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“You love your mother.”
“Every man should love their mother. She gave them life.”
“I mean that youreallylove her.”
“I’m not ashamed to admit it. She’ll be coming to London next week to see me off on my next voyage.”
“It must be painful for her to visit London if she was disinherited.”
“She only comes here once a year. She meets with her estranged sister in secret. I’ve never even met my aunt, or my young cousins who live here. Our family was sundered and the two sides can never be rejoined.”
“Well, even so, I think you were lucky to be raised in a family where there was genuine love and feeling. My parents shared nothing but a name and a house.”
“You had every luxury and privilege.”
Beatrice plucked a nail free, welcoming the physical exertion. It kept her from becoming too wistful. She had a specific task, and her heart wasn’t to perform too many maudlin meanderings.
“What are luxuries when there’s no love?”
“Spoken like a lady who’s never had a Christmas morn with no gifts to unwrap.”
“I would have traded my expensive gifts for a Christmastide filled with love and laughter. My father was always absent. When he was home, it was worse than when he wasn’t. And while my mother loves me, it’s a smothering kind of love that seeks to change me. I’m never good enough. In the same way that we’re transforming this bookshop, my mother wants to make me more conventional and presentable. All I want to do is retire to Cornwall and work on my dictionary. What’s so terrible about a solitary life surrounded by books?”
“Sounds a little lonely, that’s all.”
“I could never be lonely surrounded by books.” She’d said the same thing to her friends, and she’d meant it, but now she wasn’t as certain.
Would it be lonely? Was she making a mistake?
When Ford had seen her walking alone in Cornwall, he’d thought she held herself aloof because she believed she was above everyone else.
But now he knew better.
She’d chosen to isolate herself because of the pain of her childhood, and because her mother had attempted to place her inside a box. No one could grow and be happy inside a box.
It flew in the face of everything he thought he knew about the privileged and perfect lives of highborn ladies.
She wasn’t holding herself apart now.
She was down here with him in the wood shavings and plaster dust, working hard, and disarming him with her probing questions and the flashes of her infrequent smile.
“I’d like to meet your mother,” Beatrice said softly.
Ford nearly struck his thumb with a hammer. Those were dangerous words.
He made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat. This conversation was heading for rocky shoals.
He’d thought that she’d hammer her thumb or drive a splinter beneath her nail and that would be the end of it. He hadn’t considered the possibility that a highborn lady who’d never done a real day’swork in her short, pampered life would actually learn to denail boards.
But she’d taken to it easily, learning to move the length of the board and not attempting to lift it free until all of the nails were loosened.
And she looked altogether too enticing working alongside him, wearing those skintight trousers that hugged every one of her slight curves. He could see the shape of her breasts, small and round, under the thin cotton of her shirt. Her hair was tied into a simple knot that could be easily undone. He longed to see her hair unbound, tumbling around her shoulders and glowing in the morning sun.
She worked with a fierce look of concentration on her face, biting her lower lip as she pried a board up in intervals along the length until she arrived at the end.
She picked up the board with both hands and lifted, shimmying it from side to side.
He moved to help her, their shoulders touching. The board lifted clear, and Ford threw it onto the growing pile. They wouldn’t have to replace the whole floor, only the water-damaged boards.
