She blinked at him with absurdly long eyelashes that made her look like an ostrich, large eyes surrounded by delicate fringes. “How do you know my first name? You mustn’t address me so informally!”
Oliver had the idea that if he started kissing her, she might run from the room. He cleared his throat. “Are you ready to hear my apology?”
“There’s no need to apologize,” she said. “You can simply address me appropriately from now on and I’ll—”
“Lizzie.”
She stopped.
“I refuse to call you Lady Troutt because I don’t want to think of you with that man. Not at all.”
Her breathing seemed a little irregular. Was that a good sign? Silence stretched between them.
“So I shall call you Lizzie,” he stated.
“All right,” she said in a rush. “All right, you may address me as Lizzie but only here, that is, when no one can overhear us.”
That would do for the moment.
“Are you prepared to pretend to be Lady Mayne?”
She gave herself a little shake, and raised her chin. “Yes, Mr. Berwick?” Her voice took on a faint but delightful Scottish burr.
“I apologize for calling you a sausage, whether it be Scottish, English, French . . . Portuguese.”
“German sausages are also excellent,” she offered. “But I don’t think you should digress into particulars, Mr. Berwick.”
“Oliver.”
She hesitated, and then gave him a small smile. “This is monstrously improper. But all right, Oliver. I think you should concentrate on making your amends, rather than straying in a direction that might make the countess dwell too much on the roundness of sausages.”
Oliver had no interest in countesses, and he couldn’t pretend that he did. Lizzie had let his jacket fall open, which meant that the gentle curve of her breast gleamed like a hidden treasure.
He took a step closer. “I take one look at you, and I lose my mind and start thinking about food.”
“Lord Mayne is unlikely to appreciate this approach. My sister tells me they are a most devoted couple.”
He dragged his eyes away from the swell of her breasts. “I scarcely met you,” he said, the words coming out rather raggedy, “before I knew that I wanted you.”
“I think your apology needs more humility,” Lizzie said, a smile trembling on her lips. She knew perfectly well that he was speaking of her, not the countess. “Perhaps you should get on your knees.”
He saw shock in her eyes the moment the words left her mouth.
“I would get on my knees,” he said carefully, “if you want me to.”
“No,” she gasped. “There’s no need for that, Mr. Berwick, I mean, Oliver. I accept your apology. Truly. No word of sausages shall ever pass between us again.”
“Very well,” he said. “But you’re certain that you don’t wish me to apologize on my knees?”
“Absolutely certain!”
He took a final step, so that there was no air between their two bodies. “When I look at you, Lizzie, I don’t think of sausages.”
There was an aching tone in his voice that he’d never heard before from his own mouth, but he gave a mental shrug. For some reason, fate had put him here, with a beautiful woman who was staring up at him with an expression of utter confusion.
He wasn’t confused. He was burning like a live coal.
He knew with a sudden, ferocious conviction that Lizzie had never been set alight at all. She was his, all his.
Never mind the fact she’d been married. She was still his.
“Looking at you, I think of peaches in the warm sunlight,” he said, making another surprising discovery about himself. He had a poetic bent. “Silky, juicy peaches, the kind one cannot bear to eat and cannot bear not to eat.”
Her eyes widened a bit. “Mr. Berwick—”
“Don’t ever call me that again,” he said with sudden violence. “My name is Oliver. It’s actually Oliver John Berwick. I am a second son, but I inherited money from an aunt, and I have managed to turn that into a great deal more money. I am not a bad prospect for marriage.”
Lizzie’s mouth closed. “We have digressed,” she said with a gulp. “The Countess of Mayne will not have the faintest interest in marrying you; by all accounts, she is very much in love with her husband, and divorce is difficult to obtain in England.”
“Yes, isn’t it a good thing that I didn’t meet you before Troutt died?” Oliver said, adding, “I might have had to kill him.”
“Kill him?” Oliver’s future wife squealed. “What on earth are you talking about, Mr.—” She stopped, catching the look in his eye. “Oliver.”
“Say it again.”
“What—”
Oliver succumbed to temptation and pulled her into his arms. “Say my name again.”
“We shouldn’t do this,” she breathed.
He looked down at her. “We should.”
“Oliver,” she said, frowning at him. “I can see that you are—you are—well, I’m not sure what you’re doing.”
“Planning to marry you.”
“Absolutely not!”
“Seduce you?”
She looked rather horrified, which made Oliver grin.
“May I kiss you?”
“No! I think you have lost your mind.”
“That is quite possible.” She had the most delightful, straight nose he had ever seen. They would have beautiful offspring, as long as the poor scraps inherited her nose, not his. “Do you truly loathe the idea of children?”
“This conversation has gone far enough,” she said, pulling out of his arms and trotting off toward the other side of the room as if the furies were at her shoulder.
Oliver followed her, thinking hard.
He’d never had any faith in fate, but he was obviously wrong.
Fate had put both women he’d wronged in his life in the same house, together with the woman he was meant to marry.
And have children with. Or not.
He didn’t really care.
The only thing he cared about was making certain that Lizzie Troutt was his, within the day, if possible, but definitely before Benjamin Jagger darkened the door of Telford Manor.
Chapter Nine
LIZZIE LAY AWAKE a long time that night, staring at the ceiling. Oliver Berwick had flirted with her. No man had ever flirted with her before this evening, but she had no trouble recognizing it.
What’s more, she was fairly certain that he meant to seduce her. For one thing, he told her that he meant to.
And for another, he compared her to a peach.
She spent a certain amount of time feeling happily peachlike. Still, she truly didn’t want to be in Oliver’s fruit basket, even if he had laughed at her joke about babies and plums.
Hopefully, he wouldn’t repeat her comment to her sister, because Cat might take offense at the idea that her baby boys had resembled plums.
They looked better now, of course. At four and five, her nephews had fairly intelligent faces, and asked interesting questions. Yesterday she’d had a long conversation with the future Lord Windingham about whether people would recognize each other in heaven.
“Mama said that your husband died,” he had said, in that straightforward way that children had. “But you won’t die for years. When you get up there, you’ll probably have white hair and a cane and all that sort of thing. How will he possibly know who you are?”
“It’s quite possible that Lord Troutt won’t recognize me,” she had said, feeling quite happy about that prospect.
“But I want Mama to know who I am!” His bottom lip began wobbling.
“Your mother will always recognize you, because she’s your mother. And you will recognize her.”
“That’s true,” he
had said, looking relieved. “Do you think there is an ant heaven, and do you think that mother ants recognize their babies? And what about the bad place?”
Lizzie had frowned, so he had said a bit impatiently, “The place you go if you don’t go to heaven. Do you think when ants get into the butter, the way they did yesterday, they go to a bad place?”
Lizzie may not have liked Adrian very much, but she didn’t want him to be in a bad place, so she said a hasty prayer for his soul.
Now, in bed, she started wondering how she felt about endangering her own soul by allowing herself to be seduced.
She finally decided that she wasn’t too worried about heaven. She had attended church regularly with her mother, and thereafter with Adrian’s mother. Left to her own devices, she would rather not listen to yet another man dictate what kind of woman she was supposed to be, no matter whether he was wearing black robes or no.
That didn’t mean that she was ready to embark on an affaire that would turn her into Shady Sadie, either.
In fact, the more she thought about it, the more dubious the idea seemed to be. For one thing, Mr. Berwick had told her that he wasn’t enjoying female company because he had an impressionable young niece.
Yet he immediately tried to seduce her in the drawing room, with two young girls not far away. Either he was fibbing about not having a mistress, or he was recklessly imprudent.
Either way, she would do well to avoid him.
At the same time, she had to admit that there was something about Oliver Berwick’s blue eyes and broad chest that she found alluring.
Alluring wasn’t a strong enough word.
When he looked at her intently, she began thinking inappropriate things about what it would feel like to touch him. Or if he touched her.
She was absolutely certain that if she ever saw him naked, she wouldn’t feel the instinctive revulsion that she felt on first sight of Adrian’s unclothed body.
And she was also pretty sure that Oliver’s private part, for want of a better word, wouldn’t look like a white snail without its shell, curled and soft.
As her husband’s had.
The very thought of that proved a shock to the system. Oliver Berwick was not good for her. He made her consider improper subjects.
It was one thing to decide that she wouldn’t marry again. It was another to contemplate an illicit rendezvous with a man so practiced in his approaches and compliments.
Having made up her mind, she finally went to sleep. In an effort to avoid temptation, she kept to her room through breakfast and luncheon the following day.
But for the first time in her recent memory, she didn’t feel peaceful, even though she was tucked away with an excellent novel to read.
Instead, she kept putting her book down and puttering around the room. She even looked through her Parisian gowns and chose one to wear in the evening.
Rather surprisingly, her sister didn’t try to coax her out. Every once in a while she heard the noises of maids, but the big house was oddly silent.
It made her feel, fancifully enough, like Cat’s dormouse, confined to the butler’s pantry and left behind when her mistress pranced off to married life.
Late in the afternoon, she heard laughter and found herself tossing aside her book and running to her window.
Tramping across the grass, looking messed and rather sunburned, came Mr. Berwick with his niece Hattie and her step-niece Sarah. He was carrying a pail, and it looked to Lizzie as if they’d been fishing.
She loved fishing.
Correction: she used to love fishing. Adrian would never have approved; shooting was the only such activity he deemed not labor. Labor was not for Adrian, nor for any gentleman.
Oliver didn’t seem to have learned that rule.
As she watched, he threw back his head and laughed. His throat was a strong, brown column, so attractive that she wrapped her arms around herself tightly, as if she could hold in the odd, explosive feelings in her stomach.
She meant to have nothing to do with him, with men in general . . . had she forgotten that? She turned back to her book.
She was sitting in a chair reading industriously, when her sister burst into the room.
“Lizzie,” Cat said, without further greeting, “you must come downstairs to supper.” Her sister dropped into a chair and scowled at her. “I’m tired of finding you in this room. I want you to go back to being yourself.”
“I am myself,” Lizzie pointed out. “I couldn’t stay a girl forever, Cat. You still think of me as a five-year-old girl running about in a pinafore. I’m a grown woman.”
Cat sighed. “I know you are. I just don’t want you to be such a cowardly grown woman.”
Lizzie’s back straightened. “I’m not!”
“Yes, you are. You took one look at Oliver Berwick, and you ran to your room like a timid rabbit and stayed here all yesterday and today. I don’t believe for a moment that you have a headache.”
“I don’t have a headache,” Lizzie admitted. “I just find my book very interesting.”
Her sister leaned sideways so she could see the book cover. “You’re still reading The Betrothed. I forgot most of it, but it was set in the 1100s and deadly boring. Don’t try to tell me it’s interesting. I know better.”
Lizzie closed the book. “You were never much good at reading, Cat.”
“All I remember is the heroine being forced to stay in a haunted bedchamber. Sir Walter Scott should have thought up something better than that. I’m sick of ghosts rattling their chains.”
“Don’t tell me! I haven’t reached that yet.”
“I’ll leave you to your medieval ghosts, but only if you come down for dinner. I promised the girls that we could have a game of croquet in the drawing room.”
“When you played it at Christmas, didn’t your husband put a ball straight through the wall?”
“The hole’s been patched,” Cat said cheerfully. “We have new hoops, and the housekeeper has already taken up the rug. It needed to be beaten before the party arrives tomorrow anyway.”
“I don’t think that you’re supposed to be pounding hoops into a drawing room floor,” Lizzie said. But she couldn’t help smiling. Her sister was such a madcap kind of person.
“That’s better!” Cat said. “I shall leave you to that unpleasant ghost. I still remember the prophecy about the heroine.”
“A prophecy! Don’t tell me!” Lizzie exclaimed. But then she caught her sister’s sleeve. “No, tell me. Otherwise I won’t come to dinner because I’ll be trying to read to that point.”
Cat stuck out her hip and flung her left hand into the air.
“Is that the way the ghost looked?” Lizzie inquired.
“I could be on the stage,” Cat told her. “If Joshua ever loses all his money and we have to sell this pile of stone, I’ll play Lady Macbeth in order to keep food on the table.”
“Never mind that, just play the ghost for the moment,” Lizzie ordered.
“Widowed wife, and married maid,” Cat declaimed. “Betrothed, betrayer, and betrayed.”
Lizzie looked back at her book. “I’m starting to feel sorry for Eveline. I didn’t realize she was going to be betrayed. I can see the ‘widowed wife.’ But ‘married maid’?”
“Her marriage wasn’t consummated,” Cat said promptly. “At least I think that’s the case but to be honest, I didn’t like Eveline. I started skipping pages after she was told to remain safely in a castle, but instead she went out in the woods, where she was seized by rebels, of course!”
“I could be Eveline,” Lizzie said, rather startled. “I’m a ‘widowed wife.’ ”
“And a ‘married maid’,” Cat added.
Lizzie shrugged and looked down at her book. “I’ve been betrothed and betrayed, but I haven’t been a betrayer.”
“You should have,” Cat said darkly. “You should have had a flagrant affaire that everyone knew about. You should have given birth to a son who would have inherited Adrian’s estate, and he would have known that it wasn’t his and there would have been nothing he could do about it!”
“It’s too late for that.”
“True. I do wish you’d been at luncheon, Lizzie. I’m becoming fast friends with Oliver Berwick. He’s frightfully passionate about steam engines and I think he talked my husband into investing in a railway, which would be a good thing since this house takes a ferocious amount of money to keep up. Something is always falling apart.”
“Perhaps if you didn’t play croquet in the house, it wouldn’t need so many repairs,” Lizzie suggested.
“We have bigger problems, like the roof. Wear that pale yellow gown with that wonderful black and yellow sash tonight.”
“It makes me feel like a French bumblebee,” Lizzie said.
“It makes you look divine,” Cat said. “Only the French would figure out how to make a woman’s waist look so tiny. I love the way the hem is weighted to make it swirl at the bottom. It’s just the thing for leaning over and hitting a croquet ball.”
“Have you changed your mind about matchmaking and Mr. Berwick?” Lizzie asked suspiciously.
“Absolutely not,” Cat said. “You’d never get along. He’s far too clever for comfort.”
Too clever? What man was too clever?
In Lizzie’s experience, men did a reliable job of pretending to be clever, but it generally fell apart because they were such emotional creatures.
Take their father, for example. He was always trying to calculate odds, but in the end, he just bumbled along like anyone else.
Suddenly she remembered a day when he had brought her to see a whole pen full of baby lambs. She had squealed and shrieked with excitement—she couldn’t have been more than six—and he let her climb into the pen and pet them for a long time, even though they lipped her hair and her bootlaces.
Her father hadn’t always been focused on turning her into Lady Troutt. Not back then, when she was his Lizzie, and he was only her Papa.
Chapter Ten