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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Dinner was as wretched as I had expected.

Lady Archer drank more and more, until eventually her comments trailed off and she sat with an absently glazed expression. Lord Archer paid her not the least bit of attention, leading me to believe this was commonplace. His conversation was split neatly in two – either he was making pointed jabs at Ash, who ignored him, or he was fawning over me with an eagerness that bordered on lechery and made me uncomfortable.

A part of that discomfort came from the dawning realization that what Ash’s parents were angling for was hardly beyond the realms of possibility. There was something real and important between Ash and I, and on paper we were even an appropriate match in the eyes of society now, given his elevation in status. The thought of marriage between the two of us wasn’t exactly a leap. Except that I didn’t want to marry anyone.

Thank goodness for Laetitia, who sat beside me, absorbing the scene in near silence and only speaking when directly questioned, but who nevertheless was a reassuring presence.

“Try to ignore them and enjoy the food,” she whispered to me at one point, her attitude philosophical.

At least the Archers’ chef was almost worth the trip, and the table heaved with dish after expensive dish, each elaborately prepared. There was cold poached salmon with ravigote sauce, mutton cutlets, fricandeau of veal, curried lobster, artichokes with mayonnaise, rabbit quenelles – it was an endless parade of beautifully presented food.

“Monsieur Henri is an angel in the kitchen,” Lady Archer simpered, rousing herself temporarily from her stupor.

At first I was confused by the evidence of an expensive French chef, but soon I realized that it was part of a wider pattern. The food, the wine, the clothes the Archers wore – everything was the finest available. I wondered if this was perhaps a clue as to where Perry had got his profligate tendencies from. Clearly what money they had was being spent on finery rather than tackling what needed to be done with the house or the estate.

I couldn’t see Ash sharing this attitude. I wasn’t sure how much money one made from a gambling den, but he certainly didn’t live in this kind of luxury, and I already knew that at least some of the profits must go to worthy causes like the Red Lion. I wondered what demands his parents were making.

At last, the butler was clearing dessert and about to serve coffee. I felt I had been pushed to the limits of polite conversation. It wasn’t exactly my strong suit at the best of times, and this evening would have taxed even the most gracious and tactful socialite. My head ached, my shoulders were so tight I was surprised they weren’t brushing my ear lobes. If Lord Archer made one more inappropriate comment, I feared I might simply snap and throw my dessert spoon at him. The image was so appealing that I felt my fingers tighten round the handle.

“I think Lady Felicity might need some fresh air,” Ash said suddenly, and all heads swung in my direction.

“Yes, yes,” Lord Archer said with barely suppressed glee. “Why don’t you show the young lady around the grounds. They are lovely by moonlight. Many a poet has found inspiration at Ely Hall!”

“I will chaperone, of course,” Laetitia said, pushing her chair back with such haste that the scrape echoed loudly around the enormous room. Lord Archer looked put out, and I couldn’t help thinking he’d be absolutely delighted to find I had been compromised by his son, followed by a hasty trip down the aisle.

“Thank you,” I said, getting to my feet. “I am feeling a bit warm.”

As the cavernous hall was draughty and heated by a single fireplace, this remark was patently false, but everyone seemed happy to pretend they believed it.

Ash escorted Laetitia and me through to the back of the house and into a dark and overgrown garden that could not possibly inspire poetry – unless it was of the deeply melancholic variety.

“Don’t mind me,” Laetitia said, pulling a cigarette from the pockets that were cleverly concealed in her skirt. “I’ve got no intention of trailing around in the dark after the two of you, but I had to get away from that pair.”

I felt a rush of affection for her: this spiky, independent woman who had taken me under her wing. I was certain that she had come along tonight only to be a supportive presence to Ash. And to me.

“Come on.” Ash held his hand out to me, and I slipped my fingers through his. “I hear this place is lovely in the moonlight.”

We walked around a winding path in silence, the darkness swallowing us up with thirsty haste.

“You once told me that moonlit gardens were the perfect scene for kissing,” I said, and half a heartbeat later I was in his arms.

“Kissing you sounds like the only possible way to salvage this evening,” he said, pulling me tightly against him. It was as though I could feel his heart beating through my whole body in perfect time with my own. “You are my hero, Felicity Vane.”

“I don’t think I did anything terribly heroic,” I said, trying to focus on forcing the words out in some sort of coherent order. His face was angled temptingly close above mine. With one small movement I could bring his mouth against my own.

Ash’s low laugh was without humour. “You navigated that dinner without crying or screaming or throwing things.”

“So did you.”

“Practice,” he murmured. “I used to regularly do all those things. It was quite enlivening.”

“I’m sorry that you have had to deal with them on your own.” I placed my palm on his chest, pressed my fingers lightly against the firm muscle.

“I didn’t have to tonight,” he said softly. “Tonight you were there.”

The words were the only encouragement I needed, and I surged up on my toes, pressing my lips to his.

This time the kiss was different. Instead of a crash, it was a long, slow, delirious fall. Ash’s mouth caressed mine as if this moment between us were something to be savoured. My fingers wound round the back of his head, pulling him closer, as they delved into the cool silk of his hair.

His nose brushed my own, his hands raised until they cradled my face, his thumbs tracing the line of my jaw in slow, sweeping strokes. My mouth opened, and the kiss deepened, a small, desperate sound that I didn’t recognize escaped from me as I pushed harder against him, wanting his body pressed against every inch of my own. I felt his smile against my lips and found the experience curiously arousing. Nipping my lip, he laughed and I wanted to drink the sound.

When we finally broke apart, he continued to hold me, velvet eyes looking down into my own with such open affection that I was struck by a sudden wave of panic.

Clearly sensing the change in my mood, Ash let his hands drop at once, putting several inches of air between us.

“Too much?” he asked, his voice rough. “I’m sorry.”

“No.” I shook my head, and my own voice sounded high, a little breathless. “It’s not that. Not at all.”

“What, then?” Ash kept a careful distance between us, but somehow I knew that he was fighting the urge to touch me.

“I—” I cut my sentence short, not sure how I could possibly explain what was going on in my mind.

“Hey.” His finger came to my chin, lifting my face as he had that first night in his office at the Penny. I held his gaze, seeing nothing but patience and understanding there. “You can talk to me about anything.”

“I don’t want to get married,” I blurted. “Not now at least, perhaps not ever.”

His eyes widened in surprise, and I pushed on, the words falling over each other in an anxious tumble. “Not that you’ve said anything about marriage. I don’t mean to presume. It’s only … I am a duke’s sister and you’re a gentleman and a few lingering kisses is one thing, but there are … conventions , rules that are usually followed…”

“You don’t wish me to have false expectations,” Ash said carefully, and I watched his face for any flicker of anger or upset but found none.

“Well, no. I suppose not,” I said, still trying to find the words to express what I really meant. “I have feelings for you, but I don’t know what to do with them. If we are to have a future.” I hesitated here, afraid for a moment that I might have misread him. “Though perhaps I am getting ahead of myself, perhaps you don’t…” I trailed off hopelessly, then tried again. “I don’t know what a future between us looks like if it’s not marriage. It’s what’s expected of me. And your parents said—”

“My parents have nothing to do with this.” Ash cut me off. “I won’t let them near whatever this is, Felicity. I have feelings too, and I won’t have the two of them come between us. Not a chance. Whatever the future looks like, it’s the two of us together.” He smiled, that charming, crooked smile. “I knew it from the second you stormed into my office, incapacitated Davey and offered to draw me some mathematical tables.”

I relaxed then, a small sigh escaping my lips as I leaned forward, dropped my forehead to the centre of his chest. His arms came up at once, wrapping me in a hug that felt as though it were anchoring me in a safe harbour. “I think I knew it from the first time I heard your voice, before I even saw your face. You touched the curtain in front of me, and I felt it in my toes.”

“In those pretty silk slippers.” Ash grinned, and then his mouth found mine again, and we didn’t talk for quite some time.

“I’ve never felt this way,” I admitted when we finally broke apart. “Right from the start, it’s as if I recognized you, as if I’d been waiting for you all along.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Ash murmured, dropping another kiss against the corner of my mouth. “You walked into the room, and my heart rolled over and I thought, there she is .”

I smiled at that, at the wonder in his face.

“I’m sorry that my parents made you uncomfortable,” he said.

I shrugged inside his hold. “It all makes me uncomfortable,” I admitted. “Over the last year, everything has changed for me. I should have been prepared for it, but I am suddenly treated like … a thing rather than a person. Like a prime bit of horse flesh up on the auction block, simply because I am a woman of a certain age and background.”

“I can understand that,” Ash said softly. “It’s not the same, but I’ve felt trapped by the expectations of my family, of society.”

“When you were yanked out of the navy,” I murmured, pulling back to look at him.

Ash nodded, paused, and then took a deep breath, brushing a lock of hair gently away from my face.

“Honestly, it broke my heart.” He spoke the words like a confession, and I knew somehow that he hadn’t said them aloud before. “I was finally happy. I felt like I belonged somewhere for the first time, thought I had control of my own destiny, and in an instant I was reminded that my career, my life was at the mercy of my father’s whims. I don’t pretend to understand your situation, but I know what it is to have someone else dictate the course your own existence should take.”

“But you didn’t let that happen,” I pointed out. “You struck out on your own, started the Penny with Joe, made something for yourself away from your family.”

Ash sighed. “Yes, but for how long?” He ran his hand through his hair, hair that was already rumpled by my fingers, the tie that had held it back lost in the darkness, a fact that brought me a strange sense of pride.

“The title brings responsibility. Not to my parents,” he said quickly at my sound of protest. “They’ve made their own beds, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m not about to pretend to feel affection for them. But they oversee an estate: one that is ailing, and one that employs a huge number of people. There are livelihoods at stake. When it comes to being the Viscount Ely, I’ll hold more than one life in my hands. It’s not something I wanted, but I can’t ignore it, however appealing the idea is.” He looked at me, and I saw vulnerability in his gaze. “I haven’t admitted that to anyone else. I don’t think I had even admitted it to myself. With Perry’s death, my life has taken another turn that I neither wanted nor asked for.”

I reached across the space between us and pulled his hand into mine, letting him know that this time he wouldn’t face the challenge alone. I admired him for his selflessness, even while I felt sad and frustrated for him. He squeezed my fingers, understanding me without the need for words.

Here in the darkness, on the brink of whatever wild, magical thing was between us, it felt like a time for sharing secrets. He had given his and I knew I should give mine.

“When I was nine, I was very ill,” I said the words quickly, wanting to get them out. “I don’t remember much about it. For the worst of it I was delirious or unconscious. The doctor diagnosed scarlet fever and I almost died.” Ash’s fingers tightened round my own but he didn’t interrupt. I was glad, because this was a story that I hadn’t shared with anyone, though I knew Max had told Izzy.

“Max was seventeen,” I said. “Younger than I am now, and a year away from officially becoming my guardian, but he was at my bedside through the whole thing. The recovery took a long time, had several setbacks. My mother is a good woman, but she’s not a person to turn to in a crisis – that person is my brother. She didn’t handle it well. She was … absent.”

I thought about Mother’s determination to help me into a good marriage. “I think she carries a lot of guilt over that,” I said slowly. “That in her own way, she sees my season as a way to be here for me as she wasn’t then. It’s difficult in a different way when people try to control you out of love. Max sees me as someone delicate; he almost lost his sister once before and now he wishes that he could wrap me in cotton. For him, seeing me married to a good man is a way of keeping me safe.”

“And your mother wants to help you now because she felt helpless then?” Ash said gently.

“Yes,” I agreed. “They’ve both sheltered me – too much, perhaps – for my whole life. I feel as though I am banging against the bars of a cage that’s grown far too small. It might be a lovely, gilded cage, but it’s a cage nonetheless. I’m ready for my life to begin. When Laetitia invited me to dinner, I met women who spoke easily about real challenges, big ideas, about changes they wanted to make for women everywhere, and I wanted to be a part of it. Badly.”

I pressed my other hand to my stomach, as though I was trying to keep everything I felt inside me. “I want to study, to learn, to travel and have adventures.” I could hear the wistfulness in my own voice. “I’m not ready to disappear into the respectable role of wife and mother when I have seen and done so little. I want my world to grow wider, not shrink. I think … you can truly understand that. Perhaps you are one of the only people who could.”

“Yes,” Ash said, and he raised my hand to his lips, pressing a soft kiss into the palm like a promise. “I can understand that.”

The air between us buzzed, so thick with emotions I was surprised we couldn’t see them dancing through the air. Again, I had that sense of a connection between us, an invisible thread that seemed as if it had always been there.

“Would it make you feel better,” he asked after a long moment, “if I promise, very solemnly, that I will never ask you to marry me?”

My eyes flew to his, which I saw were back to their normal state, lit with mischief. “Yes, actually, it would,” I replied.

“Then I swear it. Felicity Vane, whatever you and I are will be perfect and ours. We will never be respectable.” Ash laid his other hand against his chest like he was taking a pledge. I heard the echo of the words Iris, Cassie and I had spoken months earlier.

And I looked up at the stars and laughed.