Page 39 of Undercover with the Heiress
The book dropped from his hands and landed on the rug with a thump.
His memories grizzled and pawed at the edge of a dream. So much of his life since she’d left him had been turned backs and closed doors. The prison cell slamming shut after he was foundin a tavern instead of at his post. The quiet hush as his stepfather turned his back and left the court once he’d heard the reduced sentence. He’d been spared the coffin closing, and for that, Phineas was grateful, because if faced with the steady tap of nails entrusting a man like the corporal to the afterlife, he wouldn’t have known what to feel. Gratitude? Remorse? Shame? Anger?
As it was, he had the option of feeling nothing.
Feeling nothing was for the best.
His memory settled into a monotonous monotone, one of those simple sleeping constructions that meant nothing in the land of sleep or waking. A deep breath, and the shapes fragmented, and swirled away. Amadeus grunted, then snorted. Phineas patted the boy’s back until he calmed.
A different dream of the world right outside his door bit his thoughts. Of the world he tried to keep his distance from and remain an observer of but was forever finding himself dragged into. For all their sullenness, his Christmases with Arley had been something of a comfort. The two of them had found one another one evening when Arley had escaped his own house after Abberton took it over for a party and some mother had tracked the duke to his office and insisted he meet her daughter. And then there was that other afternoon, not even two years ago, when Phineas had been walking home, and Hamish’s manservant had demanded he come to Number 4 to hear some business proposition. By that time, he’d already sniffed out Iris’s scandal, but Irving had said he could make things better. His undoing, over and again, was in trying to help.
The front door clicked. Phineas blinked his eyes open. He listened from the edge of his thoughts, absorbing the familiar step on the floorboards, her boots probably spreading dirt everywhere. The worry around his heart loosened a little. She was home.
Outside the library door, Rosanna paused and had a whispered conversation with her sister Beatrice. Johannes flashed in, then out of view, and through slitted, heavy eyelids, the slow procession of older children carrying younger children paraded by. The second boy, Elliot, carried the small girl who always sang. Beatrice clasped the other small girl around her hip. Nanny, small yet strong, balanced the toddler she was always chasing against her chest.
‘Ammie?’ Rosanna called, her voice soft, yet edged with worry.
‘In here.’
Rosanna stopped in the doorway. Johannes bumped against her.
‘I’m too scared to move. Everything hurts,’ Phineas croaked, as loud as he dared. ‘Help.’
Johannes chuckled, his deep baritone like a gong in the settled silence. ‘Ammie sleeps like a brick. You could have pushed him onto the floor, and he wouldn’t have woken.’ Johannes caught his brother beneath the armpits and scooped him into his arms. Amadeus snuffled, his head lolling backwards. Rosanna laughed softly, pecked his forehead, and arranged him into a more comfortable position.
The front door closed. The familiar tap and tread of the staff as they moved down or upstairs faded away to silence. Phineas stretched into the firm leather of the chair, and his back cracked with relief.
Rosanna slipped his glasses from his nose, folded the arms, then placed them on the table. She smoothed his hair. ‘Do you need to be carried off to bed, too?’
Her touch brought back all his senses, and his memories collided. The bright burst of terror that had rushed over him when he’d thought someone had come for her lit in him like a furnace once more. ‘I was so worried about you.’
‘Johannes was with me, just as you told me. I was only at the hotel. Lord Richard was there, dining with Mr Vincent and skulking about, but he didn’t come near me—’
Half asleep, half twisted with anxiety, all of him flooding with relief, Phineas grasped her skirts with both fists and yanked her closer. He had no right to claim her softness with a husband’s assertion, but his body yearned for her physicality, ached for the certainty that she was well and whole andhere. She yielded to his tug and slid onto his lap with a giggle. Before she could say anything, he sought out her lips as a balm to his anxiety.
She returned his kiss lightly, then deeper in intensity, like a whirlpool drawing him to a precipice where he floated, dreamlike, knowing he should stop but so unwilling to even try.
‘What is this?’ she sighed against his lips, their familiar softness nipping his. ‘Between us. Is it becoming more?’
Phineas crawled her skirts into his palms as he grasped her tighter. Could he imagine a world where he would give her the life she wanted, the freshness and freedom she needed? More of what? Family? Laughter? Light? Which of those things could he give her? They could not become more because he had nothing more to give.
‘Nothing,’ he said, his voice gravelly and harsh. ‘This is nothing. I forgot myself. You shouldn’t do that.’ He shoved her from his knee until she stood, and with a mumbled goodnight, he stumbled from the room.
Chapter Sixteen
Ammie, his eyes concealed by Mama’s hands, his smile somewhere between caution and expectation, reached into the space before him. Framed by the ornate arch of the entrance to the hotel’s dining room, the two of them seemed so small. Ammie almost matched Mama’s height already. Neither of the Hempel parents were tall; in fact, they were probably lucky to have reached the five foot they had after growing up in an orphanage. Mama pulled her hands away, and Ammie took in the expanse of the room. Bright red and white crepe rosettes hung in every corner, long twists of ribbon cascaded from the ceiling to the floor, and on the table in the centre of the room sat a three-layer cake. Family, friends, and a few neighbours filled the room. Ammie’s anticipation turned to wonder as he flung himself around Mama’s neck and hugged her tight, shouting, ‘It’s perfect!’ He raced across the room to where the other children were gathered, presents in hand.
Elliot pushed to the front and shoved a wooden crate at Ammie. ‘I made you firecrackers. Whizzes and bangers. Fathersaid we can let them off outside the hotel, as long as we’re quick and scarper if the coppers come.’
Rosanna neatened the bow on her gift—a set of coloured pastels. It was wrong to have favourites when it came to siblings, especially in a family as big as hers. No matter how warm their hearths or how attentive their parents, everyone had trouble getting a smidgeon of attention. But in moments like this, she couldn’t deny it—Ammie was special. Almost three years after the loss of Garnett, her mother had quietly announced over breakfast that another baby Hempel was on the way. The following months had been slow and shadowed, laced with worry and anchored in unease. But for all his reserve now, Ammie had come into the world screaming with health and gusto, and from early smiles to floor-slapping crawling, he’d brought a new vitality to their home. He was the baby who did not know the pain or the heartache of before, but who must have felt them regardless as they infiltrated everything in the Hempel household. With every rosy-cheeked laugh, flat palm against her cheek, or tug of her long hair, he’d brought a peace to their lives. Not a forgetting, for that was impossible. More of a settling. As grief turned to memory and agony to acceptance, the family had moulded itself into a different type of happiness, and he had unknowingly been at the centre of it.
Ammie had that effect on people. Even on her aloof, impenetrable husband.
When she’d returned home the night before last, she hadn’t been worried until she’d clambered out of the hackney cab, followed by Johannes, the pair of them wrung out with conversation and decisions. Only then had she questioned what she might find inside Number 1. Chaos? Anger? When she’d climbed the steps, slid her key into the lock, and entered a house of happy humming and contentment, she’d felt something completely unexpected. She’d comehome. The fullness of thefeeling had been swiftly pursued by a wave of dread. The little red coats lining the cloak room. Phineas’s hung up beside them. In the dining room they’d found scattered crumbs while the air had been rich with the smell of the simple food children liked. The sense of completion and gnawing terror vied for dominance until the final blow—discovering her husband, stiff and uncomfortable, with little Ammie nestled beside him. The affection stirring inside her had turned into an avalanche.
And later, when they were alone, his possessive fisting of her skirt, his determination to feel her… As if he were reconciling her like a number in a column, checking her tally and finding her sums correct. Then he’d underlined it with a kiss…
Those moments where she’d niggled and nudged him to frustration or low chuckles, when she eased around his defences and drawn out a different man, had become too treasured. She’d dared to ask…what is this? Three simple words that created a tangle of complexity.
