“Impossible girl,” he repeated, but this time his tone was soft and low, making the words into something sensual. “I’m saying it for me as a reminder, not for you as an insult. Jane. Brave girl. Lovely girl.” He did touch her cheek then, laying his fingers against it once more. And, oh, how good it felt, that tiny little touch. That point of connection.
“Girl I should not touch,” he said. “Or kiss. Or have.”
His smile was a little sad, and she could recall him saying that she was the last woman he would ever marry.
“But bright. So bright. It’s a shame you’re so impossible, Miss Fairfield, because otherwise, I think I would try for you.”
She had preferred it when he’d called her Jane. She liked the way he said her name, not short and terse, a spare syllable to be gotten over with, but long and slow, a bite to be savored.
She reached up and laid her hand over his against her cheek. Warmth met warmth. He let out a noise, not quite a protest, but he didn’t move away.
“Remember,” he finally said, “what I am contemplating. I don’t think I should be making you more vulnerable to me. Not at all.”
“Too late for that,” she told him.
He pulled his hand away as if it would make a difference. It didn’t matter. He’d slipped past the layers of lace that she’d used to shroud her heart. She wasn’t anything so foolish as in love with him; even she was not that brave. But…
“You’re the most scaldingly honest betrayer I’ve had,” she told him.
He grimaced. “Come, Miss Fairfield,” he finally said. “It’s getting cold and we ought to go in.”
Chapter Eight
“More than two weeks in Cambridge,” the man Oliver had called father all his life said from his vantage point overlooking the stream. “And you’re just now visiting?” He didn’t look at Oliver as he spoke; he was examining the lure on the end of his line.
It was mid-afternoon—the worst time for fishing—and January to boot. But his father hadn’t quibbled when Oliver suggested a trip to the stream.
Hugo Marshall was a good bit shorter than Oliver. His hair was an untidy brown, his features square, his nose broken. He looked nothing like Oliver, and with good reason: They were not actually related. Not by anything other than time and affection.
Oliver very carefully didn’t look at his father. They had situated themselves next to their fishing pool—a wide, flat stretch of water where the stream went still. A large, gray rock on the bank made an excellent seat. “It took me far too long.”
His parents’ farm, just outside the tiny village of New Shaling, was a mere forty minutes’ ride from Cambridge. When he’d been at university, he’d visited every weekend he could.
“Free thinks you’re avoiding her,” his father said.
She would think that. His youngest sister had always had a temper—and a tendency to think the world revolved around her. That it appeared to do so on a regular basis had done nothing to dissuade her.
“Of course I wasn’t,” Oliver replied. “I was avoiding you.”
His father chuckled obligingly.
Oliver didn’t laugh. Instead, he busied himself with his own rod and line.
“I see,” his father said after a moment. “What horrible thing have I done now?”
Oliver cast his line with vicious intent into the pool, watching little ripples rise up in the otherwise still water. “Not you. Me.”
His father didn’t say anything.
“I’m struggling with a question of ethics.”
“Ah.” Hugo Marshall’s gaze abstracted. “Is it a thorny question of ethics? Or is it the sort of ethical question where the right choice is easy, but the unethical answer is too tempting?”
Trust his father to see to the heart of his problem without having heard a word of it. Oliver fiddled with his rod and didn’t look up. Normally, he’d have laid the whole thing before his father. But this time… This time, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell the story. Too much of it had to do with Hugo Marshall himself.
His parents had scrimped and sacrificed and saved so that Oliver could have the chance he did. He’d only barely begun to understand what his parents had given up for him.
When Oliver’s brother, the duke, had reached his majority, Oliver had visited Clermont House for the first time. Oliver had dimly known that his father had once worked for the Duke of Clermont in some capacity, but he’d never known details.
Not until he was twenty-one. Not until he’d arrived in London alongside his brother and was introduced to the staff. A good half-dozen servants remained from the time twenty-two years ago when Hugo Marshall had worked for the duke. They had been very curious about Oliver…and even more curious about what had become of Hugo Marshall.
“I knew him,” the housekeeper had said. “I was only first maid, then, and we’d all fight over who had to take him tea. None of us wanted the task, he was that fearsome.”
Fearsome. He’d seen his father angry a few times in his life, and Oliver supposed he was fearsome. But he’d understood that she had meant more than that. His father was fiercely intelligent and brooked no foolishness.
The housekeeper had sighed.
“He was the sort of man who I thought would be running all of London in twenty years. Sometimes you meet a man, and you just know about him. You know he’s going to be something more.” She’d sighed fretfully and readjusted her cap. “That’s what we all said at the time. We just knew. It was a feeling you had, looking at him. And then it all came to nothing.”
It all came to nothing.
Oliver glanced at his father. Hugo had cast his line in the deep pools at the edge of the river and sat without speaking, without expecting. Waiting to see if Oliver wanted to talk, assuming that anything that needed to be said would be.
It hadn’t come to precisely nothing. All that energy had been devoted to this—into fishing trips with boys who were not really his sons, to money made and then immediately invested into his children.
Every bit of excess that the business had produced had gone to his family—helping Laura and her husband start a dry-goods store in town, paying for Oliver’s university tuition, managing Patricia’s shorthand lessons and then, when she had married Reuven, giving them enough to start their own business in Manchester.
It all came to nothing.
No. It wasn’t going to be nothing. Oliver was going to make his father’s sacrifice mean something. He was going to make it mean everything.