The Duke’s Obsession Bundle (64 page)

“It galls me,” Bothwell said, smile fading. “People around here will pay good coin for Emmie to make these gorgeous cakes—and they taste as good as they look, St. Just—but they won’t invite the woman to their weddings and parties and picnics. She’s never put a foot wrong, never flirted with anybody’s husband, and even after what—twenty-five years of spotless behavior?—they still judge her.”

“Your defense of her does you credit,” St. Just said with grudging honesty. “But Emmie does not curry their favor, and that, I believe, is what costs her admission.”

“And you’ve put your finger on the real truth.” Bothwell frowned, his gaze traveling over the tidy village green across from the church. “Enough of that, as there has been churchyard politics as long as there’ve been animal sacrifices to the pagan gods, but I think Emmie has just concluded touching up the cake, and the wedding doesn’t even start for an hour,” Bothwell said, turning toward the doorway to the hall.

“I’m ready to go.” She smiled at St. Just. “Nice to see you, Vicar, and these”—she held out a package of buns—“are for you.”

“My thanks.” He took the package then bowed over her hand, pressing a lingering kiss to her bare knuckles.

St. Just silently ground his teeth at that shameless display and even let Bothwell hand Emmie up into the gig. As St. Just took the reins, the Kissing Vicar patted Emmie’s hand where it rested in her lap.

Except it was more of a stroking pat, St. Just noted, a caress, the filthy bugger.

“You’re quiet,” Emmie remarked, lifting her face to the sun. The relief in her expression suggested she hadn’t been interested in lingering in Bothwell’s company.

“Is Bothwell pestering you, Emmie?”

She glanced over at him, a furtive, assessing glance that he unfortunately caught and comprehended too well: It isn’t bothering if the lady welcomes it.

“He is a friend,” she said, lapsing into silence when St. Just said nothing more.

He reached over with one hand and gently peeled Emmie’s index finger from her teeth. “No biting your nails. Whatever it is, you have only to ask, and I will help.”

“Is it possible to love someone and hate them at the same time?”

“It is. I love my father, in a complicated, resentful, admiring sort of way, but when he gets to tormenting my brothers, which he used to do brilliantly, I would rather Bonaparte himself had sired me than that scheming, selfish old man.”

Emmie grimaced and looked like she wanted desperately to bite her nail. “That is quite an indictment, especially coming from you.”

“He’s a quite a character. I don’t know how my mother…”

He fell silent: Her Grace was not his mother. Twenty-seven years after meeting her, St. Just was still making the same mistake he’d made when he was five years old.

“You never talk about your mother,” Emmie said. “I’ve heard stories of each brother or sister, Her Grace, your papa, Rose, her family, and even the dogs and horses, but you never talk about the woman who brought you into this world. You forgot her, I suppose.”

He drove along in silence until Caesar brought them back to the kitchen terrace. St. Just set the brake, climbed down, then came around to assist Emmie. He paused first, frowning up into her eyes. Then he settled his hands on her waist and lifted her to the ground.

In the normal course of such a courtesy, Emmie set her hands on his shoulders, and there they stayed as he continued his hold on her, even when it was clear she no longer needed his support.

“What?”

“I never forgot her, Em,” he said, closing his eyes. “Never… but not for lack of trying.”

She slipped her hands around his waist, hugged him for a brief, fierce instant, then retreated again to her kitchens and the endless work to be found therein.

To Her Grace, Esther, Duchess of Moreland,

Thank you for your recent letter. I pray by the time you’ve received this, young Devlin is once again in robust health, tagging after his brothers and enjoying the pleasures of a country summer. I’m happy to report the farm here will prosper this year, but as harvest approaches, I find my thoughts turning to the day I parted from my little boy. As I am sure you recall, it was in mid-October, a bright, beautiful fall day, a day too pretty for as much as it pained me.

I am consoled, however, to hear Dev has taken to riding with his father and brothers, and he excels at this endeavor. Even as a babe in arms, he was taken with horses. I used to walk with him to the mews and hold him up so he could stroke the great velvety noses of the carriage horses. They seemed to sense his wonder with them, his heart for them.

Still, you must promise me, Your Grace, though it is rank arrogance to ask such a thing, that you will not encourage him to recklessness. Many a laughing boy has fallen to his death from the back of a horse…

St. Just stopped, unable to read further as he recalled all the laughing boys he’d seen fall to their deaths. Nearly a month he’d had these letters in his possession, and he could barely get through three paragraphs. Ever since Emmie’s innocent comment about forgetting his mother, the letters had been burning a hole in his awareness. Like an addict who knows there’s a pipe of opium inside a drawer, he’d held the letters in his hands countless times, letting hope and fear and loss and so much more reverberate through him.

His mother had worried for him, she had remembered him, she had kept him in her prayers, and never, ever stopped thinking of him. If only three paragraphs told him that much, how could he bear to go through seven years of letters? Because he knew he had to, somehow, he had to find the strength—the courage—to read every word.

“Are you all right?” Val cocked his head where he stood in the library doorway. “You are pale beneath your plebeian tan, and… You’re not all right.” He closed the door behind him and locked it. “Talk to me, Dev.” He came over to the desk, no doubt seeing correspondence laid there and more in his brother’s hands. “Is it bad news? Did the old bugger finally shuffle off this mortal coil?”

St. Just managed a swallow and a shake of his head.

“So then what is it?” Val asked softly. But St. Just was staring a hole in the window, and the letters in his hands were shaking with some elemental exertion of will he could not have named to save his life. Carefully, Val extracted the folded paper from St. Just’s hands. He’d see it was a woman’s hand and that the paper was yellowed and frail with the passage of time.

While St. Just ordered himself to rise and move, to say something, to escape the grip of the emotions choking him, Val studied a letter at some length.

“You haven’t seen these before,” Val said, sidling closer and putting the letter far to the side. St. Just shook his head and began to blink, his throat working with the effort of expelling words.

“Oh, child.” Val slid his hips along the desk and rested his hands on St. Just’s shoulders. “I am so sorry.”

“Val?” It was little more than whisper.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“I remember,” St. Just got out as he wrapped his arms around Val’s waist and held on. “I remember petting the horses… With her…”

They wept, as soldiers often do, in absolute soul-wrenching silence.

***

They sneaked out through the kitchen like a pair of truants, Val grabbing a bottle to slip in with the sandwiches, and a book to keep the sun off his face. For most of a long, lazy afternoon, they read Kathleen’s letters to each other, sometimes falling silent for long moments before resuming. When the stack was complete and reverently folded and put aside, they lay on their blanket watching clouds laze across a brilliant blue sky.

“Feel all better?” Val asked, taking a pull from the bottle and passing it to the brother on whose stomach his head was pillowed.

“I want my mother.” St. Just’s hand drifted over his brother’s hair. “You’d be surprised, young Valentine, how many dying men call for their mothers. Not their priest, not their wives of twenty years, not their God, not their firstborn. They want their mothers.”

“I had a kind of grudging admiration for old Boney before.” Val laced his fingers on his stomach. “Thought he was a determined rascal, valiant little prick, and all that. But hearing you…” Val closed his eyes. “Loving you, I have to hate that little bastard with everything in me. Why didn’t you come home, Dev?” The question echoed through the fears of an adolescent boy who’d seen two of his brothers ride off to war and only one come home.

“Riding dispatch, you think the orders you’ve stuck in your shirt are the ones that will turn the tide of some battle or see the enemy’s magazine blown up. When you’re on the battlefield, you charge in and disrupt the infantry lines, get under cannon range, and tear into their forces; then the real fighting can begin. You think you’re necessary.”

“You were necessary,” Val said, accepting the bottle. “But you were necessary to us, too, Dev.”

“You weren’t going to die without me,” St. Just countered, but his hand brushed over Val’s temple again. “You were safe and sound back in merry old England, which was exactly where I needed you to be.”

“I thought about joining up. Her Grace cried, and that was that. His Grace forbid it, and I caved. Some soldier I’d make. Her Grace said I lack the ability to defer to my betters.”

“Because you have none, but you mustn’t speak ill of Her Grace, or I will have to thash… thrash you.”

“Here’s to Her Grace.” Val held up the bottle. “She loves you best, you know.”

“Oh, shut up.” St. Just chuckled, the mirth making his stomach bounce under Val’s head. “You take this business of being the baby too seriously.”

“You were a pathetic little orphan,” Val went on. “Women are suckers for pathetic orphans. Trust me on this. Every time you slipped up and called her Mother or Mama, she nearly left the room in tears. But you slipped up less and less.”

“Perfect little soldier,” St. Just murmured. “This is why one needs nosy little brothers, who remark one’s maturation more carefully than one does himself.” He paused and sorted through his last profundity. “I’d forgotten about calling her Mother. I thought she left the room because she didn’t want me to be embarrassed.”

“Are you embarrassed now?” Val twisted his head to peer up at his brother’s chin. “She loved you to distraction and still does. She was the one who jumped on this earldom when Westhaven mentioned it; then he got all excited, and Anna chimed in… you were doomed.”

“It’s not so bad, being doomed. Read the one about the trip to the park again.”

Val fished through the letters, and with his brother absently petting his hair, he reread the second-to-last letter Kathleen had written. From his strategic location on St. Just’s stomach, he knew his brother was weeping again, but it was a soft, untroubled kind of weeping—just an expression of honest sadness.

“Want to hear it again?” Val asked as he passed the bottle back up, then a clean handkerchief.

“We’ll be late for tea.”

“Bugger tea.”

“Maybe just the last two paragraphs.”

Val read the whole thing yet again, slowly. They didn’t go in until it was dark, the drunk was wearing off, and the air growing cold again.

***

The next day dawned cold and overcast, gray clouds hugging the tops of the distant hills. St. Just rode Red, Caesar, and Wulf before going in to breakfast, lest rain cheat one of the geldings of his exercise.

When St. Just came into the house, the familiar scents of yeast and cinnamon wrapped around him. Val’s fingers were busy at the keyboard, and Scout sat panting outside the door of the music room.

Would it be so bad to be married to this?
He hadn’t formally proposed to Emmie, but she knew the offer had been made, just as he knew it had been rejected.

He’d finished his morning rides convinced Emmie was being stubborn for a
reason
. Emmie was a sensible woman, not prone to flights and fits. She cared for him—he’d wager Caesar on that—and she cared for Winnie—he’d bet his life on that. There had to be a reason she’d walk away from both of them, something beyond her insistence that she wasn’t fit for polite society.

“You are lost in thought,” Val said as he emerged from the music room with Winnie at his side. “Either that, or you are trying to communicate with the dog by divining his thoughts.”

“My lord?” Steen emerged from the morning room. “You have visitors. The Tosten ladies are here to welcome you back from your journey.”

Val arched an eyebrow. “Ladies?”

“Come on, Scout.” Winnie stomped away without another word.

“Ladies.” St. Just closed his eyes. “Lady Tosten, Miss Elizabeth. Had the pleasure last spring at one of Her Grace’s at homes, and now I am their bosom beau.” He turned a martyred expression on Steen. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance I’m not at home?”

“They saw you come up from the stables, my lord,” Steen murmured sympathetically. “I’ll bring them tea and explain you need to see to your toilette.”

“Suppose I do at that.” St. Just blew out a breath. “Val, you are honestly better off lying low. Once word of your presence gets out, the Vandal hordes will descend.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.” Val grinned. “Winnie has deserted me, so I’ll entertain your callers while you turn yourself out in proper attire. Take your time.”

He didn’t take his time, as the gleam in Val’s eye hadn’t been quite trustworthy, but he did manage to run the Tostens off in summary fashion when Val explained to the ladies, straight-faced, he never practiced his piano when there were guests in the house. Lady Tosten’s disappointment at being denied an invitation to luncheon for the third time would have been comical but for being blatant.

“God Almighty.” Val ran a hand through his hair. “That was work. Do they call often?”

“Once is too often,” St. Just replied. “There’s nothing wrong with Elizabeth, and from what I saw at church, she’s the belle of the valley, but somehow…”

“Don’t do it.” Val pointed a warning finger at St. Just’s chest. “If you have to talk yourself into a woman, a man, an encounter, a deal, then don’t do it.”

“Words of wisdom from my baby brother?”

“She would flutter you senseless in a year,” Val assured him, “and you might think, yes, well, but a fellow can get an heir in the dark, and then we’d just live our separate lives, send the boys off to Eton, and needs must and all that. Ask Sir Tosten how marital bliss appeals after twenty-five years with Elizabeth’s mother. Ask him why Elizabeth is an only child. Ask him why he’s around his wife and daughter for only a few weeks in the spring and perhaps over the holidays. Am I making my point?”

“You are,” St. Just said as they headed for the kitchen, “but why so emphatically?”

“Good little soldiers”—Val poked that finger at his chest this time—“do stupid things because the general says so. Lady Tosten is a general—an enemy general. You leave her to me.”

“Valentine… You are not to do anything rash.”

“Protective of the sweet young thing?” Val retorted. “She isn’t helpless, St. Just.”

“Of course she isn’t.” St. Just sighed, wondering where the argument had started and why. “But we are gentlemen, need I remind you, and we do not trifle with ladies.”

Val narrowed his gaze, pursed his lips, propped his fists on his hips, and started to say something, only to change his mind.

“You’re right.” His hands dropped to his sides. “We absolutely do not trifle with the women we respect.”

The off-balance mood of the household continued for the rest of the day, with Winnie pitching a tantrum at the dinner table when Emmie asked St. Just about the governess candidates. Val watched the unfolding scene and suggested St. Just write to Her Grace about little girls who pitch public fits.

“You have a point.” St. Just eyed his brother across the table. “It can’t hurt.” He shoved to his feet. “I’ll just dash off a couple more notes then seek my bed. You will excuse me, Val, if I eschew the decanter?”

“Get your rest”—Val waved him off—“while I flirt with Emmie and winkle recipes from her.” St. Just bowed to Emmie and departed, hoping Val would mind his manners while he was flirting and winkling.

St. Just came out of the library some time later and headed for the stairs. His first thought was to make directly for bed, but a light shone from Winnie’s bedroom, and the child’s outburst still troubled him. He tapped lightly then let himself in, finding Winnie sitting on the bed, a single candle burning while she labored at her lap desk.

“You’ll lose your eyesight by the time you’re old enough to dance, child.” He ambled into the room and considered lighting more candles. “Did you light that one yourself, or did Mary Ellen leave it for you?”

“I asked her to leave it.”

“But you told her it was because you were afraid of the dark”—St. Just lowered himself to the foot of her bed—“not because you wanted to stay up, writing royal warrants of execution for every adult in the house.”

“What’s a warrant of execution?”

“Win.” He leaned his head back against the bedpost. “You’d better come clean soon, or you’ll miss more than dessert the next time you’re rude to Miss Emmie.”

“I don’t want a governess,” Winnie said. “I don’t need a governess. I can already do sums and read, and double and divide a recipe. I can write letters, and I know my prayers. I don’t need a governess.”

“
Weisst du, das Ich liebe dich?
” he asked, “
Ou je t’aime? O, yo te amo?
”

“What?”

“I just told you I love you in three different languages, Winnie Farnum, but because you’re not done with your education, you could not comprehend my words. Emmie might be able to teach you a smattering of one of them.”

“You can teach me the other two,” Winnie shot back, “and I can understand English fine.”

“My point is that Emmie loves you, and I love you, but there is more you need if you’re to do well in this life. A governess is not being hired to punish you, but to help you.”