Proof by Seduction (Carhart #1)(38)

And yet what was she to do with herself now? As a woman, most professions were closed to her. She could sew piecework—and ruin her eyes while eking out a living. Perhaps, after all these years, she could attempt to find work teaching. Although with no character references to speak of—she could hardly ask Lord Blakely, after all—the opportunities that presented themselves were likely to be unsavory.

The employment offered to the girl of unknown family hadn’t been savory even before she’d run away to London.

She could retire to the country, where the coins she’d saved would stretch further. She could make a pension of the money, and hope that twelve pounds per annum would keep her for the remainder of her life. It would, so long as she was hale and hearty and capable of cooking and cleaning for herself. A gamble; and a life that sounded frighteningly blank and devoid of purpose.

None of that sounded right. All those possibilities echoed emptily in the hollow of her lungs. Jenny breathed out and thought of what she wanted.

What would she do if she were to start her life over again, from the very beginning? What would she change? That old, deep aching overtook her.

She wanted a mother.

God, she wanted a child.

She wanted to make someone of herself that even the fastidious Lord Blakely would have to respect.

Three impossibilities. She shook her head.

Jenny had no idea where she would end, but she did have some idea where to start. Slowly, ceremonially, she pulled the black fustian from her tables and chairs. She gathered the heaped cotton in her arms and hauled it to the fireplace.

It landed in the hearth in a swirl of ash and coal dust. Jenny coughed the particles from her lungs and waited. For a few seconds, the dark material cut off all light and heat. Then it glowed red, and finally caught in a crackling blaze. Jenny pulled off her multicolored skirts, one by one, and tossed them atop the fire. Her kerchief flew next, and then her shawl. Finally, she stripped down to her shift. The conflagration lasted only minutes, but it scorched the front of her thighs with its heat.

When the flames died down, the last of Madame Esmerelda had burned away.

CHAPTER NINE

AS NOTES WENT, the one Gareth received from his cousin two days after his disastrous encounter with Madame Esmerelda struck him as particularly opaque.

Meet me, it said. Musicale at Arbuthnots’. Eight o’clock. In the blue dining room. Very important. Don’t bring Madame Esmerelda. You were right about her. Ned.

Gareth couldn’t bear to think of Madame Esmerelda. Every time he thought of that evening, a hot stab of shame lanced through him, like a burning poker stabbed in his side. Sitting in his study, pretending to industriously pore over a stack of bills and reports, it should have been easy to put the woman from his mind.

It wasn’t. After all, he was in his study with his man of business.

There was no place for nervousness in Gareth’s relationship with his servants. Until these last few days, his interactions with White had been simple. The man dealt with the estate correspondence; Gareth paid his salary. Gareth liked simplicity. He liked not having to worry about what the man thought. He liked not wondering whether his latest ham-handed attempt at conversation would result in humiliation and unease.

He didn’t like feeling like an ass. And Madame Esmerelda’s dreadfully clear eyes—the ones that had seen Ned as something other than a childish irritant—had dismissed him. He’d told her to look at herself through his eyes, but if she had really done so, she would not have been ashamed. If she’d understood how bravado and bluster had transformed in his breast to hunger, she’d have laughed outright.

Who was he fooling? She had known it. She had spoken the truth that he’d hidden for so long behind a scowl and a cutting phrase. He had no way of conversing with others. He didn’t know how to make friends. He cringed, feeling awkward and ungainly every time he made the effort. And so long ago—more than twenty years before—he’d given up the task entirely.

But there came a time in a man’s life when he no longer wanted to cut down everyone around him. Gareth didn’t need to read tea leaves to see the future that lay ahead of him if he continued on this solitary path.

He was going to be lonely. And not just the little loneliness that he experienced now, the soft wistfulness for someone to talk with and touch, but a fierce longing, one that whispered that it could all have been different if only—if only—

If only he what?

Because of all the things she had said that night, the one that had cut the deepest—the one that had slashed through layers of muscle and subcutaneous fat, to score the artery—was that it was his choice to be who he was. For years he had told himself that he had no choice about the way he was. That coldness and calculation were natural to his personality. That he responded to threats by eviscerating them with his mind.

He’d believed he could not be the warm, loving brother his sister longed for; that he could not bring Ned under his wing as a friend instead of a subject, to be ordered about.

She had stripped his illusions away. He’d chosen this life, and what seemed bearable when it resulted from implacable fate became untenable as a matter of option. If he did not change in the years to come, the thought that he had chosen this path would nibble away at him, like a mouse at a sack of grain, until nothing was left.

If only he had the courage to make different choices.

If he was going to have that courage, he could not put the matter off. He could not wait for some far-off time or place in dreams and fairy tales. It was now she demanded. This moment. In his study.