Chapter 11
Making decisions is like a beach. I’m no fan of Brighton, but my choices of late aren’t even as solid as the pebbles there.
—Lawrence Sinclair, who wished he were at a beach of any sort instead of trapped in the same house as Lady Caroline Lovell
The longcase clock chimed a quarter past. When the last tone faded, all Lawrence could hear was the wind in the eaves and a few small creaks as the town house squatted a little deeper on its foundations for the night.
Then Lovell House went as silent as a churchyard.
She’s not coming.
He sighed. There was no reason she should. He’d far overstepped himself. He really ought to take his leave in the morning and seek lodgings elsewhere. It had been beyond generous for Bredon to host him as long as he had. No matter what Bredon thought he owed him, the last thing Lawrence wanted was to wear out his welcome.
Besides, even while in residence at Lovell House, he’d not been allowed much time with Caroline. Passing her in the hallway or seeing her at the far end of the long dining table was becoming increasingly painful. The more time he spent with Bredon’s family, the more aware he was of his own shortcomings. He had no polish, no great wit. He may have been wellborn, but his prospects were murky at best. Especially since he’d heard his uncle was still hale and hearty and in London seeking a young wife. He could so easily be displaced by an infant; he couldn’t count on an heritance of any kind. He had nothing to offer a woman like Lady Caroline.
Lawrence felt a bit like Moses on the wrong side of the Jordan. He could see the Promised Land, but he could not cross over.
He still hoped she’d come.
After another quarter hour, he took his candle in hand and rose to trudge back down to his chamber. But as he neared the stairwell, light from another candle sent a shaft of brightness up to the ballroom. There came a soft tread on the steps and, against all expectation, Caroline appeared.
“You came,” he said, his voice a scant whisper. His chest constricted strangely.
“Yes, well…” She seemed to have trouble meeting his gaze. “I expected you would have given up by now and gone on to bed.”
“So you only came because you didn’t think I’d be here?”
“No, I only thought you might be…I mean, I hoped you hadn’t…” She set down her candle on a side table and moved into the center of the room. Lawrence followed suit. “That is to say, I was sure you would still be here, if you were serious.”
“I’m nothing if not serious.”
“About learning to waltz, I mean,” she added hastily.
“Of course.” She seemed a bit flustered. He didn’t wish to cause her discomfort. Not for worlds. But the fact that his presence shook her usual poise did his heart good for some odd reason. “What else might I be serious about besides waltzing at present?”
“Indeed, Lord Frampton’s upcoming ball is the only reason we’re both here.” She crossed her arms over her chest, as if daring him to dispute the matter. But from her tone, Lawrence guessed she was trying to convince herself and wasn’t having much success. “If you asked me to join you because you were serious about anything else, meeting like this would be…”
“Improper?” he supplied. Helpfully, he thought.
“Quite.” She nodded with vigor. “Above all else, we must not be improper.”
“No, we won’t be,” he promised as he moved closer to her. She dropped her arms, but now her hands fiddled nervously with the diaphanous sides of her gown. “Being improper would be exceedingly bad form.”
“We wouldn’t want that.” She stopped fiddling and finally met his gaze.
“No.” He stepped closer, near enough that he heard a little hitch in her breathing. “We certainly…” Closer. “Wouldn’t…” She tipped up her chin and her lips parted. “Want…” Her sweet breath feathered across his lips.
Her mouth was so near he could almost taste it. If he bent only a little, he’d close the distance between them. In all his life, he’d never seen anything as fine as Caroline Lovell. Just being near her made him feel stronger. And weaker. He didn’t pretend to understand the paradox. He only knew it was so.
If he kissed her, everything would change. They could never go back to a time when they hadn’t shared a single breath. He’d have a part of her always. If he could kiss Lady Caroline Lovell just once, his time on earth would not have been wasted.
Was it his imagination or did she raise herself up on tiptoe just a bit?
Then, in the exact instant when he’d screwed his courage to take her mouth, she turned away and broke the spell.
“If we’re going to do this, we must be quick about it,” Caroline said, suddenly all business. “First, we must make a good frame.”
Lawrence felt as if he’d been kicked in the gut.
By a draft horse.
He and Lady Caroline had teetered on the edge of something together, but she seemed determined to pretend that moment hadn’t happened.
Perhaps for her it hadn’t.
He drew a deep breath and spread his arms. “Once again, I am yours to command. I believe that’s what you said all women want to hear, is it not?”
“Somehow I doubt you’d take my commands well.”
He wanted to say, Ask me to climb to the top of St. Paul’s. Bid me swim the Thames all the way to the sea. Shall I run from here to Snowdon and back for you, my lady? Just say the word.
Instead, he said, “I shall obey your wishes.” Then he assumed the first dance position she’d taught him earlier that evening.
He wished he had the courage to give voice to his feelings. No one who’d served with Lawrence would ever name him cravenhearted. He was always first in, last out of any action. But when it came to Caroline Lovell, he bore a white feather.
If he could find the words to express what he felt and release them to her hearing, it would amount to a declaration. A declaration she was certain to stomp on.
Then it would be over.
Hope wasn’t much, but it was all he had. As long as he kept everything bottled up, he could still hope.
“What do you wish me to do?” he asked.
Her brows tented in distress. “What if I ask you to leave Lovell House and never return?”
He had been gut-kicked again, and this time the kicking horse had brought along a friend. “Have I offended you?”
“No,” she said with a sigh. “But you’ve put me at risk of public censure if we are found alone together. You made me toss out everything I’ve been taught. You cut up my peace so dreadfully that I couldn’t sleep. You should never have demanded I meet you like this.”
“It was hardly a demand.” Besides, she’d made the decision to come. He’d only asked. She could have ignored his request.
“It was a dare, at the least.” Even in the low light of the candles, her eyes flashed.
“And you can’t resist a dare.”
“Oh, but you knew that and used my very nature against me,” she accused. “How could I rest, knowing you would think me a coward if I stayed away?”
“I’d never think you a coward. In fact, I doubt you fear anything.”
“I’m not afraid of you, at least,” she said with a firm nod. Then her certainty seemed to crumble. “Besides, even if I was, didn’t you tell me that fear has nothing to do with cowardice?”
“I did.” They may not have had many conversations, but she seemed to remember a good deal of what he’d said. “I could never work against you, and I am sorry to have disturbed your peace. My intentions toward you are only good.”
Well, most of them.
“There is a place, they say, which is paved with good intentions,” she said, pacing like a caged lynx, “but I’ve a feeling neither of us wish to summer there.”
Actually, Lawrence already felt as if he had one foot in hell. He couldn’t bear to be without this woman. And she couldn’t seem to bear to be with him.
“My apologies. Because you wish it, I shall quit Lovell House immediately.” He crossed the hardwood to retrieve his candle.
“No, wait.”
He turned back to her.
“I…I didn’t ask you to leave,” she said, even more perturbed now. “I only said what if I asked you to.”
He shook his head. “When you told me you were changeable as a weathercock, you certainly didn’t lie. I’m out of my depth, Caroline. Which is it to be? Do I stay or go?”
“I want you to…” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Don’t go.”
“Why?”
Bredon had warned him that women change their minds as often as their frocks, but Lawrence had thought he was exaggerating. He’d never doubt his friend again.
“Because I…because we haven’t…” She lifted her hands and shrugged, as if she, too, were perplexed by her own behavior. “Because you don’t know how to waltz yet.”
“So far, my teacher seems less than willing.”
“One lesson, then, as long as we’re both awake and here and…” Again, she shrugged and sighed. “This is just so you can make a decent showing at Lord Frampton’s, mind.”
“Of course, my lady.” He wouldn’t dream of calling her Caroline now. She might take offense at that little intimacy, even though she’d allowed it before. “I thank you.”
“And so should the toes of your future partners,” she said, smiling for the first time since she’d joined him in the dim ballroom.
He grinned back at her. She might be the most vexing woman in the world, but he wouldn’t change places with another soul on earth. It was enough simply to be in the same room with her. “How shall we begin?”
“Raise your left arm like so.”
He mirrored her movement and slowly, she slipped her right hand into his left one. It was small and icy. He wished he could hold it close to his heart to warm it, but after narrowly escaping eviction, he decided his best course of action was to take no action that wasn’t expressly dictated.
“Our joined hands complete one side of the frame. Now I rest my left hand on your shoulder,” she said, as if captioning her motions somehow took the intimacy away from them.
“Where would you like my right hand?”
* * * *
Where indeed? Just holding his left hand made her insides quiver like a bowl of aspic. She’d waltzed with any number of men before, but never had just standing close to one made her breath hitch so. “Rest your hand gently at my waist.”
Her column gown didn’t have a clearly defined waist, so he made a guess. Unhurriedly, as if she were a mare who might spook at a sudden movement, he put his hand at the narrowest point of her body below her ribs.
“You’re slenderer than I realized,” he said softly.
“That is not an appropriate thing to say to your dance partner.” Her cheeks heated. “But as long as we’re saying inappropriate things, your hands are bigger than I thought as well.”
Fashion dictated that a man’s hands and feet be small and sensitive. A rough callus rested at the base of each of Lawrence’s thick fingers. With hands like these, Lawrence might well pass for a dock worker in fancy dress.
“Is that a problem?” he asked.
“Not at all.” Surprisingly, she rather liked the roughness. He’d worked with those hands. Fought with them. Lawrence was strength under tight control. “Once we begin, you will use your hands as points of contact to direct where we go, leading with your left hand and with a slight pressure from the right.”
He squeezed her waist a bit.
“Yes, that will do to communicate your lead.”
He pulled her closer until there wasn’t a finger’s width between them. “Like that?”
“Not exactly.” She took a half step back. “We must keep some distance between us. Otherwise, our feet may become hopelessly entangled and we’ll land on the floor together.”
“And that would be bad, I take it.”
“Very bad.”
“Actually,” he said with a grin, “I can think of far worse fates than having you tumble on top of me.”
“Mr. Sinclair!” She pulled out of his embrace.
“Lawrence,” he corrected evenly. “And I shall call you Caroline, because either we are friends or we’re not. I grow weary of this back and forth. Friends should be able to say what’s on their minds without fear of causing offense.”
“Ordinarily I’d agree.” She had been terrible to him actually, telling him to go one moment and ordering him to stay the next, but the man irritated her so. She’d never been so unsettled. “Friends should be able to share their thoughts, but what if what’s on your mind is…well, if it’s not really acceptable…”
“Then friends should be able to talk about that, too. But may I point out that you were the one who first raised the idea of our being tangled up on the floor together?”
“Oh, pish!” He was right. She had said something like that, without meaning anything untoward by it of course. And maybe he was right about the other thing, too. Friends should be able to talk about anything.
But the problem was, she didn’t feel particularly friendly toward him. She wasn’t sure how to name it, but she was certain this tingly, shivery sensation rolling around inside her had nothing to do with friendship.
He raised his arms in the approximation of a waltz hold. “Shall we continue the lesson?”
It was either that or she’d have to explain why she was being so touchy. She couldn’t tell him he made a mess of her insides, so she stepped into his arms and began instructing him in the standard box step.
“Eyes up,” she ordered. “Look at me, not your feet.”
“With pleasure.”
There was that smile of his again. She’d do anything for him if only he kept smiling at her. Caroline was grateful for the dimness of the candlelight. Based on the way her cheeks heated, she was blushing like a schoolgirl in the throes of her first crush.
She remembered what that was like. When she was a young girl, long before she’d decided to forsake convention and claim a life of adventure for herself, she’d had a bit of a crush on Rowley. She’d mooned over him during cricket matches. She frequently consented to play the part of damsel in distress so Rowley and her brothers could rescue her from an invisible dragon who’d trapped her in the haymow. Even then, she wasn’t wild about the idea of needing rescue, but it allowed her to play with Rowley. Her diary from those days had several pages worth of Lady Rowley, Lady Rowley, Lady Rowley scribbled across them. Or, if she were feeling particularly syrupy about Oliver on a given day, Caroline Rowley might border her diary’s pages, swimming in a sea of hearts and flowers.
But that kind of calf-love wasn’t at all what she was feeling now. Along with frustration and jumbled-up confusion, a lump of something like tenderness glowed inside her.
For Lawrence Sinclair, of all people.
She didn’t understand it, but that didn’t make it less true. And it was a thing to be shunned with all her might or her plans for an adventurous life might well be upended for good.
“We’ve been stuck in this pattern for some time now,” Lawrence said. “Is this all there is to a waltz?”
“No, of course not. This is just the basic step, which you seem to have more or less acquired.”
“More or less, eh? Careful. Such praise will ruin me.”
She swatted his shoulder. “You’re doing well enough. Take the compliment. Now, you may take me around the room by pivoting a bit on the balls of your feet with each step. Ah! Just so.”
Lawrence started humming the Sussex waltz as they circled the room.
“How do you know that tune if you’ve never attended a ball?”
“When I was in the military, I often volunteered for guard duty outside the dancing hall.”
“As a way to avoid dancing itself,” she surmised.
“Correct. In any case, I could not avoid hearing the music. This tune stuck in my mind.”
It was just enough of a melody in three-quarter time to keep them together. Caroline showed him how to lead her in underarm turns and in the promenade hold that had them traveling around the room side by side. Lawrence even managed to remember the up-up-down dipping motion that helped them move in perfect harmony.
Her dance lesson was a success, but her real reason for venturing up to the dark ballroom alone had wilted along the side of the room like a sad wallflower. She was no closer to learning Lawrence’s tragedy, and thereby knowing him better, than she had been when she arrived. He was dancing well enough now that a little conversation ought not to disrupt his steps.
“Did you lose many friends in the service?” she ventured, assuming that would be a natural point of tragedy.
“Yes.”
Taciturn as always. Well, what else were you expecting? “And it affected you deeply?”
“How could it not?”
It was like trying to wring blood from a turnip. “Do you wish to talk about it?”
“Not particularly. It doesn’t make pretty hearing.” He began to hum a little louder.
“Because I’m a woman, you think I can’t hear about such things?”
“No, because you’re a human being with a sense of decency. Whatever else war is, it is rarely decent. What I did during my time in the military was for my king and country, and more particularly for the soldier fighting by my side. I’ve made my peace with it and have no need to dredge it up again.” He led her through a couple of underarm turns in fairly quick succession, leaving her more than a little dizzy.
“Is it usual to pose such personal questions to your dance partner during a waltz?” he asked.
“No,” she admitted. “In truth, it’s not usual to ask such personal questions any time, but I wanted to understand you better.”
“There’s not much to understand. I’m a simple man, Caroline.”
“I doubt that.” Even though they continued to dip around the room, the ballroom faded a bit from her peripheral vision. All she could see was the man before her. “I’ve rarely met anyone as difficult to know as you.”
“And you want to know me?”
“I do.” Then, because that smacked far too much of a declaration of affection, she hastily added, “As…as a friend, of course.”
“Then ask something else and I shall try to answer.”
Because his military service didn’t seem to qualify as a tragedy, Caroline was forced to look elsewhere. That left only his family.
“Why have you not gone home since you returned from the Continent?”
“Honestly?”
“There’s no point to the question otherwise.”
“Because you are in London,” he said, not caring that he seemed to be making a declaration. “Since I first met you, I can’t bear the thought of being where you are not.”
The lump of tenderness inside her glowed even more warmly, but she tamped it down. “That’s too bold for a friend.”
His dark eyes said they were much more. Their waltz slowed to a stop, but they kept hold of each other, her fingers laced with his and his hand still heavy on her waist. “Perhaps you were mistaken when you called us friends.”
“Perhaps I was.” Silence stretched between them, and she feared if she didn’t fill it soon, something dreadfully serious—she didn’t know what exactly—was about to happen. Something she wouldn’t be able to take back. “To be honest, I’m not sure what I feel about you. You are quite insufferable sometimes.”
“So I’ve been told.” He smiled as he said it, and the smile seemed to take the awful seriousness away.
“I only want to know you better, Lawrence.” She’d asked Mr. Price if Lawrence had posted any letters bound for Ware, but the butler said Mr. Sinclair had failed to write any. It seemed beyond strange that he hadn’t sent word to let his family know he was safely on English soil once again. “So in order to know you, I want to understand why you have not gone to Ware. Not even for a short visit.”
He frowned, an implacable, grim expression. Caroline decided she wouldn’t have wanted to be the French soldier who met him on a field of battle. “I didn’t return to Ware because I wouldn’t be welcome. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
She shook her head. Families weren’t like that. No matter what, she knew with certainty that her parents loved her. Even when she disappointed them by refusing to accept one of the many proposals that came her way, she never doubted they cared about her.
“You must be wrong to be unsure of your reception at Ware Hall.”
“Oh, I am sure,” he said. “And I’m not wrong.”
“Would you…I mean, sometimes it helps me to talk about difficult things. Perhaps if you tell me why your fam—”
“I’m sorry to have kept you from your rest, my lady.” He released her hand and stepped back. “I thank you for teaching me to waltz. It would be inappropriate for me to see you to your chamber, so I shall wait here until you’ve had enough time to reach it on your own. Good night.”
It was a blatant dismissal.
She’d been on the other end of such a rejection countless times. Sometimes, behavior bordering on boorishness had been the only way to rid herself of an unwanted suitor. But no man had ever dared to send her away like this.
None but Lawrence Sinclair.
“Yes, well, try not to tread on anyone’s toes at Lord Frampton’s ball,” she said waspishly. “I shall make certain you have no opportunity to tread on mine.”