Perhaps that was why, when Ash had invited his brother to Parford Manor, the man had fobbed him off with excuses. But when Mark asked, he had dropped everything and come running.
His brothers had passed from discussion of art to some new philosophical text that had recently been released to great acclaim. Naturally, Ash hadn’t read it. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of it. Next to them, Ash felt profoundly empty and wistfully ignorant. He’d been trying to scrape together a fortune at fourteen, so that his younger brothers could study Latin declensions. He’d succeeded.
But he hadn’t known that in so doing, he was guaranteeing that he would never again have the privilege of engaging either of them in meaningful conversation. Mark and Smite were bound together with the threads of a thousand common experiences, everything from the hidden truth of those years when Ash had been gone, to their time at university. And Ash would never, ever be able to share any of that with them.
“Do you want some refreshment?” he asked. “The cook here serves the most amazing cream teas. I can ring for some.”
His brothers turned in unison, as if surprised that Ash was still present.
“I’ve been sitting in the coach for hours,” Smite said. “The last thing I want to do is sit again. Besides, I’m not hungry.”
Ash tried again. “Well, then. There’s a lovely promenade that follows the banks of the river. If you would care to join me…?”
Smite turned his head to look at Mark, his eyes widening.
“No,” Mark said gently. “I don’t think we’ll be walking along the river right now.”
It was that same rebuke he always got from his brother. Smite had never spoken his accusations aloud. He just rejected every gift Ash laid at his feet, every suggestion for camaraderie, one by one. Even the gentlest slap on the face came to sting, after it had been repeated often enough. And this particular slap was none too gentle.
They were trying to get rid of him. Ash felt that hollow lump in his chest, that distance between him and his brothers.
I’m sorry I ever left. I’m sorry for whatever happened to you out there. I’m sorry there’s nothing between us to stitch together into even a pretense of friendship. I’m sorry, Smite. But he couldn’t get the words out of his throat.
“Well,” he finally said. “I’ll leave you two alone, then. I have work to do.”
He turned his back on them. Right now, even the books waiting for him in the library seemed preferable to another rejection.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
UNSURPRISINGLY, THE mess of ink that faced him on the pages offered Ash scant comfort. The wide glass doors in the library looked out on the garden where his brothers stood. It was hot enough that the windows had been, by necessity, thrown open. The breeze that wafted in should have been cool and comforting. Instead, it carried to him the dim rumble of their laughter—an amusement he could not share, couched in words he could not make out.
He drifted to look out the window, with the sick sensation of a man scratching at a scab—knowing that the wound was best left alone, lest it fester, but unable to keep his hands away.
Mark was pointing out various features in the garden while Smite watched. Ash felt as if he were their geriatric father, stooped by age and bearded in white, rather than the sibling who was a mere handful of years their elder. His hands clenched on the frame of the window.
“Ash?”
At that quiet query, he turned around. Margaret was standing in the doorway, her brows knit in an expression of concern. He hadn’t seen her in days. He’d thought she was avoiding him.
She was dressed as she always was—in a loose frock of dark gray muslin, the only definition being the sash that pulled the dress about her waist. Her hair was pulled back into a tight knot at the nape of her neck and pinned into place. The picture would have made another woman seem severe. But the warm, interested light in her eyes softened the effect, and suddenly he no longer felt quite so isolated.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
His gaze strayed out the window once more, to Mark and Smite. They were happy, chattering back and forth between themselves. He wasn’t so selfish as to wish them miserable.
“No.” He swallowed the accompanying sigh. It sat like a lump of indigestible gristle, deep in his belly. “Nothing’s wrong. Everything is precisely as it should be.”
It must not have been an especially convincing denial, because she raised one eyebrow and placed her hand on her hip. “Usually,” she said, “when one speaks the truth, one answer suffices. You just answered me three times.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Well, then. Come see what has me in such a state.”
She came to stand by him. From this vantage point, they could see the shrubs of the formal gardens, trimmed into precise low squares. Rosebushes waved pink heads in the wind. And beyond that…
Smite’s hair was a shade darker than the bark of the walnut tree just beyond him. It gleamed in the sunlight. He was slightly taller than Mark, and he bent his head towards his brother as they talked.
“You see?” Ash said in his cheeriest tone. “My brothers are both here. What could I possibly have to grieve over?”
“You’re not grieving,” Margaret said. “I know that look on your face.”
“Do you, then?” He asked the question out of genuine interest. He’d not been faced with both his brothers before this moment. How could she possibly have seen it?
“Intimately.” Her voice was low. “I know what it’s like to stand on the outside and look in, believing I will never be accepted. I know what it’s like to yearn to be a part of something, and yet to know that it will never come. Trust me, Ash. I know.”
Of course she would know. Ash put little faith in labels; in his experience, a title had never made a man worthwhile. You judged a man—or a woman—by what he did, how he spoke, the way he met your eyes…or failed to do so. But too many others eschewed actual observation in lieu of proxies. Who your father was. Whether your parents had been married. How much wealth you had, and how long it had been in your family.
“I understand,” he said softly. “Your life would have been very different if you’d been Parford’s daughter, instead of his servant.”
She looked up at him, a sad tilt to her eyes. He had a sudden urge to burn every one of those dull, severe frocks. He wanted to replace them with vibrant silks—something to draw attention to her, to bring out the intelligent light in her eyes. Anything to chase away the haunting sadness that touched her features. It felt as if his own grief echoed through her.
She reached out and set her hand atop his. It was, perhaps, the first time she had deliberately touched him since he’d returned from London. He sucked in his breath, hoping. He could feel the warmth of her against him. He turned his hand to press hers. He hadn’t meant to grip so hard, but she did not pull away.
“I know precisely how you feel,” she said. “What I do not know is why you are in here, watching them, instead of out there forcing your way in. I can attest to the efficacy of your charm.”
She turned her face up to his, her dark eyes glinting.
“Can you, then? Attest to my charm?”
He had not let go of her hand. He ought to have, but he didn’t dare—and she was gripping him back so hard, her fingernails cutting into his palm with the best kind of pain.
“Intimately,” she said again.
He wasn’t displaying any of that vaunted charm now. He dropped her hand and looked away. “I wish to God,” he said passionately, “that I had never gone to India. I wish I had never left them. But I did, little knowing that the gulf my actions would open would be wider than a handful of years and a few thousand miles of ocean. I wish I had not gone.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Pardon?” She’d spoken so matter-of-factly that he could scarcely believe what he had heard.
“You heard me. You don’t wish any of this undone—not your time in India, not your stupendous fortune,
nor even the suit in the ecclesiastical courts. Certainly not your place as a duke’s heir. I know you, Ash. Had you stayed in England with your brothers—had you merely accepted your lot in life and sunk into poverty, you wouldn’t be happy. You enjoy your wealth. You live to shower your brothers with presents. You would despise being a poor man.”
He let out a sigh. “It’s a hard woman who won’t even let a man indulge in a little unreasonableness. That seems most unfair.”
“What is unfair is that you want to have the benefits of your voyage to India without paying the price. That’s what makes this world so damnably awful—the choices you must make that cost you what you most desire.”
“It’s more than that, though. When I went to India…it was as if I chose to be an entirely different person. I gave up the chance to be a person like my father. He was a mill owner and a tradesman—but he loved to read. He would be gone on business for weeks, and when he returned, he’d bring back all sorts of books. I used to believe he knew everything. And now, my brothers take after him. I can’t. I’ve tried to figure it out. I’ve tried to become that person. But what you do when you’re young has a way of sticking with you. At fourteen, my brothers were reading. I was making my first five thousand pounds.” He shrugged. “I would trade every penny I had, if it would mean that I could walk down that path with them and talk like that.”
“You left because your sister died, Ash.” Margaret looked at him, tapping her lips with one finger. “Would you really risk your brothers’ lives for the sake of their friendship?”
“No.” Damn it. “Never.”
She inclined her head, and he accepted that as a simple judgment. You made your choice. Now stop whining about it.
Too true. There had been enough of this indulgent claptrap. “Younger brothers make me mawkish,” he said by way of halfhearted apology. “They’re like little repositories of sentiment. One looks at them and remembers how helpless they once were.”
But Margaret was shaking her head. “I think you give yourself too little credit. Maybe you cannot speak to your brothers about books. But you can talk to them. I doubt they despise you.”
“But they’re educated.”
She turned her head to one side and looked at him. “I can talk to Mark, and I never went to Oxford.”
“But that’s different. You at least—”
She looked at him.
“You,” he said quietly, “can read.” And then he glanced away, so that he would not have to see his own shame reflected in her eyes.
She didn’t say anything. He’d wanted her to protest, to tell him it wasn’t true, that he could bridge that gap. But then, she wouldn’t lie to him. He was uneducated. And illiterate. And while it made not a bit of difference in the world of business, she must see how impassable a barrier it posed with his brothers. He squeezed her hand, where it was still trapped in his. He wasn’t letting her go—not even now, when she must see what he truly was.
She ran her thumb down his fingers. A tiny caress, but a caress nonetheless.
“When I met you,” she said quietly, “I’d lost the ability to glance in a looking glass and believe I was worth something.”
She repeated that touch a second time, and his eyes fluttered shut.
“And then you looked at me and you told me I mattered. You didn’t need theories or arguments to make me believe it. You just…looked. And you believed.”
They’d touched before—in affection, in lust, even in comfort. But her hand, stroking his, returning the strong grip he gave her—this was something different.
“There is…there is something I came here to tell you, Ash. There’s a great deal you don’t know about me. But right now, I want you to know one thing.”
Her hand whispered up behind him, finding the nape of his neck. She drew his head down to rest against hers.
“You matter,” she whispered to him. “You are important. And you are the single most magnificent man I have ever had the honor of meeting.”
His breath shivered out and he put his free arm around her, pulling her close. He could feel her chest rise and fall. Her breath mingled with his.
“I don’t ever want you to think otherwise. Not for an instant.”
There was a fierce note in her voice as she spoke. So it hadn’t been the premonition of mere lust he’d sensed, that day he’d first seen her. It had been a tiny taste of this—this intimacy that went so far beyond mere desire. It had wound itself between them, interlacing his own emotions. He could untangle their intertwined fingers, but he couldn’t unravel this.
He inhaled her breath, and he believed. He leaned down and tasted her lips. There was no prelude to the kiss—no light tentative touches, to be sure of his reception. It was a full, hot-blooded exchange the instant their mouths touched, carnal and wanting. Desperate. His body reacted to the feel of her in his arms—her soft roundedness, the slim curve of her waist. But it wasn’t just lust that made him pull her close.
He kissed her because she made him feel strong where he’d felt vulnerable and weak. Because she saw him—all of him—and didn’t wince and glance away. Because she knew what he was like when he was stripped of defenses, and she reached for him anyway.
This was what he wanted—her. Margaret. No. Them.
When he lifted his head to draw breath, she looked at him.
“Remember,” she said softly. “When—when you know everything. Remember. You are important. And…and I mean that.”
And then, before he could ask her what she meant, she pulled away from him and left.
MARGARET HAD SEEN Ash cheerfully powerful, as talkative as a jaybird. She’d seen him silently powerful while he was listening to those around her. She didn’t like seeing him vulnerable. It made her feel odd inside—hotly angry on his behalf, and enraged that someone had made him feel that way.
Rather hypocritical; in a short space of time, when the truth came out, she would be the one to introduce doubt into his life.
She shook her head and walked down the gallery towards her father’s room. The duke’s chambers lay past the end of the wide hall, down another long hallway. For months, the length of that hall had been enshrouded in silence as she traversed it. The servants tasked with airing the rooms that abutted his sickroom had walked on tiptoe, for fear the slightest noise would bring on the duke’s ire.
But as she walked down the hall today, she heard the deep rumble of masculine laughter. A door was ajar; as she passed by, a thin slit of daylight made a jaunty angle across the dark carpet.
Mrs. Benedict must have put Ash’s brothers in the upper parlor. Margaret stopped, and another ring of laughter traveled out to greet her. Mark’s chuckle she already knew. His brother, the middle Mr. Turner with the dreadful name—he must have been the one with the baritone.
Margaret set her hand against the door and pushed it open another few inches.
The brothers stood on the far side of the room, leaning towards one another as if in each other’s confidences. They had thrown a window open, and they were looking out, the curtains fluttering about them. They did not see her enter, as they were both engaged in gazing into the distance, their shoulders forming one uniform wall. She would have guessed they were brothers from that unity. If that hadn’t betrayed their relationship she could see some similarity in their figures. They were both lean without being skinny, tall without towering over her.
Her mother had used this parlor as a dry, stuffy place to take tea; it had the most formal arrangement of all the rooms in Parford Manor. Margaret could not recall a time when the gilded walls had ever felt a breeze. For as long as she remembered, the curtains had been tightly drawn to protect the lush carpet underfoot from the sun.
But daylight played across the window sash now, spilling carelessly from there onto the priceless carpet.
It wasn’t the sunlight Margaret minded. It wasn’t the laughter that set her stomach to a slow boil. It was the way these two men stood in such close friendship, never car
ing that not so far from this room their eldest brother was feeling vulnerable. Alone.
The taller gentleman—Mr. Smite Turner—appeared to be in the midst of telling his brother a story. He had shed his coat and had draped it over one arm—a trick that reminded her of Ash. He gesticulated with the other hand. His face was turned in profile. His visage was a quiet echo of Ash’s. But where Ash had dark, curling hair, this man’s was cropped close to his skull, and it was almost ebony. Where Ash’s skin was tinged in color from the sun, this man was pale.
One thing they had in common was that air of charisma. He said something, and Mark let out a cackle of laughter. At the same moment, the new fellow turned his head slightly and met her eyes. The friendly smile froze in place. His face stiffened; his chin lifted. His eyes grew harder, and he scanned her from head to toe.
Margaret was used to men looking her over. But this perusal didn’t feel like masculine admiration. It felt as if he were cataloguing her, from the half-boots still on her feet from the gardens, to the starched white collar of her gown. He nodded once, as if he’d fit her into some mental taxonomy.
“Mark,” he said quietly, “this is she, is it not?”
She? Etiquette demanded that Margaret curtsy, that she smile at this man in greeting. But he hadn’t even addressed her. He’d been rude to Ash. And he was standing here, laughing with Mark, while his brother felt unwelcome. She stared back at him and straightened her spine.
“At least she’s pretty,” he finally said.