“Well,” he said, “that calls for the least offensive and most unsatisfactory item in that arsenal. Damn! Double damn! And don’t expect an apology. Ah, I am sorry, my love. I truly am. I asked, you replied, and like a gentleman I should have started conversing politely about the weather. Forgive me?”
“Always,” she said.
“I will ask again,” he told her, “perhaps on the night of the ball. It would be a fittingly romantic setting, would you not agree, and we could make the announcement to our gathered guests. I believe you, you see, when you say that you are fond of me. However, I do not believe you have spoken the full truth and nothing but the truth. I shall ask again, but I shall try not to pester you. Which is precisely what I am doing now. Do you trust this weather? Or will we be made to suffer for it with storms and vicious cold for the rest of the spring? I never trust weather. It gives with one hand and then delivers a knockout blow with the other fist. If, of course, we pretend not to be enjoying the sunshine and warmth one little bit, then perhaps we can trick the weather fairy into giving us more of the same just to keep us miserable. Do you think? Are you a good actor? It is a dreadfully tiresome day, is it not? The sunshine forces one to squint.”
And, incredibly, she ended up laughing. He went on and on, all on the topic of the weather, getting more absurd by the minute.
And he was laughing too.
It cut like a knife, the sound of their laughter and the feel of it bubbling up inside her. It hurt that he loved her, that he believed she loved him.
23
In less than a month, Percy thought several times over the next few days, he had made a thorough mess of his own life and countless other people’s. And there had been no satisfactory conclusion to anything and very probably would not be.
Sir Matthew Quentin thought he was mad. He had not exactly said so, it was true. Indeed, he had even commended Percy for having the courage to speak out when no one else had for years past. But he still thought Percy was mad. And Quentin might have been a friend—well, still might, in fact. Percy liked him.
The customs officer was merely frustrated, but that, Percy concluded, was probably his natural state. Chasing down smugglers when they were shrouded by a conspiracy of silence was not the most enviable of jobs.
Everyone in the house and neighborhood had been stirred up, but to no purpose. It all seemed pointless, except that perhaps the whole organization might fall apart if the leaders had been shaken badly enough. Might was the key word, though. Perhaps Ratchett was not the kingpin or Mawgan his right-hand man. And even if they were, they may well be setting up somewhere else without having lost any of their control over their followers.
Perhaps Imogen was still in danger. And perhaps Percy’s actions so far had merely made them more bent upon revenge. They knew very well that the worst thing they could do to him was to harm Imogen.
Devil take it, but he was desperate to get her away from here, preferably to London, where he knew a lot of people and perhaps she did too, where a gang of Cornish smugglers was unlikely to pursue her. And he was desperate to marry her so that he could keep her secure within his own home, surrounded by his own handpicked servants, and safe within his own arms both day and night.
He had thought she might agree. He really had. Oh, she had said she would never marry again, it was true, and he knew that a great deal more damage had been done her by the events of the past eight or nine years than she had admitted to him. He knew there was a gap in her story, and that knowing what was in that gap would explain everything. But . . . could she never let it go? He had thought—damn it all, he had known—that their affair had been more than sex to her, more than just sensual gratification. He had had affairs before. He knew the difference between those and this.
And goddammit all to hell, he had told her he loved her, prize ass that he was. He had not known he was going to say it—that was the trouble with him. He had not even known he meant it until the words were out. He had realized he was in love with her, but that was just a euphoric sort of emotion relying heavily upon sex. He had not fully realized he loved her until he told her. And there was the trouble with language again. Whose idea had it been to invent a single word—love—to cover a thousand and two meanings?
She had refused him, and—the unkindest cut of all, to quote somebody or other—she had told him she was fond of him. It was almost enough to make a man want to blow his brains out from both directions at once.
Would she ever be safe here again?
And would he ever be able to live here again even if she was? If she would not marry him, he was going to have to stay away. This was her home.
But, hell and damnation, it was his too. The funny thing was that though he had grown up at Castleford House and had had a happy boyhood there, he never thought of it now as home. It was his father’s home, and his mother’s, even if he was the owner. Hardford Hall—perish the thought!—felt like home. It felt like his own.
And he had messed everything up. If all this had been a horse-jumping course, he would have left every single fence in tatters behind him.
These thoughts and emotions rattled about his brain while he divided his time between his social obligations and meetings and interviews. With only two days left before his belated birthday ball, his mother and the aunts became almost feverish with anxiety lest they had forgotten something essential, like sending out the invitations. At the same time, the house, which had appeared clean and tidy to him from the moment he had first stepped over the threshold and looked around him for cobwebs, took on a shine and a gleam that almost forced one to wear an eye shade. It was not only the ballroom that was being overhauled and cleaned from stem to stern, it seemed.