“In any case, I like conversing with your father,” Alistair said quite truthfully. Despite what he’d learned about Oldridge as well as what Alistair observed and what he’d surmised, he couldn’t dislike the gentleman.
“No one converses with my father,” the daughter said. “Not as normal human beings understand conversation. It is all detours and tangents and non sequiturs.”
“You have too many responsibilities pressing upon you,” Alistair said. “You haven’t time to follow the meanderings of his mind, let alone sort them out. I, however, am completely at leisure at present. I can listen and puzzle over the connections between one idea and the next. It is fascinating.”
Her expression sharpened, and her blue gaze fixed upon him with an intensity he could only wish were amorous.
But he knew better. He had said something wrong. He didn’t know what it was, but he had no doubt he was about to suffer the consequences.
“Fascinating,” she said quietly. “Of course you would say so. You are such a good listener. You let him ramble on about botany the way you let the other gentlemen hold forth about their hounds and poachers and mole catchers.”
Something was springing out at Alistair from the darkness of her mind, but he could not yet make out what it was.
“Mole catchers?” he said lightly while he braced himself to be torn to pieces.
“I listened all day to ladies’ remedies for ailments ranging from warts to consumption,” she said. “It was tedious and annoying. But the exercise resulted in my neighbors thinking more kindly of me.”
Alistair caught on. “Miss Oldridge, it is not—”
“When you first came here, you told me why you’d contacted Papa first,” she said. “Since he’s the largest landowner hereabouts, you assumed his opinion of the canal would carry great weight with his neighbors. I thought that by now you would have realized my father takes no notice of practical concerns, such as the prospect of coal barges or passenger boats filled with drunken aristocrats cruising through his meadows.”
“Miss Oldridge—”
“You are wasting your time cultivating my father,” she said. “In the first place, he dotes upon you already. In the second, he hasn’t the remotest interest in your canal.” She lifted her chin. “In your place I should stick to seducing his daughter, since she, as anyone can tell you, is your most dangerous—and determined—opposition.”
“Miss—”
But she, knowing a good exit line when she’d uttered one, swept out of the room before he could utter another syllable.
He listened to her footsteps fade.
From another corner of the room came a pitying cough.
LATE the following afternoon, Mirabel was in her father’s study, answering his correspondence.
She had found the perfect way of keeping Mr. Carsington at the very back of her mind, instead of occupying every cubic inch of that organ: property law. She was locked in a desperate battle with the legal jargon of a letter from her father’s solicitor when she became aware of a series of faint thumps from the hall.
She assumed a servant had dropped something. If the problem was serious, she’d soon learn of it.
She returned to the solicitor’s letter.
“I must speak to you,” a voice rumbled from near at hand—and nearly catapulted her from her chair.
But composure was reflexive. Mirabel kept her seat, dropping only the pen with which she’d been making notes. Replevins, mesnes, distreins, and writs of cessavit, however, all flew out of her head.
Mr. Carsington stood in the doorway, leaning on a cane. He was fully dressed. His linen was immaculately white and crisply starched. His sleek brown coat hugged his broad shoulders as though it were a second—and costly—skin. She was not sufficiently versed in men’s fashion to identify his inexpressibles as pantaloons, breeches, or trousers. All she knew was that they fit snugly, outlining the long, muscular legs she’d seen in their natural state.
That recollection brought a host of others, and a rush of longing swept in with them, and in that moment she saw the truth, so stark there was no disregarding it.
She’d crossed a boundary.
She was infatuated.
She’d done it without realizing, and now that she understood, it was too late. She had no way back to safety.
She must simply endure it, and hide it, pretending she felt nothing, that, for instance, the room had not grown too small, suddenly, and too warm.
“This is most unwise,” she told him. “Your ankle is not strong enough for traipsing about the house.”
“Today Dr. Woodfrey told me I might take some mild exercise, as long as I used a cane, and put as little weight upon my foot as possible,” he said, advancing into the room, which seemed to shrink further. “My leg has given me a good deal of practice with the method.”
Cautiously she stood. She braced her hands on the desk. “I strongly doubt that Dr. Woodfrey’s idea of ‘mild exercise’ is a hike from the guest wing, down a long staircase, and several hundred feet to the coldest part of the house,” she said.
“I don’t care what his idea is,” Mr. Carsington said. His voice dropped to a throbbing undercurrent. “I must speak to you. About yesterday. You accused me of seducing you.”
“You need not announce it to the household.” Mirabel hastily skirted the desk, and him, and closed the door. She stood in front of the door, in case she needed to make a speedy exit…before she added a blatant outrage to her rapidly mounting heap of indiscretions, something she couldn’t cover up with sarcasm or by taking the offensive, as she’d done previously.
He remained where he was, but a pace or two away.
“You announced it in front of my valet,” he said.
“I forgot he was there,” she said. “Crewe is discreet to the point of invisibility.”
“His master is not,” said Mr. Carsington. “I am indiscreet, and very stupid at times, but I am not duplicitous. I do not go about seducing women in order to further business aims.”
“I see,” she said. “You do it merely for amusement.”
He regarded her with half-closed eyes, yet she detected the glitter in them. “I am not the one who left London strewn with broken hearts,” he said.
Was he mocking her? “I told you that was nonsense,” she said tightly.
“You made a start at breaking mine,” he said.
“I what?” She could not believe her ears. “Are you delirious?”
“You accused me of seducing you,” he said. “You seem to have forgotten who made the first move.”
It had been she, and she couldn’t pretend otherwise. Heat washed over her, not all of it from shame.
She remembered the feel of his mouth against her hand, and the way the world had gone away. She experienced again the spill of sensations she had no name for, and the sense of toppling off balance. She did not know how to come right, and wasn’t sure she wanted to.
She looked up and saw hi
s mouth curve a very little. It seemed like a taunt, daring her to contradict him. She didn’t want to. All she wanted to do was lay her fingers over his mouth and feel those sensations again. She didn’t want to talk or listen or think. She didn’t want to be sensible. She was always sensible and thinking ahead. She was one and thirty years old. Why could she not be a fool this once?
“Well, if you must split hairs so fine,” she said unsteadily.
“I certainly must,” he said. “Furthermore, I am not cultivating your father. He has been kind and amiable to me, and altogether impossible to dislike, even for your sake. If anyone is being won over, it is I. This is why—”
He broke off with a gasp as she grabbed his lapels. “Miss Oldridge.”
She looked up at him.
He looked down at her hands. “You’re wrinkling my coat,” he said in horrified tones.
Mirabel smiled, though her heart banged as loudly as a cannon volley.
His gaze went from her hands to her mouth, and the horrified look faded. His eyes darkened.
Her breath came and went too fast, and her knees wanted to buckle. She tipped her head back.
He bent toward her—then drew back. “No. There is too much at stake. I cannot be—”
Mirabel tugged on the lapels, pulling him to her, and kissed him, full on the lips.
It was like kissing a block of wood.
Her spirits, a moment ago so agitated, plunged into a black abyss.
She started to draw away.
“Oh, don’t look like that,” he said. “I am only—It isn’t that I don’t want…Oh, what’s the use?”
He let go of the cane, and it toppled to the floor.
He caught her face in his hands and gazed at her for a long moment. She brought her hands up to cover his. They were warm, and his touch was gentle, as though she were fragile. She wasn’t, and for a moment, nothing at all made sense, and butterflies fluttered in the pit of her stomach.
Then he lowered his mouth to hers, and with the first gentle pressure of his lips, the world changed.
Mirabel had been kissed before, and passionately, too, and she’d responded passionately because she’d been in love.
But this was different, as different as another universe, and she didn’t care about passion or love, only that it was sweet and made her limbs weak.