What a Lady Needs for Christmas (32 page)

He loathed to see Margaret upset, though the feel of her—skirts bunched, her knees snug against his hips—was fearsomely agreeable. “Margaret, what are you about?”

She leaned down, the better to glower at him. “If one of those earls or their wealthy relations offers you a job managing their affairs, you take it. I’ve watched Dante for years, pretending that humble origins haven’t cost him, that his regard for Rowena was genuine and not manufactured in the interests of his ambitions.”

Insight struck, warm and sweet. “You daft wee woman, you fancy me.”

Not as two people orbiting the same mill owner might have a friendly regard for each other, but as a woman who waited up late in a lonely library might fancy a man who made excuses to visit that library.

“Aye. I fancy you. I fancy your kisses too.”

“Those, you may have.” As for the rest of it… Hector urged Margaret down into his embrace. He was familiar to her at a time when much was changing in her world; he was safe and could be trusted not to pursue a woman above his touch. Dante might have the balls to seize Lady Joan’s hand when it became available; Hector couldn’t view marriage from as mercenary a perspective.

“You’re humoring me, you dratted man.”

He kissed her cheek, then her eyebrow. “Aye.” He should lock the door.

He kissed her nose instead.

She sighed, a soft exhalation of frustrations, insecurities, and who knew what else.

“I don’t take well to teasing,” she groused. “I want your kisses, Mr. MacMillan.”

He wanted all of her, for the rest of his days, but Dante would not allow that, and forcing Margaret to choose between her brother and a prospective husband of exceedingly modest means was beyond him.

“Kiss me, then, wee Margs. Cease yer bletherin’.”

They kissed and talked until the small hours, falling asleep entwined on the sofa. Hector eventually roused and carried a drowsy Margaret to her bed, kissed her forehead, and left her to dreams more pleasant than his own could be.

For he’d recalled what had bothered him so, what had nagged at his conscience.

He’d seen Dante write out the bank draft to renew the insurance policy on the mills, but Hector could not recall passing a missive containing the document to the postmaster in Ballater. In the morning he’d assure himself the bank draft had been sent, come mistletoe, wassail, or even a spinster with a taste for his kisses.

***

Joan had married a working man, and the difference between her husband and the other men she’d had occasion to study at close range fascinated her.

The marquess, like generations of landed gentlemen before him, typically rose and rode out early, at least several mornings a week if the weather were fair. He might grab his fowling piece and tramp his woods when game was in season, or take a fishing pole and spend an hour or two on a handy riverbank. Riding to hounds between harvest and planting was his dearest delight—after his marchioness, of course—regardless of the weather.

Quinworth had correspondence to tend to, and a secretary to assist with it, but business was an afterthought on his schedule.

Tiberius lived life less at leisure, in that he spent more time with his commercial interests—and with his countess—but he, too, ordered his day as much for pleasure as productivity.

Dante Hartwell
worked
.

In the week he and Joan had spent in Aberdeen, Joan had awoken every morning to find her husband in a dressing gown, sitting with a single lighted lamp, a cup of coffee by his elbow as he read some pamphlet, report, letter, or newspaper. He went to bed the same way—reading—until, with all the lights out, he’d take Joan in his arms and make slow, sweet love to her.

If they took a carriage, he read in the carriage. If Joan went out of an afternoon to pay a call or browse the shops, she’d come back by teatime to find him scribbling away at figures or dashing off a note to Hector or one of the mill suppliers or managers.

His fascination with matters of business intrigued her, even as she acknowledged that for the first time in her life, she was becoming acquainted with jealousy.

“What shall you do, Wife, on this our last day of freedom before we must return to the loving arms of our families?”

“I haven’t found you a Christmas present yet,” Joan said, and perhaps it was English of her, but a present to her husband on their first shared Christmas was important.

“Make me something with these clever hands of yours,” he said, reaching across the breakfast table to clasp Joan’s hand. “Something to remind me of my wife.”

“I don’t know much about men’s fashions.” Joan visually measured his shoulders. For embroidered handkerchiefs would not do. For all she knew, Charlie and Margs were giving him embroidered handkerchiefs. “Waistcoats have always fascinated me.”

Dante set his paper aside and topped up Joan’s coffee. “Why is that?”

Her brother or her father would have gone back to their newspapers had she made her observation at the Flynn family breakfast table. Her sisters would have rolled their eyes while her mother gave her a pitying look.

“You can tell a man by his waistcoats. The waistcoat is one aspect of his clothing that allows for some color and some individual style, and what a fellow does with it gives insight into his character.”

He added a half teaspoon of sugar, a dollop of cream, and a dash of cinnamon to Joan’s coffee, then set it by her plate.

“Your brother is a sober and elegant man, then, with a hidden streak of daring.”

“Yes.” Exactly, precisely.

“And Hector is desirous of more notice than I give him.”

Joan took a considering sip of perfect coffee. “Many men wear plaid waistcoats, especially here in the North.”

But in this conversation—about waistcoats, her family, and her husband’s man of business—Joan grasped a sense of exchanged marital confidences, and that appealed to her more than the coffee she was learning to savor.

“Hector is restless,” Dante said. “I’m not sure what to do for him. If I give him any more responsibilities, he’ll have no time for sleep. He churns out reports and memos and calculations almost faster than I can read them, but when it comes to the mills…”

Joan took a turn reaching across the table and squeezing her spouse’s hand. “When it comes to the mills?”

“Nobody had to show me how to take apart or put together a loom. I can’t say I was born understanding how one works, but with a few tools, I soon figured it out.”

“Sewing is the same for me. I see a dress, and know how it’s put together, and often, how it might have been done better—a different fabric, a different piecing scheme, or different lining.”

Again, her family might have scoffed at that offering, but Joan was coming to understand that her family did a lot of scoffing at one another.

While Dante Hartwell listened.

“For me, the broken piece of equipment is a chance to leave the perishing paperwork on the desk for a change and do something of practical value. Coal mining was like that too.”

All Joan knew about coal mining was that it was dirty, dangerous, brutally hard work. “In what sense?”

“A man who digs a ton of coal knows that people will be kept warm by that coal, locomotives will roll across the land burning coal, industry will turn coal into all manner of products. Coal matters.”

Viewed through her husband’s eyes, yes, it rather did. “And Hector lacks your ability to repair a loom? Aren’t there others with that skill?”

He withdrew his hand, maybe the better to concentrate on Joan’s question. “Margs has the same ability. It’s the damnedest thing. An entire crew was struggling to get a new dye vat through the loading dock doors, and it looked like we were going to have to tear down the factory and rebuild it around the damned vat. Margs came by with my lunch, or some such rot, and she quietly suggested we turn the thing on its head, angle it so, and buy an inch of purchase by taking the doors off their hinges.”

“And you listened to her.”

“I either listened to her or had wider doors installed on the one mill I can honestly say I own. She glowed for a week over it.”

Margaret’s brother still glowed with the memory of his sister’s cleverness. Had Tiberius ever been that proud of his sisters?

“You should talk to Hector,” Joan said, taking another sip of coffee. “Ask him in what direction his ambitions lie. My father once said an ideal toady is lazy, smart, and proud. Such a man will delegate work efficiently and take enough pride in the results to ensure they’re competently rendered, and yet, he’ll lack the ambition to leave his employer, much less establish a competing enterprise.”

Papa’s diatribe had gained Joan’s notice, because it suggested he was not the simple hounds-and-horses man Mama and Tiberius sometimes made him out to be. Judging by her husband’s expression, Papa’s thinking had gained Dante’s notice too.

“Hector is not a toady.”

“I don’t think your Mr. MacMillan is lazy, either.”

On that thoughtful observation, Joan picked up her small stack of correspondence, despite a lack of enthusiasm for its contents. The good wishes of Society acquaintances on the occasion of her wedding—and so on and so forth,
dearest
Lady
Joan
—were not half so interesting to Joan as her marriage.

She was falling in love with her husband. Yes, he worked incessantly, but he also
listened
to her. He was patient with her in bed, and tender, and he wrote notes to his children and his sister among his other correspondence, and—

Something Dante had said floated to the surface of Joan’s musings.

“I thought you owned three mills.” She was sure he’d said as much, repeatedly.

“I own the one,” he said without glancing up from whatever he read. “The other two are held in trust, one each for Charlie and Phillip. The rail cars are part of the same trusts, and there’s stock too.”

Unease slithered down Joan’s spine. Ownership was not a detail. She was sure she would have taken note if her husband had explained this to her earlier.

“And the houses?”

“Charlie owns the town house, Phillip the country house. I’m trustee over the lot of it for some time yet, and I’ll end up with minority shares fairly soon.” He’d nearly muttered this, so intent was he on some column of figures.

Joan lifted her coffee cup to her lips, but the contents had grown tepid.

Her husband owned one mill. A single mill. He had not even a house to call his own.

They
had not even a house to call their own.

Abruptly, the buttery scones and crisp bacon Joan had enjoyed with her coffee threatened to make a reappearance. She was upset with herself, for not ascertaining her husband’s relative poverty before she’d married him, and she was upset for Dante.

This arrangement was Rowena’s doing, Joan was sure of that. The woman had been so resentful of the need to marry to secure control of the mills that she’d organized her affairs to keep Dante from ever having title to them.

Idly Joan leafed through her correspondence, not even seeing the letters she held, but needing to do something with her hands.

“You’re quiet,” Dante said, peering over the rims of his gold spectacles. “Planning another assault on the shops?”

The last epistle in the stack bore a familiar elegant script, and Joan’s queasiness was joined by a dull throb behind her eyes. “I suppose I ought to, lest I return to the Highlands without anything to give my husband for Christmas.”

“We’re not poor,” Dante said, a touch defensively.

He apparently understood her the way he understood one of those complicated looms in the mills he did not own.

“We’re not wealthy either,” Joan said, regretting the words as soon as she’d uttered them. Regretting was an acquired skill, and she would soon excel at it.

Dante took off his glasses, folded them slowly, and tucked them into a pocket of the waistcoat he wore beneath his dressing gown—a muted version of the Brodie hunting plaid.

“I will provide for you, Lady Joan. You will never go hungry. You’ll never be without a comfortable roof over your head. You’ll never want for safety and a place to come home to.”

He didn’t mention that her children would all be legitimate, and for that, her nascent love acquired an element of admiration.

“I don’t need more than that, and if your incessant work is undertaken in the misguided belief that I do, please know that you’re mistaken. I simply did not understand that these…assets belonged to the children. I understand that now.”

Whatever he’d expected her to say—that Rowena woman really had much to answer for—his raised eyebrows suggested it wasn’t that.

“We’re set up well enough,” he said. “I’ll organize the figures, and we’ll go over them together. The children hold title, but I’ve allowed no mortgages on their assets, and all the profits from the mills and the estate are mine to do with as I see fit.” He leaned over the table and kissed her cheek. “
Don’t worry.
If we’re prudent and a bit lucky, things will be fine.”

That he would be honest, that he’d offer her a tutorial on their finances, reassured her no small amount.

And yet, Joan did worry. She was a new wife preparing to have yet another assignation with a scoundrel who could ruin not only her good name, but her husband’s apparently precarious finances as well.

***

Some men did not have the knack of being married, and Dante feared he might be one of them.

Joan was patient and affectionate with him in bed—even passionate—but he sensed she’d yet to find her pleasure in his arms. A man never knew for sure, particularly with a woman he’d made love to only a half-dozen times, but a husband had instincts, and Dante’s were coming to dread the end of each day.

Again.

And now this little tête-à-tête over breakfast had upset Joan to the point that she was putting a hand to her belly and probably fearing starvation.

“Why don’t I come with you this morning, Wife? We’ll bill and coo before the shop owners, do the newlywed bit, and earn some bargains in the name of the recently married.”

He should not have mocked their wedded state, for Joan rose, her hand on her stomach.