Лиза Клейпас - Chasing Cassandra

At the conclusion of breakfast, Kathleen walked with Cassandra and Tom to the library, where a jug of water and glasses had been set out on the long table, along with a neat stack of parchment, pens, and an inkwell.

“Ring for the servants if there’s something you require,” Kathleen said. “I’m going to leave the door ajar, and I suspect someone might come to check on you now and then. But that someone won’t be me.”

“Thank you,” Cassandra replied, smiling affectionately after the woman who’d been such a steady and loving presence in her life.

When they were alone, she turned to Tom. Before she could say a word, he reached around her, pulled her up against him, and kissed her. She responded helplessly, lifting her arms around his neck, pressing tightly against his solid form. He made a hungering sound and altered the angle of the kiss to make it deeper, more intimate.

All too soon, Tom broke the kiss, his eyes cinder-bright, the set of his mouth brooding. “You won’t be getting half a husband,” he said brusquely. “Just the opposite. You’ll probably have more of me than you want.”

“My family—” she began apologetically.

“Yes. I know why they’re concerned.” His hand smoothed over her back, up and down the length of her spine. “My work is important to me,” he said. “I need the challenge, or I’d go mad from boredom. But it’s not all-consuming. As soon as I’d achieved what I’d set out to do, there was nothing left to prove. It all started to seem like more of the same. Nothing has been exciting or satisfying for years. With you, though, everything is new. All I want is to be with you.”

“Even so,” Cassandra said, “there will always be many voices clamoring for your attention.”

He drew back enough to look at her. “Yours is the one I’ll heed first. Always.”

She smiled slightly. “Perhaps we should put that in the contract.”

Taking the remark seriously, Tom reached inside his coat and extracted a pencil. He bent to the table, writing something on the sheet of parchment in front of them and finishing with a decisive period.

As he turned back to her, Cassandra stood on her toes to kiss him. He claimed his reward immediately, fitting his mouth to hers and taking a long, ardent taste. Her head swam, and she welcomed the exploration of his tongue. He savored and consumed her, with a kiss more aggressive than any he’d given her before. It made her knees weak and turned her bones fluid. Her body listed toward his and was instantly gathered into the hard urgency of his embrace. Desire curled through her in hot tendrils that insinuated themselves in deep, private places. Her throat caught on a whimper of protest as his mouth lifted from hers.

“We’d better start negotiating,” he said raggedly. “The first issue is how much time you’ll want to spend with me.”

“All of it,” Cassandra said, and sought his lips again.

Tom chuckled. “I would. I . . . oh, you’re so sweet . . . no, I’m . . . God . It’s time to stop. Really.” He crushed his mouth against her hair to avoid her kisses. “You’re about to be deflowered in the library.”

“Didn’t that already happen?” she asked, and felt the shape of his smile.

“No,” he whispered, “you’re still a virgin. Albeit slightly more experienced than two days ago.” He brought his mouth closer to her ear. “Did you like what I did?”

She nodded, her face turning so hot that she could feel her cheeks throb. “I wanted more.”

“I’d like to give you more. As soon as possible.” Tom released her with a roughcast sigh. He seated her, and instead of taking the chair on the opposite side of the table, he occupied the one beside her. Picking up the metal propelling pencil, he used his thumb to push down the top, which clicked as it let out some of the graphite lead inside. “I’ll record the points of agreement as we go along, if you’ll write the final draft in ink.”

Cassandra watched as he made a few notes on the page in small, neatly formed print. “What interesting penmanship.”

“Drafting font,” he said. “Engineers and draftsmen are taught to write like this, to make technical drawings and specifications easy to read.”

“Who sent you to engineering classes?”

“My employer at the tramway company, Mr. Chambers Paxton.”

“That was kind of him.”

“His motives weren’t selfless,” Tom said dryly. “My skills were put to use designing and building engines for him. But he was a good man.” He paused, his gaze turning distant. “He changed my life.”

“When did you meet him?”

“I was twelve, working as a train boy. Every week, Mr. Paxton rode the eight twenty-five express from London to Manchester and back again. He hired me, and took me in to live with him and his family. Five daughters, no boys.”

Cassandra listened carefully, sensing the wealth of important details tucked between the simple statements. “How long did you live with the family?”

“Seven years.”

“Mr. Paxton must have seemed like a father to you.”

Tom nodded, examining the mechanism of the metal pencil. Click . He pushed some of the lead back in.

“Will you invite him to the wedding?” Cassandra asked.

His opaque gaze angled up to hers. “He passed away two years ago. Disease of the kidneys, so I heard.”

“You heard . . . ” Cassandra repeated, perplexed.

Click. Click. “We fell out of communication,” Tom said casually. “I’d worn out my welcome with the Paxton family.”

“Tell me what happened,” she invited gently.

“Not now. Later.”

Something in his pleasant manner made Cassandra feel shut out. Pushed away. As he neatened the stack of writing paper, he looked so solitary that she instinctively reached out to rest her hand on his shoulder.

Tom stiffened at the unexpected touch. Cassandra began to draw her hand back, but he caught it swiftly. He drew her fingers to his lips and kissed them.

She realized he was doing his best to share his past with her, yielding his privacy and his secrets . . . but it would take time. He wasn’t accustomed to making himself vulnerable to anyone, for any reason.

Not long ago, she’d seen a comedy at Drury Lane, featuring a character who had fitted the door of his house with a ridiculous variety of locks, latches, and bolts that went all the way from the top to the bottom. Any time someone new entered the scene, it necessitated a laborious process of searching through keys and painstakingly unfastening the entire row. The resulting frustrations of all the characters had put the audience in stitches.

What if Tom’s heart wasn’t frozen after all? What if it were merely guarded . . . so guarded that it had become a prison?

If so, it would take time and patience to help him find his way out. And love.

Yes. She would let herself love him . . . not as a martyr, but as an optimist.

Chapter 20

Negotiations

10:00 A.M.

“So far, this has been much easier than I expected,” Cassandra said, straightening an accumulating stack of pages with headings, sections, and subsections. “I’m beginning to think you weren’t nearly as intolerable at the bargaining table as Cousin Devon said you were.”

“No, I was,” Tom said ruefully. “If I had it to do over, I would handle the situation far differently.”

“You would? Why?”

Tom looked down at the page before him, using the pencil to scrawl absently in the margins. Cassandra had already noticed his habit of drawing shapes and scribbles while mulling something over: gears, wheels, arrows, railway tracks, tiny diagrams of mechanical objects with no discernible purpose. “I’ve always been competitive,” he admitted. “Too focused on winning to care about collateral damage. It didn’t occur to me that while I was treating it as a game, Trenear was fighting for his tenant families.”