Page 126

He tilted up her head. The look in his eyes unlaced her.

“Reality isn’t perfect,” he said, his voice raw. “But I will work every day to fill my own holes so I’m not a sieve for your love. So it can flow back to you, along with my own. Lucy, marry me.”

She could feel the smile spreading over her face.

“You’re really breaking your engagement?”

“I’ll do it now if you think it best. Should I redirect the coachman?” He lunged forward, and she flung out her arm to stop him.

“I have to get home,” she said, laughing, dashing away tears.

“It’s just as well.” His voice hardened. “I don’t want you within a mile of Robert Yardley.”

She thought she knew all of his faces, but this one was new, cruel and frightening. She feared for him, feared what he might do during the inevitable encounter, feared what it might do to him.

He blinked several times, dispelling the shadow.

“I will inherit,” he said. “I suspect it will take more than a fortune to endear me to your aunt. Perhaps she’ll be interested to know that I’m working in the House to appoint a select committee. The committee will mount an independent investigation into the Board of Works.”

“Oh, well done!” It burst from her. She thought he might bridle at her enthusiasm, not wholly untinged by surprise, but he tossed the hair from his eyes and grinned.

“I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,” he said. “I’m coauthoring a bill that proposes to reform metropolitan government altogether. Do away with the Board of Works and its crooked appointees. Replace it with a city council of elected men.”

“Has it any hope?” She couldn’t help but grin back at him. Hadn’t he boasted of the cobwebs on his bench in the House of Lords? More than his declarations, these proofs of purpose spoke to the change the weeks had worked on him.

“Wiser heads than mine say not a shred of hope, but supposedly that’s where the fun begins.” His eyebrow quirked. He wasn’t quite so transformed as to accept whole hog the notion that drumming up parliamentary support for a bill reforming city government could be fun. But she could see in his eyes that he was up for the challenge. She blinked.

“Lucy.” His voice altered, the words slow and stretched. “I love you and I know who you are and what that means. A proper marriage to you would be madness, the sweetest madness I could imagine.”

He hooked her hair behind her ear, so he could peer into her eyes. Her heart swelled, and she sipped his scent, the musk of his skin, which seemed magnetized to hers, drawing their limbs together, their lips. The kiss was tender but searing, and the words stuck in her throat. For a moment, she eased into him, marveling anew at his hard dimensions.

Excitement sent lightning bolts through her, clearing the vapors in her skull. She was awake. She was hurtling toward the future, their future, a great and glorious one.

“Tomorrow.” She buried her face in his throat. “Tomorrow I will submit my picture for the Summer Exhibition. And after that . . .”

She sighed, not daring to hope aloud. She drew back far enough to see his face, to shock herself again with his beauty.

“I’d meant to submit today, but no matter. Submissions are accepted until Tuesday.” She smiled. “I feel like a mother hen, fretting about her chick. The pictures all go into a great wooden pound in the center of a room, stacked six feet deep. I waited so long maybe mine will be on top and less likely to get a hole punched in it.”

He didn’t return her smile. Something about his expression warned her. She could see his eyelids contract, the black lashes sweep a pained angle. She cleared her throat, fighting the sudden panic.

“Funny,” she said, with studied casualness. “I don’t know, actually, how long I lay in that room.” She brushed her fingertips nervously across her nostrils. How many times had she inhaled the chloroform? How many cycles?

“Anthony.” She looked at him but kept speaking, refusing to accept the answer she saw on his face. “What day is today?”

He didn’t want to speak. An eternity passed.

“Tuesday,” he said. The muscles clenched along his jaw, and his cheeks hollowed starkly, before the shadow swept again across his face.

“Ah.” She pushed off his chest, twisted from him, sagging at the waist. She rubbed her forehead against the window glass. She could barely speak.

“Longer than I thought.” She managed to gasp the words. “Longer than either of us thought.” Kate had been as dazed as she on the drive back to London. But surely only one night had passed. It was Monday, and tomorrow she could bring her picture to the door beside the students’ entrance, watch the porters carry it through.

“Is it really Tuesday?” Her voice strained, broke. “Don’t lie to me. Is it?”

He was silent.

“No.” She shook her head.