Stephen Hawkhurst really expect just to waltz into her life and change it as if it were a knitting pattern, easy and simple? She knew what would happen next. Of course she did. If Mr James Beauchamp came to the house in the guise of a distant cousin inclined to help, everything would change.
They would all have to be grateful to him and the whims of an unmarried twenty-seven-year-old man might include the wish for a wife. Then Leonora or Prudence or Harriet would be sacrificed for the greater good of the family, and each of them would go without a whimper to protect her. She knew this as truly as she knew the night followed the day because all year the whispers she heard when the others thought she was not listening had been about their worries for her.
Aurelia works too hard. If only we could find a way to help her.
Well, the silks were beginning to pay and the new completed designs were beautiful and different. Another few months and everything would be possible. the only tripping block stood before her in Hookham’s lending library in the large form of the implacable Lord Stephen Hawkhurst and he did not look pleased.
‘How many other sisters do you have?’
‘Two. Prudence and Harriet are twins.’
‘Do they look like you?’
‘No. They are much prettier, for they favour Leonora and—’
A ripe swear word broke off her sentence.
‘Charles was a man who appreciated beauty in women. Surely he let you know of the qualities in yourself that he admired?’
‘Oh, indeed he did.’ She took away the sting in the words by sheer dint of will. He admired women who would do things in the bedroom that even prostitutes in the East End of London might have blushed at and he had simply abandoned her on his estate in the far north when she had refused to take part in any of it. Even the servants he had left her with had been instructed to be of as little help as possible until she came around to understanding what the words ‘I promise to obey’ meant in their hastily completed marriage.
The first few nights alone had been the worst. After that she had thanked the Lord for the distance between her new abode and her new husband and for the independence that naturally followed. Aye, her freedoms had been hard won and she was not about to give them up now to anyone.
‘Such problems are mine to solve, my lord.’ Aurelia could barely get the words out, so desperate was she to escape, and the headache she had had all morning began to play upon her vision. ‘The silk trade is shaping up well and in a few months I am certain I shall be—’
‘Dead and buried by the looks of the dark rings beneath your eyes.’
Glancing down, she resisted the urge to lift her fingers to her face. She had hardly slept for days, the difficulty of everything increased somehow by all the consequences of the Hawkhurst ball. Leonora and Rodney. Cassandra Lindsay and her invitation to a country-house party. The carriage ride home where she had understood for the first time in her life what it was to be attracted to a man.
Not just any man, either, but this one before her, his eyes filled with certainty.
‘What if Lady Lindsay brought your sisters out and I footed the bill?’
Aurelia could not believe what she had just heard and shock made her step back.
‘I could never accept such an offer.’
‘Why not? You were married to my cousin and as the head of the Hawkhurst family I would be most remiss to leave you floundering financially as a widow.’
‘I am hardly a relative you might be expected to nurture, my lord, and people would talk.’
‘They talk now, Aurelia.’
His eyes were softened in the grey light of a gloomy London afternoon and she thought he had never looked more beautiful.
‘I should tell you that Cassandra Lindsay broached the subject with me yesterday. She has met your sisters, apparently, and was most impressed by them.’
‘Oh.’ The wind was taken from her sails as she tried to decide exactly what to do.
Turning away, she looked out of the window, a squally rain shower pushing a stray sheet of paper down the street. Once, she would have accepted such help with barely a backward thought. Once, hopes and dreams had been written in her eyes just as they were now in Leonora’s, and the future had looked bright. She had worn colourful gowns, then, gowns to highlight the shade of her hair and the dashing Mr Charles St Harlow, newly returned from The Americas, had been entranced.
For all of a month. The anger in her grew with the shame.
‘Would Lady Elizabeth Berkeley not find such patronage odd, given you are already promised to her in marriage?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Lady Lindsay herself. At your ball.’
A single muscle rippled in his jaw, but he did not speak.
‘I do not wish to make matters difficult for you, but if I agree to such a thing it would only be on the grounds that I would pay you back.’
‘Very well.’
‘When I sell my silk business. I would write out a vowel, of course, though I understand if you would prefer to involve a lawyer…’
‘I wouldn’t.’
Flustered at the clipped tone in his words, she held out her hand. ‘Do we shake on it, then?’
His fingers came across her own, warm and strong, the connection even here in a public library and under the strictest terms of trade still having the capacity to make her…breathless.
‘I shall keep a careful tally of all expenses, Lord Hawkhurst.’
His pupils darkened with shards of gold splintering on the edge. Predatory and watchful, yet Aurelia could not care.
He did not break his grip and she did not loosen hers, either. Rather, here in the quiet corner of a room of knowledge she wished she was standing instead on the top of Taylor’s Gap with no one around for miles and all the reason in the world to thank him properly.
He had shown her what a kiss could feel like, once, and she wanted that again. Her face flushed with the effort of holding back and for the first time she saw a hint of uncertainty cross his brow as he brought her hand upwards and placed his lips upon her skin in the smallest of caresses. His tongue against the juncture of her fingers was soft and real, saying much in the hidden quiet of honesty.
‘I don’t know what burns between us, Mrs St Harlow, but there will come a time when we shall not have the will to stop it, I can promise you that.’
There, the words were said, falling against lies and covering them with a softer edge, like snow across the jagged sharp of rocks.
Only truth. The lump in her throat made her swallow as she tried to find an answer, but what indeed could she say? If she agreed, then only ruin would follow, and if she didn’t…
She could not speak, even with everything held in a balance, and he let her hand go and took a pace backwards.
The heavy fall of feet made them turn as a woman rounded the corner a good twenty feet away and proceeded towards them and Aurelia gained the distinct impression that he had heard her coming well before the lady came into sight.
‘Lord Hawkhurst, what a delight to see you here.’ Her smile was bright until her glance passed over Aurelia’s face, and the sheen of it flattened.
‘Lady Allum.’ Hawkhurst’s detachment was back, easily in place, and Aurelia had to marvel at the way he changed so quickly from one thing to another. She feared her own expression was nowhere near as schooled. ‘Might I introduce Mrs St Harlow to you?’
Caught, the woman finally made eye contact, a furtive quick glance telling Aurelia that she believed all that had been said about her. Today the criticism