And Then He Kissed Her (15 page)

“No doubt,” she agreed, laughing with him. She felt strangely light of heart all of a sudden, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She turned her head and looked at him. “It’s odd, but you’re the first person with whom I’ve ever spoken of it. Auntie knew what had happened, of course, and our friends, but no one talked about it, including me. Ladies, you see, don’t break down in front of anyone, and they don’t ask each other indiscreet questions. I never felt able to tell anyone how much it hurt.”

“It always hurts to find one’s love is not reciprocated.”

“Your wife never loved you?”

“No. And the odd thing is, I knew it.” He pressed a fist to his own abdomen in the same place where he had touched her moments before. “I knew it here, in my guts. But I didn’t listen. I listened to my heart instead. Had I listened to my instincts, I would have saved both Consuelo and myself from years of misery.”

Abruptly, he shook his head and moved as if to depart. “It’s getting dark. I’d best be on my way.”

“Yes, of course. Good night, my lord.” She turned to open her front door, but his voice stopped her.

“Emma?”

She looked over her shoulder at him.

He was standing on the sidewalk, watching her. “If you really think what I did today was wrong, then why didn’t you stop me?”

Without waiting for an answer, he turned
away and started toward his waiting carriage. It wasn’t until he was in the vehicle and it was halfway to the corner before she admitted the truth. “Because even though I thought it was wrong, I felt it was right. And that terrifies me.”

She watched as the carriage vanished around the corner. She knew the rules for nearly everything, and yet, she couldn’t help wondering if those rules had anything to do with what was right and what was wrong. Worse, she was beginning to think that despite being a mature woman of thirty years, she knew nothing at all about life.

A
s much as he hated to admit it, Harry knew that Emma was right. What he’d done at Au Chocolat would have hurt her reputation had anyone seen them. Despite his insistence to her that what he’d done had been harmless, he knew it wasn’t. A woman’s virtue could be so easily compromised. He didn’t care what people thought, but he was a man, and he was fully aware that for a woman, the consequences of what had happened could have been far more serious.

He knew he had to put things with Emma
Dove back on the impersonal footing they’d had before. Instead of meeting with her, he used the excuse of other business obligations to avoid her. He sent her revisions to her by courier and communicated with her through Quinn.

Distance, however, did not prove the deterrent he’d hoped for. Time and again, he found his thoughts veering toward that afternoon at Au Chocolat, his imagination reliving that moment when he’d seen passion come alive in her face. He’d never seen anything like it before.

Until that moment, he’d never dreamt such a deep capacity for passion existed within the prim and proper Miss Dove. Now he knew the truth, but it did him little good. She was not the sort of woman to ever consider an illicit liaison, a fact he found so damned aggravating, his only choice was to redouble his efforts to stay away from her.

On a more positive note, his domestic life smoothed out a bit. Diana, it seemed, had finally accepted the fact that neither of the Dillmouth girls nor one of their Abernathy cousins was the special woman destined to capture his heart or get him to the altar. Their visit at an end, all four young ladies returned to Lord Dillmouth, much to Harry’s relief, and life within the Marlowe house hold returned to normal, at least in most respects.

Breakfast, however, remained the place to discuss the wonderful Mrs. Bartleby. Now that he had acquired her, Harry might have found this sort of conversation much more acceptable than he had when she wrote for Barringer, except that
the women of his house hold were determined to learn that lady’s true identity. Having discovered that he had purchased the
Social Gazette
, and Mrs. Bartleby’s column along with it, they made every possible attempt to wheedle her real name and family background out of him.

Harry, however, was no fool. Though his sisters could be trusted with the secret, he had doubts about the other two women in his family. Despite her pretense of dignified restraint, Grandmama was a terrible gossip. As for his mother, heaven bless her, she couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended upon it. Harry was determined to keep mum.

“How can you be so tiresome?” Louisa looked at him with disappointment. “She writes for you now, doesn’t she? I don’t see why you don’t just tell us who she is.”

“It is vital to preserve her anonymity,” he answered as he began spreading butter on his toast.

“Well, it isn’t as if we’d go around telling everyone,” his mother said with a sniff. “We can be discreet, I daresay.”

“You are discretion itself, Mama,” Harry answered, even managing to say it with a straight face. “But I must respect Mrs. Bartleby’s privacy.”

All the women of his house hold were forced to accept this, but Harry didn’t like the thoughtful way Diana kept looking at him throughout the meal. When he departed from the table to have his carriage brought around, she followed him. Her pretext was asking for Jackson to fetch their second carriage so that she might go out,
but Harry understood his sister well enough that he knew the second carriage was a pretext.

“Have you heard anything of Miss Dove?” Diana asked him as they waited together in the foyer. “Has she found other employment?”

He turned and gave her a sharp, searching glance, but Diana wasn’t looking back at him. She seemed thoroughly absorbed in the task of putting on her gloves.

“I’m certain she has,” he answered.

“Hmm, perhaps she’s writing those etiquette books now?”

“Perhaps she is. I wouldn’t know.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Diana turned, and there was an ironical little smile at the corners of her lips, but before he could answer, she spoke again. “I wonder if Miss Dove might give me some assistance with my wedding plans. She’s so efficient, and I’m sure her advice would be impeccable. Even Mrs. Bartleby would no doubt approve of Miss Dove’s knowledge in such matters, don’t you think?”

“Diana—” he began, but she cut him off.

“Don’t worry, Harry.” Her smile widened into a grin. “I won’t tell.”

“How you guess these things is beyond my ken,” he grumbled.

“Simple deduction, dear brother. Rather like Sherlock Holmes, you know.” Her expression became serious. “But I do need help with the wedding, Harry, really I do, and I’d love some of Mrs. Bartleby’s clever ideas. Would it be all right if I asked Miss Dove for her assistance?”

He gave her a rueful look. “Could I stop you?”

“Of course. If you ever said no to me, I would accept that. It’s just that you never do say no. You spoil me. Spoil us all, really. In your eyes, nothing is too good for us.”

He looked at his sister, and he wanted to tell her why. He wanted to say it was because he loved them all. Because he was head of the family and he had to take care of them and he would cut his heart out before he’d let anything happen to them. He wanted to say that nothing was too good for them because nothing he could give would ever make up for how they had staunchly stood by him through the five painful years it had taken him to obtain his divorce. They had been as disgraced in the eyes of society as he, but had never complained, had never questioned his decision, and he knew he could never do enough to make up for that.

Harry looked into his sister’s eyes, and he wanted to say all those things. “Diana, I—” He stopped, the words stuck in his throat. What an irony. Glib as he was, he always found it so hard to say the serious things, the important things. He cleared his throat and looked away. “Yes, well, soon you’ll be Rathbourne’s problem,” he said lightly. “Poor fellow. Good thing he’s got pots of money. Spoiling you requires lots of it.”

She jabbed him in the elbow for that comment.

“Your carriage, my lord,” Jackson said, stepping away from the window to open the front door.

Harry started out to his carriage, but his sister’s voice followed him. “Harry?”

He paused and looked over his shoulder. “Hmm?”

“We love you, too.”

Harry jerked at his tie. A tight sweetness squeezed his chest. “Get all the clever Mrs. Bartleby ideas you like,” he told her. “Just be discreet about it.”

Diana understood at once. “Because Miss Dove hasn’t the background and bona fides?” When he nodded, she went on, “People are so silly, aren’t they?”

“They would be more than silly,” he said and started out the door. “They would be cruel. So it’s important to preserve the secret of Emma’s identity. I don’t want people ridiculing her.”

Emma? Diana stared at the door in astonishment as Jackson closed it behind her brother. He’d called Miss Dove by her Christian name. As unconventional as Harry could be, some things were just pounded into one from birth, and referring to a woman by her Christian name was just not done. Unless…

“Good lord,” Diana murmured, causing Jackson to give her an inquiring glance. She shook her head in reply, but did not speak, for she was trying to wrap her mind around the incredible thought that had come into her head. A man did not use a woman’s Christian name unless she was an intimate acquaintance.

Diana cast her mind back to the one time she’d met Harry’s former secretary, and she felt a mo
mentary doubt. There had always been gossip about Harry and Miss Dove, but Diana had always found it hard to take seriously. If memory served, Miss Dove’s hair was a nondescript sort of brownish red. She wasn’t plain, exactly, but she was no exotic beauty. And she certainly did not possess a volatile temperament. She was not Harry’s sort of woman at all, and Harry would have been the first to say so.

Still, Diana had introduced her brother to any number of dark-haired, hot-tempered beauties during the five years since his divorce from Consuelo had become final, with little success. Perhaps Harry’s sort of woman wasn’t what any of them had thought her to be, including Harry himself.

Diana smiled. Enlisting the aid of Miss Dove could prove fruitful in more ways than one.

Emma was determined to concentrate on her work. She would not indulge in any more idle daydreaming that put her behind schedule. She would not be disappointed every time Marlowe sent his revisions to her by courier instead of meeting with her in person. She would not miss his teasing and his laughter and his company. And she most certainly would not imagine him licking chocolate off her fingers.

She’d determined years ago that he was not the sort of man any woman with sense would want. A sensible woman would run as fast as she could from a man who broke off romantic liaisons by letter, who had the propensity to fall in love instantly and often, who put a woman’s
reputation at risk for a bit of fun, who was divorced and would never remarry. And despite all her own efforts to become more daring, Emma was at heart a woman of sense.

No, best all around if they kept their distance from one another as they had always done in the past. Marlowe was clearly of the same mind as herself. His avoidance of her these past two weeks proved that much.

Emma stared down at the blank page in the typewriting machine before her and wondered why she felt so dismal.

What was the matter with her, in heaven’s name? She was living the dream she’d cherished for years and doing it quite well. The first two expanded Mrs. Bartleby issues had been a huge success. She had a nice, cozy home, a nice, cozy circle of friends, and a nice, cozy life. What more did she want?

A sharp rat-a-tat startled Emma out of her reverie, and she rose from her desk. She crossed the room and opened her door to find Mrs. Morris standing in the corridor with a card in her hand.

“Lady Eversleigh to see you, Emma,” the landlady informed her, sounding quite impressed. Lady Eversleigh was Marlowe’s sister, and despite the tarnished social standing of the Marlowe family among their own set, a peeress always impressed the middle class.

The landlady presented the card with a flourish. “She’s waiting upon you in the parlor downstairs.”

Emma stared down at the card in puzzlement.
She could not think of any reason why the baroness would pay a call upon her. “Please tell her I shall be down directly.”

Mrs. Morris departed, and Emma gathered her unruly thoughts. What ever the reason for the baroness’s unexpected visit, it certainly wouldn’t do to be daydreaming about kissing Lord Marlowe when his sister was sitting in front of her.

A few moments later, Emma went downstairs where she found the baroness engaged in a friendly tête-a-tête with Mrs. Morris on the settee.

Emma had met Marlowe’s sister once, four years earlier, and the moment she saw the other woman again, she was struck anew by the baroness’s resemblance to her brother. She had the same dark brown hair and striking blue eyes.

Lady Eversleigh came forward to meet Emma, her hands outstretched in greeting. “Miss Dove, how do you do? We met once several years ago, though I expect you do not remember the occasion.”

“But I do. I had come to your brother’s house in Hanover Square, delivering some contracts for him to sign. I was standing in the foyer, waiting, and you came walking through on your way out somewhere. You asked who I was, then you insisted I not stand in the foyer. You took me into the drawing room. How could you think I would not remember you after such a kind gesture?”

“Kind? Nonsense. It was simple politeness. That Jackson had left you standing in the foyer was unpardonable.”

Emma knew that a mere secretary did not get shown into the drawing room of a lord. Marlowe’s butler was well trained, for though she was not a tradesman to go down to the servants’ entrance, nor was she an acquaintance paying a call. Lady Eversleigh was clearly as unconcerned with social conventions as her brother.

“Besides,” the other woman went on as she resumed her seat, “if nothing else, I was prompted by a spirit of profound gratitude toward you.”

“Gratitude?” Emma asked as she also sat down.

“Yes. It is thanks to you that Harry began remembering things like birthdays and social invitations.” She glanced at Mrs. Morris. “For that alone, my entire family is indebted to your dear Miss Dove.”

“Fancy that,” the landlady murmured, seeming quite pleased.

The baroness returned her attention to Emma. A hint of mischief so like her brother came into her expression. “And I have to say that you always did choose the most wonderful presents for us. Heaven only knows what we shall get now that you are no longer Harry’s secretary.”

Emma smiled back at her. “You were never supposed to discover that little secret.”

“Yes, well, as my brother will tell you, I love a mystery, and I’ve a knack for ferreting out secrets.” She hesitated, then went on, “Secrets are, in fact, part of the reason I am here.”

“Indeed?” Emma was growing more astonished by the moment.

“Yes.” The baroness glanced at Mrs. Morris again. “I wished to speak with you about a most important and delicate matter…”

In the pause that followed, the landlady took the hint. “Heavens,” she said and rose to her feet. “Here I am dawdling when there is so much work to be done. I shall leave the two of you to your little visit, dear Emma,” she added, trying to conceal her disappointment at being left out of things. She departed, closing the door behind her and leaving the two women alone.

“In what was can I be of assistance to you, Lady Eversleigh?” Emma asked.

The other woman gave a grimace. “Oh, I do hate it so when people refer to me by my title. The name gives me…” She paused and gave a little shudder, closing her eyes for a moment. “It gives me painful memories.” Opening her eyes, she leaned closer and added, “I wish we could all use Christian names. So much simpler. All this emphasis on titles and position and who’s the right sort of people gets so tedious sometimes. You wouldn’t agree, I know, being that you are the famous Mrs. Bartleby and the standard-bearer of proper decorum.”