Laurel Ames - Tempted

“I’ll see you in your grave before I’ll see her married to you.”

She turned on her heel and exited, with Evan thoughtfully closing the door behind her. He realized he might have to revise his plans. But what could not be taken by direct assault could be had by patient siege, and he knew how to be patient.

The ride about the estate was not the casual affair that Evan had anticipated, but a tour of the lands acquired in anticipation of his father’s canal project. They were all under cultivation, as it happened, but the acquiring of them might well have beggared him. Evan could see some point to it, if they had a manufacture to ship goods from or even a woolery, but with the current price of corn and cloth, it would never pay for itself. He did not, however, ruin the ride by saying so. Judith was in her glory, garnering compliments on her new skill from both Lord Mountjoy and Terry. Evan liked to see her smiling shyly at them, since most of the things he said to her drew a suspicious look.

They returned to the house with hours to spare before dinner, so Evan invited Judith for a walk. He led her toward the dower house and found them a seat in its neglected garden. Even in its overgrown state it seemed very familiar to him. It should. He had spent many days here recovering from the accident that had claimed his brother.

“I miss her,” Judith said, picking a flower and twirling it sadly between her fingers as she sat sideways on the stone bench.

“So do I. I would have come if I could.”

“She did not expect you to. She would not even let me write that she was ill until she knew she could not—”

“It was your hand that wrote those last letters for her then?” He took her hand and turned it over, to regard the ink stains lovingly.

Judith swallowed but did not pull back. She liked the touch of him too well. What harm would it do, after all? “I suppose you did not get them all, if you didn’t know she was dead.”

“I must have been on my way home by the time those would have reached me.”

“It was little enough to do for her. We used to sit out here and she would talk.”

“Of what?”

“The war.”

“She did not know about our victories then.”

“She had every confidence you would triumph in the end. She—she let me read your letters.” Judith stared down at the flower and their joined hands, and wondered if she had said too much.

“Then I fancy you know me a great deal better than I know you.”

“I know that there was a great deal you left out so as to spare her. She used to rant at your lack of detail.”

“That sounds like her.” Evan smiled. “If I could not be here with her, I’m so glad you were. There isn’t anyone else I would rather have had with her.”

“Lord Mountjoy was not inattentive. He—he read your letters, too. Or rather, I read them to the both of them. He has them now. It was the only thing he wanted.”

“Father? I’m surprised.”

“I do not know what is between you two,” she said finally, drawing her hand back, “except that it is in the past. I only know that I like you both and would rather not see you at odds with one another.”

“He must have mellowed indeed.”

“He has always treated me gently, as though we are old friends.”

“Why is that?” Evan asked suspiciously.

Judith studied her hands for a moment. If ever there was a time to tell Evan the trials that his father had shared with her it was now, but her courage failed her. “I think because of the time we spent here together,” she lied, her voice milky with tears.

“I would not have thought it of him.”

“People can change. They can see what they’ve done wrong and try to make up for it,” she pleaded.

“Are we talking about him or me?”

“I had meant…” She stopped when she realized she had been speaking about herself. Tell him, she thought, but any way she arranged the admission, it sounded sordid.

“Yes, if the shoe fits…Is there the slightest chance that an educated and proper girl such as yourself would ever consider marriage to a worn-out soldier?”

“No, never!” She jumped up in shock.

“Oh,” he said, slowly rising, knowing he had moved too fast and not wanting to panic Judith further.

“I mean I shall never marry.” She turned her face away.

“But why not?”

“I have found a…higher pursuit—my studies.”

“Do they consume all your time?”

“Nearly all.”

“When you are not sewing.”

“Yes.” She looked from side to side, as though searching for a means of escape.

“How is it that you sew a great deal and have nothing to show for it?” He could see a tear sparkling on her eyelashes. “Don’t mind me. I’m just a clumsy soldier. Think of me as your brother if it will help.”

“I have to think of you as a brother or I will not be able to think of you at all,” she said desperately.

Evan studied her intense face and knew she was not indifferent to him. “And as a brother I should be able to buy you some bolts of fabric to sew with. Once again you had better help me pick them out.”

“Why are you doing this?” She looked into his eyes.

“There is so little I can do. Humor me?”

“It is not right. People will talk.”

“Who are these unnamed people who talk so much?” he asked with a forced laugh. “I think they should mind their own business.”

She nervously brushed away a tear and said, “I don’t know. It’s what Helen always says when she does not want us doing something.”

“People will talk no matter what you do. It’s a waste of energy to pay any attention to them.”

“I should like to ignore them, all of them,” she said wistfully.

“Good, we will go shopping again tomorrow.”

As they found their way back to the house, Judith thought again that she should tell Evan why she would not marry. But she could not bear to think of him disgusted with her, angry even. In spite of reading all his letters over and over, she did not know him well enough to guess how he would react. If he pressed her, of course, she would have to confess, but she rather thought that she had nipped his suit in the bud, that he would become much like Terry. Now she had only to worry about controlling herself around him. His slightest touch, whether to help her off her horse or up from a seat, made her heart pound with desire.

Evan’s inspiration to include Angel on this next shopping expedition was a wise one, since she chivied Judith into more extravagant fixings for finery than would have occurred to Evan. He drove the gig home himself. Such intense discussions of hemlines and laces would have distracted even such a staunch mind as Judith’s from her driving.

They heard Lord Mountjoy shouting in the library from the courtyard and ceased their merry laughter. Evan shooed the girls upstairs with their packages and wondered whether he should intervene on Terry’s behalf. Having listened to many such lectures, Evan was not cowed, except to shrug in sympathy at the monologue that issued from the library. His father might have been speaking to him, for some of the lines were the same. And yet the words were all he remembered, his father’s disembodied voice nagging at him. He looked around the hall. Unless it had changed vastly, he did not remember it any more than he did the library or dining room, or even his bedroom. But he knew he could walk into the dower house and go through it blindfolded. What freakish tricks the mind played.

The library door burst open. “I thought I heard you come in.”

Evan jumped at his father’s intrusion.

“Get in here. I need you.”

Evan moved reluctantly into the room, but Terry was nowhere in evidence. There was instead, lounging in one of the chairs, a surly young lad of no more than fifteen years, who bore a resemblance to Angel in one of her pouts.