Chapter 17
She should break from his gaze. But through some strange, tenebrous force unique to them, it held her rooted in place. Didn’t he understand that Miss Fox’s shrewd, vulpine eyes missed nothing?
Well, he would soon enough, if they began a courtship.
Began? Clearly, they’d begun. And she was here to bear witness to it. Delightful.
She must leave this instant. She couldn’t watch Jake court Miss Fox. It was too much. She stepped backward, making her intention clear. “Miss Fox, it was nice to make your acquaintance, but I have some matters to attend and must bid you fare—”
Jake held out his arm, halting the flow of her words. “Lady Olivia, would you care to stroll with us?”
Her heart beat out a hard thud, and her skin tingled with anticipation. Anticipation of what? With her next heartbeat came the answer. His touch.
She took one halting step forward, then another, drawn in against all will and reason. She placed her hand to hover above his forearm, wild electricity racing between that half inch of air, invisibly connecting them. She inhaled the irked sigh that wanted release and placed her hand down.
Beneath the layers of fabric that lay between them, she knew the naked feel of the arm beneath her palm, its smoothness, its fine dusting of hair, the flex and release of muscle that ran in hardened rivulets up and down its length. She knew what those muscles were capable of. A flush of heat pinpricked her skin, and she shrugged inside her pelisse beneath confining layers of muslin and light wool.
Miss Fox cleared her throat. “Lady Olivia, do you stroll the wilds of the Green Park often?”
“Never.”
“Yet, here you are. I can only imagine what brought you out today”—Miss Fox looked around, presumably searching for Olivia’s companion—“Alone.”
Olivia had the distinct feeling that she was being hunted by Miss Fox. “I was cutting through the park to calculate a distance when a rambunctious pair of wrens distracted me.”
Jake’s face angled left, and his gaze caught hers. “What sort of distance?”
Awareness shot through her, and she was powerless to do anything but tell him the truth. “The distance from St. James’s Square to Queen Street.”
A trio of silent footsteps fell behind them, and she sensed in the quiet that he understood why she’d been calculating that particular distance, the distance from the Duke’s address to the house she was considering purchasing.
Good. It was good for him to understand that all the loose threads of their association would be tied up soon.
Not that it mattered. He was well on his way to a proper wife, and she wished him the best of luck with her. He would need it.
“St. James’s Square, I understand,” Miss Fox cut in like a razor blade. “After all, that is the Duke of Arundel’s address, but what, pray tell, could be on Queen Street?”
“It was just a notion,” Olivia said. She was most definitely being hunted by Miss Fox.
“Speaking of the Duke of Arundel,” Miss Fox began. How Olivia was coming to hate the chit’s tone, as if each word contained a sneer especially for her. “I received an invitation to a ball to be held two days hence at St. James’s Square. Such an impromptu affair in the middle of the Season is creating quite the stir about Town. But, of course, everyone will drop everything for the Duke of Arundel’s ball.”
“I daresay,” Olivia said in the hope that agreement would quash this conversation. Miss Fox would extract no currency for gossip from her.
She risked a quick glance up at Jake, but his features gave nothing away. Likely, he’d never been held prisoner between two ladies politely discussing balls and parks while waging a silent war of wills with each other just below the surface. He had so much to learn about Society.
“Curious,” Miss Fox pressed on. “One can only wonder why the impromptu ball.”
“One will find out two days hence, I suppose.”
An unhurried succession of footsteps passed, and Olivia realized that she’d shut the chit up. She almost felt badly for her. Almost. It was deuced difficult to feel badly for Miss Fox.
It was time for her to bid them farewell and best of luck on their future union. Well, maybe not that last part.
As she opened her mouth to speak, Miss Fox beat her to it. “If you will forgive me, I must see to Miss Markley. It seems the tenacious gooseberry has claimed another victim.”
With that, Miss Fox excused herself and left Olivia alone with Jake.
Jake. Enlivening sensation scattered across her skin at the mere thought of his name. He would ever be Jake to her. And now she was alone with him.
“My solicitors have informed me,” he began, “that you’ve looked at another house since I last—” He stopped himself. “That is, since we last—” Again, he stopped himself.
But it was too late. What they’d been doing the last time they saw each other solidified into a near tangible presence between them. She swallowed and addressed the first part of his sentence. “That is correct.”
“Was it to your liking?” he asked, his voice calm, measured, the fluster of moments ago gone.
For all the world, they appeared to be having a calm and measured conversation. How deceptive appearances could be. “It was serviceable enough,” she said, “but it lacked a specific something.”
His gaze lit upon her for the span of a single second before returning to the path ahead. “Magic.”
How she wished her heart didn’t race at that word, at the velvet in his voice when he spoke it. She needed to find a different subject to occupy them, one that had naught to do with magic. “It appears that your wife hunt is progressing nicely.”
“It does appear so.”
Another silence, charged and stubborn, snapped in the air about them. She should make her excuses and go, but she couldn’t. Nor could she stop herself from saying, “Undoubtedly, Miss Fox is the sort who will make someone a proper, spotless wife.”
“Undoubtedly,” he echoed back at her.
She might have detected a hollow note in that single word. But it might be what she wanted to hear. Was it, though? “Well, I wish you the best of luck.”
Beneath her hand, the muscles of his forearm, muscles hardened by years of sweat and toil, flexed and released, and an unruly frisson of excitement purled up her spine. She liked his forearms very much.
“Luck won’t be involved,” he said. A distance sounded in his voice. A distance that was good for both of them. “Marriage is a contract.”
His words were the splash of cold water her body needed. Perhaps she liked his forearms too much. “What a romantic courtship you and Miss Fox will have,” she replied. “How the ladies will envy her.”
“Any lady I marry will understand that romance has naught to do with my needs in a wife. I need a stepmother for Mina and, by extension, a partner for me.”
“A partner? What a strange way of putting it. Like a business equal?”
A curt nod of his head was his answer.
“That would make you different from any man and wife I ever heard of. But you may have the right of it. Marriage isn’t a romantic enterprise, and yet women keep getting tricked into thinking it so.”
“Tricked?”
“Most definitely tricked. If young women truly understood marriage, they would run as fast as their feet could carry them the instant a man got down on one knee. Marriage changes nothing in a man’s life. But for a woman? It changes everything.”
“And not for the better?”
“Not in my experience of it.”
“And what was your experience of it?”
Strangely, a moment that should have scared her witless and sent her fleeing turned sideways and went soft and intimate. A thrill of joy ribboned through her at the curiosity and concern in his voice, at the very gravity of it. It was a seriousness that spoke to the secret craving she had to give up her secrets. His seriousness told her it was safe to do so.
Possibility budding within her, she glanced over her shoulder to see if there was any chance Miss Fox would return. All she saw was an empty path behind them. Miss Fox and her chaperone had quietly taken themselves away. Mayhap that wasn’t the most auspicious start to Jake’s courtship with the lady, but it wasn’t Olivia’s concern, now or ever.
It was safe. That was her only thought. It was safe to tell him. He wasn’t a suitor to her, not really a friend either, but he was safe. She could tell this man anything.
Even the truth about her marriage.
She inhaled, pulling air deep inside her lungs, and allowed it to expand and buoy her into speaking words she’d never spoken aloud to anyone, not even Mariana. On the release, she said, “Shall I tell you how marriage is for a woman?” Her words sailed forth on a cool, blithe breeze, providing the distance she needed to speak them.
“I wish you would,” he said, his words anything but cool and blithe.
“Well, Lord St. Alban,” she began, bright, chirpy, and false, the sort of façade she needed to hide behind if she was to tell him. “The newly wed couple steps out of St. Paul’s on a bright and sunny day, a future of domestic bliss stretching before the optimistic bride. At last, she has everything she ever desired: a handsome husband, her own household, her own curricle, everything Society told her she ever wanted. She’s never felt so happy.”
“You speak of the husband as if he’s an object of the same value as the curricle.”
“That is, indeed, how the average Society wife views her husband.”
“And is that who we’re speaking of? The average Society wife?”
“Who else would we be speaking of?”
Her question was met with silence, stubborn and unconvinced.
“A week later,” she continued, “she wakes to find herself in bed, alone, her husband off to sport his newest horse on Rotten Row. She might feel a bit hurt that he didn’t include her, but she has plenty to fulfill her. Remember, she is the mistress of her own household, even if it is technically part of a duke’s household and doesn’t much involve her. And she has social calls to make, even if she has begun to find them endless exercises in tedium. And, lest we forget, she has the shiny, new curricle. She won’t allow herself to consider that she might be the B word.” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Bored.”
“And why can’t she be honest with herself?”
“Because she might search for the root of her boredom, and that wouldn’t do at all. She’s entirely too young and the marriage entirely too new for such notions, so she tucks them away. It’s only when her husband begins excusing himself after dinner to spend the odd evening out with his friends that the notion pokes up its nasty head again. The odd evening soon becomes every evening, and she must admit that she’s not only bored, but lonely, too.”
“And this wife can’t tell her husband how she feels?”
“By the time she’s able to put her feelings into words, it’s too late, the gap between her and her husband, too wide. You see, by now the rumors have started.”
“Rumors?”
“Of his gaming, his horses, his”—Again, her voice lowered to a whisper—“mistress.”
Muscles twitched beneath her palm, but Jake’s features remained otherwise impassive. She wouldn’t have even known of his reaction was she not touching him.
“That is when she allows it to hit her: hers is nothing more or less than a Society marriage. Her husband is no different from the men of his set, and she is no different from the women of hers. Their extraordinary love has been perfectly ordinary all along.”
“Betrayed by an ideal.”
“Indeed, my lord,” she chirped on the bright note that rang more false to her ears with each word she spoke. Yet she couldn’t seem to plug the spring. It would flow until its reserves ran dry. “She’s never felt so betrayed. By an ideal. By her husband. By Society. She realizes that she’s been tricked into this life, that Society trapped her with a lie, but such is the life of every other wife. She swallows the bitterness and gets on with her life.
“Then, one day, not half a year into their marriage, her husband tells her that he’s bought a commission in the army to fight the French scourge in Europe. He races off to the Continent to involve himself in war and glory, and she never sees or hears from him again. Six months later, she’s informed of his death.”
“This hypothetical husband,” Jake interrupted, “never met his daughter?”
“Never. The wife is six months along when she receives the news.” She hesitated, certain her tale had gotten away from her. Yet she needed to see it through to the end. “You must understand that her grief for her husband is genuine. She hasn’t forgotten how handsome and charming he was. But after the initial wave of grief subsides, an unexpected and shameful feeling takes its place. Can you guess what it is?”
Lips pressed in a straight, silent line, Jake continued guiding them along the path dotted with puddles wide and deep enough to be a nuisance.
“Freedom. For the first time in her life, she feels free. The future stretching before her is no longer dull and lonely. It is bright and golden with the opportunity to set forth on a life entirely of her own choosing. Yet the shame stays with her for this future isn’t possible without Per—” She corrected herself mid-word. “Her husband’s death. So, she locks it away. All Society sees is a grieving widow with a young daughter. If the widow is a bit eccentric with her growing involvement in the arts, Society tolerates it. She is, after all, one of them.”
“A merry widow, it seems,” Jake inserted drily.
“Ten years later,” Olivia continued, “the unthinkable happens: the husband rises from the dead, and all the wife can feel is the walls closing in on her. An alive husband means the end of her freedom. It means a return to her dull and lonely future. It means a return to being a wife. She vows then and there that she will never be wife to any man again. She petitions the House of Lords to set her marriage aside and prevails thanks to the combined power of her noble families and the acquiescence of a Lazarus husband who must have reasons of his own for acceding to her request. To be sure, her reputation doesn’t emerge unscathed, but she cares not. What’s the point of a spotless reputation when freedom is within reach? What cost is too high?” She took a deep breath. “And that is the story of a marriage from a wife’s point of view.”
She tried to force a carefree laugh, but it lacked all substance and emerged hollow. She’d never felt more exposed in her life. Beside her, Jake planted his feet and brought their progress to a halt. His hand at her elbow, he pulled her around to face him, an unspoken demand pulsing between them. She wasn’t sure how she could meet his eye. Somehow, when they’d been walking side by side, her story had felt removed from her because she hadn’t been looking at him. But now she must, even as her courage from moments ago abandoned her.
Calloused fingertips touched beneath her chin and tugged, angling her face up, slowly, by increments, even as her eyes remained lowered, her lashes a soft brush against her cheeks. “Olivia,” he murmured, his voice a low, resonant rumble that penetrated through skin and bone to touch the very core of her.
Her gaze lifted, and the breath caught in her chest at what she saw in his eyes. Ferocity . . . Protectiveness . . . The same look he’d directed at the ton when he all but dared them to speak a word crosswise about his daughter. Except now it was protective of her.
“Not every marriage has to be that way.”
She inhaled a tiny sip of air and composed herself long enough to say, “How would you know? You’ve never been married or even engaged, I daresay.”
“I was engaged once.”
“Oh?” she breathed out, her heart a hammer in her chest.
“To Mina’s mother.”
Olivia’s mouth opened and closed. She’d gone speechless.
“Does that shock you?”
She shook her head for no words seemed to be coming to save her from the truth: she’d believed the gossip. She’d believed Mina the product of a lord’s tawdry liaison with a servant. She hadn’t even questioned it.
But for Jake to have been engaged to Mina’s mother, there was a different story, one less sordid, one more honorable, one in keeping with the man she’d come to know. She should feel ashamed, but she couldn’t. A curious and ineffable joy sprang up from the pit of her belly and shimmered through her veins. High-born or low-born, Jake had loved Mina’s mother.
Why did it matter to her? It confirmed what she’d felt about this man from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him. He wasn’t the sort of man who let a woman fall.
It mattered. Too much.
“No wife of mine will ever be subject to such a marriage.”
“Of course,” she began, protesting his words because she must, “you don’t believe so now, but—”
“Never.”
She believed him. And, oh, how she shouldn’t. It occurred to her that she might be lost, that she just might be in lo—
“Here you are!” a sharp voice sliced through the air some distance away.
He blinked, then she blinked, and they each took a step back, snapping out of the trance that had overtaken them. When had their bodies drawn so close?
In unison, they turned to face a rapidly approaching Miss Fox. “I had a devil of a time finding you. You do realize that you’ve strayed off the main path, don’t you?”
That sounded appropriate. But she would keep the sentiment to herself as it didn’t apply to Miss Fox’s meaning. Olivia tucked her shoulder blades together and drew herself up straight, even as awareness of him at her side pulsed through her with every beat of her heart.
A winded Miss Fox drew to a stop a few feet away. “The rabid gooseberry performed quite a number on the posterior area of Miss Markley’s dress, and she had to return directly home in my carriage.”
Jake cleared his throat. “Seems the most prudent course.”
“And as we weren’t finished with our stroll,” Miss Fox continued, “I decided to come back. You two are such delightful and fascinating company.”
Olivia’s head canted to the side. What a curious person Miss Fox was.
“As to my lack of a chaperone,” Miss Fox went on like it was of the slightest concern to her audience, “since we have you here, Lady Olivia, you can play the part.”
Olivia nearly started out of her boots. Chaperone to Jake’s courtship of another woman? Not in an eternity of years.
“Lady Olivia,” Jake cut in, “won’t be accompanying us in that capacity.”
It was all Olivia could do to suppress the sigh of relief that wanted release. Really, though, the cheek of Miss Fox. “Lord St. Alban is correct. I have a round of calls that I must attend, if you will excuse me.”
She stepped away, and Miss Fox said, “But, Lady Olivia, it is too early in the day to pay calls.”
Olivia drew up short, flummoxed. It was time to put an end to this farce. Umbrage that had wanted to rise the instant she’d spotted Miss Fox strolling arm in arm with Jake was given its head. “Miss Fox, has it ever occurred to you to mind your own affairs?”
The smug smile froze on the chit’s face, and Olivia felt a mean bit of satisfaction at having hit her mark. She inclined her head, chirped a bright, “Good day,” whirled around, and marched away, her heels a muted crunch on gravel. Several yards down the path, a realization, hard and true and utterly annoying, struck her: she was heading in the wrong direction.
On a deep sigh—would nothing go right today?—she stopped and pivoted. There they stood, observing her like a particularly curious animal at the zoo, Miss Fox’s eyes wide and amused, Jake’s eyebrows drawn together in concern. They looked like a couple. And why shouldn’t they? They were a couple. The thought slid a tiny dagger into her soul. It was wrong that it did, but feelings couldn’t be controlled like actions. Right.
Well, she could do something about herself. She set her feet into motion and focused on a point in the distance well beyond their shoulders. Just as she was about to move past the duo, her eyes darted left and locked onto Jake’s. How still he could be. How serious. How appealing. But the contact was cut when she sailed past and left him behind.
No wife of mine will ever be subject to such a marriage.
Oh, that she didn’t believe him. Such a belief made her feel both warm and wretched. Such a belief allowed the possibility of a different narrative for how marriage could be for a wife.
For Jake’s wife. For Jake’s proper, stainless wife.
It was too late for her to have that sort of marriage. She wasn’t the sort of wife he needed, and she could never be the sort of stepmother his daughter needed.
She strode forward, her pace set at a purposeful clip, and remembered her destination. Queen Street offered a different sort of life, the free life she’d fought so hard to obtain. It would be enough to satisfy her.
It had to be.