Dangerous in Diamonds - Madeline Hunter [102]
He toyed with locks of her hair that had come unbound. “You are not to worry about her. Mr. Edwards knows the inns where I keep all my pairs, to change off when I travel. He was responsible for sending payment for the horses’ keep. They will reach Liverpool and be on a ship in good time, and even if they are followed, which I doubt, no husband will catch up.”
“Liverpool? I thought they were making a run for the eastern coast.”
“That is too predictable and leaves them on the Continent. Mr. Edwards needs to find employment. America probably has use for a well-educated man of letters.”
America. So far away.
“I must go and tell Audrianna. She sent a messenger with a request that I come by this evening. After the carriage returned to them, the coachman must have explained his absence and where his passengers were left.”
“We will go together.”
That honesty showed in his eyes, and she knew what he implied.
“I welcome your company, Castleford. She will not quiz me too boldly if you are there. However, we will not return here together afterwards.”
“If you return to living at Park Lane while Summerhays and his wife are in residence, it will be hellishly inconvenient. Having an affair with a married woman would be easier.” He toyed with her lips and feathered his fingertips over her jaw to encourage a liberal view. “It is only for a few days that you would live here with me in sin. By the time scandal breaks, we will be wed, and that will distract the fools all the more, anyway.”
There it was again, that assumption about marriage. That guilt and its necessary penance. He still had not proposed, of course. All three Castlefords just assumed it would happen as he decreed.
“I will not be living on Park Lane,” she said. “Tomorrow I will return to The Rarest Blooms. I cannot expect Verity to care for the gardens and greenhouse in my stead.”
He sighed in his dramatic way, as if the world’s idiocy and her stubbornness conspired to persecute him. He rested his forehead against hers during a smothered moan.
Then he looked down again, too deeply and too seriously. “You know that we can hire gardeners to send there. So you leave for other reasons.”
He had become curious again. He was thinking too hard on a small point.
“I belong there.” A deep ache squeezed her heart, because he would hear all the rest of what she meant, even though she had not put it into words. I don’t belong here, with you. We both know it.
“You are burying yourself there before your time. It might as well be a graveyard covered in flowers.” His gaze sharpened with his words. “Even living here in scandal would be better, and I am not asking you to do that. Living out there so long has made you too comfortable with your isolation, I think.”
This time she heard the words unsaid. It makes no sense for a woman to give up being a duchess and choose obscurity instead. It makes no sense even if it means marrying such as me.
“It is not for you to decide what is best for me. Do not convince yourself to go back on your word about a place in the country where I can live, least of all to satisfy your own preferences instead of mine, in the name of saving me from my sorry fate.”
He rolled off her and onto his back, thoroughly annoyed. He looked over at her. “Have you tired of me already? Was this a parting gift? How like a woman, to only admit her desire as she walks out the door.”
“You are forgetting yourself, Your Grace.”
“Answer me. Have you tired of me already?”
She should say she had. Only she could not lie easily when looking into eyes that were so frankly open to her.
“I need to be there when Margaret and the others arrive. I need to prepare for them, as well as care for the plants. This is not about you but about responsibilities that I have.”