Chapter 7
The happiest unions are those where a gentleman and lady have shared interests.
Mrs. Matcher
A Lady’s Guide to a Gentleman’s Heart
There was any number of rules in terms of a gentleman’s relationship with young ladies: sisters of best friends were most certainly off-limits, as were the widows of late friends.
What Heath, however, had never been able to suitably sort out were the rules on a best friend’s former betrothed.
For everything Heath didn’t know about the specifics of that particular dynamic, there was one singular certainty: A gentleman did not kiss his best friend’s former betrothed. Ever.
Particularly this woman. Guilt needled at his conscience. For Heath, it was an unfamiliar sentiment. After all, he’d always been endlessly loyal to both friends and family. This, however, his lusting after Emilia, crossed all manner of lines. What was worse, Heath wouldn’t undo that brief moment if he could.
As such, as Emilia hurried out the door, ice skates in hand, Heath was more than tempted to allow her to continue on her way, and take whatever opposite path she took, and forget that moment under the mistletoe had happened.
Alas, the decision was ultimately made for him by another.
“Here.” Iris shoved his ice skates at his chest. Heath grunted, reflexively catching the skates and neatly slicing through the fabric of his glove. “You’ll need these.”
“The lady is rather impressively swift, and very soon I suspect you shan’t catch her.” With that, his niece rushed over to join her sister at the long hall table where the previously forgotten strips of garland lay.
“I’ll have you know,” he called after her as he fumbled with the straps of the skates, “I am quite quick.”
“That remains to be seen,” Creda muttered as she collected the leather footstool. “For your sake, I hope you are, or you shan’t catch her.”
Catch her?
Those two words suggested he was in pursuit of the lady in question. Which, in a way, given he’d received a list with his marching orders from the Duchess of Sutton, was not far from the mark.
And yet…
Heath peeked through the glass panels alongside the doorway and caught sight of her rapidly retreating figure.
If he were at least being honest with himself, he’d admit that he was, and rather had been, enjoying these moments with her.
Including their kiss.
Nay, especially that kiss.
He strangled on his swallow.
Good God…
“I should hope you’re as impressively swift as you claim,” Creda drawled. “Because you’re going to need that speed to catch the lady.”
I do not recall you being this swift of foot.
He went absolutely still.
Why… why… the minx had issued him a challenge. By God, he’d been so fixed on the memory of her mouth on his and the unexpectedness of that kiss that he’d failed to realize precisely what she’d done: She’d set out to prove she could outpace him.
Skates in hand, Heath sprinted to the door and rushed out.
“Who would have imagined? He is faster than I would—”
He slammed the door shut behind him, drowning out the rest of the backhanded compliment from his disloyal niece.
Squinting, he did a sweep of the snow-covered grounds. The chit couldn’t have put too much distance between them. Why, she was hampered by cumbersome skirts.
A memory traipsed in of a long-ago house party her parents had hosted.
“Emilia Abernathy Aberdeen, what in the Lord’s creation are you wearing…?”
“Why, pants, Papa. Skirts are far too cumbersome. If you’re so adamant I wear them, you should don them yourself and see how bothersome they are.”
A smile ghosted his lips and then withered as an altogether different image flitted forward, a forbidden one fabricated by his own roguish inclinations: Emilia, a woman grown, in tight-fitting trousers that hugged her buttocks and hips and those long legs that went on forever.
Stop.
Heath gave his head a firm shake and exhaled slowly. The sough of his breath stirred a small puff of white in the cool air. He wasn’t a rogue like the other Whitworth brother. He was nothing if not responsible. Dutiful. In fact, it was those two qualities that saw him dancing attendance upon the impish Lady Emilia.
Therefore, his being out here in the early morn hours, in the freezing winter weather, was simply a product of those obligations.
With that reminder clearing his previously improper—and guilty—musings, he resumed his search.
And then he spied her. She was a fading mark on the horizon. “Goodness, even in skirts, you are still as quick as ever,” he muttered into the quiet.
Suddenly, Emilia stopped and turned, the hem of her crimson cloak dancing in the wind.
She shot a hand up and waved at him wildly, startling a laugh from him. Why, she had issued him a challenge. One he was already on his way to losing. “The minx,” he whispered without inflection, and then, he bounded down the steps two at a time. The moment his boots touched the graveled drive, Heath took off sprinting.
His boots churned up rock and snow that was ground into the path, and as he raced to catch up with Emilia, the wind caught and carried her laughter on the breeze.
Heath grinned and increased his strides. The cold filled his lungs, invigorating and pure.
When was the last time he’d raced about in the snow? Or… anywhere, for that matter? Nay, he’d become increasingly fixed on the expectations his family and the world had of him as the ducal heir. This, running carefree through the grounds of Everleigh, was magical. Exhilarating. Joy—
“Oomph.” Sputtering around a mouthful of snow, Heath skidded to a stop. His eyes blurred from the remnants of that missile, and he wiped his face. Surely the chit hadn’t just—
There was a slight hiss.
Thwack.
His hat went flying from his head.
Recoiling, he glanced around and then down at his hat sitting, top up, on the snow. Why… why, she’d hit him a second time. He didn’t know whether to be impressed or affronted at having been caught off guard by her twice now.
“You are out of practice with snowballs, Lord Heath!” Her entirely too amused voice sounded from around the trunk of one of his parents’ beloved pines.
Heath dusted remnants from where her missile had exploded snow upon his shoulder. “I’ll have you know, ducal heirs do not go about partaking in snowball fights,” he informed her as he dropped to a knee to rescue his upended hat.
Emilia stepped out from behind her hiding place and rested a shoulder against the tree. “Don’t they?” she drawled, so negligent in her repose and so different than the prim and proper ladies of London.
“Certainty not.”
“I trust they are—” She paused. “You are,” she amended, “seeing to far more important ducal-heir matters.”
“Indeed.” Attending to that future role had been something that had fallen to him when he’d been just a boy of ten. From the moment his father had taken him under his wing, he’d kept him there, and Heath had lost out on moments such as these that his brother and late brother had known.
So much time had been lost. Graham… His late brother, Lawrence, who’d died too young.
“What are they?”
She sounded so genuine in her curiosity that he briefly stopped his distracted movements. Heath glanced up.
Emilia drifted closer, her crimson cloak whipping about her ankles. At some point, her bonnet had been knocked back, and a handful of golden curls had fallen about her shoulders. Heath’s breath froze in his lungs. She was… Aphrodite. That goddess of love and beauty.
“Surely if they are so great to enumerate, you must recall at least one of them, Lord Heath,” she teased.
And yet, with her wit and humor, she had the spirit of Thalia.
Emilia drew to a stop five paces away. When the silence continued, the lady tipped her head at a confused little angle.
God, he was rot at discussion. He always had been and always would be. Particularly with Lady Emilia Aberdeen. “There is the continued study of land holdings.”
“Of which yours are vast,” she murmured.
“Indeed. There is also—” Jumping to his feet, Heath launched his snowball, catching Emilia square in the chest, shocking a gasp from her.
The young lady glanced from him to the smattering of snow upon her cloak—her now damp cloak—and then to Heath. By the shock rounding her expressive eyes, he might as well have fired a pistol at her breast. “Why… why… Heath Whitworth. Did you… trick me?”
Grinning, Heath dropped a bow. “And I managed to catch you, as well.”
She cocked her head.
With his index finger and middle one, he mimicked a rapid walking movement. “Caught you. I raced quickly and—”
“I know what it means to be caught,” she said with another toss of those golden curls. A shaft of early morning sunlight caught the edges of those strands and added an ethereal shimmer around her.
His smile froze on his face. She was beauty personified.
Grateful that the cold had already stung his cheeks so that she’d attribute his damned flush to the winter air, Heath scooped up his hat. “I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that battling the same person whose favors you seek hardly seems the wisest course to guarantee your skating lesson.” He knocked the snow-covered article against his thigh.
“No,” she said somberly. “I considered as much.” A slow, teasing grin spread across her face. “But then I weighed both pleasures and could not possibly pass up striking you with a snowball.”
Heath held two fingers aloft. “Two.”
They shared a smile. And a lightness suffused his chest.
It had… never been like this with her. He’d never been like this around her. I wanted to be, though… I wanted to be the manner of man who could have wooed her. While she? She had always been her usual charming, witty, and spirited self.
He, however, had been the man who couldn’t muster two proper sentences to bring her to even the smallest smile.
“This is nice,” she said softly. It was. A pensiveness filled her eyes. “I don’t remember you being…”
Heath waited for her to finish that musing. When she made no attempt to finish the thought, he, a gentleman who prided himself on his restraint, found himself moving closer to her, needing the remainder of her words. “You don’t remember my being…?”
“Like this,” she murmured.
Mayhap had I been, she would have noticed me and not another…
His lips froze in a painful smile. As soon as the traitorous thought slid in, Heath quashed it. He was never, nor never would be, the manner of man who could entrance a lady the way Renaud had managed with Emilia. Heath cleared his throat. “Yes, well, there were—”
“Responsibilities?” she murmured, and there was something so faintly pitying in her voice and in her eyes that he had to briefly look away.
How much of his life had he missed in being the dutiful son? He’d forgotten what it was to have simply enjoyed the simplest of pleasures, such as racing through the snow-covered countryside and throwing snowballs. “Responsibilities,” he echoed.
So much time lost.
The possibility of her, lost… to another. A man who’d known how to smile and laugh and charm. Or, he once had. Renaud was no longer the man he’d been, either. That only intensified the guilt sitting in his belly.
“Come,” Emilia urged. She fetched their skates and handed his over. “You have new responsibilities.”
He blanched and, for one agonizingly endless moment, believed she knew that his mother had ordered him to squire Emilia about during the house party.
Emilia gave him a peculiar look. “Teaching me to skate, Heath.”
Teaching her to skate?
“Unless you’ve changed your mind?” she ventured when he didn’t immediately reply.
“No! Not at all.”
Her smile returned, dimpling her right cheek and glimmering in her eyes. “Shall we, then?” Looping her arm through his, Emilia urged them onward.
As he let her lead him down the path, he felt a kindred connection to Adam, who’d eaten of that forbidden fruit.