Lady Eve's Indiscretion

“I will not marry you.” She could not, not him of all men. That signal fact gave her scattering wits a rallying point.

Deene did not argue. When an argument was imperative, he did not argue. His hand stroked slowly over her hair, and as the fighting instinct coursing through Eve’s body struggled to stand against a swamping despair, some part of Eve’s brain made a curious observation:

Deene was breathing in a slow, unhurried rhythm, and as a function of the intimacy of their posture, Eve was breathing in counterpoint to him. The same easy, almost restful tempo, but her exhale matched his inhale.

“We cannot marry, Deene. I won’t have it. A white marriage was as far as I was willing to go, and then only to the right sort of man, a man who would never seek to… impose conjugal duties on me.”

His arms fell away, when Eve would very much have liked them to stay around her. Better he not see her face, better she not have to see his lovely blue eyes going chill and distant.

“We need to set you to rights.”

His hands on her shirt were deft and impersonal, his fingers barely touching her skin. The detachment in his touch was probably meant to be a kindness, but it… hurt.

“Lucas, I cannot think.”

“We’ll think this through together. I can guarantee you not a soul will be coming through that door until we decide to pass through it ourselves.”

“I hate that you can be so calm.”

And—worst thought yet—she loved him for it too, just a little. He wasn’t stomping around the room, trying to subtly blame her, cursing his fate while figuring out how to duck away from it. He wasn’t thrusting her aside so he could put himself together while he left her floundering to right herself with clumsy fingers and a clumsier mind.

She loved him for his simple gestures of consideration, though one could love and hate simultaneously. When she’d been recovering from her accident, this truth had borne down upon her every time Jenny or Louisa offered to read her another hour’s worth of bucolic poetry.

“I feel just as if I were lying in that filthy sheep meadow, the scent of sheep dirt all about me, the cold in my bones, the…”

Eve snapped her jaw shut. What on earth was she babbling about?

Deene paused in his tucking and buttoning and put a warm hand on either side of her jaw. He kept his hands there until Eve managed to meet his gaze. “If you are in some stinking sheep meadow, I am there with you. Is there tea in this house?”

Tea. Oh, of course, tea. “Yes.”

And still he did not lift her from his lap. While she watched, he withdrew a handkerchief from a pocket and swabbed at his flat belly.

He had a moderate dusting of chest hair. That she would notice this made Eve doubt her sanity—Canby had had no chest hair—because her impulse was not to look away, it was to touch him. What would it feel like to run her fingertips over that chest hair? With self-discipline making far too late an appearance, she denied herself the appeasement of this one small curiosity.

When they were both more or less tidied up, Deene wrapped his hand around the back of Eve’s head and once more drew her face down to his shoulder.

“You shall not blame yourself for this, Eve Windham. You are a lady, innocent of any wrongdoing, and I have breached the bounds of gentlemanly behavior altogether.”

Not quite altogether, though the distinction would make no difference. “Lucas, you have no idea…”

He squeezed the back of her neck, gently, just as he had when Eve had been suffering a megrim weeks ago. “We’ll sort this out, Eve. You have nothing to make apology for, not to me, not to Their Graces, not to anybody.”

Papa’s heart would be broken. She closed her eyes at that realization. Her Grace would be disappointed; she’d get that tight “where did I go wrong?” look about her eyes and mouth, but Papa…

“Come along.” Deene patted her hip. “We’ll make some tea and get the color back in your cheeks. It won’t be so bad, Eve.”

He waited for her to extricate herself from his lap, and this took some doing because her hip was stiff—it hardly ever gave her trouble anymore, but of course it would today. When she was on her feet, Deene rose as well, tied her stock around her neck in a neat, graceful bow, saw to his cravat, and offered her his arm.

She took it, a reflex—one she resented even as they arrived to a spotless, empty kitchen.

“May I rummage for some food?” He asked her this as she tossed kindling on the coals in the hearth and took the kettle from the hob.

“There should be bread in the bread box.”

Maybe it was a propensity for self-preservation in the adult male, maybe it was the instincts of a former soldier, but as Eve assembled a tea tray, Deene’s foraging produced bread, butter, strawberry jam, and cheese. They domesticated in the kitchen in an oddly comfortable quiet, and by the time the tea was steeping in a plain white ceramic pot, Eve realized Deene had been giving her time to settle her nerves.

Or perhaps to settle his own—a cheering thought.

When she lowered herself to a bench at the worktable, Deene came down beside her, meaning she had to scoot a little.

“Don’t run off.” He poured her tea, buttered her a slice of bread, then spread a liberal portion of strawberry jam on it.

If he tried to feed her, she was going to bite off his hand. “I’m not helpless, Lucas.”

The look he gave her was impassive. “Pleased to hear it. Pass the sugar.”

So they sat there side by side, swilling tea, and not arguing. As Eve filled her belly—the food was a surprising comfort, as was Deene’s bulk beside her—she tried to reconcile herself to her fate while she topped up their cups.

“This is worse than if we’d been happened upon by strangers.”

“Your mother and sister will never mention what they saw if you don’t want them to, Eve.”

Eve studied his profile and saw he believed this made a difference. “They will never mention it in any case, though Her Grace will likely tell Papa. That they know makes a difference, Lucas. To me.”

“To me as well. I am formally renewing my proposal for your hand in marriage, Evie. Don’t hog the butter.”

“I am refusing your suit, though you do me great—don’t you hog the jam.”

“You want a white marriage. I cannot give you that. The responsibility for the succession lies with me, despite Anthony’s willingness to step in, if necessary. I wonder if your father will call me out.”

He reached for another slice of bread as he spoke, the observation so casual Eve wanted to slap her hand over his mouth. With no more regard than if he’d asked, “I wonder if Islington will put his colt in the second heat at Epsom?” Deene had heaped terror on top of Eve’s dread.

“He wouldn’t. Papa likes you.” The tea in her stomach started to rebel at the image of Lucas, facedown, bleeding his life away in some foggy meadow… Papa, facedown… Or—it had been known to happen—both men, dead or permanently incapacitated over Eve’s idiocy.

Oh, merciful, merciful heavens.

“Westhaven might see to it,” Deene went on, “given that His Grace should not be involved in such a scandal at this point in his life. All of your brothers are tiresomely good shots. I suspect Lord Val might be pressed into service—time spent in Italy generally improves a man’s command of the art of the sword.”

He munched away on his bread, while Eve concluded there was never a species, a gender, or a creature on earth as blockheaded as the honorable English male in possession of a pair of dueling pistols—or swords, foils, whatever the proper term was.

Unless it was she, herself, for allowing such folly to be contemplated.

Whatever was she going to do?

They tidied up the kitchen and put the parlor to rights—this involved arranging pillows so the smudges left by Eve’s dusty boots were covered up, but as one mundane, simple task followed another, Eve faced the growing realization that the last time she’d fallen so far from sense and proper behavior, the consequences had been