Page 61 of One Thing Leads to a Lover

“Why do I have the feeling you aren’t speaking generally about life in small towns and villages?” She recalled his expression yesterday morning, in the general’s office, when she’d named where the Hursts lived. “Do you have some particular familiarity with this one?”

They had walked perhaps a quarter of a mile down the road—hardly more than a lane—and were only now coming in sight of another house, this one slightly larger than the Hursts’ and fashioned of stone.

“As luck would have it, I do,” Langley said, pausing at the end of its curving drive. “This was Benjamin Stanhope’s house.”

She dared an upward glance. His eyes were narrowed, staring toward the house, but not at it. Staring into the past, as he had the night he’d told her the story of his youth.

The fingertips of her free hand flew to her lips, stifling a thousand questions. Just one managed to escape on a trembling breath. “Was?”

He did not hear it, or pretended not to, at any rate. “Will we have a look around?”

All was quiet, as if even the house awaited her answer. “The present owner will not mind?”

“The present owner will be greatly troubled, I expect. Nonetheless…” He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew something in a clenched fist. “I’m asking you to take yet another risk. With me.”

Then he uncurled his fingers, revealing an iron key.

Chapter 15

From the moment in Scott’s office when Amanda had pronounced the word Richmond and Scott had declared it an interesting suggestion, Langley had been steeling himself against the experience of swinging open this door and ushering her across this threshold.

He might have said nothing, of course. Let the Hursts’ proximity to the Stanhopes’ house go unremarked.

He had dismissed that possibility almost as soon as it crossed his mind. He couldn’t be so close and not pay his respects to the home that had sheltered him—even when the very notion of shelter had seemed abhorrent.

But he also knew he could not make the visit alone.

Paintings and furniture, shrouded in coarse holland cloth, pressed on his vision like so many ghosts. He strode to a window in the sitting room and thrust open the draperies, let a wide stripe of sunlight drive a few of those spirits away. “The caretakers, Mr. and Mrs. Morris, do not live in. No need to keep the house at the ready. I—I never visit.”

Amanda was making a slow circle, taking in everything. More than she had expected? Less? He watched her trail her fingertips over the dusty slopes and valleys of cloth that covered a camelback sofa, where he had first sat thirty years before and looked about himself with greedy-eyed wonder.

“I understand. I too prefer London to the country.” She untied the ribbons of her bonnet and laid it aside on an empty table. “Or think that I do. Until I’m actually…in the country.”

By any measure, it was a strange reply to make. But stranger still was the fact that he understood what she meant. The way one could persuade herself—or himself—that the memories of a place were too painful to bear, until one was forced to confront them and discovered those memories were themselves a sort of balm. The way the hustle and bustle of town got into his blood, made it race, until he was convinced that dull country life would be the death of him, only to get there and discover…peace.

The way the heady danger he craved had begun to look far less like rushing down a dark alleyway in pursuit of a fellow spy, and more and more like standing in a half-lit room bearing his soul, his very self, to this woman.

“Come.” He turned back toward the entry hall. “Let me give you a little tour of the place.”

Every room was its own chapter of the story of his youth here. The dining room, where Sophia Stanhope had once picked up a bowl of soup and drunk from its brim, when she’d seen him struggling with his spoon. The library, where Benjamin had been wise enough simply to sit and read to himself, until Langley had demanded to know the secrets of those marks on paper, how they could produce laughter or tears. The drawing room where the pair of them had taught him to walk and sit and bow and even dance like a gentleman—all the knowledge he’d hoarded, like the magpie he was, until he was no longer sure what was truly his and what he’d managed to steal from right beneath their noses.

Amanda laid her slender fingers on yet another door. “And this?”

“My bedchamber.”

The words lit a blush across her cheekbones. He expected her hand to fall away, for them to continue down the corridor.

Instead, she made a little noise of interest in her throat and reached for the doorknob. “I should like to see where you slept,” she said, opening the door. “Or did you lie awake nights, even then?”

“Sometimes,” he confessed.

Sometimes he had laid on his back and tears had leaked from the corners of his eyes until his pillow was damp. Had that bewildered boy been weeping for what he’d lost, or what he’d found?

That was a question for which he still had no answer.

Once inside, he walked to the window and sent yet another pair of dusty draperies scooting merrily along their rod, driving out the darkness. If he ever came back to this house to live, he supposed he would be expected to occupy the master’s chamber. It was what Benjamin and Sophia had intended. What they would have wanted. Doubtless Amanda would find that room more to her taste, with its elegant furnishings and larger windows overlooking the river.

But when he turned away from the window, she was standing beside his bed, one hand resting on a sturdy, carved bedpost, watching him. Dust motes danced in the beam of sunshine he’d let in, a path of light leading, improbably, from him to her.