Linda Needham (16 page)

She hummed as she inked the leather balls on the marble-topped inking table, pounded and rolled the pair together in a steady rhythm, then inked the letters, folded down the frisket onto the bed, and slid the whole platform easily beneath the bulk of the huge machine.

“Now I need the tail, my lord,” she said, with a smile tucked into the corners of her mouth. He brought it to her from the table and she screwed it into the fitting. Then she pulled it sideways with the full might of her shoulders and arms.

He hadn’t been able to resist bending to watch
the platen press against the paper; his curiosity strained toward what she was printing.

This
surprise
.

Bloody hell—something she would make him read.

The slate floor beneath him began to shift, and his heart slowed with his pulse, making it difficult to breathe.

“When I’m working with one or two other people, I can manage two hundred copies of the
Tuppenny
an hour.”

He wanted to make excuses and leave her, but he couldn’t manage a step as she reversed her dreadful, fascinating dance.

He stood rooted to the ground, watched her brows knit as she leaned over the bed and carefully peeled the paper off the inked form. Then she held it up for him to see.

“Charles,” he said aloud.

He said. Because he’d read it.

His name. Clearly, unmistakably. He’d never seen it so plainly before. He didn’t know the letters or the sound of them, but—great God, had he actually read the word? Or did he just recognize the shape of it?

“Well, Charles?” She was still holding the piece aloft, still smiling patiently beside it. “What do you think?”

His heart was rocketing around inside his chest. He hadn’t any breath to answer her; it was
tangled up in a shout of joy that he didn’t dare let loose, caught up on the tremendous desire to beseech her to print another word for him. And another.

He wanted her name this time. Desperately wanted to know what it looked like.

“Hollie.”

She quirked her head. “Yes?”

Caught. Distracted.

“Fascinating,” he said.

“Endlessly.” She smiled, walking away from him to the window, where she held the page up to the light, inspecting something across the flat surface. “Addicting, I think.”

He followed her, his enchantress in her inky muslin apron, battling to keep himself from capturing her waist and turning her, from carrying her into his arms and kissing her. “What are you looking at?”

She reached up and pointed to the arc of letters that made up his name. “I’m checking the sharpness of the type as it touches the paper. Do you see there?”

He bent his knees so that he could see the flat of the sheet from her vantage point, chastising himself for seeking the scent of her. “Why is this important?”

Hollie could hardly keep from sighing, had to work to keep her hands steady. His chest was so warm against her back, his mouth so near her temple, his words hot against her ear.

“Well, you see, Charles, the kiss has to be just right.”

His would certainly be. A perfect kiss. A simple thing to turn slightly and touch her mouth to his chin, to sample the sheen of his afternoon beard.

“The what, Hollie?” he asked, his question brushing past her cheek, one hand on her shoulder, the other on her waist, hot-palmed and huge, the searing heat of him invading the weave of her apron, seeping right through to her chemise, spreading down her back and into her drawers.

“The kiss,” she said breathlessly, “shouldn’t be too deep or too light.”

It was difficult to recall exactly how they’d gotten onto this subject. Even more difficult to think at all as he turned her toward him, and hovered over her in his possessive way.

“Just deep enough, Hollie?” He tilted her chin so that she was forced to look directly into those midnight eyes, the eyes that came to her in her dreams. “This kiss you speak of?”

Yes, oh, please do. And for as long as you wish.

Then she realized the depth of her error and stumbled backward a step into the Stanhope, which only made him catch her around the waist.

Oh, my, his hands were warm and broad, his thumbs meeting low on her belly.

“That’s what it’s called, my lord. Sir. Charles. A kiss.” She took a deep breath and rattled on, so aware of the contours of his hands and the fit of his hips against her. “The kiss impression, actu
ally. The depth of the letter imposted against the paper. It’s very important.”

“I imagine it would be.”

“Oh, yes.” There wasn’t a single inch of her that wasn’t blushing and on fire. Glowing beneath his hands. She stepped out of his startling trap and escaped to the drying line hanging across the room.

“May I have one?”

His rumbled question turned her on her heel and stole her breath with the smoky fog of his gaze, the hard-muscled, heated scent of him. She’d been banking on his honor, his restraint—because it appeared that she had none.

“A kiss? You forget, sir, I’m a married woman.”

“It,” he said, his eyes sharper than before. “I meant, may I have it? The sheet of paper with my name on it.”

Ah.
She pegged it on the line. “The ink hasn’t dried yet, and it’s impossible to get it off anything it stains. Can it wait until later?”

“If you think it best.” He started toward the garden door, then turned back, so very tall, so different than she’d always believed. “Oh, and Hollie…”

“Yes?”

“Believe me, I’m not likely to forget the state of your marriage.”

“Neither am I, Charles.”

Which made her want to cry.

H
is library seemed different tonight. The lamps giving off more light, the room feeling occupied, almost friendly. He’d never given the books housed inside the wire-hatched cases any more notice than a paper-brocaded wall. They merely took up space and defined his title and his class: a label for the room, as the oven labeled the kitchen.

Now the books seemed to be whispering to him.

Making promises.

His tidy desktop had been merely a piece of furniture, with a silver inkwell that dried up regularly, unused, a blotter without blots, pristine pointed pens that never needed replacing. Its edge was marked with half-moons where his
heels dug in when he was pretending to relax and read.

CHARLES
.

The picture of his name was still clear; black letters on ivory. And Hollie’s warm smile.

His throat closed up; the sting of hope and gratitude seared the backs of his eyes. He’d given up trying so long ago. And yet he’d actually read the word this afternoon! He was certain of it.

And here it was. She’d put the page on his desk sometime in the late afternoon, displayed it squared to the corners of his blotter, the edges deckled, as she called them.

Surely he could copy the printed lines.

I’d love to be his teacher for a time.

She’d promised to make it simple enough for the boy.

And for me, Hollie? As simple as this?
His hand shook as he opened the lid of the inkwell; his breathing quickened in a familiar kind of panic as he picked up the pen. He’d learned long ago how to scribe his signature, but that had quickly become an unreadable slash, resembled nothing like the original letters.

His name, lost to him.

Until now.

The paper lying in front of him was as daunting as any had ever been. But these letters were large and strong and printed by Hollie.

Her smiling surprise for him.

A bloody huge surprise. A challenge. A tiny miracle that no one would notice but him. He dipped the pen into the ink, put the nib to the paper, and drew the first letter of his name. A simple curve.

C.

The result was shaky and gobbed with ink at the end of the stroke. But readable—and heart-pounding because he couldn’t recall the name of it.

He took another steadying breath, dipped the pen into the ink again, and tried the second letter, unable to recall its name either for the ringing in his ears. Simply two short lines crossed with a hatch. His palms were sweating; a trickle of pure terror and sizzling hope ran down his back.

He inked the nib again, ready to try the next letter, when he felt someone watching him intently. The tingling across his shoulders, the prickling fear at his scalp kept his eyes riveted to the pen barrel.

Hollie. It had to be. She’d come to spy on him on her cat feet.

One glance at his chicken-scratch efforts and she’d know exactly what he was doing, what he was trying to do. She would use the information against him in her next breath.

He grabbed at the dozen well-rehearsed defenses scattering around inside his brain as he braced himself for the battle, as he looked up and into the eyes of his accuser.

But it was his own face looking back at him, his much, much younger self.

“Chip.” The boy’s hair was a darkly curling jumble, one side mashed by sleep, his eyes twinkling.

“I can write my name, too.” That huge, heart-tugging smile was missing another tooth.

“What happened to your tooth?”

Chip stuck his tongue into the gap. “It came out in the kitchen. Hollie and I were sharing an apple and there it was! Didn’t hurt at all. Can I show you how I write my name?”

A moot question, because Chip was already climbing onto his knee and grabbing the pen out of his hand.

“This is a big C,” he said, his tongue working as he wrote just below the first letter that Charles had scribed. His hair smelled of apples. “Hey! My C’s just like yours.”

His own attempt had been larger, a bit more precise. Not bad, actually.

“H is the next one.” Chip dunked the nib into the ink with an astonishing eagerness and dribbled it across the pristine blotter and onto the page.

Charles remembered relentless dread, not the boy’s boundless, unsettling joy, his driving sense of discovery. “When did you learn to do this?”

“Last night. Hollie showed me. She’s my teacher now.” He whipped around to grin up at Charles, his eyes brighter than before as he
pointed back at the page. “Look, sir! My H is like yours too!”

H. Aitch. The first was a sea, like the ocean.

He watched the boy finish off two more letters. “This one’s an I,” he said, “and this is a P. Chip!” He turned again on Charles’s knee.

“Chip.”

“But it’s really Charles. Like yours. Can you write ‘Charles’ for me, sir? Right here.”

Holy Christ!
But the boy had already shoved the pen into Charles’s hand, inking his palm and his wrist. His usual defenses rose up around him like a flock of voracious ravens, blue-black wings brushing at him, obscuring his vision.

He was about to stand up and bluster at the boy, to distance himself from the threat, when Hollie appeared at the side of the desk, his guardian angel, and peered down at the untidy page of letters.

“Your name’s there already, Chip,” she said, leaning down and bracing her elbows on the desktop, her mouth just inches from his own, her lashes brushing her cheeks. “See: here’s ‘Charles’ at the top.”

She lifted her gentle eyes to Charles, neither accusing nor suspicious, just pleased, sharing a moment with him, making him wonder how long she’d been watching.

“There it is!” The boy pointed to the name. “I can write that!”

Charles watched over the top of the boy’s
head, following the unsteady but determined stroke of Chip’s pen, watching the ink spreading between his little fingers, as his amazing son scribed the name they shared.

You can do it, boy!
He wanted to say that aloud, had desperately wanted to hear it from his own father. But the encouragement came instead from the sublime woman at his elbow in her softly ripened voice.

“‘Charles,’” she said. “Oh, Chip, that’s very good.”

“I am good.”

Charles thought his coat buttons would burst.

Hollie wanted to kiss them both: Chip for his huge grin and his curling hair and for the little stick horse he was now drawing in the corner of the paper while he sat wriggling in his father’s lap. And Charles because he seemed enormously enthralled by his son’s progress, and because he…well, he was just ultimately fine and good.

He tilted a private smile at her that simply melted her heart and sluiced it down into her belly like summer honey, that made her pulse skip along lightly. And all that lightness made breathing a bit difficult.

She was about to suggest that she and Chip take some time to do a little reading lesson while the boy was focused when she noticed a letter from Sidmouth sitting with others, leaning against the lamp base.

It was probably just ministerial blathering. Charles received so many letters from the Home Secretary every day, there were enough messengers to Everingham Hall to warrant a full-time traffic warden.

But Charles was Sidmouth’s advisor, and any punishment against the press and the people that might be brewing in the Home Office would surely cross his desk before it was presented in Parliament.

But she could hardly just steal letters off his desk and slip them into her apron pocket while Charles watched his son drawing pictures or rifle his files in the middle of the day. A midnight raid would have to do. Crawling in through the window, if necessary.

“Is that a horse, Chip?” Charles was peering at the little drawing.

“It’s Briscoe. See his white sock?”

“There you are, my lord!” Mumberton rushed through the library door in his shirtsleeves and danced a little jig in his impatience. “It’s Carlson, sir; he says the foal is coming.”

“What’s a foal?” Chip dropped the pen and whipped his head around to his father.

“It’s a baby horse, Chip,” Charles said evenly, tousling the boy’s hair as he lifted him off his lap and stood him in the chair. “How long, Mumberton?”

“Sounds like right now, my lord.” Mumberton shuffled off down the hallway.

Chip’s eyes were saucer-wide. “Carlson’s bringing a baby horse to the stables? Can I go see it, sir?”

“Well, Chip, that’s….” Charles raised a worried eyebrow at Hollie, a wordless consultation.

Should I take him, Hollie?
was his question.
Is he old enough to understand?
The man was certainly doing his best, and Chip was a bundle of curiosity.

“Chip and I’ll both come along with you. If that’s all right, my lord?”

“More than all right, madam.” He smiled and gestured toward the door.

“Come on, then!” Chip grabbed Hollie’s hand and dragged her past Charles, leaving her the briefest glance at the jumble of envelopes leaning against the lamp, hoping they would stay put until she could find the opportunity to read the ones from Sidmouth.

Hoping most of all that Charles would forgive her when she was finally gone, when he finally learned what she had done.

The stable yard was awash with lantern light and scurrying grooms. She knew very little about horses, but this seemed like far more excitement than an ordinary foaling would require.

“Briscoe’s the sire, Hollie,” Charles said, shrugging out of his coat, his eyes straying to Chip, who was clinging to the fence rail. “His foal will be worth a great deal someday.”

So are sons, Charles,
she wanted to say. But it
seemed that he was coming to that notion on his own.

It was the most natural thing in the world for Hollie to reach out and take his coat from him while he rolled up his linen sleeves to the elbow. The wool was still warm, smelling of his day in the fields.

She stayed with Chip in the lantern-lit stable yard until it became clear that the mare was going to deliver in her own good time. It was after ten when she finally got the boy well storied and tucked into his bed.

The lamps were still blazing in the stable yard when she skulked down the hall and into Charles’s library. Snooping. Spying. Betrayal was nearer the feeling that slithered through her limbs.

There was one letter to Charles from Lord Liverpool and three from Sidmouth. The last of them sounded a tocsin in her heart—a clear threat in the offing.

“What measure do you mean, Lord Pudding?” she whispered.

What were they planning? And what did Charles know about it?

She’d have to keep her eyes open for letters from the Privy Council. When details of this only measure arrived, she’d copy it and see that its message was broadcast before the hammer could fall.

Hollie doused the candle and left the library, her heart as heavy as lead.