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Emeline nodded. “Show them in.”
She struggled to hide her surprise. She’d invited them to tea this morning, but it had never occurred to her, after last night’s disagreement, that they’d arrive together. Yet here they came, Jasper first in a striking scarlet coat with yellow trim and a cobalt blue waistcoat that caught the color of his eyes. His dark mahogany hair was clubbed back in an unpowdered queue that no doubt had been quite neat when he’d left his valet this morning. Now, however, curling locks rioted about his temples. Emeline knew quite a few girls who’d cheerfully kill their nearest and dearest for hair like Jasper’s.
“My sweet.” Jasper advanced and caught her a careless kiss somewhere near her left ear. Emeline, looking over Jasper’s shoulder, met Samuel’s enigmatic gaze. The colonial was in brown again today, and, although the handsomer man, standing next to Jasper, he appeared like a crow in the shadow of a peacock. The viscount stepped back and threw himself into one of her setting-sun orange chairs. “Hartley and I have come hat in hand like petitioners before a queen. What would you have with us? Do you mean to broker a peace?”
“Perhaps.” Emeline smiled quickly at Jasper and then turned to Samuel, bracing herself for the contact. “Will your sister join us?”
“No.” Samuel laid his long fingertips against the back of a chair. “She sends her apologies and pleads a migraine.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Emeline gestured to a chair. “Please. Won’t you sit, Mr. Hartley?”
He inclined his head and sat. His hair was tightly braided in a military queue today, every strand contained and controlled, and the sight made her perversely want to take it apart. To let his hair stream round his shoulders and run her fingers through it until it pulled at his scalp.
The maids bustled in with tea at that moment, and Emeline was glad to take the chance to calm herself. She sat and oversaw the placement of the tea things and kept her eyes down, away from the wall and away from him. Just last night he’d kissed her in this very room. He’d pressed her against the wall beside the window, and he’d traced her lips with his tongue, and she’d bit him. She’d tasted his blood.
Her teaspoon clattered as Emeline’s hand trembled. She glanced up, right into Samuel’s dark stare. His face looked carved from stone.
She cleared her throat and glanced away. “Tea, Jasper?”
“Yes, please,” he replied cheerfully.
Was he completely oblivious to the undercurrents between her and Samuel? Or perhaps he was aware and chose not to notice. They had a very civilized understanding, after all. She didn’t expect him to live like a monk before marriage—or indeed afterward, if it came to that—and perhaps he was equally tolerant.
She handed the teacup to Jasper and asked without looking up, “Mr. Hartley?”
There was a silence. Jasper noisily stirred sugar into his tea—he had a horrible sweet tooth—and took a sip.
“Tea, Mr. Hartley?”
She stared at her fingers curled around the teapot handle until she couldn’t stand it any longer. Jasper must surely know something was wrong. She looked up.
ne glided after them. She went straight across the dark room and stood by the window, pretending to look out, although of course all she could see was her own ghostly reflection. After a while, the bustling behind her died and she heard the door shut. She turned.
Samuel was stalking toward her, his face quite grim in the candlelight. “Why Vale?”
“What?”
He continued coming, his footsteps disconcertingly silent on the sitting room carpet. “Vale. Why marry him?”
She clutched the fabric of her overskirt in her right hand and tilted her chin up. “Why not? I’ve known him since childhood.”
He halted in front of her finally, much, much too close, damn him, and she was forced to crane her neck up in order to meet his eyes.
His angry eyes. “Do you love him?”
“How dare you?” she breathed.
His nostrils flared, but that was his only reaction. “Do you love him?”
She swallowed. “Of course I love him. Jasper is like a brother to me—”
He gave a nasty bark of laughter. “Would you make love to your brother?”
She slapped him. The sound echoed in the room, and her hand stung. She drew back in appalled shock at her own violence, but before she could say anything—even think to say anything—he’d grasped her.
He pulled her close and lowered his head until she felt his breath brush her cheek. “He kisses you like a brother. As if you meant no more to him than the maid who brings his tea in the morning. Is that what you really want from your marriage?”
“Yes.” She glared up at him, so intimately close. Her hands had nowhere to go but his shoulders, and she clutched him as if they embraced. As if they were lovers. “Yes, that’s what I want. A civilized man. An Englishman who knows the rules of society, an aristocrat to help me with my son and my lands. We are perfectly suited, Jasper and I. We are as alike as two peas in a pod.”
