William smirked at the butler standing guard in the corner of the library. Since he’d opened the door and found William standing outside it, he’d not allowed him from his sight. Mr. Gaines took his position as manager of the household seriously, and apparently, he considered ‘guardian of his lady’s virtue’ to be among his responsibilities.
That was fine with William. He wanted nothing that would alarm Nora’s father about his intentions. In fact, he didn’t want his intentions to be known yet at all. As far as Lord Tarrin was concerned, William was here for one purpose only: to study the feasibility of his tunnel project.
His father had wanted to kill the project; he wanted him home. There was work to be done, and progress to be made, in California. But William had argued that leaving now would be leaving potential on the table. His father’s response had been typically Frazier: if William felt so strongly about the project, then he should take full responsibility for it—its failure or its success.
So William was funding this extension himself—and not merely as an excuse to be near Nora. He believed in this project and wouldn’t be satisfied to walk away without being sure it was truly hopeless. If it was a failure, he would survive the attempt. If it were to succeed, however, he might eclipse his father, and possibly his grandfather as well. He was sure that the idea itself was sound. If it failed, it would be because he couldn’t convince the people here to see its promise.
He’d never thought of himself as a visionary like they, and he’d never been as deeply invested in the business as a way of life as they. His ambition lay in Sacramento, and someday perhaps Washington. But every time someone had told him ‘no’ in England, he’d taken one more step toward obsession over this project. Maybe that was why his grandfather and father were visionaries. Maybe what the Fraziers truly were was obstinate. He’d been called arrogant often enough in the past four months—because he wouldn’t back down.
He’d jumped ahead of his intentions with Nora, he thought, simply because she was the first person in all of England to have expressed his own thinking about the tunnel. He’d meant to move much more slowly, to be sure of his feelings, and of hers, before he spoke of intention, to be mindful of the siren call of infatuation and keep reason in control. Then she’d spoken his own mind to him, and he’d been sure.
It had had nothing to do with her sleek, supple legs encased in tan riding breeches or the way her thighs had sloped to a pert derrière. He’d seen women in pants before—it wasn’t common in America, but women who worked the earth, on ranches and farms, sometimes dressed for maximum practicality. And he’d seen his share of women out of pants and everything else. He understood the female form.
To see Lady Nora Tate dressed in that manner, however, was different. In London, she’d been attired as a proper lady, in elegant silks and tasteful jewels, long gloves and pointed shoes, her hair braided and coiled into elaborate constructions. To see her in breeches, spattered with mud, her hair windblown and bursting free of its unworthy bindings, her color high and her dimpled smile wide—he’d felt he’d seen Nora, the true woman, and the impact had been sensual and immediate. A revelation.
Not one sufficient to render him irrational, however. He’d asked for her hand with reason at the helm. He’d simply been sure much more quickly than he’d anticipated.
Nora made her moves on the backgammon board and bore two of her dark checkers off. She had five left; he had seven. She looked up at him, challenge beaming from her bright eyes, and he focused his attention on their game and shook out the dice: five and four. He studied the board she’d left him, and she did as well. He had no choice but to leave a single checker vulnerable on a point, and she knew it when he did. She leaned back in her chair and linked her hands across her middle, the picture of confident patience, waiting for her chance to destroy him.
He moved and sacrificed his piece to her success. The game was over two turns later.
As she put the board and pieces in the game case, she asked, “May I ask what happened to your forehead, Mr. Frazier? Did you and Christopher get up to mischief together?” Her grin twisted into puckishness. “Perhaps physical games are more your strength than intellectual?”
William laughed and brushed his temple. His encounter with the London police had happened nearly two weeks before, but the bruise still showed faintly, a bluish-grey shadow at his hairline. “Not a game, sadly. I had a misadventure in chivalry.”
“Really? Do tell.”
“I was walking back to my hotel and ended up in a riot. Suffragettes broke shop windows up and down the street, and shop owners and passersby took it badly.”
Nora’s smile faded away, and she went as still as if her flesh had become marble, except for her eyes, which flashed heat at him. “And what did you do, Mr. Frazier?”
He returned that fiery gaze with cool calm. “I tried to help one of the ladies, and found myself riding in a paddy wagon with them.”
She blinked, and her posture eased. “The police did that to you?”
“Yes. And worse to the women.”
“Did they—the women—they didn’t happen to wear white roses?”
William’s surprise stilled his tongue for a moment. “How did you know?”
Nora stood up and turned from him, walking to a tall window that looked out onto the grounds. She’d changed clothes before lunch and wore a pretty, high-necked day dress, a blue linen that turned her eyes to jewels. Her hair had been redone, but in a softer style than she’d worn in London—just a wind of braids at the nape of her neck. The pale sun of the autumn afternoon limned her silhouette in gold, and it was like she’d stepped out of a dream.
William went to her and stood just behind her. “Nora?” he murmured, quietly enough that the honorable butler wouldn’t hear his familiar address.
“Were they hurt?”
“Yes. I’m not sure how badly. I didn’t see them after we were brought into the police station. The woman I helped had been badly beaten, but not broken.” He smiled at the memory of the woman’s sharp tongue. “Not broken at all.”
“I don’t suppose you asked her name?”
“I didn’t. I’m sorry. Nora”—he wrapped his hand around her arm and turned her to face him. “Do you know these women?”
“I think so, yes.”
He’d assumed that she supported the suffrage movement, of course; she’d as much as said so—but it surprised him to think that she’d had the chance to know suffragettes. “How?”
“I can’t say.”
“You can trust me.”
“I know. But I made a promise.”
It was a question of her honor, then, not his. He understood. “Fair enough. I’m sorry your friends were hurt.”
“They aren’t my friends. I don’t know them well enough to claim that. But they do important work. Thank you for helping them.”
She lifted her hand and brushed his temple, and William closed his eyes. Her fingers trailed down to his cheek, along his beard, to his mouth, like she’d never felt anything like him before. Perhaps she hadn’t. Need ignited his body at the thought that he was, would be, her first in all such things.
Forgetting his resolve to be careful, with every intention of kissing her senseless, he caught her hand and drew her close. But Mr. Gaines cleared his throat, and in that sound gave a lecture on propriety. William came back to himself and stepped back, and Nora shook the moment away.
The sound of a motor rose up beyond the window. Nora turned to look. “It’s Christopher!” She ducked around him and hurried across the room.
William followed her and the butler to the front door. He was glad that Christopher had arrived first—it made for a much simpler explanation when their father returned.
“You’re in Kent on business, Mr. Frazier?”
William set his knife and fork on his plate and finished chewing his bite of lamb. “I am, my lord. And please call me William.”
At William’s side, Chris chuckled and lifted his wine glass. Before he drank, he said, “He’s convinced we need a tunnel under the Channel, so the ladies can scurry underground like rats to buy their gowns.”
The earl made a noise somewhere between contempt and interest. “It’s been tried before, William. In my lifetime, it’s been tried three times. The last time, excavation began, and still yet the attempt lost support and failed—and those were Englishmen who tried. Why do you think you’ll have more success than they?”
As always when he had a chance to discuss the idea, William’s blood began to buzz with excitement. Might Lord Tarrin be an ally in the work? He leaned toward the earl. “I know about the previous attempts. The first attempt was as far back as 1802, on the French side. The tools have come a long way in the last hundred and eight years, my lord. Our company’s developed new innovations in excavation. We’ve tunneled through mountains in America, with thousands of tons of rock over our heads. I know we can do this.”
“And why do you wish to? What is it to you if the English ride the train to France or take the ferry?”
“Think of it, Father,” Nora piped up. “Travel would be much faster and freer. People could move back and forth daily. There might even be an express between London and Paris.”
“As I said,” her brother interjected. “The House of Worth should be Will’s chief investor.”
Her father ignored his son’s sarcasm and shot his daughter a warning glance. “I understand, Nora. That isn’t the question I asked William. Please don’t interrupt.” He turned to William and waited.
Nora’s eyes narrowed at the rebuke, but she turned to William and gave him a small smile. He answered the question. “Lady Nora is right. It’s an opportunity for improvement. As you said, there have been several failed English attempts, and French. I bring the tools to succeed.”
Again, Chris chuckled. “Will is an idealist, Father. He thinks the hardest part of his work is digging the hole.”
William loved Chris like the brother he’d never had, but sometimes he wanted to punch him in his smug face. The cynical commentary from a man who, with the exception of his military service, had quite literally never done a day’s work, chafed William to the core.
Attempting to let the most recent instance of his friend’s incessant ribbing roll from his back, William managed a smile he thought believable. “After all this time, I see the hardest part. It’s convincing people to support the project. There is deep suspicion here of progress. I need to build a team here, and I haven’t been able to do it.”
The footmen cleared away the roast course and reset the table with dessert. As they set aromatic pastries on the small plates, Mr. Gaines announced that they were baked apple crêpes.
“Excellent,” Lord Tarrin declared. He smiled at Nora. “You planned a lovely meal, my dear. Well done.”
“Thank you, Father,” she said without enthusiasm.
“You’ll not succeed in building a team, William,” the earl said, picking up the earlier conversation and setting his daughter aside again.
“Because I’m American?”
“No. It’s something else, something you’ve apparently not seen. Perhaps that is because you’re American. The Channel has been there since before men walked the earth. England and France have stood at opposite ends all that time. When we cross, we do so over the Channel, in the open. We can see each other coming. This is important. The English and the French have a long and tumultuous history. As long as history itself. We won’t forget that.”
“You’re saying it’s not distrust of me, but of France?”
“I’m saying it’s distrust, simply. And not ours alone. We remember, and we’re cautious.”
“You speak at cross purposes,” Nora said. All three men turned to her. She sat upright and stared down her father’s censure at her ‘interruption.’ “Isn’t that the problem? Father, you say England won’t forget history. Wi—Mr. Frazier says that he has a new innovation. You’re not having the same debate. You’re not on different sides, you’re on different points.”
William wondered if her father had noticed her near slip in the way she’d referred to him, but he seemed not to have—he was distracted that she’d spoken at all.
“Nora—“
“Don’t tell me not to speak, Father. This is the dining room in my own home. Am I to be bound and gagged here, as well?”
Obviously caught between the impulse to control his daughter and his awareness that a guest was witness to this exchange, Lord Tarrin remained stiff and silent. His cheeks reddened. Nora stared at him, defiant.
Chris saved the moment. “She makes a good point, Father.”
“I agree,” William met Nora’s eyes, then turned to her father. “I see your point, my lord, I do. I recognize now that I was interpreting hostility to change as hostility to me. I suppose I find it hard to imagine the past standing in the way of progress.”
“That, William, is because you’re young. Your country is young. All you see is the future. You cannot learn from a past that doesn’t exist.”
“The past seems an excuse men make any time they are asked to consider something new. Time moves in one direction only, Father,” Nora said, her voice clear and assured. “Forward.”
Forgetting his frustration, her father answered her warmly, and William had a flash of insight into what their relationship had once been, what Christopher had described it to be. “Yes, but the past shapes the present—and thus the future, if we are wise enough to see its hand at work. ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.’”
“You quote Cicero,” she answered. “I’ve not said we should forget the past. Mr. Frazier has spoken knowledgeably about the history of the tunnel attempts—he’s learned the past, and learned from it. There is a wide chasm between ignorance of the past and slavish devotion to it. I believe it was Kant who said ‘a man may postpone enlightenment in what he ought to know, but to renounce it for all posterity is to trample on the rights of mankind,’ was it not?”
“That is Kant, yes.” The earl smiled. “I’m not sure I see its relevance to the Channel. How is that an issue of rights, or of enlightenment?”
Chris and William sat like spectators at Wimbledon, swiveling back and forth between father and daughter.
“Faster, cheaper travel, Father. Greater access to the continent. Goods moving to market. Employment as the tunnel’s built and managed.” She sat back in her seat. “Change is coming, Father. The world will be different soon.”
The earl stiffened, and the moment of free exchange between them was over. “Yes. Well.” He turned to William. “I don’t mean to suggest that I’m opposed to your vision, William. But I do caution you that others will be. Especially here, away from London. We are simple people in the country. We like things as they are.”
“Truer words never spoken,” Chris agreed with a laugh. He swept his hands around the room. “All you need do is take a tour of this medieval magnificence. I should warn you, my friend, not only is there no electricity, but the gas lights are not to be turned on past midnight. It’s candles in the dark here at Tarrindale Hall. One almost expects the ghost of your Mr. Poe to lurch through the halls.”
William had taken a room at the village inn, but neither Chris nor his father would hear of him staying away. As late as it was, after dinner, Lord Tarrin sent their driver to the inn to collect William’s things, and then sent one of the footmen to unpack him and serve as a valet he didn’t want.
Chris had, with a subtle but provocative hand gesture, silenced him before he refused the help and caused consternation in the earl. Thus, he would be dressed by someone else while at Tarrindale. But he sent Fred, his new valet, away while he was still in his trousers and shirt; there was a limit to how much assistance he’d accept.
The room was large and comfortable. There was a faint dullness in the air, a sense that it had been very recently closed up, but the tall windows were open, and fragrant autumn air lofted in on a light breeze. The windows looked down onto the garden and its hedge maze. With only a few candles lighting the room, he could see clearly into the night beyond the glass—the leaves of the hedges shimmering in the breeze, the lopsided moon flickering in the reflecting pool, the wide span of lawn that led to the stable, the paths of white pebbles, bright and sparkling, seeming to float above the ground.
He smiled, remembering Nora in his arms, only a few hours before.
Standing in the breeze from the open window, William unbuttoned his shirt and breathed deeply as the air danced over his bare skin and lightly stirred the hairs on his chest. He thought of Nora, that faint tracing of her finger over his face, and imagined her touch moving over his chest. He went hard at once, and, with no possible relief but his own hand, sought somewhere else to send his mind. It would be a long wait to have her, and he meant it to be a wait. Thinking of her like this was nothing more than self-torment.
He recalled instead the conversation over dinner, which had continued in the drawing room. Insights had abounded tonight: he understood Nora better, and her father—the Tates as a family, in fact—and he understood the limitations of his project as well. He’d been looking at it all wrong, trying to sell potential partners on the promise of the project. Instead, he needed to look backward to help them see what lay ahead. A tall rhetorical order. Well, he fancied himself good with words.
He heard a scratching at his door and was ashamed of himself for a moment’s unease—the whickering wind and the flickering candle glow, and Chris’s accurate joke about the gloomily Gothic atmosphere of this medieval manor at night, had predisposed him to hear ghosts, it seemed. Then the scratching became a knock, barely perceptible, and William picked up a candle and went to open the door.
Nora stood there, holding a failing stub of a candle.
He lifted his own candleholder and peered down the shadowy corridor. She was alone. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. I … I’m reckless to be here, I know, but …”
With another furtive search of the darkness beyond, William drew her into his room and closed the door. He took her candleholder from her and blew out the stub before he set the holder on a nearby bureau. Was she here so he could bring her into his bed? He was still hard from his thoughts of moments before and could think of nothing he’d enjoy more than the feel of her bare skin on his, but she’d had her first kiss in the garden that very day, and he didn’t want her to regret anything about her connection to him. She wasn’t ready.
Then she reached out with both hands and set them on his bare chest, and his chivalrous resolve shook. When she pushed her fingers through the hair there, exactly as he’d imagined moments before, his knees nearly buckled.
He groaned and grabbed her hands to still them before he was no longer in command of himself. “Nora …”
Her eyes wouldn’t meet his. “You must think me a …”
“Beautiful woman,” he finished, before she insulted herself. “Whom I love.”
She left her deep study of his chest and smiled sweetly up at him.
“Why are you here, Nora?”
“I couldn’t sleep until I was sure.”
“Sure about what?”
“That you were really here. Alone in my room, I’d all but convinced myself that I’d imagined the whole day, that my dreams had conjured you from thin air. But you’re here. And so beautiful.” Her fingers, resting on his chest, under his hands, curled and flexed, and William pressed them flat before she got them both up to mischief.
But if she wanted it … would he be right to deny her? “Do you want to stay with me here? For a while?”
It might have been a trick of the poor light, but he saw a strange movement in her eyes, like a shadow passing through—a thought or a memory that darkened her mood. Then it was gone. “I don’t want to creep out before dawn and hunker back to my own room in shame, no.”
“I don’t want that, either. I want you to be glad of what we do. We should wait until you can be proud.” Releasing her hands, he combed his fingers through the miles-long mass of golden silk that was her hair. He’d never seen it fully loose before; it coursed over her shoulders in fluid waves, the ends dangling at her hips. “What do you want?”
“I came only to reassure myself that you were here, but now …”
“But now?”
Her hands moved again, this time boldly, arcing over his chest, grazing his nipples, sweeping down and in to a point just above the waist of his trousers. She’d drawn a heart over his skin. Gooseflesh rose up and made the hairs she teased stand. His cock strained inside his trousers, so close to her hands.
“But now I can’t stop touching you.”
“Damn,” he muttered. “Nora,” he gasped, strangled by his need. “I want to treat you with respect, but you have to go, or”—her hands slid around his waist, under his shirt—“Nora!” He grabbed her hands again and this time pulled them away.
She frowned, her lips drawing into a thin line. “Have you had other women, Mr. Frazier?”
Her use of his surname cooled the temperature between them by several degrees. He let her hands go. “Yes.”
“How many?”
“Nora, no.”
“Why not? Is it a secret?” She gasped theatrically and affected wide-eyed alarm, pressing her hand to her throat. “Are lives at stake?”
“Nora …” His body was undeterred by the sudden turn of mood, but his mind reeled. Still hard and nearly desperate for her, now he was becoming aggravated and insulted as well—and perfectly aware that a maze of dangers lay ahead in this new topic.
“Is it more than five?” When he didn’t answer, she put her hands on her hips. “More than ten?”
What exactly did she expect him to say? He said nothing.
“More than twenty?”
“I haven’t kept count.” And he had no intention of making an accounting.
“No notches on your bedpost, eh?” She walked away from him, deeper into his room, and stood before the open window, in nearly the same position he’d been when she’d come to his door. The breeze had picked up; it made her hair flutter and pushed her filmy nightgown and open robe back to hug her body and waft out behind her.
“Why is it, do you think, that men may take all the women they like, women they know scarcely or not at all, and they’re celebrated for it, but a woman may not even touch a man she loves until they’ve been stood in a church and had a man in a robe give them leave? And after that, the man may still follow his cock all over town, and no one cares, but if his ignored wife were to seek affection elsewhere, a whole house might be brought down under the scandal of it. How is that fair?”
He was too shocked to hear her use the word ‘cock’ to have heard anything else she’d said.
In the wake of his silence, she spun on her bare heel and stormed back to him. “Do you think it’s fair, Mr. Frazier?”
He didn’t appreciate the way she used his name like a blunt weapon. “I think it’s the way things are, Lady Nora.”
She blinked as his return volley hit its target, but her righteous fury flamed no cooler. “That’s a very disappointing answer. I expected better from you.” She brushed past him, her head held regally high, and stalked to the door.
He got there just as she’d pulled it free of its frame, and he pushed it shut, standing behind her, looming over her. “Nora. It’s not fair. Of course it’s not. But it is the way things are. For now. There will be no one else for me but you from today forward. I wish you could stay tonight. I want to feel your touch and let you feel mine. But if you don’t want to creep out in shame, what’s your solution?”
She sighed and let her head fall forward until her forehead hit the door with a thump. “I don’t know. Every way I turn, my path is blocked. I feel trapped.”
William brushed her hair from her shoulder, exposing the sleek length of her neck. “I mean to free you,” he murmured and pressed his mouth to the point where her heartbeat echoed.
Their disagreement was over, and the fight left her body on a whimper. As he kissed and laved the sweet, soft velvet of her neck and shoulder, tracing the connection between each of those three small moles, she trembled beneath his lips and whispered his name. “William.”
He turned her around and claimed her mouth. She opened to him at once, coiling her arms around his neck when he drew her to his body, threading her fingers into his hair. Through the filmy silk of her nightclothes, he could feel her heat, her heart, her innocent need.
Before they were beyond the point of turning back, he turned his head. “You have to go, Nora. This is dangerous. Just this afternoon, you told me you wanted your father to accept me. What’ll he do if he finds you here?”
Her eyes searched his for several seconds. Finally, she sighed, and he knew she hadn’t found what she’d sought. “I wonder what it would be like not to be ruled by men who think they know my best interest better than I do.”
Again he was in a thicket of thorny words. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
She smiled sadly and brushed her fingers over his lips. “You’re right, of course. I’ll go.”
He stepped back. As she settled her clothes, he lit her candle again and handed it to her. Then he opened the door and checked the corridor—it was dark and silent. Safe.
Before she stepped over the threshold, she looked back. “You do love me?”
“I do. And you’re the first, Nora. I haven’t been in love before.”
He was glad of the bright smile the words earned him. “Then, as I can’t free myself, I’ll trust you to open my cage for me.”
She walked away, a pale angel in a halo of dull gold light. He watched her as long as he dared.