Someone to Care (Westcott #4)(32)

“And does that work?” she asked.

“Oh, assuredly.” He looked at her, eyebrows raised. “I do not suffer fools gladly. Or at all, in fact.”

“Your family and servants are fools?” she asked him.

He gave the matter some thought. “I can see,” he said, “that I am going to have to choose my words carefully with you, Viola. No, they are not fools. At least, not all of them are. They are merely . . . tedious. Is that a more acceptable word?”

“I do not know the people concerned,” she said. “Are they all your family? Do you not have children? Surely your own children are not tedious.”

He sighed and settled his shoulders across the corner of the carriage seat, putting a little distance between them. He folded his arms over his chest. “They are not,” he said. “But those who have the charge of them would make them tedious if they could.”

“But can they?” she asked. “Do you not have the charge of them yourself?”

“Perhaps,” he said, “I am tedious, Viola.”

“How old are they?” She was not to be deterred, it seemed.

“Seventeen, almost eighteen,” he said.

“All of them?” It was the turn of her eyebrows to shoot up.

“Two,” he said. “Twins. Male and female.”

“And are they not—” She got no further. He had set one finger across her lips. Enough was enough.

“I am running away,” he said. “With you. I have the necessary baggage with me in the form of a few changes of clothes and my shaving gear. It is all I need. And your company. But not your probing questions.”

“Just my body,” she said, drawing back from his silencing finger.

“That,” he said softly, refolding his arms, “was uncalled for.”

“Was it?” she asked.

“I suppose that now we are embarked upon a thoroughly satisfactory affair you want more?” he said.

“Like most women?” She smiled, but the expression did not reach her eyes. “That is what your question implied. No, Marcel, I do not want to own your soul. I certainly do not want to own your name. But is an affair only about—” She stopped and frowned.

“Sex?” he said. “But sex is very pleasurable when it is good, Viola. As I believe you would agree.”

“Yes,” she said, and laid her head back against the cushions and closed her eyes. Shutting him out. Leaving him feeling somehow shallow for wanting nothing but sex from this brief escape from responsibility. She was the ice queen of memory, lips in a thin, straight line. He wanted her.

“None of them will miss us,” he said after a few minutes of irritated silence—irritated from his point of view, anyway. She looked perfectly serene, apart from her lips. He might almost have thought she had dozed off except that her head had not flopped to the side. “Do you realize that, Viola? None of your numerous family members will even notice you are gone. They think you have returned to whatever-the-devil house you live in—”

“Hinsford Manor,” she said without opening her eyes.

“Hinsford Manor,” he said. “They will continue to enjoy themselves in Bath and not spare you another thought.”

She had no comment on that. No protest to make. She knew he was right.

“And no one will miss me,” he said. “When André arrives with word that I have fallen by the wayside but will put in an appearance when I put in an appearance, they will breathe a collective sigh of relief and carry on with their lives. Their tedious, sometimes fractious lives. And they will all write me another letter of complaint, and then complain to one another when they realize there is nowhere to send it.”

Her lips softened and curled at the corners in the suggestion of a smile. “You are out of sorts,” she said.

He pursed his lips and glared at her, but she would not give him the satisfaction of opening her eyes. And he would not give her the satisfaction of speaking another word, even to deny her charge.

He was not out of sorts.

After a few minutes her head tipped to the left. He unfolded his arms, slid away from his corner, and lifted her head to rest on his shoulder.

They had had their first quarrel.

But he was right. No one would miss them. And he was not going to start feeling self-pitying about that. Though he did permit himself some small indignation on her part. They had let her go—in a hired carriage, no less—when the raw wound of what she had suffered a few years ago had not even begun to heal. They had let her go, and they would not even miss her.

He would miss her when she left him, he thought. Which was, of course, utter nonsense.





Eight





Viola’s family began to miss her after just a few days, when no letter came from Hampshire to inform them that she had arrived home safely. It was unlike her not to let at least her daughters know, especially when she must realize they would be more anxious than usual. They had tried everything they could to dissuade her from leaving in a hired carriage with no servant for protection or company, not to mention respectability.

Camille and Abigail had each since written to her. So had their maternal grandmother and Viola’s sister-in-law on the Kingsley side and two of her erstwhile sisters-in-law on the Westcott side, they discovered when they mentioned the matter during a family dinner at their grandmother’s home on the Royal Crescent. And so had Wren, the Countess of Riverdale, and Elizabeth, Lady Overfield, Wren’s sister-in-law, Alexander’s sister. One of a lady’s daily duties, after all, was to write letters, and they had all been concerned about Viola and her abrupt decision to return home so soon after the christening of her grandson.