A Fresh Perspective, A Regency Romance (18 page)

“Megan. About yesterday.”

She knew what was coming. She had prepared herself for it. She had lain awake, staring at the ceiling for half the night composing in her mind what she supposed would be his careful explanation of what had happened between them. He would say something to the effect that his senses had run away with him, that she must not take the moment too much to heart. He would remind her that it had all been pretense of passion--a passion that was all too real to her. She had played and replayed their kisses in her mind--every unforgettable moment.

She did not want, could not stand, in fact, to hear his carefully worded explanation. She had, as a result, worked out exactly what to say.

“Oh, yes. The kisses,” she said conversationally. “I had no opportunity to thank you.”

“Thank me?” He sounded confused, but she could not risk looking at him. She would forget every carefully prepared word if she looked at him.

“Very instructional. Most enlightening. More skillful than even I had imagined.”

“But. . .”

She cut him off. “You were really quite convincing, I must confess.”

“Wha--”

“Your pretense of passion for me. I almost began to believe it was real. Was I as convincing?” She darted a glance his way.

He looked dazed, frowned. “Unquestionably so.”

“Good! I should hate to think you did not enjoy the experience as much as I did. I mean, if I did not know you as well as I do, I would surely fall head over heels in love with you on the sole basis of such kisses. They were remarkable. Really, quite remarkable!”

She babbled. She knew she was babbling, but could no more stop it than she could stop his leaving. If not words flowing, it would be tears. “It is a good thing I know. . .that we are friends in every way. There can be no confusion between us when we have known one another for so long, right? I would not care to have confusion or misunderstanding between us, after all. Would you?” She forced every word to sound cheerful, steady and convincing.

He stared at her. She could feel his gaze following her, but could not, would not, turn to meet his eyes. Had she done so, she would most assuredly have given herself and her growing sorrow, away to him.

“Megan.” His voice was soft.

“Yes? What?” She sounded pitiful, so unsteady was her voice.

“I hate to be going. I hope to see you in London.”

“Yes. London. It will be good to see you again before you leave for India. . . or is it, after all, the Americas?”

He frowned, raised his brows as if he had no answer ready for her.

She rushed on. “We must see the sights together: the Academy, the Townley Collection, the Annual exhibit at the National Gallery. It will be great fun.” She could say no more, else the tears that stung her eyes would have begun to flow.

Farewells and hugs all around, he held her very tight for a trifle longer than she might have expected before he leapt into the carriage and bade the driver, “Walk on.”

Reed’s carriage disappeared up the lane, wheels rattling, harness jingling, hoof beats muffled on the dirt track. Megan stood listening until there was nothing more to hear.

“Oh Gussie,” Megan turned into her sister’s shoulder with a moan. “What am I to do? He means to leave England. He means to leave me behind.”

“Oh dear.” Gussie offered a handkerchief, though moisture threatened her own eyes. “Dear Megan. You have kissed him, haven’t you? What a fool I have been to suggest such foolishness.”

“No!” Megan said vehemently, dashing tears from her eyes. “Never blame yourself. I will cherish the memory for the rest of my life.”

Gussie gave her shoulder a comforting squeeze. “Is there no hope for the two of you, then? None at all?”

Megan set her jaw. “No. Never has been. I am an extremely foolish girl to have believed otherwise.”

In the main road leading out of Grasmere Reed encountered Giovanni Giamarco, mounted, with a string of three saddle horses trotting behind him. Flinging down his window, Reed called to the driver to pause.

“Off to London are you?” Giovanni shouted.

“Yes, and sorry to go.”

Giovanni nudged his horse closer to the carriage window. “I am sorry to see the back of you.” He spoke with sincerity reflected in the crystal blue of his eyes. The two found themselves on new footing, based on the depth of understanding they shared. “You have yet to tell me if there is anything I can do to repay the debt of gratitude I feel I owe you.”

“There is one thing,” Reed replied thoughtfully.

“Anything!” Giovanni promised.

“Megan will be lonely for the remainder of her stay here, and in need of an escort when she goes on to London. Will you look after her?”

Giovanni sat up very straight in the saddle and looked Reed steadily in the eyes. “Depend upon it. You honor me, sir. To entrust one so dear to you, to my care.”

Chapter Nineteen

O
nce again, the well-laid landscape of Reed Talcott’s life had been turned upon its head. Megan’s kisses had moved a mountain of feeling within him. A river of yearning, too long damned up, flooded the parched terrain of his heart. Reed did not like to leave the Lakes behind. He did not like to leave Megan with so much unsettled and unsaid. He did not like to leave her in Giovanni Giamarco’s care.

Feelings had sprouted within him that he had never before allowed to seed. Megan’s garbled claim that there was nothing more to their kisses than pretense stirred every feeling within heart and head into rebellion. She could not mean what she said. Could she? Did she feel for him none of this tumbled race of emotion, the yearning need and desire that now troubled him? Every word and glance they had shared seemed pregnant with new meaning. Every moment they had spent together at the Lakes bore re-examination.

As if he saw his life from a mountaintop--hills, valleys and rivers spreading, unclouded before him--he realized his current financial disappointment was in fact a small thing compared to the great emotional desert he had accepted for far too long. As rhythmically as hoofbeats, as bruising as ruts in the road, questions in an unending and unanswerable stream flowed through his milling mind. He had never before questioned the fact that Megan was his best friend. What was it they now shared? Love?

What little he knew of love, he had learned at Blythe Corner. Megan’s family shared a warm, playful tenderness that had at times, almost overwhelmed him with jealousy. Why could he not witness such pleasant discourse, such gentle bantering within his own family?

In the last weary leg of his journey, with the mountains far behind him and the quiet with which he had so recently filled his ears lost in a medley of too many hooves and too many wheels on paved roads, Reed worked himself into a bit of a state, a temper most unusual. A blended rage of emotion possessed him: fear, anger, love and hatred. Overriding all, galloped the feeling he had been betrayed, by those who should have loved him most. Anguish tore at his heart, built from the lost potential of what might have been. In this state he arrived, late in the evening, upon his father’s doorstep.

He was met at the door by Marsden, his father’s butler, with the information that Lord Talcott was not at home to visitors.

Something inside of Reed snapped.

“I am not a visitor,” he said tersely, pushing past the poor man. “I am Lord Talcott’s son. You will not turn me away. Take my coat, have a footman see to the horses and tell me at once where I may find my father. Upstairs, perhaps?” His gaze fixed on the stairs, where he had stood long ago, looking down on his father and mother as they tore asunder everything he knew to be good and true in an argument over a music teacher.

The sound of a woman’s throaty laugh and the low rumble of a gentleman’s reply came from the dining room, not two yards from where he stood. He turned his attention toward the double doors before which the butler positioned himself.

“His lordship is not to be disturbed.” Marsden’s voice was hushed. “He asked specifically not to be interrupt. . .”

Ruthlessly, Reed thrust past him. The ledgers that held his pitiful life’s story piled in one arm like a battering ram, he opened the door on a scene straight out of one of Hogarth’s etchings. His father, clad in no more than his shirt and a pair of gartered stockings, wig askew, lolled on a comfortable chair drawn up before the dining table on which reposed the remains of a sumptuous meal, four empty wine bottles and a naked woman of voluptuous proportion.

The woman must have been a beauty once. There was still the fading bloom of it in the exaggerated hourglass of her figure, in the curling length of her hair and the gentle laugh with which she met the opening of the door. But the walnut shade of her tresses had a manufactured look and the milk white expanse of her thighs had begun to curdle. Her face, like that of a china doll, was aided and abetted in its claim to youth by heavy applications of paint.

“Dear God! She’s lying on the Spode!” breathed the butler.

Unfazed, either by the condition of the china, or the tarted-up trollop who lolled atop it, Reed, goal clear, mode unstoppable, slammed the ledgers onto the table. “I must ask you, sir,” he demanded, “did you do this because you do not truly consider me your son--blood of your blood? Did you hope to leave another man’s bastard, though he might wear your name, penniless?”

The woman on the table, heedless of the fearsome clatter of fine bone china against Waterford crystal, picked up the corner of the tablecloth as if it were a shawl, and covered the more blatant parts of her nakedness.

“What?” His father rose from the chair, like a phoenix from ashes. “What in blazes do you mean, bursting in on me like this without warning?”

“What warning did you give, sir, that my inheritance had all been spent on an indulgent lifestyle that far exceeds your means?”

There fell a silence, thick as the pudding congealing on the sideboard.

The woman further wrapped the tablecloth around her torso. “I believe this must be my cue for an exit, my dear,” she said politely to Reed’s father before jumping down from the table in a tinkling hail of fine crystal and now worthless china. With theatrical flair and a completely deaf ear for the havoc wrought, she nonchalantly made her exit, dragging the tablecloth after her like a royal train--china, crystal and plate crashing down in her wake.

Marsden leapt forward to capture in one hand a crystal goblet that teetered on the edge of the table. With the other he scooped up an unbroken gravy boat, before it sailed away on the surging tablecloth tide. Expression carefully devoid of emotion, he asked blandly, “Does madame require her carriage?

“Madame does.” The woman’s voice echoed from the entryway. “Her clothes as well.”

With an economy of movement, Marsden gathered together the scattered raiment and left them. Father and son watched him go with equal expressions of wordless awe.

“Damn,” Lord Talcott swore when the door closed gently on the last traces of his evening’s entertainment. “You had better have a bloody good excuse for interrupting this evening’s business. I worked six months on the wooing of that woman.”

Reed thumbed open one of the ledgers. “An expensive indulgence. More than four hundred and seventy five pounds you had spent on her as of the middle of last month.”

“As much as that?”

“Yes, and ill could you afford it.”

“How ill?” Lord Talcott still stared at the door. His voice rose in anger. “You had better bring me word that I’ve not two grote to rub together if you mean to interrupt me as you have done.”

“I do.”

Those two tersely uttered words won him attention.

“Do what?”

“You have not two grote to rub together.”

“It’s never as bad as all that.”

“My mother’s words exactly, sir, but I must disappoint you as much as I have disappointed her. You have no money.”

“None?”

“As I have even less desire to inherit your debts as I have to inherit nothing, I have made arrangements to deal with the situation. There are papers here that require your immediate signature.”

“It is all gone?”

“All of it but the five percents, a few bonds and the properties.”

His father blinked, eyes glassy and blank. “It cannot be.”

Reed marveled that his father could be so completely oblivious to the state of his fortune--or lack thereof.

“It can and is. I have checked the figures thrice.” He flung a page with rows of neat and irrefutable numbers in front of his father.

Lord Talcott fell silent, studying them. When his gaze rose from the bottom line his expression was haggard. “What was it you said when you first burst through the door?

Reed had no desire to repeat what he had said. He could see by his father’s demeanor that the harshness of reality came as a shock. “I do not recall,” he lied.

His father closed his eyes, head lolled back upon a cushion, brow furrowed in concentration. “No, no, I have it now.” Eyes still closed, he repeated, “Did I do this because I do not truly consider you my son--blood of my blood?” His eyes opened to stare at Reed. “You think I did this on purpose? Out of spite?”

“The thought did cross my mind, sir, that you might prefer to spend every penny rather than leave it to a son you believe to be a by-blow foisted off on you by an unfaithful wife.”

His father closed his eyes again. “You are no bastard, Reed. Your resemblance to your grandfather, who died before you were born, is too marked to deny. No, I did not pauper us by design. Ignorance and carelessness are my only excuse.”

“Do you use the same excuse for your abandonment of your only son?

Lord Talcott cleared his throat with gravelly anger. “Do you mean to send me into an apoplectic fit, boy?”

Reed considered holding tongue. He had already said and done far more than he had ever dreamed himself capable of, but the words would not be stayed. “I have missed your presence throughout the great majority of my life, sir. I would not risk losing you entirely now that we do, on occasion, share words.”

His father rose, drew on his breeches and buttoned them as he crossed to the decanters on the sideboard. “I find myself desperately dry. Disaster does that to a man, you know.” He poured amber liquid with shaking hand, crystal clinking erratically against crystal. The tremor ceased when he downed the shot in a single gulp. “Care for something? You can probably tell me how dear this particularly fine scotch cost me, but I beg you will refrain.”