Мэри Бэлоу - Someone to Romance

“You are Gabriel,” she said, turning her face toward his. “But the angelic connotation is somewhat marred by your other name. Mr. Gabriel Thorne.”

“A rose is spoiled by the thorn on its stem, then?” he asked, turning his head to look into her eyes.

“Are you indeed an angel, then?” she asked him. “Mr. Thorne ?”

And it struck him that they were no longer talking about roses. It occurred to him that she knew, or at least suspected.

“By no means,” he said. “How tedious life would be.”

“The other Gabriel is no angel either,” she said.

“Apparently not,” he said. “If one is to believe Mr. Rochford’s story, that is.”

“And you do not?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Does it matter?”

She shook her head slightly, set down her fan on the bench between them, and rubbed a finger over one of the white keys as though she had spotted a dust mote there. “Let us discover how good an instructor you are, then, Mr. Thorne,” she said. “My guess is that I am about to make an idiot of myself in front of almost my whole family as well as some distinguished guests.”

“Impossible,” he said. “With me as your teacher?”

They turned their heads at the same moment—a massively uncomfortable moment as it turned out. Their faces were only inches apart. Her cheeks were slightly flushed, her eyes wide. He had not really noticed before how thick and dark her eyelashes were or how her upper lip curved slightly upward when her lips were parted, as they were now. Or how pearly white her teeth were. He had not noticed how very kissable a mouth she had.

It was not a thought he cared to pursue at this particular moment. And yet . . . He had promised to romance her. Was that what he was attempting to do now? In full view of a roomful of people? By coaxing her to do something she was reluctant to do?

The flush in her cheeks deepened before she looked back to the keyboard. He was no accomplished lover. How did one romance a woman in a way that would speak to her heart? Unfortunately, it seemed that women thought with their hearts, while men thought with their minds. Or with another part of their anatomy equally distant from the heart. He had feelings. Of course he did. Often they came close to overwhelming him. But they were something he had always carefully guarded. Even the deep affection he had felt for Cyrus had not been fully apparent to him until after the accident, when it was too late to show it.

Agreeing to romance Lady Jessica Archer had been little short of madness.

“We will keep it simple,” he said. “You will need to use just your left hand.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “I am right-handed.”

He showed her how to play a simple rhythm with a pattern of notes that could be repeated endlessly though they could be varied with tempo changes. He did not burden her with that possibility, though. He played the rhythm with her, an octave higher, until she had it, then added a melody above it with his right hand. She turned her head to smile at him, a flashing brightness of an expression that almost made him falter. She did falter and had to search for both the notes and the rhythm again while he adjusted the melody to hide the gaffe. Eventually he stopped parroting her rhythm with his left hand and played a variation on it while he changed the melody with his right hand.

She flashed that smile at him again, and he smiled back at her.

“It is permitted,” he said, “to play at a tempo slightly above that of a tortoise crawling across a beach.”

“Oh, is it, indeed?” she said.

And she changed the tempo so suddenly that he had to scramble to keep up. And then she sped it up again. They played for a minute or two in perfect time with each other until she missed a note, exclaimed with dismay, tried to correct herself, and got hopelessly entangled with wrong keys, lost rhythm, and wayward fingers.

She bent her head over the keys and laughed. Actually, it was more like a peal of giggles while he ended his contrived melody with a grand flourish and laughed with her.

There was a ripple of laughter and applause from the rest of the room, but they both ignored it.

“Thumbs,” she said. “All thumbs. Indeed, at the end I would swear there were six of them just on my left hand. It must have borrowed from my right.”

And he wondered how he could ever have thought she was all cold hauteur. Oh, she could be that and often was, but it was not her to the exclusion of all else. Perhaps these flushed cheeks and bright eyes and gleeful laughter were not her either. But how foolish of him to have assumed that anyone was one or two things and nothing else. He was far more than just a successful businessman and Earl of Lyndale. Far more. Labels helped identify a person, perhaps, but they did not define him. Or her.

What she had said or tried to say at Richmond suddenly made all the sense in the world.

“Tell me about Lady Jessica Archer,” he said.

Her smile faded, but it left her eyes softer than they usually were, and it left the flush of color in her cheeks.

“That is a request that always has the effect of completely tying my tongue,” she said.

“Tell me about your childhood, then,” he said. “What about your father?”

“I was fourteen when he died,” she said, in a quiet voice. “He was very different from Avery. He was the sort of man to whom children are the mother’s domain. I did not see a great deal of him. He was never unkind when I did, but he took no real interest in my upbringing or in me. I have always believed that when he married my mother he hoped for another son. A spare, so to speak. Though he never expressed open disappointment. Not in my hearing, at least. And there were no more children after me.”

“You did not complain to him about your music teacher?” he asked.

“Oh good heavens, no,” she said. “I would not even have dreamed of it. I am not complaining about him. It never occurred to me that a father could be affectionate or that he might wish to spend time with his children until I saw Avery with his —the three girls as well as the lone boy. If he feels any disappointment that he has only the one son so far, he has certainly never shown it. And indeed, I do not believe he does. He adores them all. One would not suspect it from looking at him, would one?”

Gabriel glanced about the room until he spotted Netherby, immaculately elegant despite the rings on almost every finger of both hands and the jewels that winked from the folds of his neckcloth and the handle of the quizzing glass he wore on a black ribbon about his neck. The expression on his face suggested slight boredom, though he was actively involved in a conversation with Dirkson and the Countess of Riverdale. No. One could not quite imagine him adoring his children. Or anyone else for that matter. Yet his duchess seemed a warm, happy woman.

“I had a contented enough childhood,” Lady Jessica said. “It was rather solitary, but there were children in the neighborhood of Morland Abbey with whom I was allowed to play quite often. And I was always close to my mother. I lived for the times, though, when I could stay with my cousins or they came to stay with me.”

“Are they here tonight?” he asked her.

“Boris and Peter are,” she said, “two of my aunt Mildred’s sons. The third, Ivan, is at university. They are all quite a bit younger than I, though. They were fun and full of mischief and I loved them, but I never had a particularly close friendship with them. The other three cousins were Aunt Viola’s. She is here. She is the Marchioness of Dorchester now. Estelle and Bertrand Lamarr are her stepchildren, though they were already very close to adulthood when she married their father. Harry, my cousin, Aunt Viola’s son, was very briefly the Earl of Riverdale after his father, my uncle Humphrey, died. I adore him—Harry, I mean. He was three years older than I and always my hero. It was devastating for him when the discovery was made soon after Uncle Humphrey’s death that his marriage to Aunt Viola had always been a bigamous one. His first wife, whom no one even knew about, was still alive when he married for the second time, and his daughter—his legitimate daughter—was put into an orphanage, where she remained until the truth was discovered when she was already grown up.”