Page 45 of Miss Dignified
“He’s spent the night in much worse surrounds.” Dylan banked the fire and gently extracted the agricultural treatise from Bowen’s slack grip.
Bowen stirred enough to twitch at the arm of the chair.
“At ease, soldier.” Dylan spoke softly, and Bowen went still.
Lydia draped an afghan over Bowen’s lap. “You give commands, and they are followed even in sleep. I envy you that.” She tucked in the blanket as one might tuck in the bedcovers for a child. “Sweet dreams, Mr. Brook.”
“Don’t you give commands as well?” Dylan asked, holding the library door for her. “To the maids and footmen and fellows at the back door?”
“I make requests, Captain. Not the same thing at all.”
Dylan did not take Lydia’s hand, because she didn’t seem to be in a hand-holding mood. Also because his conscience plagued him. His venture into Lydia’s private apartment after lunch had been in part simply to share a moment requiring discretion. One did not kiss one’s housekeeper on the back terrace for all the world to see, after all.
But some ungentlemanly part of him, a part he’d been loath to acknowledge at the time, had also wanted to inspect her quarters, tospyon her. He’d delighted to see her pretty little writing desk—good quality, only slightly used. To see her slippers by the hearth—also good quality and beautifully embroidered.
He’d wanted to open her wardrobe and sniff her shawls and touch her chemises. He’d been tempted to lie on her bed, to learn what she beheld in that sweet moment when she stretched out on the mattress at the end of a tiring day.
Bad of him, just as feeding her a tea cake on the back terrace had been bad of him. A lapse, a weakening of defenses. Not quite a breach of the city walls, but… significant. Now he was vexed by the puzzle of why a lady whose Shropshire family had means, who was distantly related to at least one title, was dusting windowsills in London for her daily bread.
He had looked about her room for answers, not once but twice in the course of a day. Once in her presence and more recently without her permission, ostensibly in search of the bouquet of forget-me-nots.
Dylan was still searching for a means of confessing his transgression, and the concern and curiosity behind it, when Lydia drew him into her unlit parlor, closed the door, and kissed him within an inch of his sanity. As he kissed her back with equal ardor, his mind presented him with an inescapable conclusion.
This flirtation, affair, whatever it was, with Lydia was serious. He worried for her, and he carried her in his thoughts when he left the house. He wanted to make her burdens his own and resolve them by any means necessary.
Jeanette’s little homily came back to him:When the right person comes along, she might not be the easy person, the convenient person, or the available person, but if she’s the love your heart has longed for, you will know.
Lydia tugged Dylan toward the bedroom, and another thought followed him into that private space. A woman whose family had some means, who’d been raised with a riding horse and singing lessons, was not the most likely candidate for the post of London housekeeper, but she might be ideally suited to become the wife of a comfortably suited Welsh landowner and former officer.
Lydia resumed kissing him with a fervor that would soon put rational thought into disorderly retreat.
“Wait,” Dylan said, resting his forehead against hers. “Wait, we have time.”
“Your sisters will be here in mere days, Captain, and with them underfoot…”
“Dylan,” he said. “If I am about to tear the clothes from your body, you can call me Dylan.”
Lydia whipped around, sweeping the hair from her nape. “No tearing, if you please. Unhooking would be appreciated, though.”
That request filled Dylan with consternation. He desired Lydia madly, and she was willing, but… the haste was troubling. Both Goddard and Powell had courted their ladies only briefly, but what Dylan contemplated in this moment with Lydia made those undertakings seem like prolonged sieges by comparison.
She deserved a siege. She deserved flowers that made her smile rather than frown. She deserved cherishing and bliss and wooing, dammit, and Dylan was just the man to give all of that to her. He slipped the first half-dozen hooks free and pressed his lips to her nape.
Chapter Ten
Lydia was in four different kinds of a muddle.
She hated to see Dylan so weary in spirit and so sad. The lodestar in Captain Dylan Powell’s personal constellation of virtues was that soldiers should be loyal to one another, and yet, his men had betrayed him three times in the course of an afternoon.
She was awash in guilt, for deceiving Dylan, for—in her way—showing him a far greater disloyalty than the soldiers had with their inaccurate directions.
And she was angry. Dylan’s observation, that Will Brook did not want to be found, forced Lydia to examine the same conclusion where Marcus was concerned. She had assumed that her brothercould notcome home, if he was alive. That an illness of body or mind plagued him to the point that returning to Tremont was beyond him. He might long for home, but he lacked the ability to make the journey or face his old life.
Dylan’s remarks raised the possibility that Marcus waschoosingnot to return to Tremont. Given Marcus’s penchant for drama and self-absorption, that explanation was as plausible as it was infuriating. How could Marcus ignore the strain on Mama, the awkwardness for Uncle Reggie and Wesley, the uncertainty every tenant and employee faced daily…?
And the burden Marcus’s absence put on Lydia herself?
Beneath her simmering ire at her brother—he’d had no compelling reason to run off to war in the first place—lay the worst muddle of all: Lydia’s whole situation was growing too complicated, and because of those complications, Lydia had little hope of any future with the first man to truly earn her notice.
