A Kiss For Midwinter

“When I push you on it, you don’t simper or fluster or make excuses. You defend what you see with a surprising capacity for logic.”

“A surprising capacity,” she said flatly. “My, the compliments you give a woman. Do say on.”

Jonas felt himself flush. He had, in fact, intended it as a compliment. “That came out poorly. I only meant that you see the entire world in glowing terms. The entire world, that is, except for me.”

Miss Charingford didn’t look at him. In fact, Jonas rather thought she was avoiding his eyes altogether. Her fingers flexed. “I don’t see the world in glowing terms, Doctor Grantham. I theorize, and not all my theories are positive.”

“I don’t believe that for one second.”

“Of course you don’t,” she said. “But I allow myself to consider both the good possibilities and the bad. I merely choose to focus on the good, when it’s there to be found.”

“Do you?”

“You, on the other hand, are only aware of the bad.” She looked away.

“I hardly think you know me well enough to judge that,” he replied mildly.

“Well enough. Take me, for instance.”

He would like to, actually. He would have liked to take her very much. But he turned to her and gestured attentively.

“You think that because I am optimistic, I am frivolous and foolish—a veritable lily of the field, unable to toil, spin, or read the London Quarterly when the opportunity arises.” She leaned in and whispered. “Let me tell you a secret. I’m not stupid.”

“Actually, Miss Charingford,” he said, inclining his head toward her, dropping his voice as low as he could. “I already knew that about you. I have never thought you stupid. Or foolish. Or ignorant.” He set his hand atop hers. “Just different.”

Her breath caught and her eyes widened. She glanced down at his fingers—he could feel her knuckles against the palm of his hand.

“You surprise me because you know precisely the same things that I know, and you come to the exact opposite conclusions,” he said. “Every time you open your mouth, I’m convinced that you must be the most naïve girl on the face of the planet. And yet…” He shook his head. “And yet every time you open your mouth, you demonstrate that you are not.”

He hadn’t moved his hand the entire time. She sat, looking up into his eyes, and he felt positively mesmerized. Her eyes were so dark, her skin so fair. Her hair was put up, with little ringlets escaping from the knot to fall at her cheek.

Miss Charingford always dressed well. There was a sleek attention to detail in her toilette that even his fashion-ignorant brain could identify. But today, dressed in a russet gown that highlighted the pink of her cheeks, she looked particularly adorable. Those light freckles dusting across her nose practically begged to be touched.

She pulled her hand from underneath his, balling it into a fist at her side. “That is because, as I said, I see both the good and the bad in everything that comes my way. That way, I am never unprepared.” She shot him a look, one that had him swallowing. “Around you, I need a great deal of preparation.”

“Ah. So you might not wonder about why I have come. But perhaps you’ve theorized about it.”

She pressed her lips together and looked away. “It wouldn’t be polite to say.”

“The one thing we have never been to one another is polite. But never mind, Miss Charingford, I shall fill in the bad and the good. Either I am an unspeakably rude fellow, the kind who vents his ire and spleen on perfectly innocent young ladies, or…” His gaze slid to her profile. She was still looking across the room, refusing to meet his eyes. “Or,” he said softly, “I am madly in love with you. And I have been for this last year.”

His heart seemed to stop in his chest as he spoke. The seconds that should have ticked by froze into an agony of waiting, watching to see if her eyes would widen. If she would turn to him and see the truth writ large on his features. If she would even care.

But she didn’t look at him. He couldn’t read what he saw in her expression—a tightening of her jaw, a tensing of her hand before she pressed it flat against the table.

“Well,” she finally said, “you’re doing it wrong. You are supposed to pick two possibilities—one dreadful and one lovely.” She turned then, deliberately meeting his eyes. There was a spark of merriment in them. “Confess, Doctor Grantham. That’s two dreadful ones.”

It was such a curious sensation, that constricting feeling that settled about him. He felt as his heart were made of green bottle-glass—cold and wavy, distorting the light that passed through it until even the brightest emotion was stripped of all illumination. He pushed the corners of his lips up into a smile.

“Ah, Miss Charingford. You slay me.”

Maybe some hint of the truth leaked out, because the light faded from her eyes, and she peered up at him. “I didn’t hurt your feelings, did I? I meant it—”

“In all good fun,” he said brusquely. “Yes.”

Fastenings, he could imagine his father saying. I wooed your mother with fastenings. Jonas tried to imagine Miss Charingford’s face if he presented her with a horse-shoe nail retrieved from some mucky boulevard. She would probably look at him…approximately as she looked now, as if he’d offered her a bouquet ripe with horse-droppings.

He’d done it to himself. He had a dreadful sense of humor, a too-blunt tongue, and he’d never seen the point in holding either back. But she’d never take him seriously now. He had told her outright that he loved her, and she hadn’t seen it as anything but another volley, another ill-considered jest. The entirety of his feelings had become a joke. She didn’t even see him as a friend, let alone a suitor.

If he were another person entirely, he might burst into flowery speech. If he did, she’d probably laugh at him. Besides, he didn’t believe in pretending to be anyone other than who he was. Even if she swooned at whatever poetic nonsense he managed to spout, she would only be disappointed once they grew comfortable with each other and he went back to making jokes about death and gonorrhea.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” he said, a little more brusquely than he’d intended. “I’m a doctor. We’re not allowed to have feelings; they interfere with our professional judgment. I’m here to make you a proposition.”

“Oh?” Her jaw squared. “On a scale of boring to improper, where does it fall?”