Chapter 8
A lady would be wise to welcome the suit of a man with whom she may match wits.
Mrs. Matcher
A Lady’s Guide to a Gentleman’s Heart
Emilia hadn’t known Heath could run so quickly.
Or that he could throw a flawless snowball and perfectly hit his target.
She hadn’t known simply because in the course of her entire life, she’d never once witnessed the always serious little boy shut away in his school rooms partaking in a single activity that could be considered improper.
Until now.
Seated on the trunk of a fallen oak, Emilia peeked over at Heath, who’d taken up a spot directly opposite her. There could be no doubting his intentions for keeping that space between them.
It was not his usual aloofness toward her, however, that commanded her stare, but rather, the masterful way in which he strapped on his skates. His fingers flew with a dizzying rapidity as he tightened and fastened each of the three leather straps.
Sitting here, staring on unobserved as she admired his effortless skill, Emilia found the whole experience rather… humbling.
She didn’t like not knowing how to do something. Those failings felt far greater for what they represented—a woman who’d been far less bold and defiant than she’d credited and who along the way had ceded more control to the expectations Society had of her.
I can do this… I can certainly don and fasten a pair of skates…
After all, how… Heath made it appear so simple.
Heath finished strapping the top latch and looked up.
Their gazes collided.
A crooked half-grin tipped the corners of his lips, so boyish, endearing, and unexpected that Emilia froze, wholly ensnared and unable to look away.
Heath stood, made impossibly taller by the blades he now expertly balanced upon. He joined her at the felled tree. “There is no harm in asking for help, Emilia,” he said simply as he dropped to a knee beside her.
“Not if you are a ducal heir,” she explained as he reached for one of the skates he’d fetched for her. “Where women are concerned, however, the expectation is that one will falter and that one will require help.” More specifically, a gentleman’s help. Because the whole world, her parents included, believed women to be inferior to their male counterparts. “It is therefore a paradoxical situation where to gain a skill a lady must cede to the world her inability to do something, which only feeds societal assumptions where young ladies are concerned, thereby perpetuating a myth that all women are unskilled in certain sets,” Emilia concluded, breathless from her explanation.
Heath paused in the middle of stretching the leather fastenings. “Hmm,” he murmured, his head bent once more as he devoted himself to his task.
Hmm? Emilia frowned. Just what precisely did he mean with that noncommittal hmm? “What?” she asked reluctantly, and he glanced up.
“Scientia est potentia.”
He should speak Latin with a fluent perfection.
“Knowledge is power,” she murmured. At the surprise lighting his eyes, she felt her cheeks warm.
“Precisely.” Heath tapped the corner of his temple. “Knowledge is power.”
“Pretty quotes do not diminish what the world is truly like.” Harshly limiting for women and even more so for spinsters who’d been jilted as young, once brightly optimistic debutantes. “The fact remains, women are not allowed to falter, whereas men are forgiven far greater weaknesses and transgressions.” She was unable to keep the bitterness from creeping into her voice. Why, they could even break a formal betrothal, and the whole world wondered what the bride-to-be had done to merit that disgrace. “Admitting one’s lack of knowledge only further feeds the low opinions the world has.”
“But humbling oneself in the search for new information and skills is only temporary. The knowledge is then learned and used and in turn transferred to the world around us, and that shatters any stereotypes you speak of, rather than pride in silence.”
Unnerved, Emilia gave silent thanks when Heath returned his attentions to the skate in his hand. Over the years, her sense of pride had shaped how she presented herself to the world. She’d not wanted anyone—not her parents, not her brother, nor her friends, nor Society on the whole—to see the same empty-headed girl prone to committing grand mistakes as she’d done with Renaud. Heath now painted that deliberate decision on her part in a light she’d not before considered. There was an unswerving truth to his quietly spoken words. Words that wound through her, powerful for their accuracy and with a depth she’d not allowed herself to consider.
“I believe this should fit,” Heath said as he lifted his head. He reached down and then stopped. He reached again.
When his fingers hovered awkwardly in the air, Emilia bent and searched the ground for the source of his hesitancy. “What is it?”
“Your foot,” he blurted.
Her foot…? As she lifted her boot and inspected the reason for his uncertainty, her frown deepened. Granted, being taller than most women and many men, she knew her feet were slightly larger, but she’d never taken Heath Whitworth for one who’d so indelicately point out that detail. “What is wrong with my foot?”
His cheeks went red. “Nothing,” he said quickly. “I’m certain it is an entirely lovely foot.”
It was a perfectly rote, gentlemanly deliverance.
“Oh?” she drawled. “And just what makes you so certain?”
Heath coughed. “Uh… That is… What I was attempting to say”—good, the miserable bounder should be discomfited—“is… is… I have to touch you,” he said hoarsely.
Of their own volition, Emilia’s eyebrows shot up.
He cursed, and her brows crept up another fraction at the impressively colorful invective from his always proper lips. “What I am saying is… That is… I need to handle your foot.” As his words rolled together, he gesticulated wildly with her skate. “Or rather, I require your foot”—Emilia angled away to avoid an accident run-in with the blade—“to put your skate on. May I have permission to touch you?”
Emilia grinned widely. “I must confess that is a rather spectacularly surprising request, given you ran the other way when I kissed you.”
“I wasn’t running away from your kiss,” he said, gesturing wildly with the skate again.
“You were not necessarily running toward it, either,” she said dryly, enjoying herself more than was appropriate.
The skate slipped from Heath’s fingers and went sailing over his shoulder. He recoiled, a response she’d wager her smallest left finger was a product of her words and not having launched her skate a good five paces behind him… into a snowdrift. Heath whipped his head around and then faced her again. “Forgive me,” he said gruffly. “May I see your foot for the purpose of putting on your skate?”
There was a faint pleading in his tone and his eyes. Emilia took mercy. “You may.” She rested her right foot on his knee. Heath immediately reached behind himself for the respective skate, and searched around with his fingers. There was nothing else for it, Emilia was going to hell for her wicked humor. “It is somewhere behind you,” she whispered.
Heath blinked, and she pointed helpfully at the skate.
“That is right.” He muttered another curse, and then, in an impressive display of agility, he leaped up and set out after her skate. As he strode through the copse, she admired the way he walked on two blades, managing an ease most men didn’t muster walking in bare feet.
Following his retreat with her gaze, Emilia chewed at the tip of her glove and used his distraction to study him.
How very different Heath was from Renaud. In fact, the pairing of the young duke and ducal heir had always befuddled her.
Ever the charmer, her former betrothed had had an artificialness to his words. His tongue had been as smooth as a rapier, and “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” he’d wielded it with a skill Byron himself couldn’t even manage. As a young woman, she’d been starry-eyed whenever he’d spoken. As a woman, burned by his betrayal, she found herself preferring that not every word to fall from a man’s lips was perfectly practiced.
She’d come to find she didn’t want pretty compliments and wicked whispers. She wanted… something more. Something genuine. At the time, she hadn’t known as much. At the time, she’d been a girl blinded by tales of debutantes who tamed scoundrels and went on to live happily ever afters. But there had never been anything of any true meaning that they’d shared on any topics.
“Got it,” Heath muttered, his deep baritone snapping into her reverie. Lifting the skate like a trophy collected by a triumphant conqueror, he raced over with an impressive alacrity for one standing atop metal blades. Heath sank back onto a knee. “May I?” he murmured.
“Please.” With none of her earlier self-annoyance over her inability, Emilia rested the heel of her boot on his knee.
He doffed his gloves and set them alongside her on the trunk.
Did she imagine his hesitation, as if he still could not bring himself to touch her?
Likely not. Furthermore, it was just being around her that he’d always struggled with. He was here because his mother ordered it. He’d never come ’round when she was a girl, and then when she made her debut, and no time after that. “It is just a foot, Heath,” she said gently.
“It is your foot,” he said quietly, and then at last, he collected her heel, handling her boot as if he had a prized treasure in hand to be guarded.
It is your foot. What precisely did he mean by that? It was his mother’s goddaughter’s foot? Renaud’s former betrothed’s foot?
“Now,” Heath went on, “the first order of business in donning skates is to lock the heel in place here. Like so.” He guided the slight heel of her boot into place. Emilia stared at his bent head as he helped her through those steps. “Then, you need to be sure the front is perfectly in line and latched. Next comes the fastenings.” A gust of wind stirred the barren trees overhead, and that breeze sent one of Heath’s dark locks falling over his eye.
Emilia should be attending him and his instructions. After all, she’d just lamented her inability to see to the task herself, and yet, God help her, she could focus on nothing more than that lone midnight strand. It added another layer of… realness to this man who, until this particular house party, had been unruffled and infuriatingly meticulous in appearance and how he conducted himself.
“…or else you’ll risk fall—” Heath suddenly picked his head up, and the abrupt cessation of his instructions shattered the moment. He frowned. “Were you paying attention?”
She blinked wildly.
Heath Whitworth would be the first gentleman to call her out.
“Yes? No.” Heat burned her cheeks, and she prayed he’d misconstrue their color as an effect of the cold. “No,” she finally settled for, shaking her head. “I may have been distracted.” Was. I was distracted. Alas, there was one thing good to come from the code by which a gentleman did not press a lady for—
“By what?” he asked, eyeing her like she’d sprung a second head.
By you. I was once again distracted by you, and now this time, the mere texture and color of your hair…
Mayhap that forthrightness she so appreciated was a bit overrated, after all. “My own thoughts,” she settled for and was grateful when he didn’t press her further.
“What were the last instructions you recall?” Heath asked, once again all business.
“You were just mentioning the leather straps.”
“Ah, yes. The first thing to remember about ice skates and wearing them…”
Emilia’s breath caught as Heath handled her ankle. There was a contradictory strength and tenderness to his touch that proved wholly distracting.
“…is that your foot, your boot, and your blades all become one. They have to move in concert. After the boot is snug, it is essential to tighten the straps sufficiently.” He demonstrated the correct degree of tightness. When he finished, he sank back on his haunches. “Now, your turn, my lady,” he said, handing over the other blade.
Emilia accepted the proffered skate. “Do you know that ice skating goes back thousands of years?”
“Indeed?” he asked with such a genuine curiosity underlying his tone that she looked up.
She was so accustomed to her own parents hurrying her tellings along. Her loving brother listened—albeit politely, if not most times patronizingly. Encouraged by the interest in Heath’s gaze, she continued, “The purpose of skating was altogether different.” She fitted the heel of her boot between the metal clamps. “Oh, they would also make the blades of animal bones, but they would use them to traverse the frozen waters while foraging for food. It wasn’t until—”
“The Middle Ages that ice skating became a pastime,” he supplied.
“Yes, precisely.” She’d become so used to being indulged in her discourse that she’d forgotten what it was to converse with someone who had like interests or studies. “How did you—?”
“I came across it while reading—”
They spoke as one: “Descriptio Nobilissimi Civitatis Londiniae.”
“Descriptio Nobilissimi Civitatis Londiniae.” She nodded excitedly. “You’ve read it.”
“I’ve read many things.” Heath swiped his gloves from the trunk and beat them together. “I was the bookish brother.” He offered that almost apologetically.
“Because you had to be? Or because you wished it?” Emilia didn’t know where the question came from. Their being together was predicated on nothing more than his mother’s expectations—and the game Emilia even now played at his expense. So why did she want to know that answer from this man who until now had been largely a mystery to her?
“My brothers, they fell into neat little categories. Sheldon…or Graham, as he prefers to be called, was the troublesome scamp who enjoyed anything athletic. And then there was Lawrence…” Such sadness suffused Heath’s gaze, she wished she could call back her earlier question.
Lawrence. The brother who’d been tragically killed while riding.
“Lawrence was the scholarly one,” he said, his voice as distant as his eyes, and she wanted to erase his sadness and return them to how they’d been speaking about ice skating and mistletoe.
Emilia gathered one of his hands, and despite the cold, despite her glove serving as a barrier between them, the warmth in that slight connection penetrated the fabric. “And what of you, Heath? What manner of boy were you?” I should know those answers. He should be more than this mystery he was.
Heath glanced at their interconnected fingers and then lifted his gaze to hers. “I was an odd combination of both,” he said wistfully. “The world, however, expects a gentleman to be one and not the other, and invariably, they always prefer the charming rogue to a proper gentleman.”
“I don’t.”
It was harder to say who was more stunned by her admission. What was she saying? What had she said? She didn’t want any gentleman—proper, roguish, or otherwise. Did she? Panic knocked away at her chest.
Heath’s mouth moved several times before he formed words, before he found them. “But you once did,” he pointed out quietly.
Emilia bit the inside of her lip. “The young are often foolish and do not realize…”
“Boring is safer?” he asked with a small smile.
The truth slammed into her. He spoke of himself. He spoke as if his own character was somehow defective. “I discovered, Heath, that a lady’s excitement isn’t and shouldn’t be reserved for the feckless cads of the world.” Emilia touched her gaze upon his face, silently acknowledging that she’d been guilty of feeding those opinions. “That one’s honor and strength of character are far greater than any fleeting thrill provided by”—her jaw tightened—“some unfeeling rogue.”
At some point, they’d begun speaking of Connell. And I don’t want to. She didn’t want to spoil her time with Heath by mention of another. Emilia braced for him to rush to the defense of Renaud.
Heath cleared his throat and then neatly steered them back to their previous discourse. “Despite having something in common with Lawrence and Graham, my responsibilities were first and foremost to the title.” He spoke the latter part as if uttering a rote command he’d heard too many times.
Given her own life experience as a duke’s daughter who’d had similar such words drilled into her head, she knew Heath no doubt had heard them, too. What must it have been like, and what must it still be, to have the world view one as nothing more than a future title? After all, Emilia had seen her own brother treated too often in that way, and by their own parents.
“It is odd that I’ve known you my entire life,” she said wistfully, “and what you enjoy or what interests you have, I’ve never known.” She’d never seen him race or skate or swim. Or do anything that the other children had done at those summer house parties. What would it have been like—nay, what would they have been like had they taken part in those same pleasures?
He cleared his throat. “Yes, well, younger sons are permitted greater freedoms and, more important, the freedom of choice,” he finished.
What had started out as a meeting to teach Heath a lesson had taken on new meaning and, God help her, a new understanding. Despite her years of resenting Heath Whitworth and his coldness, she’d found that they had more in common than she could have ever believed.
Horror rooted slowly in her brain as she acknowledged what would have been otherwise unthinkable until this moment: She genuinely liked Heath Whitworth, and God help her, she enjoyed his company.
Unable to meet his eyes, Emilia set to work on her skates.