An Offer from a Gentleman with 2nd Epilogue (25 page)

“With child again?” Benedict asked.

“Act surprised. You weren't supposed to know.”

“I'm not going to act anything. I'm leaving.”

She made a desperate leap forward and somehow managed to grab his sleeve. “You can't.”

Benedict let out a long breath and tried to pry her fingers off of his arm, but she had his shirt in a death grip. “I am going to pick up one foot,” he said in slow, tedious tones, “and step forward. Then I will pick up the next foot—”

“You promised Hyacinth you would help her with her arithmetic,” Eloise blurted out. “She hasn't seen hide nor hair of you in two weeks.”

“It's not as if she has a school to flunk out of,” Benedict muttered.

“Benedict, that is a terrible thing to say!” Eloise exclaimed.

“I know,” he groaned, hoping to stave off a lecture.

“Just because we of the female gender are not allowed to study at places like Eton and Cambridge doesn't mean our educations are any less precious,” Eloise ranted, completely ignoring her brother's weak “I know.”

“Furthermore—” she carried on.

Benedict sagged against the wall.

“—I am of the opinion that the reason we are
not
allowed access is that if we
were
, we would trounce you men in all subjects!”

“I'm sure you're right,” he sighed.

“Don't patronize me.”

“Believe me, Eloise, the last thing I would dream of doing is patronizing you.”

She eyed him suspiciously before crossing her arms and saying, “Well, don't disappoint Hyacinth.”

“I won't,” he said wearily.

“I believe she's in the nursery.”

Benedict gave her a distracted nod, turning toward the stairs.

But as he trudged on up, he didn't see Eloise turn toward his mother, who was peeking out of the music room, and give her a big wink and a smile.

T
he nursery was located on the second floor. Benedict didn't often come up that high; most of his siblings' bedrooms were on the first floor. Only Gregory and Hyacinth still lived adjacent to the nursery, and with Gregory off at Eton most of the year and Hyacinth usually terrorizing someone in some other section of the house, Benedict simply didn't have much reason to visit.

It didn't escape him that aside from the nursery, the second floor was home to bedrooms for the higher servants. Including the lady's maids.

Sophie.

She was probably off in some corner somewhere with her mending—certainly not in the nursery, which was the domain of nurses and nannies. A lady's maid would have no reason to—

“Heeheeheehahaha!”

Benedict raised his brows. That was most definitely the sound of childish laughter, not something likely to come out of fourteen-year-old Hyacinth's mouth.

Oh, right. His Wentworth cousins were visiting. His mother had mentioned something about that. Well, that would be a bonus. He hadn't seen them in a few months, and they were nice enough children, if a little high-spirited.

As he approached the nursery door, the laughter increased, with a few squeals thrown in for good measure. The sounds brought a smile to Benedict's face, and he turned when he reached the open doorway, and then—

He saw her.

Her.

Not Sophie.

Her.

And yet it
was
Sophie.

She was blindfolded, smiling as she groped her hands toward the giggling children. He could see only the bottom half of her face, and that's when he knew.

There was only one other woman in the world for whom he'd seen only the bottom half of her face.

The smile was the same. The gamine little point at the end of her chin was the same. It was
all
the same.

She was the woman in silver, the woman from the masquerade ball.

It suddenly made sense. Only twice in his life had he felt this inexplicable, almost mystical attraction to a woman. He'd thought it remarkable, to have found two, when in his heart he'd always believed there was only one perfect woman out there for him.

His heart had been right. There
was
only one.

He'd searched for her for months. He'd pined for her even longer. And here she'd been right under his nose.

And she hadn't told him.

Did she understand what she'd put him through? How many hours he'd lain awake, feeling that he was betraying the lady in silver—the woman he'd dreamed of marrying—all because he was falling in love with a housemaid?

Dear God, it bordered on the absurd. He'd finally decided
to let the lady in silver go. He was going to ask Sophie to marry him, social consequences be damned.

And they were one and the same.

A strange roaring filled his head, as if two enormous seashells had been clapped to his ears, whistling, whirring, humming; and the air suddenly smelled a bit acrid and everything looked a little bit red, and—

Benedict could not take his eyes off of her.

“Is something wrong?” Sophie asked. All the children had gone silent, staring at Benedict with open mouths and large, large eyes.

“Hyacinth,” he bit off, “will you please evacuate the room?”

“But—”

“Now!”
he roared.

“Nicholas, Elizabeth, John, Alice, come along now,” Hyacinth said quickly, her voice cracking. “There are biscuits in the kitchen, and I know that . . .”

But Benedict didn't hear the rest. Hyacinth had managed to clear the room out in record time and her voice was disappearing down the hall as she ushered the children away.

“Benedict?” Sophie was saying, fumbling with the knot at the back of her head. “Benedict?”

He shut the door. The click was so loud she jumped. “What's wrong?” she whispered.

He said nothing, just watched her as she tore at the scarf. He liked it that she was helpless. He didn't feel terribly kind and charitable at the moment.

“Do you have something you need to tell me?” he asked. His voice was controlled, but his hands were shaking.

She went still, so still that he would have sworn that he could see the heat rise from her body. Then she cleared her throat—an uncomfortable, awkward sort of sound—and went back to work on the knot. Her movements tightened her dress around her breasts, but Benedict felt not one speck of desire.

It was, he thought ironically, the first time he
hadn't
felt desire for this woman, in either of her incarnations.

“Can you help me with this?” she asked. But her voice was hesitant.

Benedict didn't move.

“Benedict?”

“It's interesting to see you with a scarf tied around your head, Sophie,” he said softly.

Her hands dropped slowly to her sides.

“It's almost like a demi-mask, wouldn't you say?”

Her lips parted, and the soft rush of air that crossed them was the room's only noise.

He walked toward her, slowly, inexorably, his footsteps just loud enough so that she had to know he was stalking her. “I haven't been to a masquerade in many years,” he said.

She knew. He could see it in her face, the way she held her mouth, tight at the corners, and yet still slightly open. She knew that he knew.

He hoped she was terrified.

He took another two steps toward her, then abruptly turned to the right, his arm brushing past her sleeve. “Were you ever going to tell me that we'd met before?”

Her mouth moved, but she didn't speak.

“Were you?” he asked, his voice low and controlled.

“No,” she said, her voice wavering.

“Really?”

She didn't make a sound.

“Any particular reason?”

“It—it didn't seem pertinent.”

He whirled around. “It didn't seem
pertinent
?” he snapped. “I fell in love with you two years ago, and it didn't seem pertinent?”

“Can I please remove the scarf?” she whispered.

“You can remain blind.”

“Benedict, I—”

“Like
I
was blind this past month,” he continued angrily. “Why don't you see how you like it?”

“You didn't fall in love with me two years ago,” she said, yanking at the too-tight scarf.

“How would you know?
You
disappeared.”

“I
had
to disappear,” she cried out. “I didn't have a choice.”

“We always have choices,” he said condescendingly. “We call it free will.”

“That's easy for you to say,” she snapped, tugging frantically at the blindfold. “You, who have everything! I had to—Oh!” With one wrenching movement, she somehow managed to yank down the scarves until they hung loosely around her neck.

Sophie blinked against the sudden onslaught of light. Then she caught sight of Benedict's face and stumbled back a step.

His eyes were on fire, burning with a rage, and yes, a hurt that she could barely comprehend. “It's good to see you, Sophie,” he said in a dangerously low voice. “If indeed that is your real name.”

She nodded.

“It occurs to me,” he said, a little too casually, “if you were at the masquerade, then you are not exactly of the servant class, are you?”

“I didn't have an invitation,” she said hastily. “I was a fraud. A pretender. I had no right to be there.”

“You lied to me. Through everything, all this, you lied to me.”

“I had to,” she whispered.

“Oh, please. What could possibly be so terrible that you must conceal your identity from
me
?”

Sophie gulped. Here in the Bridgerton nursery, with him looming over her, she couldn't quite remember why she'd decided not to tell him that she was the lady at the masquerade.

Maybe she'd feared that he would want her to become his mistress.

Which had happened anyway.

Or maybe she hadn't said anything because by the time she'd realized that this wasn't going to be a chance meeting, that he wasn't about to let Sophie-the-housemaid out of his life, it was too late. She'd gone too long without telling him, and she feared his rage.

Which was exactly what had happened.

Proving her point. Of course, that was cold consolation as she stood across from him, watching his eyes go hot with anger and cold with disdain—all at the same time.

Maybe the truth—as unflattering as it might be—was that her pride had been stung. She'd been disappointed that he hadn't recognized her himself. If the night of the masquerade had been as magical for him as it had been for her, shouldn't he have known instantly who she was?

Two years she'd spent dreaming about him. Two years she'd seen his face every night in her mind. And yet when he'd seen hers, he'd seen a stranger.

Or maybe, just maybe, it hadn't been any of those things. Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe she'd just wanted to protect her heart. She didn't know why, but she'd felt a little safer, a little less exposed as an anonymous housemaid. If Benedict had known who she was—or at least known that she'd been the woman at the masquerade—then he would have pursued her. Relentlessly.

Oh, he had certainly pursued her when he'd thought she'd been a maid. But it would have been different if he'd known the truth. Sophie was sure of it. He wouldn't have perceived the class differences as being quite so great, and Sophie would have lost an important barrier between them. Her social status, or lack thereof, had been a protective wall around her heart. She
couldn't
get too close because, quite honestly, she couldn't get too close. A man such as Benedict—son of and brother to viscounts—would never marry a servant.

But an earl's by-blow—now that was a much trickier situation. Unlike a servant, an aristocratic bastard could dream.

But like those of a servant, the dreams weren't likely to come true. Making the dreaming all that much more painful. And she'd known—every time it had been on the tip of her tongue to blurt out her secret she had known—that telling him the truth would lead straight to a broken heart.

It almost made Sophie want to laugh. Her heart couldn't possibly feel worse than it did now.

“I searched for you,” he said, his low, intense voice cutting into her thoughts.

Her eyes widened, grew wet. “You did?” she whispered.

“For six bloody months,” he cursed. “It was as if you fell right off the face of the earth.”

“I had nowhere to go,” she said, not sure why she was telling him that.

“You had
me
.”

The words hung in the air, heavy and dark. Finally, Sophie, propelled by some perverse sense of belated honesty, said, “I didn't know you searched for me. But—but—” She choked on the word, closing her eyes tightly against the pain of the moment.

“But what?”

She swallowed convulsively, and when she did open her eyes, she did not look at his face. “Even if I'd known you were looking,” she said, hugging her arms to her body, “I wouldn't have let you find me.”

“Was I that repulsive to you?”

“No!” she cried out, her eyes flying to his face. There was hurt there. He hid it well, but she knew him well. There was hurt in his eyes.

“No,” she said, trying to make her voice calm and even. “It wasn't that. It could never be that.”

“Then what?”

“We're from different worlds, Benedict. Even then I knew that there could be no future for us. And it would have been
torture. To tease myself with a dream that couldn't come true? I couldn't do that.”

“Who are you?” he asked suddenly.

She just stared at him, frozen into inaction.

“Tell me,” he bit off. “Tell me who you are. Because you're no damned lady's maid, that's for certain.”

“I'm exactly who I said I was,” she said, then, at his murderous glare, hastily added, “Almost.”

He advanced on her. “Who
are
you?”