Page 35 of One Thing Leads to a Lover

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Having reached the point in her well-worn path where the broken gate impeded further progress, Amanda paused, tempted to grab the bars and rattle them like a caged creature.

When the poor things in menageries behaved so, were they frightened? Or frustrated? Or angry?

A combination of all three, if her current mood was anything to go by.

After a deep, steadying breath, she turned back toward the house and discovered Major Stanhope standing in the morning room, watching her pace. The discovery did not improve her wild mood one jot.

She quickened her step back toward the house, just as he opened the door and trotted down the steps. A half-dozen long strides from each of them brought them toe to toe in the middle of the garden, where the perfume of roses was strongest.

“My lady,” he began, all politeness and propriety, as if they were not meeting in the darkness for the third time—or the fourth? Heavens, she’d lost track—and he clad only in his shirtsleeves.

His cravat had worked loose, revealing the notch at the base of his throat and a hint of dark hair on his chest. The sight of it, much like the sight of his spectacles earlier, made something strange happen inside her. Sent a rush of sudden warmth to her belly, and lower. Shallowed her breathing and made her breasts chafe against her corset with their rapid rise and fall.

Or maybe those reactions were all simply caused by the exertion of her brisk walk and the dreadful, sticky heat of the night air.

She had made it a rule not to dwell on a man’s looks. When she had been on the marriage mart, it would have been an exercise in futility to focus on gentlemen’s faces and figures, when her parents’ decision would be entirely guided by other qualities. And once their choice had been made, it had never occurred to her nineteen-year-old self to think of Lord Kingston as attractive. He’d been positively ancient when they’d wed—which was to say, approximately the age of the man standing before her now.

It seemed at thirty-two, she was more than capable of finding a man of thirty-seven or thirty-eight handsome indeed.

The way his shirt clung to him most provocatively, confirming the breadth of his shoulders and highlighting his taut abdomen.

The way his dark eyes pierced her through those steel-rimmed spectacles, making her want to gnaw her lip like a schoolgirl and express her willingness to learn whatever lesson he offered to teach.

“Are you even qualified to be a tutor?” she blurted out. “Oxford, you told Lord Dulsworthy. But I—I’m not even sure what’s real anymore. Secret codes and spies and…the Crown shan’t require anything further from you, you said,” and she deepened her voice in mock imitation of his. “But now you’re here, living in my house, and claiming to be—I don’t know—no. I won’t let him send Jamie away in the autumn. I can’t, I just can’t. But, oh God, you see, he…he can! Lord Dulsworthy, I mean. The will said—but Kingston can’t have intended—and—and—oh, surely this can’t all have happened because of a-a-a cookbook?”

She snapped her jaw shut on the word cookbook, having momentarily forgotten that Magpie had asked her not to speak of it. The click of her teeth was audible in the silent garden.

Even to her own ears, she sounded hysterical. Nonsensical. If George ever heard such a stream of chatter from her, he would declare her unfit to have care of her sons. And if the alarmed expression on Major Stanhope’s face was any indication, he might concur with the assessment.

As usual, she’d been waving her hands about as she spoke. Their fluttering movements sometimes seemed to make the words come even faster. When she’d been a girl, Mama had urged her to sit on them whenever she talked to break the habit.

When, exactly, had Major Stanhope caught hold of them? His grip was firm, implacable. The resistance made the muscles of her arms ache.

But then his thumbs chafed over the thin skin on the backs of her hands, first one, then the other, and some of the tension eased from her. After a moment, her shoulders drooped in surrender.

He did not release her hands.

“Now, then.” His voice was calm and calming. Quiet, but not a whisper. An accent slightly different from any she’d previously heard him use. Less refined? No. Not less anything, she decided. More…authentic. More him.

Probably just another disguise, a familiar inner voice warned her. Mind your step.

“I did go to Oxford, if it’s any reassurance to you. Though with no intention of becoming either a clergyman or a tutor, I confess. And Rugby before that, from the time I was about the age of your sons.” A wry smile lifted one side of his mouth. “Go ahead. You may well look surprised. I was.”

It was a curious thing to say. Young gentleman of the sort who went to Rugby and Harrow were not generally surprised by the privilege. They considered it their due.

Had he perhaps been a scholarship boy?

Clever. An exceptional mimic.

Magpie.

She wanted to unravel the mystery of him, and that, she feared, was even more foolish than her wanton desire to drag her fingers—no, her mouth—along the bristled edge of his jaw.

“You have been giving them their lessons, I take it?”

She nodded. “I began when their father took ill. Before that, he had managed it himself. He was a man very interested in books and learning—as I suppose one might gather from the library here.” When it had become necessary to stay in London to be closer to his physicians, Kingston had ordered crates and crates of books brought from the still larger library at Foxhaven. “In any case, my teaching them was only ever meant to be a temporary measure. My husband, you see, was to have got well.”