It had been one week: one week since Alice and Rhys had entered into their arrangement.
Each morning, Alice and Rhys could be discovered walking the sprawling grounds of the Kent countryside. When they returned, they adjourned to the library where they read and shared their favorite literary works. And during the evening meals, Rhys maneuvered sitting beside Alice, and they spoke quietly, the rest of the room forgotten, about his business ventures and Alice’s opinions on them.
Everyone attending the Marquess and Marchioness of Guilford’s house party sighed over the rapid courtship between Alice and Rhys. And with their devotion to one another, they’d done a masterful job of convincing all that the pretense was real.
But somewhere along the way, the lines of reality and pretend had blurred for Alice. At some point, Rhys had reminded her how to smile, erased the heartache left by Henry’s betrayal, and made her long, once more, for a dream she’d given up hope on—the love of a devoted, honorable, clever gentleman.
And there could be no doubting, despite his reputation as a scoundrel, Rhys was far nobler than all the lords in London. Unlike Henry, who’d cared more about his reputation as a barrister, Rhys was one who when he loved, did so deeply and without apology, and certainly didn’t allow rank or Societal expectations to drive him.
But his heart had been broken beyond repair, and no one… certainly not Alice, could ever have anything with him.
It was why Alice desperately needed distance from him. Space with which to think, to order her thoughts, and to construct walls to keep herself safe from Rhys Brookfield’s magnetic pull.
Or mayhap it is too late…
Standing beside the ceiling to floor windows in her room, she peered out through the crack in the curtains to where the guests gathered in the courtyard. She searched among the dark cloaks for one gentleman—and found him, with young Violet perched on his shoulders.
The little girl removed his hat and waved it about. The pair engaged in a back and forth tug of war with Rhys ultimately winning. He settled the black Empire hat atop Violet’s head. The too-large article instantly sank over the eyes of the giggling child. Alice squeezed her eyes shut as her heart shifted perilously in her breast.
“Are you listening to me?” Lettie’s concern-laden voice brought Alice’s eyes reluctantly open. “I’ve been waiting for you—”
“I am not going,” Alice said for the benefit of the young lady reflected back in the crystal panels.
Silence fell. “What do you mean you aren’t coming?” Lettie demanded when she found her voice.
Alice toyed with a golden tassel affixed to the fabric. “Well, it means I won’t be joining you.”
Lettie took a hesitant step forward, when there had never been anything remotely cautious about her friend. “Have you and Rhys had a spat?”
Alice sought him out once more and found him.
She fisted her hands, as icy tendrils of jealousy swept through her.
Young Violet still cradled in his arms, Rhys now spoke with the dark-haired beauty his mother had hand-selected as his bride. Alice wanted to despise her. She wanted to find Aria Cunning loathsome and hateful as those stunning Diamonds of the First Water oftentimes were. Miss Cunning caught Violet’s fingers and gave them a playful shake.
Alice sank her teeth into her lower lip. But she could not. The other woman, when they’d conversed, had proven only kind and clever and blast it, the manner of lady Alice would call friend.
Lettie hovered at Alice’s side, looking out. “Is… this about Aria and Rhys?” she ventured. “Because I’ve seen the way he looks at you and I know my brother enough to say there is nothing between him and—”
“No,” Alice rasped, spinning around, the curtain sliding back into place. She drew in a steadying breath, and tried again. “This has nothing to do with Miss Cunning and Rhys,” she said in even tones. It had everything to do with Alice.
Lettie peered at her. “Then what?”
Tell her. She is your friend. She deserves the truth about this game of pretend you play with her brother.
Alice covered her face with her hands and breathed in. Then, letting her arms fall to her sides, she revealed the truth. “It is a lie.”
Lettie puzzled her brow. “What?”
“Our courtship.” Before her courage deserted her, Alice shared everything; from her and Rhys’ first meeting in The Copse to Rhys’ proposal. She took care to leave out the one stolen moment of passion in the library. When she’d finished, only silence met her recounting. Needing to fill the void, Alice wandered over to the edge of the window and pressed her forehead against the wall. “I’m sorry I kept all this from you,” she said softly.
Lettie clasped her hands before her. “Mayhap your courtship with Rhys did begin as a ruse,” she said with more seriousness than Alice had ever heard from her. “But somewhere along the way, something changed,” her friend went on in an eerie echo of Alice’s fears.
“You’re wrong,” she said, her voice emerging sharper than she intended.
“I might be,” Lettie conceded. She rested a hand on Alice’s shoulder. “But the fact that you are hiding from Rhys even now tells me that it’s more likely I’m correct.”
“I cannot…” Alice swallowed around the lump in her throat, unable to voice that fear aloud. I love him. Her legs weakened and she shot her hands out, catching the edge of the windowsill to keep upright. Her mind, heart, and soul immediately revolted at that whisper of a thought.
She could not love him. He was a rogue who’d had his heart broken once and had been abundantly clear with the fact that the last thing he desired was to walk the path of love, again. Just as she had vowed. But that had been before Rhys had barged into The Copse and flipped her world upside down.
“We’ve known one another not even a fortnight.” Who was that entreaty for? Lettie or herself?
Lettie took Alice by the forearms. She brought her friend around to face her. “You were betrothed to Henry for more than a year. So mayhap, time truly means nothing in the scheme of one’s heart.”
Her pulse hammered loudly in Alice’s ears.
She shook her head.
Lettie nodded.
No.
Lettie smiled. “Yes.”
Restive, Alice rushed back to the window and found Rhys mingling below. Beating his gloves, he did a sweep of the guests. “But he doesn’t want a bride.” He’d had his heart broken and was content to live a bachelor’s carefree existence. Wasn’t he?
Lettie chuckled. “Men invariably don’t know what they want. While we, women? We do.” She wrinkled her nose. “Which is really what makes this,” she swatted a hand in Alice’s direction, “all so frustrating. I’m disappointed in you, Alice. I shouldn’t have to convince you to trust your heart. You should do so yourself.”
But she had, once before, and it had ended failingly bad.
She touched her forehead to the cool windowpane, finding Henry in the small crowd below. Or mayhap it had ended precisely as it had been intended. She hadn’t loved Henry. She knew that now. Not truly. She’d loved the idea of what he represented and the bucolic future she’d dreamed of; the family she’d not had. With his staidness and single-minded devotion to his work, he could never have been that man.
Her gaze slid over to Lettie’s older brother and their stares locked. A warmth unfurled in her belly. How was it possible for a man, more than a hundred feet below, to make her feel like she was the only woman in the world?
Rhys grinned. He lifted his palms in silent question.
She’d, however, made too many mistakes before; Henry, their betrothal, her public display. The caution that she’d allowed to drive her since The Scandal reared itself. Alice shook her head. “I cannot,” she mouthed.
His smile dipped. “Of course, you can,” his lips slowly articulated. He gathered the two pairs of ice skates resting at his feet. Holding them by their metal curls, he lifted them up. “A race?” he mouthed.
Alice hesitated, wanting to say no. Nay, needing to. With every encounter, she lost more and more of her heart to the roguish Rhys Brookfield.
Need that be so very tragic? What if she and Rhys, both with once broken hearts, could, in fact, heal one another? That whisper of a thought slid forward, dangerous in its appeal.
Rhys motioned once more for her to join him.
Alice smiled.
I am lost.
She nodded.
“Pretend courtship my arse,” Lettie muttered. And taking Alice by the hand, she tugged her friend along.
Other than a solemn “Good morning”, Alice hadn’t uttered a single word to him since she’d joined the gathering of guests a short while ago. Instead, as they made the trek to the lake, she remained more laconic than he’d ever known her to be.
Not even during their first meeting in The Copse.
He broke the silence. “I trust this means you’re unable to skate.”
Blinking like an owl startled from its perch, Alice stared questioningly up at him.
“First, there was your intention of skipping the lakeside revelry. Tsk. Tsk. That is certainly not like you.”
“And you know me so well?” she asked curiously.
The unexpectedness of that question gave him pause.
For… he did. In a short time, they’d forged an unlikely friendship. He’d learned her many smiles and all their meanings. He knew the books she enjoyed and the ones she’d gladly use as kindling. Unnerved, he redirected his gaze to the party moving more quickly ahead of them. “You’re afraid of racing me, then?” he put forward because, in this instance, it was safer to settle for the light teasing of before, than all the uncertainty that came with the unnamed emotions swirling in his chest.
Alice snorted, returning them to their usual camaraderie. “The arrogance of you, Rhys Brookfield. You’re entirely too big.”
“I beg your pardon?” he asked, indignantly. With his spare hand, he patted his flat stomach. He wasn’t one of those paunchy lords who indulged in too much drink and dessert.
Clear, bell-like laughter spilled from Alice’s lips, rolling around the countryside. “Tall,” she clarified, stretching a palm above her head. “Muscu—” Color fired her cheeks.
Pure, masculine satisfaction gripped him. “What was that?”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t preen. It doesn’t suit you.”
They reached the clearing where the other guests had already taken seats on boulders and logs scattered about the frozen lake. Finding a quiet area on the fringe of the group, Rhys guided them over.
He held a hand out to assist Alice onto the fallen trunk but she was already settling herself onto the makeshift bench. Her emerald cloak fanned out behind her, revealing the hem of her sapphire blue gown… and for a too-brief instant, the hint of her trim lower legs. He swallowed hard. How had he failed to appreciate the inherent allure of those limbs until now? Or mayhap it was only this woman: who stirred his lust with a barely-there glimpse of her skin and flouted Societal conventions with an ease greater than his own?
You won’t tell me, then?” he asked, affixing one of the metal skates to his boots.
“Tell you, what?”
“The reason you wished to remain indoors,” Rhys elucidated. “Surely, it wasn’t because you preferred to embroider with my dear mama, Lady Lovell, and Lady Hammell?”
Alice’s lips pulled in the corners. “Decidedly not. I’d rather stick a needle in my eye than an embroidery frame.”
He laughed. That sound was naturally stripped of the artifice and jaded cynicism that had held him in its snare since Anthony and Lillian. And how very good it felt to laugh again. Rhys looked up and the teasing reply died on his lips.
The sun’s rays cast Alice in a soft glow; highlighting the shades of blonde to those luxuriant strands. He ached from his need to yank free his gloves and tangle his fingers in her hair once more.
“What is it?” she whispered.
Everything. It was the absolute upheaval of his world set into disarray by the spirited woman before him. “Nothing,” he said gruffly. Did she hear the lie there? And why did that not terrify him as it should? “Your skate, madam,” he murmured, reaching for the metal blade.
Without another word passing between them, Rhys strapped the skates to her boots and helped her stand.
The laughter of the other guests rang cheerfully through the countryside. Stepping onto the ice, he offered Alice his arm.
She glided forward with a long, fluid movements, doing a half-circle around him.
“You skate, Lady Alice,” he called after her as she skated off.
Alice did a perfect pirouette, her skirts whipping about her ankles. She winged an eyebrow up. “Did you believe I lied?” she shot back, her gaze on him as she skated backwards.
“No.” Clasping his hands behind him, Rhys lengthened his strides to reach her. His sharpened blades left a trail of dust in the ice. “I believed you did as a girl. I failed to consider you still, in fact, skated.” After all, even his own sisters had abandoned the pursuits deemed too athletic to ever be proper by their mother.
“Should all joyful activities cease because a lady makes her entrance into Society?”
That was certainly the expectation among the ton. It was a belief Rhys’ own straight-laced mother had ascribed to the whole of her lifetime. “Hardly,” he acknowledged. “And yet, that is what so many do when stern mamas exert their influence.”
Alice slowed her movements and glided to a near stop. “I never had a mother around to reign in my spirited ways,” she said wistfully.
Her brother was Rhys’ most recent business partner. However, those financial dealings they had with one another drove their entire relationship. Aside from the former rakish existence the Earl of Montfort had lived, the man’s familial life had been his own, and of little interest to Rhys—until now. Rhys skated ahead, positioning himself in front of her. He crossed his legs back and forth, keeping pace with her forward movements. Questions swirled around his mind. In the time he’d come to know her, he’d learned so much about Alice Winterbourne and, yet, much of her life was still a mystery. “Do you have any memories of her?” It was the first time he’d ever asked any woman intimate questions about her family. They were details that had proven irrelevant—until Alice.
A gust of wind whipped about them, tossing her bonnet back. Not breaking stride, Alice adjusted the garish headwear he’d mocked at their first meeting, and now appreciated it as so endearingly her. Alice glided to a smooth stop at the edge of the lake where an old, gnarled oak’s branches arched over the now frozen waters. Removing the hat, Alice turned it over in her hands, contemplating the garish article. “I never knew my mother,” she said softly. “She died in childbirth.” Alice paused. “She died birthing me,” she quietly amended. “My father resented me the whole of my life for it.”
An ache settled heavy in his chest for the loss she’d known. Desperate to imagine a sliver of happiness for the girl she’d been, he asked, “What of Montfort?” Before he’d become the rake who’d scandalized Polite Society, had he been one who’d looked after her and been a friend or playmate?
Her lips formed a half-grin. “Daniel couldn’t have been bothered with me,” she said without inflection. Rhys silently cursed his business partner to hell for having failed Alice. Having grown up without a mother, and both a father and brother invisible presences in her life, how strong she’d had to be. His admiration for Alice grew all the more. “Now, he is devoted,” she said on a rush, defending a sibling who was undeserving of that loyalty. “Where other girls and young ladies were dealing with decorous mothers, I was riding across the countryside, trying spirits and cheroots, and living freely.”
How very solitary the image she painted of her childhood. Rhys stared off to where Miles and his young family moved in careful circles over the ice. Philippa slowly pulled Faith by her hands, gliding along with her daughter. From where she stood along the shore, Lettie clapped loudly, cheering her nieces on.
How many years had he spent bemoaning his propriety-driven parents? They’d been endlessly proper, so devoted to the Guilford line, he’d resented their failure to see him as anything more than the spare to Miles’ heir. However, Rhys had been blessed with loving siblings, and a mother and father who, even as they’d failed in many ways, had played a part in his becoming the man he had. He might have despised his mother for her interference with Lillian, but the truth remained—she’d saved him from himself.
Shame filled him for dwelling on the darker aspects of his family and not the gifts he’d enjoyed in them.
“This was hers,” Alice murmured, pulling him back from his regret-filled musings. Settling onto the edge of a boulder, she lifted her bonnet—that same article he’d mocked upon their first meeting.
A vise cinched about his chest. How dismissive he’d been… with Alice and everyone. It made him wish he’d been a better person before her, and not because she’d opened his eyes to the truth of his character. “I am so sorry,” he said hoarsely, claiming the spot beside her.
Alice chuckled. “It really is ugly.”
He made a sound of protest.
“Oh, but it is. I know that. It’s quite garish, with entirely too many adornments, and yet,” she contemplated the frayed strings of that bonnet. A gentle wind rolled over the frozen lake and tugged at the ribbons. “I love it,” she said softly. “When I was a girl, my father ordered every hint of her gone from our household. While everything was being carted away, I sneaked into her chambers and found this. It was one of the few articles that hadn’t yet been removed. I plucked it from her bed and raced from the room.”
Her telling was so vivid it conjured an image of Alice as she would have been then; a determined little girl, desperately clinging to a scrap of the mother she’d never known. Pain settled sharp in his chest.
“Every day, for so many years, I would just stare at this bonnet. It was a window into the life of a mother I’d never known. All these ribbons and flowers and…” Again laughing, Alice shook her head. “pins. I insisted the modiste who came to fit me create similar monstrosities.”
“Not with the ribbons and flowers?”
“Oh, yes.” Alice waggled her eyebrows. “And the pins.” Her shoulders shook with the force of her amusement so pure and infectious that he joined in. “Along the hem, all the way up to my knees were these b-big billowing pink bows.” She laughed, tears pouring down her cheeks as she held her palms out, demonstrating the size of those accents.
“S-Surely not?” he managed through his own mirth.
“And there were metal medallions around my waist th-that would jingle when I w-walked.” Alice doubled over, clutching at her middle. Little snorts escaped her.
His laughter abating, Rhys caressed his eyes over her, and something shifted deep in his chest. Hers were not the practiced giggles or sultry laughs of previous lovers. Rather, there was an unfettered beauty to her mirth that held him enthralled.
Her amusement faded, and she dusted the moisture from her cheeks. “And then one day, I must have been eight or nine… I wanted to sneak away from my lessons and take one of my father’s mounts for a ride.”
“But you were wearing that dress,” he ventured.
“Precisely,” she confirmed with a nod.
“It would have been impossible to ride in such a monstrosity.”
“For me?” She snorted. “Hardly. I would have just rucked it up.”
His grin widened as he imagined the spirited imp she’d been as a girl. Her daughters would one day be the same; golden-curled, troublesome minxes who tossed flawless snowballs and sneaked off from their lessons. Only, in his mind’s eye, that small child was embroiled in a snow battle between Alice and Rhys, and not some nameless stranger.
And I want that future…
The air left him on a whoosh; terror and denial all rolling together. The last thing he wanted or needed was marriage.
Wasn’t it?
Alice continued through his riot of emotions. She lifted an index finger. “The true difficulty came in trying to sneak away. Every time I turned a corner, my nasty nursemaid would call out, ‘I hear you, Lady Alice’,” she said, her voice pitched high. Alice let her hand fall to her lap, and gazed out to where Violet and Faith now skated with their parents. A longing smile graced her lips. “I raced into the one place no one was permitted entry—my mother’s chambers.” The wind whipped a stray curl across her cheek and, reflexively, Rhys gathered that strand and tucked it behind her ear. He hung, enrapt by her words, wanting to know everything about her. He’d sort through the significance of that at a later time. For now, he wanted the remainder of her tale, and then she held out that gift. “I was out of breath, leaning against the door panel, and there was this… silence.” She closed her eyes. “The kind that rings in your ears and hums. I can still hear it now.” Alice opened her eyes. “And that is when I realized,” she murmured.
He leaned closer. “What?”
“I could continue wearing those dresses, clinging to the past. All the while allowing my miserable nursemaid to find me.” Alice held his gaze. “Or I could shed them and live for now.”
Those handful of words were wrapped with layers of meanings.
How long had he been trapped by a past of hurt and betrayal? Only, he’d allowed himself to be fixed on Lillian and Anthony’s treachery, and his mother’s role in breaking up his betrothal.
Emotion wadded in Rhys’ throat.
He covered one of Alice’s hands with his. Alice glanced at their connected fingers, and then held his gaze.
And together, with the joyful guests skating in the distance, Alice and Rhys simply sat and there was a soothing peace in just being with her.