Page 65 of An Unusual Wager

She bowed her head. “Fortuitous for you.”

“I am flattered you think so.”

He eyed her knobbly hands. In the four years since he’d last seen her, they’d grown worse. They looked like gnarled tree roots, the fingers twisted and bent. When he’d been a child she’d had hands like his, smaller, of course, but with long, elegant fingers on which she’d worn a variety of beautiful rings that had fascinated him and played the harpsichord with skill. And her hair had now gone completely white. A brief memory of standing in her bedroom while her maid brushed out her waist-length dark hair flashed into his head. How different she was now. How cruel life could be.

She cleared her throat. “I assume there is a point to your visit. It cannot be from feelings for me.”

Could it not? Just because she didn’t love him, it didn’t mean he didn’t love her, in some small way. Perhaps he’d loved her properly, once, but she’d killed all but a small vestige of that love. A child’s love for the distant parent who occasionally would appear in the nursery in a beautiful gown, reeking of exotic perfume, to pick him up and hold him close, his face in her warm neck. Had he mistaken that longing for her attention for love? Had he been wrong all along?

“I came to tell you that I shall be staying on at Luxborough for the foreseeable future.”

“And I need to know that, why?”

“You are my neighbor.” He refrained from telling her she was his mother. Surely she knew that. “I need time to recover from my injuries and Verity likes it here better than in Town.” He gave a rueful smile. “And I have no intention of returning to London before I’m capable of defending myself from possible assassins.”

She fixed him with a hard stare. “If you get yourself an heir, you will automatically be safer.” She paused. “Until a son of yours sees you as a barrier to his own progress.” Her tone was icy, tinged with long-matured dislike. Hatred, even.

He bristled. Did she really think that of him? “I shall endeavor not to follow in my father’s footsteps by pursuing the female servants and so offending a son of mine.”

An easy promise to make as, since Mary, he’d never compromised a member of his staff, although more than a few had given him looks that had indicated their inclination to oblige him if he so wished. Would it be as easy to foreswear the London habits he’d formed since he was a boy of sixteen?

“I wish your wife luck,” his mother said, with a curl of her lip. “I formed a liking for her when she visited. You can tell her she’s going to need it.”

His interview with his mother over, Jonathan descended the stairs with care and received his hat and gloves and cane from her butler. The man opened the door for him and he emerged into the summer warmth. A gentle walk back would do him good.

He managed to make it to the avenue more easily than he’d expected and was glad of the shade afforded by the limes. At the junction, he paused to get his breath back. Deep breaths were still difficult with his broken ribs only started on their road to being mended. Up ahead he could just make out the distant sparkle of water through the trees. He would return via the lake rather than taking the longer route along the main driveway.

He walked slowly, pausing every now and then to regain his breath, and was glad of his cane for once for its normal usage. Birds sang in the trees and beyond their shade sheep grazed, fat lambs by their sides.

Idyllic. Why did he not spend more time here?

Because when he was in London, he could put behind him what had happened here. He could put behind him his father’s behavior, his death, his mother’s hatred of him. He could forget Mary and the way she’d died on a bed drenched in her blood. Of course, that had also meant forgetting Kitty, his biggest regret. For he loved her dearly, as much as she loved him. That she had accepted his infrequent visits still astonished him. He would spend as long here this time as he could, as much time as possible with his daughter.

But, there was someone else he wanted to spend time with too.

Verity.

As a man for whom female companionship had meant blissful oblivion as much as heavy drinking had, he would have been surprised if anyone had suggested he was in love with his wife. He liked her very much, he was ready to accept, but love? What was that? He’d known so little of it in his life. Just Mary, and that had been so fleeting he could barely remember how it had made him feel.

If it meant he was longing to see her face, to hold her in his arms, to feel the warmth of her body beside his in bed, then it might be love. If it meant he was impatient with his infirmities that prevented him from taking their new relationship further, then that might just be lust more than love. And that was something he’d felt many times, with every woman he’d ever seduced. But for none of them had he felt the former. None of them had inspired him to want to spend time with them that wasn’t occupied by being in bed and indulging in physical pursuits. Physical pursuits he’d thought had driven his fevered dreams away.

And yet, in the past four days she’d come to his bed at night and slept by his side, her presence comforting and soothing, and no nightmares had troubled him. There’d been no physical side to this arrangement. Not even a kiss after that first one she’d bestowed on him when she’d woken him from his nightmare. He’d lifted his good arm and she’d snuggled up on his left-hand side and sleep had come to him. Healthy, revitalizing sleep not induced by pain-killing drugs nor the aftermath of lust.

What magic did she possess? Or was love itself a kind of magic? Would he ever know?

He’d been walking along the edge of the lake for a while now, having crossed the bridge without even noticing he’d done so, and he was suddenly jerked back into reality by a voice calling his name.

“Jonnie.” Verity’s voice, as though his thoughts had conjured her. “If you keep going that way you’re going to get wet.”

He stopped, aware for the first time of his surroundings, and blinked in surprise. He was on the very edge of the lake and in front of him the bank curved to his left. Another two steps and he’d have had a decent ducking.

Verity was sitting under a stand of drooping willows, on a plaid rug, with a parasol, and the leafy branches, giving her shade. She looked utterly charming in a pale-primrose gown embroidered with tiny white flowers. Fresh, friendly, sweetly smiling at him. Welcoming, even.

He said the first thing that came into his head. “I thought you were engaged in studying suitable new gowns for Kitty?”

She laughed, a sound that to him had all the attraction of music to his ears. “I have selected four, as you suggested, and we will send for a dressmaker from your nearest town, or perhaps Oxford itself, to come out and measure her for them forthwith. You will be pleased to hear that, without Kitty’s constant interruptions, I have been able to choose gowns that are modest and therefore suitable for a girl her age. She would have had them slightly less proper, I fear.”

“I look forward to seeing her in them. I’d quite forgotten that girls of her age are inclined to grow, or I would have had Mrs. Burke see to her apparel sooner.”