A Kiss For Midwinter (Brothers Sinister 1.5)

“What do you think of Grantham?” Her heart raced as she spoke.

Her father looked over the rims of his spectacles at her. “Am I going to have to have another talk with him?”

“No. No. I’m just accompanying him on a few house calls.” And hitting him, and bursting into tears, and letting him hold her. And then there were the topics of their conversation. Safe to say that she wouldn’t tell her father that Grantham was instructing her on the use of French letters. He might take that amiss.

Lydia looked up at the ceiling. “He’s an interesting man. I only want to figure him out.”

“Hmm,” her father said. He glanced over at her mother, who gave him a repressive shake of her head.

Grantham had said she could figure out who it was, and Lydia wouldn’t be able to sleep until she did. It couldn’t be that he’d been in love with Minnie, could it? Lydia’s best friend had married recently, and it would make perfect sense if he liked her. She was intelligent and beautiful—perhaps not the kind of beauty that would land on lists, but the kind that anyone with eyes could see, if only they looked long enough. It would explain why he hadn’t said a word. Lydia could have ceded him to Minnie without even thinking.

Except…

Except that up until two months ago, Minnie hadn’t had a decent prospect at all, and she’d been near the point of desperation. Grantham would have had only to speak the word, and she would have been his.

Not Minnie.

Doctor Grantham had told her that he had a few defects in his character.

Lydia knew she had a few faults of her own, and one of the things she knew she was shockingly good at was telling lies to herself. She had convinced herself she would be happy to marry a man she didn’t care for, simply because it made sense to marry him and would have done her father good. She’d convinced herself that there was something else that would happen when she married—something besides the unholy joining of male and female forms, something beside the emission of seed, simply because the man she loved had said it was so.

She’d convinced herself that she wasn’t angry about what had happened to her. Lydia knew that she lied to herself as assiduously as Grantham told the bare truth.

But occasionally, she managed to shock even herself.

She had just thought to herself that she could have ceded him to her friend. As if the mere fact that he’d held her this afternoon meant that he belonged to her. She didn’t want him for herself, did she? She couldn’t want him. He was… He was…

Lydia swallowed.

He was in love with another woman.

She knows, she remembered him saying calmly. I am not a particularly subtle individual.

“Oh,” she said aloud, “you sly little…sneaky…ridiculous…”

She ran out of insults just as her parents both looked up at her.

“Not you,” she said to her father. “Not you either, Mother.”

But he hadn’t been sly or sneaky. He’d been remarkably upfront. He’d told her that he was madly in love with her, that he had been for months. And he’d said it just sarcastically enough that she’d shook her head and refused to think about the flutter in her belly. It didn’t make any sense, though. He couldn’t be in love with her. Why, he knew that she’d been pregnant—that she’d had relations with another man outside of marriage.

The hymen is just a membrano-carneous structure…

Oh, God. If she started with the premise that he wanted her, this whole wager took on an entirely different complexion.

If she started with the premise that he wanted her, she didn’t even know if she could talk to him. Their easy conversation of the last day, their friendship, his jokes about gonorrhea… The way he’d put his arms around her and held her, even when doing so had made the circumstance of his physical arousal so apparent. Everything had been so simple.

I may be difficult, but I am remarkably constant in my affections, and I have thought of her every day for these last sixteen months.

He was talking about her. He’d been talking about her the whole time. He’d known it and he’d looked straight at her and said those things, knowing precisely what he was saying and who he was saying it to.

And he was right. She’d known it. Even when she had been unable to admit it in her mind, her body had known, inclining to his, molding to his. She’d thrilled when he’d looked at her. That was neither fear she felt nor antipathy. That shock that traveled through her when he looked at her…that was attraction.

Lydia swallowed.

She should have been happy at the discovery. She was beginning to like him—perhaps more than like him. To realize that he felt the same way about her, that he’d been so fixed on her despite all the things she’d said to him…

No. The last thing she needed was this want, this feeling that he might complete her in a way that everyone else could not. The last thing she needed was to flush when he talked of sexual arousal, to have him tell her in that calm way that it was natural, normal. That she could have it, that it wasn’t wrong.

If she didn’t acknowledge what she felt, what he wanted, then it couldn’t lead her astray. She wanted to turn away and bury her head in her skirts. She wanted to take that certainty and stuff it back where she’d hid it before. But there was no way to unknow the thing she didn’t want to know. He wanted her, and she wanted him back.

Knowledge led to action; action led to heartbreak.

She knew, now, and she wished she didn’t.

Chapter Ten

SHE KNEW.

Jonas could tell from the way she no longer met his eyes, the way she wouldn’t take his arm this afternoon. He could tell by the way she scarcely answered him when he spoke to her on the way to their final destination. And he could most particularly tell because when he guided her into the house far down Fosse Street, when he brought her close to him and led her through the labyrinth of rubbish that made up the front room, she drew away from him as soon as they reached the hob in back.

“You should go on ahead of me,” he said.

“But—”

“He’s expecting you,” Jonas told her. “I told him the other night that you would be here, and you can rest assured that he was delighted by the prospect of a visit from a pretty girl. He wouldn’t hurt you, even if he could.”

He looked around the room at the chaos that always reigned here, and felt a full-blown body itch settle into his skin. “I have a few things to do down here first.” Such as washing his hands and wrapping that end of cheese in wax paper. Such as avoiding the fact that he’d intended to introduce Lydia to his father.