Page 28 of One Thing Leads to a Lover

He raised a hand to forestall another apology. “I often manage without them.”

“Oh?” She tilted her head to the side, studying him. “I suppose they don’t fit in with certain…disguises.” She spoke that word with the same inflection she’d earlier given to the word mission.

He answered her with a brusque nod. He had not intended to invite her scrutiny, and he would not let himself enjoy her gaze sweeping over his features like a delicate, searching touch.

“Forgive me for disturbing you, Lady Kingston. I should withdraw and leave you to the pleasures of your garden.”

She tossed a glance over her shoulder, leaving him momentarily bereft of her warm, dark gaze. “No, I should retire. I only come out here sometimes to—to clear my head, I suppose. Though I don’t know as it does any good,” she added with a self-deprecating laugh, turning back toward him without meeting his eye. “I am tired. I’m not used to keeping such late hours. It’s been many years since I had two evenings out in a row, you see. So many years taken up with my husband’s illness, and my mourning, and my children…”

“A quiet life is not always to be regretted,” he said, deliberately avoiding the word she had used the other night. Dull was not the same as quiet, was it?

As if he had any experience with either one.

“Besides,” he added, “I’m sure that for one tasked with raising two boys, a quiet life is rarely on offer.”

A little huff of laughter—wry, skeptical—lifted her chest. “You might be surprised.” Then her breath caught, as if a sudden pain had stabbed through her. “And it will soon be quieter still…” Those words were spoken almost entirely to herself.

At last she lifted her eyes to her face and with an obvious effort, mustered a smile tinged with sorrow. “I have just remembered that Lord Dulsworthy will be out of his house again tomorrow morning. He is to call here at ten o’clock, to discuss his intention to send Jamie—Lord Kingston—away to school.”

“His intention?” Langley echoed without meaning to.

“A young nobleman’s education is not a matter to be left in the hands of a woman, Major Stanhope,” she said, and he knew from her stiff way of speaking that the words did not belong to her. Who had told her such a thing? Her late husband? Dulsworthy?

The affair was nothing with which he need concern himself. He ought to be considering how best to use the information that Dulsworthy would be from home. He ought to be thinking of his mission.

And he was. Just not in the way anyone, including General Scott, would have anticipated when the assignment was given.

Then again, he did have two missions. And he had not earned the title of Scott’s best agent by doing only what was expected.

“I thank you, ma’am. I will do my best to make something of the opportunity.” He gave a rather pointed bow, as if taking his leave, though of course as he had already relieved the other guard from duty, he would be going nowhere tonight.

As he had hoped, she mirrored the gesture with the dip of a curtsy. Then, as he had not dared to hope, she laid a hand on the iron railing again. As if reaching for his hand. As if reaching for him.

He held himself rigidly still, never more a soldier than in the endless moment until her hand fell away once more.

“Good night, Major Stanhope.”

Was it his imagination, or was the fatigue in her voice now tinged with disappointment?

“Good night, Lady Kingston.”

He slipped back into the shadow of the hedge and from there, watched her make her way into the dark house.

* * * *

Amanda woke at the usual hour the next morning and did not wince at Martha’s ringing voice or the light stabbing through the curtains, though her sleep had been checkered with shadowy dreams.

Dreams rarely bore scrutiny in the morning, she had found. They slipped through one’s fingers like water. And since a good many of her dreams last night—or had it all been one long, repetitious nightmare?—had ended with George arriving to announce she was not fit to have charge of Jamie and Philip, she had no particular desire to try to shape those hazy fragments into something like a memory.

Instead she rose, dressed, and went upstairs to the schoolroom for her usual breakfast with her sons.

The room at the top of the house was not overlarge, but light-filled with its rows of high windows around three sides. The furnishings she had kept deliberately simple: bookshelves, wooden chairs, a table almost too big for the space. Already the chairs’ lower rungs bore the scuff marks of restless, swinging feet, and the table, the scars of pen knives and spilled ink. Those signs of schoolboy use brought a soft smile to her lips.

On either side of the stairwell, on the wall without windows, sat two doors. She tapped softly on the one to her right.

“Jamie? Philip? Ready to begin the day?”

Time was, the boys would have been up before her, the table covered with toy soldiers or spillikins—some charged battle between them—while they impatiently waited for breakfast and for her. But they were growing older, less eager for their mother’s companionship. Jamie in particular would as soon not rise at first light, and both of them had declared that she must not open the door before they were dressed.