“The country.”
“Yes.”
She said it in a way that made the word sound like a bolt sliding into a lock. Click.
“With your father the surgeon.”
“With my father the surgeon.”
“And... your mother as well? Were there more in your family?” he asked idly. He’d found another place to begin untangling the yarn. “I’ve a half brother I’ve never met, which seems odd.”
“Yes. Well, I was the only child. My mother died when I was fifteen years old. Her heart was never quite strong, and then fever weakened it more, and...”
She looked up at him, her mouth quirked ruefully.
“I am very sorry to hear it.” He’d lowered his voice. “It’s a difficult thing.”
He meant it. He knew at once what that must have been like for a girl her age with a father who wasn’t gentry. And she knew that he knew what it was like to lose a parent when one was young.
The moment—that exchange of silent sympathy, tacit understanding—was entirely new to his experience of women, at least ones he also desired. And all at once it made him feel a little uncertain, unfamiliar with how to navigate it, which he did and did not like. The past few years had tempered him like steel, or so he thought. Now he’d begun to suspect he was made of steel save perhaps one golden-haired, hazel-eyed, Achilles’ heel whose creamy throat made him long to draw a finger softly down, down, down until it vanished into the shadow between her breasts.
But even he knew that one did not stroke the breasts of one’s friends.
“And do you miss your mother still, Mrs. Breedlove? What was she like?”
She paused and gave a little self-conscious laugh. “Oh, well. She was kind and funny and beautiful. Every now and then I talk to her a little bit, where no one can hear, so no one will think me mad.”
He paused, hopelessly charmed and touched in a way so unexpected it made him nearly irritable.
He paused in turning the now less tangled yarn. He didn’t think he was quite ready to tell her that he occasionally talked to his own.
“Would your mother like me?”
“I think you would shock her to her toes.”
He laughed.
“So... is that when you became a governess? When your mother died.”
“Yes. Well. That is, I became a governess to support my father and myself after he became ill. He believed in educating women and myfivelanguages were a useful commodity.”
His eyebrows shot up and he gave a low whistle.
“There weren’t any gaming hells in Devonshire, so my options for income were limited.”
He smiled at that. But it struck him that she’d been orphaned, then, at a rather vulnerable age, and absurdly, though surely that was about a decade ago at least, he felt uneasy on her behalf, a little restless, as though he wished he could go back and protect her from all these losses and their consequences. Was that when she’d married?
Unlike Mrs. Pariseau, she wasn’t one to lightly toss the fact of her widowhood into conversation. There was a story of some sort there, he suspected.
For some reason he found himself reluctant to ask. He did not want to bring another man into the conversation.
“Lord Bolt.” Mrs. Pariseau’s ears pricked up at the words “gaming hell.” “Dot here thinks it might be amusing to appear in the gossip in the newspapers.”
Angelique’s head swiveled sharply. “Dot! I thought we discussed that,” she said, imbuing this with a thousand shades of reproach. Delilah supported her by adding a reproachful stare of her own.
Dot hung her head. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Breedlove. I didn’t really mean it. I was joking with Mrs. Pariseau, you see. Ajoke,” she reiterated, half-accusingly, to Mrs. Pariseau.
“Nonetheless,” Mrs. Pariseau persisted breezily. “We wondered whatyouhad to say on the subject, Lord Bolt. Given your experience.”