Chapter 16
Elsie’s heart raced, just as it had since he’d stormed the gardens.
Her reaction was not a product of any fear that he might wish her harm, but rather, her body’s inexplicable awareness of him and his presence.
Just as she’d been aware of him watching her from the window while she’d worked.
How to explain it?
Setting her scissors inside her pocket, Elsie climbed to her feet and at last faced him.
“Why?” she asked simply.
He cocked his head.
“Why?”
Of his own volition, he’d come to her.
“Why have you sought me out?” she clarified.
“Is this some manner of game?” he snapped.
“No game.”
He continued as though she hadn’t spoken. “Do you wish to exert control over me in this?”
“I’ve no control over you, William, or anybody. The only person whose actions I am in full command of are my own. And I’ve given you my word I don’t intend to trick you into complying.”
“You did not come,” he gritted out. His jaw throbbed in a telltale sign of the effort that reflexive movement cost him.
She opened and closed her mouth several times. He’d noted her absence. Which also implied that he’d wanted her there.
Color splotched his cheeks. Was he embarrassed by his own admission?
Elsie shook her head slowly. “I don’t…”
William took a step toward her so that only a handbreadth of space divided them. Energy thrummed to life, crackling like the volatile air on the cusp of a lightning storm.
“We had agreed to meet in my chambers, and yet, you’ve been out here tending trees.” There was a husked quality to his tone, which was stripped of the earlier indignation, gentler, warmer, revealing a man who’d come out here not to compel her, but who’d genuinely wished for her company.
Butterflies fluttered low in her belly. Over the years, she’d been treated as an oddity with whom the villagers would not even interact. Aside from her father, people had all sneered at her skills and knowledge. Until this man. “Shrub,” she said softly, forcing herself to say something.
He angled his head. “What?” he whispered. A bemused glimmer sparked in his eyes.
The air stuck somewhere in her chest. This was who he would have been before his wife perished. He would have been a rogue with gentle tones and a lighthearted gaze.
Through her sadness for him and all he’d lost, Elsie forced herself to go on. “Trees are generally closer to twenty feet or taller,” she explained. Shielding her eyes with her palm, she glanced to the flowering dogwood at the center of the gardens. “Trees are also in possession of trunks several inches in diameter. Whereas shrubs, on the other hand?” Elsie pointed to the neglected boxwoods, and William’s gaze followed her gesture to the object in question. “They are smaller. Rounder. And…” Catching the amusement in his eyes, Elsie let her unintended lecture trail off.
A smile ghosted his lips, erasing the last vestiges of tension from his chiseled features. He brought a hand up between them and palmed her cheek. Searing heat spilled from his hand to her skin, and she leaned into that touch. “I cannot determine whether you are attempting to distract me,” he said without inflection, “or whether you’re making light of me.”
Her lashes fluttered. “I-in this instance, I am not.”
His smile deepened, setting off another round of wild fluttering in her belly. “But in other instances, you might?”
Elsie tipped her chin back so she might better meet his gaze. “It would depend upon the circumstances,” she whispered. “One would be wise to avoid speaking in absolutes.” Their breath blended in a union that urged each owner to press their mouths together.
All lightness fled William’s eyes. The sapphire depths darkened. His throat moved. His gaze went to her mouth. “That is not altogether true.”
What was not altogether true? Everything was becoming so very jumbled in her mind. Or it already had been. Even that detail was muddled. “Some things do hold true in all times and in all places, Elsie. Some evidence is empirical and holds that there are some truths because they are logically true.”
Her lips parted. “Euclid,” she breathed. William was versed in the great Greek philosophers. It was shocking. Unexpected. And contrary to everything she’d come to believe about noblemen and academic studies. And it also revealed him as a man learned in the books she’d pored over since girlhood.
He chuckled. “Do you take all nobles for indolent lords, unfamiliar with learning and scientific teachings?” he asked, his breath a blend of coffee and hazelnut.
“I didn’t…I don’t…” Quite simply, she’d never known. Her experience with the nobility had included the wounded gentlemen who’d come to her family’s cottage. During their recovery, they had bypassed the books she’d offered them to read while they convalesced in favor of gossip pages and documents pertaining to their official Crown business. Not a single one of those men, in all those years, had ever demonstrated the slightest interest in any of the sciences.
William flicked the tip of her nose in an endearing gesture that forced her mind to the present. “By that damning silence, it seems you are speaking in absolutes, Elsie.”
“You are correct,” she said softly.
He gave his head a bemused shake. “I’m fairly certain you are the only woman… nay, person in the whole of the world that I know, or will ever know, who is unashamed to claim ownership of one’s mistakes.”
“I’m not too proud to own when I am wrong.”
“And that,” he murmured, working the pad of his thumb in small, soothing, counterclockwise circles that brought her lashes down, “is what marks you as different.”
“Different,” she repeated dumbly. That familiar word, an oft-hurled insult, shattered the splendorous pull. It was all she’d ever been. Elsie stepped away from him and, to give her fingers something to do, urged Bear over with two snaps. The recently disloyal dog remained planted behind William. Suddenly, she fought silly tears… over all of it. Elsie dropped to a knee, claiming a much-needed distance from his stare. Fishing the scissors from her pocket, she resumed cutting the bush.
“You took that as an insult.” There was a frown in his voice.
“Isn’t it?” she asked with a forced casualness she didn’t feel. Her father had insisted the world’s opinion didn’t matter, and yet, what made her different had also isolated her. “It’s hardly ever intended as a compliment.” Her time on this earth had proven that to be an absolute.
“Who has insulted you?” This time, there was such affront in his voice that she paused midcut.
Aside from her father, who had not?
“Your father’s patients,” he muttered.
Patients who’d also happened to be gentlemen who answered to William. She sat back on her heels and shrugged. “My father’s patients. The villagers in the town where I lived.” Elsie resumed shaping the boxwood.
William dropped to a knee beside her, and she stiffened. “You are different.”
She flinched, but did not stop trimming.
He brushed his knuckles along her chin, forcing her to stop, urging her gaze to his.
“I wanted to send you away the moment you set foot in my chambers,” he murmured. “Until you spoke.” A small grin dimpled his cheeks, shattering the hardened mask he’d worn these past days. “You debated my word selection and did so admirably.”
“Because you had opted for the incorrect word,” she whispered, her heart doing a little leap.
William chuckled, the expression of mirth still rough from lack of use, but no longer as jaded as it had been. “I didn’t send you away because you are different. You’ve proved yourself unlike the stodgy doctors and healers to come before you, who alternately preened at their own skill and avoided my gaze. So do not let anyone shame you for being different. Wear it as a mark of your strength and take pride in what sets you apart.”
A fragment of her heart slipped free from its proper place and into the hands of the unlikeliest holder. Elsie’s grip slackened, and the scissors fell from her hand.
William cursed, and still dazed, Elsie glanced unblinkingly at the place where the tool had landed… on his lap.
She gasped. “Blast,” she whispered. Running her fingers over his thigh, she searched for evidence of blood indicating a wound.
“I’m fine.” His voice emerged as garbled.
Only… Elsie bit the inside of her cheek. “You do not sound fine.” She probed the slightest tear in his trousers. “You sound hurt.”
At his silence, she looked up and stilled.
Desire burned within his eyes, touching her like a physical caress.
Elsie yanked her hands back. “Forgive me.” Heat exploded upon her cheeks. What are you doing? She’d been required to come here to try to help William, and now she lusted after him in his gardens like the tavern keeper’s daughter in Bladon. And because it was far easier to focus on the task that had brought her to his household and her role here, Elsie stood and took a step away, composing her features… even as an inner tumult waged within her. “We should begin our treatment.”
His brow creased, William glanced around.
“Here,” Elsie confirmed, settling more easily into the role she’d been born to in her family’s household. Snapping her fingers three times, she cleared Bear from the blanket. With a purposefulness to her every action, Elsie straightened the wrinkled blanket and then moved the gardening tools off to the edges.
When she finished, she paused to assess her makeshift workstation. She gave a pleased nod and then glanced up at William.
She might as well have sprung a second head and was in the process of sprouting a third, for all the horror stamped on his features. “Surely you are not expecting to treat me”—he dropped his voice to a hushed whisper—“here.”
Elsie lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “There is no better place to treat you.” That had just been one more vital lesson handed down by her father in what had become an unofficial schooling in healing and medicine.
William snorted and proceeded to tick off on his fingers. “My chambers. My offices. The library Your chambers. One of ten parlors.”
“Ten parlors?”
“Mayhap thirteen,” he corrected. “Something ’round there.”
She laughed. “There is something cleansing about nature, though.”
With a slightly bemused expression, he did a sweep of the grounds. “London is hardly the epitome of a bucolic landscape.” There was something wistful and something sad, all together, in his tones. Once more, a yearning to know more about this enigmatic gentleman pulled at her.
“You’ve created a sanctuary amid the city,” she said softly. “One that allows one the illusion of something else.” A kestrel landed at the corner of a long-empty fountain and ducked his beak into the smallest of puddles left by a recent rainstorm. Elsie stared at the bird. “And sometimes, the eye and the soul can come to believe the trick that the mind sought to play.” A life of peace and tranquility and calm… when the mind truly knew the harsh reality that was life.
Feeling William’s stare on her, Elsie glanced over. They shared a look, an intimate meeting of two people who’d both suffered and struggled and who also kept those secrets close. And then they both looked out at the kestrel once more.
Until the bird took flight.
“Since I was born, there has been the expectation that I have no vulnerabilities,” William said unexpectedly, a gruffness to his tone.
That admission, from a man who’d snapped and snarled with every attempt she’d made to learn more about him, was one that surely cost him.
Having tended wounded animals, she’d learned the importance of timing in all her exchanges. As such, she let his pronouncement sink around the gardens, not rushing to a response. “Everyone has vulnerabilities, William,” she finally said.
He clasped his hands behind him and stared straight on at the brick wall, as though engaging not Elsie herself but the ivy that grew there in discourse. “Dukes do not. Dukes do have obligations. Dukes have responsibilities and strict expectations which they must adhere to. At no point must one reveal any hint of frailty.”
Sadness tugged at her heart. His was the rote deliverance of one who repeated back a familiar phrase that had been ingrained into him early on. “Dukes are also just men,” she said gently.
A laugh tinged with bitterness tore from him. “Men who are not permitted any weakness.”
How very different his life must have been from her own joyous, carefree childhood. For him, having slid into the role of leader of the Brethren, where feelings were a detriment and emotion was stripped from all interactions, it would have been a natural marriage. “Admitting one is human and flawed is perhaps the greatest mark of one’s strength, William.” Elsie sank onto the blanket. “As I promised before, I’ll not force you. I’d have you come to me when you are ready.”
“And if I’m never ready?” he gritted, the color leeching from his cheeks as soon as he tensed his mouth.
“You will be,” she said with a sureness that came only from truth.
He fell to a knee beside her. “You speak with such certainty, Elsie Allenby,” he said, the statement steeped in his usual faintly mocking edge.
“By your brother’s admission, as well as your own, you do not leave your chambers, which upon consideration, I believe was false anyway. You have not interacted with your staff, stepped foot in the breakfast room or”—she glanced about—“your late wife’s gardens.” Grief contorted his features, her insides wrenching at the agony she’d inadvertently caused him. “And yet, you’ve done all those things in a short while. No, William,” she concluded, sitting back on her haunches, “those are not the actions of a man who truly wishes a life of self-exile.”
“Even if I deserve it?”
His question was so threadbare that, for a moment, Elsie believed she’d imagined it. And then the enormity sank in. He was punishing himself. She’d taken him as an unfeeling bastard. A man who’d left Elsie and her father to their fates and disregarded all the work they’d done for the Crown. This new side of him—a man conflicted, tormented—added a level of humanity to him she’d convinced herself he was incapable of.
Elsie sat and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I do not know all of the past that you keep so carefully concealed, William. I do not know the guilt you carry or the memories that haunt you.” But I want to. For reasons that terrified the everlasting wits out of her. “But the fact that you are riddled with regret means you are not the beast you”—or I—“make yourself out to be.”
All the muscles in his arms jumped. That tautness caused a rippling in the black wool fabric. He passed his penetrating gaze over her face. “What is it about you, Elsie, that makes me want to do whatever you ask?”
Her heart tripped. Foolishly. “You crave human connection, and I’m the only one who has not allowed you to push me away,” she said, for his benefit as much as for hers.
“Very well. I’ll agree to your evaluation.”
“Treatment,” she murmured. This was altogether different. At his capitulation, she should have been flooded with the greatest sense of victory. Instead, she had this unexplainable urge to cry at his lack of protestations to her earlier claim—he believed himself deserving of his pain.
He stared expectantly at her, jerking her into movement.
“Remove your jacket,” she said swiftly.
Without hesitation, his hands went to the gleaming buttons of that expensive article, and he slid them free. He shrugged out of the jacket, and the casual movement sent all the muscles of his chest rippling.
My God. Her mouth went dry. Focus. “I’ll take it,” she said, avoiding his eyes lest he see the wicked thoughts there that no lady ought to possess. She accepted the garment and then folded it until the fabric formed a makeshift pillow. Elsie placed it beside Bear. “If you would lay your head there?” she urged.
Wordlessly, William lowered himself onto the blanket and closed his eyes.
It was an act of absolute trust, when past patients had insisted that her father tend them and had fought him on her presence in their rooms. And yet, William, a duke with strict views of people’s placement and what was proper, ceded his care over to her.
Shifting herself behind him, Elsie framed his cheeks between her hands. She closed her eyes and familiarized herself with the bones and muscles there.
“What are you doing?” he asked curiously.
“Shh,” she urged. Then, using her thumb and forefinger, she applied a light pressure from the start of his brow and worked outward. “Open your mouth, slowly.”
He complied.
There it was. The joint slid slightly, leaving his mouth uneven.
Elsie leaned down, inspecting the old wound. “You broke it badly.”
“Yes. I was unconscious for two months following… following the accident,” he finished, his voice ragged. “The only time I awakened was when the bone was reset.”
Oh, my God. That would have been excruciating.
“Shh, relax your muscles.” Elsie continued working her palms over him. She applied her fingertips to various points over his face. “It is called massage. Asclepiades believed that disease and death resulted when movement was obstructed or disrupted. You’ve just been disrupted.”
A small groan left him.
“Is it too much?”
“It feels wonderful and miserable all at the same time.”
Her lips twitched. “Now, don’t talk. Just feel.”
They remained that way, with Elsie discovering every contour and groove of his aquiline-sharp features. A short while later, she dusted her fingertips along his cheeks and then reluctantly drew back and pushed herself to standing. “You would benefit from a straw diet, William. More liquid-based meals. Fruits that are ground up. Puddings.”
He opened his eyes and stared up at her. “A straw diet?”
“It’s a device made of wheatgrass that allows you to sip a drink and reduces the amount of movement required of your mouth when you eat.”
William shoved himself up onto his elbows and worked his gaze over her face. “I don’t think I know anyone like you.”
Her cheeks warming under that praise, she grabbed her bonnet and jammed it atop her head. “The sun will do you good, William. It will invigorate you and restore you in ways you believed you couldn’t be.” She glanced at Bear so comfortably curled up alongside a man who was just a stranger a short while ago. “I will leave you to your own company.” She hesitated, wanting him to ask her to stay. Craving his company.
When no request was forthcoming, she gathered her things and left him and Bear staring after her.