It was a miracle indeed. The tray was huge and the tea service occupied only a third of it. The rest held roast beef, smoked salmon, toasted cheese, boiled eggs, bread and butter, and even a few slices of rich-smelling queen cake.
She followed the innkeeper’s wife to the table, where the latter set down the tray. “How—” How did you know I would have given a whole crown for high tea at this hour, kind woman?
Then she noticed that the innkeeper’s wife had brought two teacups and two sets of cutlery.
Her head swung around. Stuart Somerset stood just inside the door, his hair and eyes very black, his shirt very white against skin bronzed from nearly a decade on the Subcontinent.
He took in her modest room—mullioned window, bare floor, dark wainscoting that came to her shoulder. His gaze skimmed over her old valise, her muddy galoshes, and her nightgown spread over the rather surprisingly spacious bed.
Their eyes met. There was such a singular purpose to his that she had to look away almost immediately.
The innkeeper’s wife curtsied to both of them—she hadn’t curtsied to Verity before. He stepped aside to let the woman and her empty tray pass. The door closed softly behind her.
Her wistful, hearts-and-flowers fantasy withered in the harshness of reality. She might be a woman of ghastly moral turpitude, but she still knew a grave insult when she encountered one. For him to intrude upon her without permission, at this resolutely indecent hour…She owed him much, but not this much.
But because she did owe him, she held her silence, to give him a chance to apologize. Perhaps he did not realize the magnitude of his breach of etiquette. Perhaps.
He gave her nothing of the sort. “Won’t you pour?” he said, inclining his head toward the tea service. She didn’t move. He walked past her to the table, and poured for them both. “Sugar? Milk?”
She shook her head, turning down his offer of tea altogether, but he brought the black tea to her instead. “I won’t make myself any more welcome than you’ll permit me,” he said.
She looked down at the cup and saucer that had somehow ended up between her hands—clutched in fingers prickling at the tips with a hot numbness. He returned to the table and began to load an empty plate.
“Why are you here?”
“I think we both know why I’m here.” He glanced at her. “The question is, rather, how long you’ll let me stay and what liberties you might allow me.”
“None. I should think that much is obvious,” she said stiffly. Had she sunk so low that a virtual stranger would assume that she was his for the asking—and a tray of tea? “I’m afraid you have wasted your time and your bribes.”
“This is not a bribe,” he said. He crossed what little distance separated them, took away her untouched tea, and pressed the laden plate into her hands. “I don’t like the way Wicked Stepmother has been feeding you. And I haven’t wasted my time. I wanted to see you again and now I have.”
There was a gravitas to him that made the most ridiculous declarations ring with truth and authority. “I’m not so easily persuaded by pretty words that you have likely scattered across the length and breadth of London.”
“I’m sure you will not believe me, but I lead a somewhat spartan existence, as far as glib womanizing is concerned. I’m usually far more interested in work than in the fairer sex.”
“Are you? And are you also a very convincing liar?” How else could he have achieved the innkeeper’s acquiescence—indeed, cooperation?
He looked full at her. “When required, yes.”
“I should like you to leave now.”
She used her kitchen voice, the one in which she spoke to her subordinates during working hours, the one that had held firm through both the jubilation of love and the despair of it.
It was obvious that he had not expected such unremitting firmness from her. He was surprised and disappointed—more than disappointed; the emotion that shadowed his eyes was deeper, rawer.
It shouldn’t matter to her that he was disappointed, or despondent even. But it did. Because of the swiftness with which he concealed it, the way one might hide a bruise that had been inflicted by a loved one.
“When you have eaten, I will leave,” he said evenly.
Again she couldn’t hold the weight of his gaze. “Do I have your word?” she managed.
“Of course.”
She began to eat. Her mouth was dry, her throat had closed. The food that she’d craved was hard to chew and even harder to swallow.
He broke off a piece of cake and studied it. “My mother worked in a mill when I was a child. We couldn’t always make ends meet. She was adamant that we must pay the rent and keep our room, so we forwent food sometimes—never for very long, never more than a day and a half for me, though I think sometimes she went for longer without.”
She stared at him. He did not look at her. “It was such a joy to eat then. The smells from pubs and chop shops would drive me into a frenzy. I would pass hours in a daze, dreaming of meat pies and a pudding bigger than my head.”
Is he a gastronome like yourself?