that Miles knew he would be dead by fall,” Esme said. Her face crumpled. “He never told me, Sebastian. He never told me!”
“Ah don’t, love, don’t.” He was there, and she was in his arms and against his chest again, crying as if her heart would break and groping toward the pocket of her pelisse for a handkerchief. But he pressed one into her hand, a large linen one with a crest that didn’t look at all like the possession of a gardener.
“Don’t mind me,” she finally said, in a crumpled kind of way. “It’s just the way I am these days, that’s all.”
He didn’t answer, and she finally wiped her eyes and hiccupped once more and looked up.
He had the oddest expression on his face. And—she realized a second later—he had a hand on her stomach.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
Esme tried to think of something light to say, but failed.
“You’re pregnant!”
14
Speed Is a Glorious Addiction
Henrietta regretted allowing Darby to accompany her the moment they left the house. How could she have forgotten that she had driven her racing curricle? No one liked to ride with her in the curricle, not even Imogen.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, turning to Darby. “I drove quite the wrong vehicle this morning.”
His eyes widened as a groom brought out Henriett
a’s prancing grays, hitched to a gorgeous little racing curricle, complete with high wheels and a small seat that would just barely accommodate two persons. It had a little perch for her groom, but otherwise made no concession to its female driver whatsoever.
“What do you think of my grays?” Henrietta asked, caressing the nose of her right leader, who was tossing his head and stamping his feet and generally indicating that he was full of spice and vinegar. “This is Parsnip, and the other is Parsley.” Parsley snorted when he heard his name, and danced just enough to make his harness chime. “Aren’t they lovely? Unfortunately, I have had to cure them of a lamentable tendency to bolt, which is why everyone in my family declines to accompany me.”
“Are they brothers?”
“Yes, from China Blue by way of Miracle, if you are interested in that sort of thing.”
“I’m not, particularly.” But a smile curled the edge of Darby’s mouth. The wheels on Henrietta’s curricle were painted scarlet and picked out in dark blue. The body was scarlet with silver accents. “Did you buy your curricle from Birch?”
“I did.”
“As it happens, I acquired precisely the same vehicle last summer. If I recall, you could have chosen scarlet cloth with a fringe.” Instead, the seat was lined in a serviceable brown.
“I thought the effect was overly grand.” Her eyes were twinkling. “Did you choose the scarlet, Mr. Darby?”
“With gold lace and a fringe.” He grinned at her.
“Are you fond of curricles?”
“Will you think me sadly unsportsmanlike if I repeat, ‘not particularly’?”
“Decidedly,” Henrietta laughed. “Those worthy gentlemen who spoke to you last night about drains would not approve.” She shouldn’t have made the mistake of meeting his eyes. They were so full of devilment that she momentarily forgot that she was holding Parsnip’s bridle. The horse immediately took advantage, throwing his head up and pawing the air like the ill-mannered beast he was.