Chapter 16
Next day
“I must confess,” Miss Fox spoke in the particular haughty tone that characterized her voice. Mayhap the sound would grate less on Jake’s ears over time. “I was rather surprised to have received your note yesterday.”
“Oh?” He wouldn’t confess that he was rather surprised to have sent it.
They encountered yet another mud puddle in the path, this one too wide for a lady to cross without assistance. He leaped the shallow distance and held out his hand for her. She placed her fingers in his and met him on the other side with a dainty, little hop. She strolled ahead while he assisted her chaperone, Miss Markley, who accepted his hand with a giggle and a blush.
Once again, they progressed forward, Jake and Miss Fox arm in arm, Miss Markley falling discreetly behind. “The trails aren’t as well groomed here in the Green Park as they are in the more fashionable environs of Hyde Park.”
“My apologies, if I was mistaken in suggesting this park for our outing.” The lady wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. He should find it refreshing, but he couldn’t quite. Every word she spoke, and the way she spoke it, contained a sharp edge.
“No need to apologize, my lord. I understand perfectly why you would suggest this park.”
He cut her a sideways glance. Her features were composed and placid, but he could see that she did understand perfectly. He’d chosen this unfashionable park at this unfashionable hour—ten in the morning, no less—for the simple reason that he didn’t want the curious eyes of Society watching him court Miss Fox. If what he was doing could be called courting.
Of course, it was courting. He was an eligible bachelor, she a single young lady, and they were strolling a path together, her chaperone trailing them at a discreet distance. This was courting.
Although he hadn’t sufficiently considered all the steps it would take to secure a Society marriage, he could see that he’d officially entered the path toward finding a stepmother for Mina.
All the goals he’d set for himself were beginning to fall into place. He’d even made an appointment with a Bow Street runner later today to find Jiro. A Japanese artist living in Limehouse couldn’t be too difficult to find. He should’ve handled the situation this way from the beginning. It was the most civilized and proper approach, he could see that now.
Rather, he’d engaged with a divorcée who Society deemed scandalous for her insistence on conducting her life according to her own principles. And yet, yesterday, he’d done more than engage with her in his bedroom . . . And there had been nothing civilized about it.
“My lord, are you quite all right?”
His jaw unclenched long enough to say, “Of course, why shouldn’t I be?”
“Well, you were glaring at that poor squirrel”—She pointed out the animal, tail twitching in the mid-distance—“as if you would incinerate it with the intensity of your gaze.”
“My apologies if I alarmed you. I can assure you that I harbor no such animus toward that squirrel.”
A tight smile pinched the corners of Miss Fox’s mouth. He’d never seen her smile any other way. Had she ever smiled unreservedly in her life? Had she ever looked at someone and poured her entire being into a smile only for him?
A face possessed of just such a smile appeared in his mind’s eye.
“You were missed at the Dowager Duchess of Dalrymple’s dinner party,” Miss Fox said. “She let it be known that she was most annoyed at having an odd number at table.”
“I’d committed to another engagement that posed a conflict.” It wouldn’t do to say which commitment came first.
“Two nights ago . . .” Miss Fox’s eyes narrowed. “That was the night of Lady Olivia Montfort’s monthly soirée, no?”
“It was,” he drawled, certain he was admitting guilt. Miss Fox possessed a specific shrewd quality that he wasn’t sure he liked. A possibility occurred to him. “Are you a lover of art? Perhaps you’ve attended one of Lady Olivia’s soirées?”
Miss Fox shook her head. “I’ve never been invited. Lady Olivia and I don’t figure prominently in each other’s social spheres.” Another descriptor for Miss Fox’s smile came to mind. Hard. “In fact, I’m not sure she’s fully aware of my existence, which is likely for the best.”
“And why is that?”
She laughed, a sound tinny and false, as if it had been forced out of her. “Lady Olivia has cultivated quite the scandalous reputation, and it wouldn’t do for an unmarried miss, such as myself, to be seen in her company.”
“Quite,” Jake bit out. Even as their feet progressed forward, he made himself go very, very still, fighting the urge to tell Miss Fox, politely and calmly, that three Miss Foxes wouldn’t amount to one Lady Olivia. But it wouldn’t do. Quite was the only word he trusted himself to say, politely and calmly, on the matter.
He unclenched hands that had curled into tight fists. It wasn’t Miss Fox’s view in particular that had him wound up, but Society’s view in general. Society deserved a good drubbing.
Perhaps Miss Fox sensed the storm brewing at her side for she asked, “Isn’t this a perfect spring day, my lord?”
“It is a lovely day,” he replied, even as a note of disappointment shot through him at this conversational turn, the weather. Possibly, it presaged his future with a proper wife. Proper marriage, proper wife, proper stepmother, proper dull.
“You wouldn’t believe the number of poems rhapsodizing about emergent spring that the publishing house gets this time of year.”
“The publishing house?” At last, something interesting.
Miss Fox tiptoed around another shallow puddle. “My father won a share in a small press a few years ago.”
“Won a share?”
“In a card game.”
“Your father is a baron, correct?”
She nodded. “A baron, yes, and a publisher.” A light blush pinked her cheeks. “My father has his fingers in any number of pies on any given day.”
“It was my understanding that gentlemen don’t enter into trade.”
“As a general rule, they don’t. But my father isn’t one to be hemmed in by Society’s rules, and they indulge him, because he’s, well, he’s a reliably entertaining dinner guest.”
Jake sensed a quiet conflict between father and daughter. In the interest of keeping clear of those murky waters, he asked, “Do you take an interest in the press?”
Her eyes, an opaque gray, darted up to meet his. She really had the most direct way of taking in a person. “Our secret?”
He nodded.
“I love it. At first, it was a bit of a lark, but one day I began sorting through a pile of submissions and didn’t look up for three hours. The written word interests me, not only for its ability to communicate ideas, but for its intersection of beauty and power. Take poetry, for instance, the fewer the words—well chosen, of course—the more powerfully it communicates its message. Fascinating, no?”
This was the longest string of words he’d ever heard Miss Fox produce. Encouraging. “Might I read any publications the press produces?”
“Oh, I, um, I doubt it,” she stammered, her eloquence gone. “We don’t publish for the serious-minded, such as yourself. Ours is lighter fare.”
Her gaze, once clear and direct, now skittered away to study the path ahead of them. He wasn’t sure what brought about the sudden change. “You are a most unexpected young lady.”
“Young?” Her brow lifted toward the blue sky above. “Society would hardly characterize me as young. I turned five and twenty on my last name day.”
“Which makes you an aged crone?”
She gave a little shrug. “Perhaps not, but it does place me solidly on the shelf, and a decided spinster in the ton’s eyes.”
“Do you care how you’re seen by them?”
“Not in the least.”
His eyebrows creased together, and, of course, Miss Fox caught the movement.
“Does that shock you, my lord? If I cared, I would be a most unhappy person. Besides, everyone can’t be who they appear on the surface, or the world would be a very dull place.”
“I feel certain you are exactly who you purport to be.”
“Do you?” Another laugh escaped her. She knew how to make a laugh sound like a chore. “And who am I?”
“A Society miss with a speckless reputation and a keen, observant eye.”
“On the prowl for a husband?”
His brow lifted in surprise. “My apologies—”
“I tease you, my lord,” she interrupted. “Well, not entirely. To be on the prowl for a husband is the lot of an unmarried lady. There seems to be no way of getting around it.”
He resisted the paternal impulse to pat her hand in comfort. “May I ask your given name?” It was the sort of question a gentleman courting a lady might ask.
“Anne,” she replied simply, the sound of it curt to his ears.
“It suits you.”
“It does, doesn’t it? Short and plain.” She waved her free hand before her, as if she was a vendor displaying her wares. “That’s me.”
Brittle. That would be another word he would use to describe her. But he would keep that one to himself.
He really took her measure for the first time. It was true, she was short in stature. And petite, waifish even, not a curve on her. Indistinct brown hair and gray eyes. She had the lovely kind of skin, translucent and clear, that young ladies likely envied, yet she wasn’t the sort who would draw his eye in the normal course of events.
But did that matter? Perhaps those very qualities made her the perfect match for him. Miss Fox would never invite gossip or excite scandal, unlike—
He stopped the sentence in its tracks. It wouldn’t do to think of her in the moment he was coming around to Miss Fox.
“Short, yes,” he began, “but to the point. I was thinking more along the lines of classic and English.” He could stop there, but he wouldn’t. A bit of kindness might blunt her sharp edge. “I think another word could be used to describe you.”
“And what word would that be, my lord?”
“Pretty.”
A deep blush spread from her modest décolletage, and he intuited this was no contrivance to display maidenly modesty. Miss Fox didn’t want to blush, but couldn’t help herself. It was possible she’d never been called pretty. How very young she appeared, how very vulnerable. Likely no one ever noticed her vulnerability, hidden as it was beneath her prickly exterior.
The birds trilling in the trees and the mellow sway of the breeze through the canopy above, they strolled in silence, and unease dissipated beneath the gentle persuasion of a lovely spring day.
They rounded a bend in the path, and she emitted a squeaky, high-pitched, “Yip!”
“Miss Fox, are you injured?”
Her hand disengaged from his arm as she struggled to his right with an adversary he couldn’t make out. “My skirts have been caught by a tenacious gooseberry bush,” she said as she continued to wrestle with her verdant adversary. “The Green Park is quite a wilderness.”
Jake stepped forward, intent on helping Miss Fox, when a familiar figure snagged the corner of his vision. In the distance, the figure stood bent over a sketchpad, charcoal a whir across paper. Two weeks ago, he wouldn’t have given that figure a second glance. Today, it stopped him in his tracks.
Olivia. His gaze drank her in like desert sand consumed the first drops of a monsoon rain.
“She is the sort who draws the eye, isn’t she?” a voice with an edge of tempered steel cut into thoughts he had no business having.
Of course. Miss Fox had noticed. “My apologies, if I—”
“No need to apologize, my lord,” she said, hands patting and smoothing her rescued gown, pretty blushes a thing of the past. “I’m made of sterner stuff than that.”
He didn’t think she could have said anything that could have made him feel more like a cad. But Olivia stood in his line of vision, and he was powerless to look away. She hadn’t yet noticed them, immersed as she was in the world she was creating on that piece of paper. He found himself in the strange position of envying a piece of paper. This was the man she reduced him to.
Of a sudden, her hand stilled, mid-stroke, and she froze, her gaze trained straight ahead of her. Suspense held his breath tight in his chest. One by one, she slid her materials into a black leather case before unexpectedly pivoting to face him and Miss Fox. Her gaze darted back and forth between them, once, twice, and she swallowed, drawing his eye toward the undulant column of her ivory throat. He’d licked a bead of sweat up its length only yesterday.
His mouth went dry. Only another lick would satisfy this particular thirst.
As he and Miss Fox drew close, he saw that Olivia understood what he was doing in the Green Park with Miss Fox. Hands at her sides, bland smile pasted onto her lips, she awaited their approach, her entire countenance placid and unmoving.
“Lady Olivia, how remarkable to find you here,” he said once they’d drawn within comfortable speaking distance.
“Indeed,” she returned. Her bland, little smile, the mask she employed for Society, hadn’t budged a jot. She didn’t want to give anything of herself away in front of Miss Fox. Or him.
How unlike the Olivia he’d known only yesterday. For all the world she looked as if she’d succeeded in purging her system of him. A pit opened up inside him, and a roil of nausea flipped his stomach over.
As they stood in an uneasy triangle, awkward silence charged the air. Neither lady appeared willing to speak to the other, and judging by the fact that their gazes rested on indistinct points in the distance, neither appeared willing to look at the other, either. “Are you acquainted with one another?” he asked, choosing a direct approach.
Olivia’s lips quirked to the side, and her gaze, at last, found his. The pit in his stomach no longer felt bottomless, not with her eyes meeting his, her mask for Society unable to reach there, not with him. “We’ve exchanged a pleasantry or two,” she said, “but never been properly introduced.”
Another silence, awkward and confused, expanded between them. Miss Fox shifted uncomfortably at his side, and Olivia’s eyes rolled to the sky. “Lord St. Alban,” she began, her voice longsuffering as if she was addressing a particularly imbecilic pupil, “I believe this is where you introduce Miss Fox to me.”
The exasperated huff in Olivia’s tone was impossible to miss, but he also sensed her pleasure in giving him another Society lesson. “Of course, my apologies”—He was forever apologizing today—“Lady Olivia, may I introduce Miss Fox to you?”
Olivia inclined her head, and Miss Fox dipped into a shallow curtsy before her social better. “My lady.”
Again, Olivia nodded, her smile cool, bland, and implacable. Then her eyes shifted to meet his, and her head canted to the side. Jake felt Miss Fox’s gaze darting between the two of them. It was reckless and contrary to his stated goal of securing a proper wife, but he couldn’t summon the energy to care.
As long as he held Olivia’s gaze, she couldn’t leave. That was his sole concern.
He would hold her gaze for eternity, if need be.