Bridal Favors (25 page)

He fixed her with an earnest, soulful stare.

From thoughts of Justin, Evelyn’s attention snapped back fully to Ernst.
Uh-oh
. She knew what was coming.

For an instant, a frantic voice within her squealed for her to take what he was about to offer, knowing it was born of true affection and deep regard and honest appreciation. And wasn’t appreciation the one thing she’d always insisted she would have from a husband?

A half year ago she might have heeded that voice. Three months ago, she would have said she owed it to herself to joyfully accept Ernst’s imminent proposal. A month ago, she would have made him a good wife, even three weeks ago.

But not today.

The knowledge filled her with melancholy, because whatever else had become of her, she wasn’t the same woman she’d been before she’d come to North Cross Abbey. Yet her feelings for Justin, and the suspicion that they were just as futile, gave her empathy for Ernst.

She turned her hands in his and clasped them warmly. “My
dear
Ernst,” she said. “When I came to North Cross Abbey, I never expected to meet someone who shared so many of the same interests as I. Someone with whom I felt immediately comfortable.”

“It is the same for me!” he said eagerly, and would have continued except that she squeezed his hands, gently silencing him.

“How very happy I shall be when I return to London, knowing that our
friendship
has meant as much to you as to me. And how happily I shall look forward to that time when we might renew our acquaintance. Perhaps in your country. I would love to see it. Someday.” She spoke softly, her voice light but sober.

He understood. The tips of his ears grew crimson. But he was a gentleman; he would never impose upon her feelings she clearly didn’t reciprocate.

“And I would love to show it to you. It is most beautiful,” he finally managed. “There. It is settled. Someday you must visit us there.”

“I’d like that,” Evelyn said. “Now then,” she laughed a little, trying to make the situation easier, “the fish course is a lost cause I am afraid, but we should be in time for the main—”

“No. No, thank you, but I am remembering something at the cottage that needs my immediate attention.” Ernst shook his head. Gentleman though he might be, he was not yet able to play dinner companion to a lady he’d hoped to make so much more. “I will take a . . . rain check?”

“Yes. Rain check.”

“Good. My English improves, does it not?” he asked, struggling for a casualness his pink complexion belied.

“Wonderfully,” she answered sincerely. He stood a second longer, simply looking at her, and then he moved past her, opening the front door. He turned. “I will see you later, Lady Evelyn.”

“Evelyn.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “But
he
calls you Evie, doesn’t he?” And with that enigmatic query he left, quietly shutting the door behind him.

For a long minute she stood still, before finally wandering morosely back toward the dining room. She was halfway there when she realized she didn’t feel up to putting on the required pleasant façade. Nor did she much feel like meeting Justin’s taunting gaze.

Instead, she turned toward her room.

Dear God, let it be the bloody wedding canopy and not Bernard’s diabolical machine,
Justin thought, racing toward Evie’s bedroom. Of all the damnable pieces of misfortune!

And Evie! He reached her door and snapped open the penknife with a flick of his wrist, ramming the thin blade into the lock and jostling it angrily. Evie
would
have to take possession of it in full view of any patch of grass that could hide interested eyes. God, if the man who’d attacked him in the library thought Evie was part of this . . .

Damn! He had to get the bloody thing out of her room if, indeed, it was Bernard’s expected shipment. And if it was nothing more than an antique canopy? Then somehow he had to make sure that everyone in the abbey knew it, lest some ambitious little spy leap to the conclusion that Evelyn was the shipment’s alternate recipient. In other words, another spy. Justin would do just about anything to make sure no one made that mistake. Anything.

The door swung open and he slipped inside. She’d left the crate in the center of the room, a box four feet high and four feet long. A quick survey of the room told Justin that the windows hadn’t been tampered with and the crate hadn’t been opened.

He found a pair of heavy shears lying on a makeshift table and slid the blades under one corner, pushing down. With barely a groan, the lid at once popped off. He peered into the dark interior. Inside was another, smaller, ominously unadorned crate stenciled over in several languages: Caution. So, there it was: the Diabolical Machine.

He stood deliberating his next move. Whoever had been watching for this shipment would know now where it was and its approximate size and possibly weight and, most importantly, who had taken possession of it. Under normal circumstances—well, as normal as circumstances could be in the espionage game—he would not
think
of tampering with that interior crate. God knew what sort of damage he might do to a delicate instrument by unpacking it.

But someone was after this crate. Weighing the options, Justin decided that the only reasonable course would be to repack the device into a different container, of a different size and configuration, as carefully as he could.

It was his job to see it ended its journey in Bernard’s scientist’s hands, and he would. He’d repack the damn thing, get it out of here to somewhere more secure, and telegram to Bernard to send his boys down here for it posthaste. He only needed to keep it safe for a few days more. But he would need to repack it before Evie finished dinner.

He rammed the shears beneath the interior box’s lid. As soon as this was over, he was done. Quits. And if he was very lucky, Evie would never know anything about his current occupation. Instead, she would blissfully think that he’d been an aimless, purposeless dilettante whom her good example had reformed to dutiful functionality.

Evie would adore reforming him. The thought made him smile. The lid of the inside box had begun to splinter when he heard the bedroom door opening. Quickly he dropped the shears and turned.

Evelyn stood framed in the doorway, her hair a shimmering cascade of black curls, her bare white shoulders polished to an alabaster sheen.

“And just what,” she asked coldly, “do you think you’re doing in here?”

Chapter 19

“I . . . I CAME TO apologize.”

Evie regarded Justin with flat disbelief. Apparently, she had some opinion regarding his capacity for contrition and his apology had exceeded it. Not very flattering.

He cast about for another excuse for his presence, coming around to block her view of the crate. He didn’t think she realized what he’d been doing. He would tell her the truth if he could, if it were his to tell, but it wasn’t.

“Couldn’t catch up to old Blumfield?” he finally blurted out.

She stiffened. All the smooth expanse of skin exposed by that dress turned a delicate pink. “I didn’t have to ‘catch up with’ him,” she said. “He hadn’t
left.”

“What?” Justin hooted derisively. “Still moon-calving around, was he?”

Her beautiful dark eyes narrowed. Why should she now be willing to sacrifice her eyesight to vanity? Besides, there was no reason on God’s green earth anyone but he need know their true color was deep, clear amber. Like gold-filigreed onyx or tiger’s-eyes. Only, he suddenly realized, these tiger’s-eyes were awash in tears.

He stretched out his hand, the Diabolical Machine, Bernard, his duty, his honor, his
role,
all forgotten in the horrifying realization that he’d made Evie cry.

“Evie,” he said. “Forgive me. Please, don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying.” She blinked fiercely. “Why would I cry? Simply because a known womanizer—”

“Dear God, not that again.”

“A known womanizer,” she repeated with fierce emphasis, “should find another man’s liking for, or
choice
of, a certain woman pathetic, doesn’t make it so.”

“You misunderstand me . . .” he began—then her words sank in.
Another man’s “choice”?
“What do you mean, ‘choice’?”

“You know, Justin,” Evelyn set her hands on her hips and they disappeared into the voluminous velvet skirts, “not every man is at the mercy of his baser instincts.”

She forged on, determined to make him feel as shallow and superficial as he’d made her feel unwanted and unattractive. “Some men find a lively, inquisitive mind appealing.” Drat her voice for trembling! “And extreme competence more attractive than, than,” she glanced at the meager bosom Merry had so ruthlessly cinched up in order to give the allusion of bounty, “being buxom!”

“Evie—”

“Some men don’t need a pretty picture to kiss or a—”

He seized her arm, snatching her close and saying, “He
kissed
you? Again?”

She tossed her head. “Is that so inconceivable? That someone should want to kiss me?
You
did.”

She threw the accusation at him like a slur, as if she thought that by accusing him of wanting to kiss her she could somehow shame him. . . . As if . . .

And then, finally, he understood.

He could scarce believe it. She
couldn’t
not know. She couldn’t fail to see. . . . With a sense of awed disbelief he clasped her wrist and wheeled, searching for
a . . . Ah! There! Small and inconspicuous and all but hidden.

He pulled her to the mirror in the corner of her bedchamber, tossing aside the clothes that hung over the top of it. He dragged Evelyn in front of him.

“What are you—?”

“Hush,” he said, clasping her by the shoulders and spinning her around to face the mirror. She glanced quickly at it and away, as one would something vaguely offensive and subtly threatening.

“What the devil are you doing?” she asked angrily when he refused to let her turn away, keeping her pinned with her back against him, her shoulder blades pressed into his chest.

“Look.”

“I don’t want to play these games, Justin,” she said irritably. But, he noted, her reflected gaze kept dancing back to her image.

“Look,” he insisted.

She glared up at him for an instant, meeting the challenge in his blue-green eyes and then, because she was brave, because she did not have anything to be ashamed of, because a woman who had proven her worth in as many areas as she had more than simple good looks to recommend her, she stared defiantly into the mirror.

He stood over and behind her, watching her gaze at her reflected image. She stood like a soldier at attention, every muscle taut, every chord of her vibrating self-mastery. And nothing else. No slow, dawning comprehension. Nothing.

“Enough yet?” she finally croaked and lifted her dark eyes to meet his. “Satisfied?”

She was near tears again. He could hear them in her voice. But this time they didn’t ignite a fire of self-loathing; they stunned him in an altogether different manner.

“What do you see?” he asked softly. She was such a small woman. One forgot, because nothing except her size was diminutive. He bent his head near her ear, took one stolen breath of her fragrance, and whispered, “Come, Evie. Tell me. What do you see?”

He felt a little shiver course through her. For a second, he thought she’d refuse to answer, but then he heard her say defiantly. “A woman who looks like a girl.”

“A youthful-looking woman,” he paraphrased her words. “What else?”

“Little.”

“Petite.”

This time he’d startled her. Her brows flew together in disapproval. Of him, of his words, or of the fact that he’d dared correct her—she was an opinionated woman, his Evie—he wasn’t sure.

“Skinny,” she stated emphatically.

“Delicate,” he whispered, his lips brushing her earlobe. He barely heard her sigh, but hear it he did. His head dipped lower, his mouth skated up the nape of her neck, nibbled the downy hairs there.

“Bony. Sinewy.” She sounded breathless and confused.

He
felt
breathless and confused. His head swam with her fragrance. “Lithe. Svelte.”

She shivered. His hand slipped from her shoulder to her hair, tunneling up through the soft cloud of curls. Pins scattered. Her hair came down, uncoiling in springy dark spirals.

“Black, wooly hair.”

“Perfect,” he murmured. “Perfect ebony ringlets.”

“Ringlets?” she questioned so softly that he had to strain to hear.

“Aye. Such as the queen of night would envy.”

Her breath caught. Her eyelids fluttered and fell shut. A little line of anguish appeared between her brows. He laughed against her creamy white skin and felt her stiffen.

Poor Evie. So confused, so unsure of what to believe when he was just struggling to keep things under control. Each passing second, it grew more difficult. She was so pliant, so yielding. So trusting and so damnably appealingly in distress.

It would be so easy to be a knight in shining armor here. To slay her dragons and ride off into the sunset. Except that sunset would give way to another day, when saving the bloody, blasted world would demand his allegiance.