“Because,” he said, slipping his arms around her middle, “the feelings refuse to be put into tidily labeled crocks with lids sized to match.”
She had no reply for that, so he gently tugged her laces into submission. “Tighter?”
“That will do. The feelings are complicated, Sycamore, and I don’t know what to do with them.”
He passed the laces forward and tied them off loosely. “You need not do anything, Jeanette. Enjoy having a devoted admirer, for I do admire you.”
Don’t leave me. The lament was old, aimed by a small boy at a mother overwhelmed by too many rambunctious children. She’d frequently decamped for Bath in an effort to gain the notice of a husband preoccupied with his botany, and then she’d gone to Bath and never come home.
Don’t leave me had been silently flung at two sisters, one lost to matrimony, the other to service and then, again, to matrimony.
Older brothers had disappeared to public school, and—worst hurt of all—Papa, after disappearing on endless botanical excursions, had died. They all left, all of them, and that Jeanette might cast Sycamore aside caused him something approaching hysteria.
“I worry,” she said, turning into his embrace. “If something seems too good to be true…”
He held her gently, knowing her pessimism was justified. “I am not a swaggering marquess twice your age and bent on securing my dynasty at the expense of your happiness. I am not a father who appears to dote on you—when I recall you exist—while I in truth burden you with making my hopes and dreams come true. I am not your brother, gone to war and come home to you an unhappy and guilt-ridden stranger.”
She pressed her forehead to his chest. “But you are dear, and I did not intend that you become dear. You were to be annoying and possibly charming, though mostly useful.”
From anybody else, that would be an almost humorous lament, but from Jeanette…
Sycamore kissed her temple. “Let me be dear to you, Jeanette. You are very dear to me.”
She sighed and, for a luscious moment, yielded to his embrace. “I am daft. You make me daft, and I like that, but now is not the time to be daft. Where is my dress?”
He aided her to don the costume of a proper lady. She tucked and tidied him into a gentleman’s riding attire. Her touch was impersonal and unloverlike, from which Sycamore took a backhanded satisfaction. Jeanette would ruthlessly suppress only those emotions that threatened to swamp her self-possession.
“Will I do?” he asked, draping his riding jacket over his arm.
“You more than do. You are a fashion plate of masculine pulchritude. Do you know why I first graced the Coventry with my presence?”
“You were curious, and the Coventry is fashionable?”
“I was bored, that’s true, and I like the challenge of a fresh deck, but I’d passed you riding in the park of a morning. You tipped your hat to me, and I saw your extraordinary eyes.”
“My extraordinary eyes earned me a number of schoolyard thrashings,” Sycamore said. “They are pretty, in the opinion of more than one youthful pugilist. Until Ash showed me how to defend myself, I suffered regular beatings. The beatings were nothing compared to the work it took to hide their effects from my family.”
“And that was the last time anybody laid a fist on you, I trust.” Jeanette began straightening up the bed. “You were tired when I passed you on that bridle path, had probably been up all night at the club. I saw the weariness in your eyes and the complete lack of flirtation. ‘There,’ I thought to myself, ‘is a man of depth and substance. A man thinking about more than his last tumble or his next pint. He would never be obsessed over something as shallow as a spare of the body.’”
“A man of substance and depth?” Had anybody ever paid him such a high compliment?
“Yes,” she said, sitting once again on the made bed. “Would it be possible to return directly to Town, Sycamore?”
“You don’t want to practice with the full set of knives?”
She put a hand over her tummy. “Perhaps tomorrow. Something I ate did not agree with me, and a return home posthaste appeals strongly.”
Sycamore assayed the state of his own digestion, for he’d partaken of the same food at lunch that Jeanette had. Jeanette was asking politely, but for her to even mention feeling unwell she was doubtless in distress.
“The coach will have returned by now, and I’ll tell John Coachman to spring ’em. Can you walk, Jeanette?”
She managed, but before climbing into the coach, she was sick in the grass. They had to stop halfway to London for her to be unwell again, and by the time Sycamore carried her into his house, she was pale, clammy, complaining of a serious headache, and in immediate need of a chamber pot.
Sycamore sent for a physician he trusted, but he did not need a doctor to tell him that Jeanette was suffering a serious, possibly fatal, case of food poisoning.
Chapter Twelve
“You are no longer begging for death, but rather, simply longing for it. That is progress.”
Jeanette rolled over to face a petite, dark-haired woman whose observation carried a hint of a Northern accent. The lady had the inherent reserve of the denizens of the Northern counties as well, though her eyes, a startling green, were kind.
“I am…” Jeanette looked around at the room and saw a fan of knives arranged on the opposite wall. The bed was enormous, the sheets softest flannel, the quilts even softer. “I am not at my best. You are Ann.”
“Miss Ann Pearson, and you are going to live.” She pulled draperies closed over two windows and poured half a glass of water. “Drink, please. A bout of the flux necessitates fluids.”
The flux, a raging headache, body aches worthy of an eighty-year-old granny in winter, and a belly that had rejected Jeanette’s entire lunch hours ago and
