Page 36 of A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
‘You seem quiet.’
‘Oh, I am often that now, my lord.’
Love me, Nicholas, my love. Love me until we both die from the feeling.
She’d said that to him at the Bromley town house. Said other things, too, full of girly pathos and rampant exaggeration. She’d laid her heart on her sleeve and told him every little thought, every sorrow and hurt.
Now she could barely admit to anything because in the tiniest clue he might guess it all. Glancing across at him, she saw he looked full of thought, though he began to speak again after the short silence.
‘For the first five weeks after I got to the Americas I lay in a poor house in Boston with fever until a reverend took me home and fattened up both my body and soul.’ When he shrugged she could see the line of tension in his shoulders. ‘That was the only time in all the six years I was away that I thought I was safe.’
She was astonished by such honesty.
‘I tell you this because I am still not safe and that if you should wish to reconsider your kindness I will understand why.’
‘My kindness?’ She didn’t quite know what he meant.
‘Squiring me through these events that I have long forgotten. Truth be told, perhaps they are better left unremembered.’ The flatness in his eyes was familiar and dragged at Eleanor’s own protected sorrow.
‘I used to think that after my mother died, my lord. I wished for no recall of her whatsoever because I had been hurt too much. Now, I struggle to remember her face, her voice, her smell and the irony is that I would give anything to have her visage back again.’
‘Jake talked of her all the time at the club in the months after her death. You were lucky with such a mother.’
‘How old were you when your own died?’
‘Eight. Young enough to forget some things and old enough to remember others.’
‘Seventeen was no better, I assure you.’ She still remembered the shock and grief as if it were yesterday.
‘My mother had hair exactly the colour of your own. In the sunshine there were threads of gold amongst the brown just like yours.’ He smiled as he said this.
‘I will take such words as a compliment, Lord Bromley.’
‘Nicholas. Or Nick. And it was meant as one.’
There it was again, the difference in him that she could not quite pin down. He was less evasive than he had been once and much more to the point. The flowery rhetoric of the past was well gone and in its place sat an honesty that was borne from adversity. She wished she might be brave enough to simply step forward and lay her hand upon his chest and tell him everything, but a vendor of hot chestnuts called out to them from further afield and her own sense of place and time was re-gathered.
‘Are you hungry?’ He looked altogether younger as he asked this of her. ‘In New York they sold chestnuts, too, but they never tasted quite right. And now I know why. They are different from the ones here in England.’
Perhaps confessing past problems had been good for them both because she was starving and even from this distance the smell of the roasted nuts was delicious.
‘Give me a moment, then.’
As he walked away to procure the treat another man coming through the park stopped before her. Swarthy and thickset, he had the look of a gentleman out of sorts with his world.
‘You are Lady Eleanor Robertson, the Duke of Westmoor’s sister, are you not?’
Flustered, Eleanor nodded.
‘I was introduced to you once at a ball in Chelsea and I seldom forget a face, particularly one as beautiful as your own.’
The slight lisp he had was as disconcerting as his words. She looked over towards Nicholas Bartlett, but his back was to her.
As the newcomer followed her glance, he, too, registered Lord Bromley’s presence and the blood simply drained from his face to leave him decidedly pale.
‘You are with Bartlett?’
Nodding, she looked away, certain that he must now move on and surprised when his hand covered her own.
