“Yes?”
Tell her you love her. “I have been wrestling with a question of logic,” Sycamore said, dusting the dirt from his hands. “Though my family does not account me a very logical fellow.”
“You are logical,” Jeanette said, arranging her skirts to sit tailor-fashion on the floor. “You are frightfully good at seeing logic that eludes others.”
“I’m not feeling very logical at present, but here is my conundrum. You sent me on my way because you sought to protect me from Beardsley. I understand that and thank you for it, but why was I not permitted to protect you as well? All I wanted—all I needed and asked for—was the chance to keep safe the woman I love to distraction, to have the right to face your battles with you, and yet, you banished me. I was left to make shift with half measures taken from the periphery.”
He moved to sit beside her, resting his back against the wall and his wrists on his bent knees, when he wanted desperately to take Jeanette’s hand. More half measures.
“You can protect me,” he went on, “but I cannot protect you. If that is your proposition, then I ought not to take up more of your time. Friends don’t behave like that, as if one is some noble martyr and the other a bumbling incompetent. Family certainly doesn’t behave that way—my family doesn’t—and I cannot imagine a marriage on such terms.”
The plants lay about them in dirty disarray, roots exposed, pots half full of soil, a general mess. This was not the genteel drawing-room proposal Sycamore had aspired to, but that performance would have been wrong for the conversation he needed to have with Jeanette.
This was the discussion he and Jeanette needed to have, or at least begin. A discussion of trust and expectations, rather than hearts, flowers, and empty poetry.
Jeanette had planned candlelight, excellent vintages, superb cuisine, and an intimate dining parlor for her next encounter with Sycamore. Instead, she was sitting on the floor in the foyer, where any footman might come upon them, dismembered plants creating a spectacular mess.
And Sycamore wanted to talk about… Jeanette could barely fathom the question he was asking.
“Of course I sought to protect you,” she said. “The Coventry is all you have, and Beardsley could have wrecked its reputation as surely as if you’d turned up drunk at Almack’s. At the time I refused your proposal, I thought Beardsley—or Viola—was willing to nearly kill me to bring me to heel.”
Though Beardsley hadn’t been the sum of Rye’s troubles apparently, merely a badly timed makeweight.
Sycamore leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He was a strikingly attractive man, and also toweringly unhappy—with her. His posture was one of weary defeat, and that was Jeanette’s fault.
“As the threat to you increased,” he said, “your determination to bear your troubles alone also increased. Do I have that right?”
“I could not risk that you…” Jeanette stopped, marshaled her courage, and tried again. “What if you abandoned me too? What if you decided that a woman you married in well-intended haste—a difficult, barren widow with a pack of lying, impecunious in-laws—was a mistake? I was the girl child my father never needed, the sister Rye considered a pest, the wife who’d failed her lordly husband, the step-mother of no particular use… I am good for little more than making up numbers at house parties and managing charities. What if you rode to my rescue and then cast me off, Sycamore?”
Jeanette drew her legs up to wrap her arms around her knees. “I could not bear your polite tolerance, could not bear to become another woman wishing you hadn’t tired of her. To know I had become a burden to you would break my heart.”
The floor of the foyer was cold and hard, like the floor of a prison cell, nothing of softness or comfort to be had. The silence stretched as Jeanette’s heart did break. She had betrayed Sycamore’s trust, and still he had come uninvited to avert disaster.
“Say something,” Jeanette muttered. “Get up and leave, tear up my invitation, but don’t simply sit there wishing you hadn’t paid this call.”
“Say something.” Sycamore scrubbed a hand over his face. “Right. Very well. Here is what I have to say: In what strange and forbidding world are women only lovable if they are perfect? Am I perfect, Jeanette?”
“You very nearly are, to me.”
“You are being polite and I am far from perfect. And yet, you sent me a dinner invitation, suggesting that even with my myriad flaws—my big mouth, my horde of siblings, my flair for blunt speech, my vanity, and on and on—I am somehow desirable company. Do you expect perfection of me?”
“No. I expect you to be yourself.”
“How fortunate for me, because I can be none other than who I am. You, however, expect yourself to be…” He flung a hand toward the ceiling. “A pattern card of self-sufficiency, feminine perfection, never cross or ill-spoken. You are to be an automaton whose knives never bounce off the target. Why, Jeanette? Why put such unreasonable demands on yourself?”
Sycamore hunched forward, drawing his finger through a sprinkling of dirt across the marble squares. “Don’t answer that, because I know what you’re thinking. If you are perfect enough, mannerly enough, smart enough, charming enough, maybe somebody will love you, or at least stick by you for a time. Well, I’m not perfect either, Jeanette. I badly bungled my first offer of marriage to you, and I am probably bungling this one too.”
Jeanette wiped her fingers across her cheek. “You’re not bungling, Sycamore.” He wasn’t leaving, and at that moment, not leaving counted for everything.
“Yes, I am, because what matters is that I love you. I love you, I love you. I worry for you, I desire you. I want to know what you think of every stupid article I read in the paper. I want to consult you on all the
