“Mr. Bertram Somerset was once very dear to me,” said Verity. “But he is not the reason why I stayed. Nor the reason why I may leave.”
Part of her wanted to hand in her resignation that very afternoon, while a different part of her begged for another day, another dinner, another chance. She wasn’t ready to completely give up. She still thought she had magic enough.
“You’ll go work for Monsieur du Gard, then?”
Monsieur du Gard was one of the wealthiest members of Bertie’s gastronomic circle, the one who consistently offered her the highest wages to cook for him.
“Possibly,” she said. “Isn’t it what you’ve always wanted for me, fame and glory in Paris?”
“Isn’t that what you’ve always assured me you don’t want?” said Michael.
“People change, don’t they?”
He stood close enough that she smelled the toilette water she’d made for him last summer, with pine oil she’d purchased from an old Hungarian émigré in Manchester. Her room had smelled like a forest for days on end.
Michael gave her a chill look. “They certainly do.”
From the hothouse, Verity had her first look at Mr. Somerset in good light.
She’d avoided him, of course. But even without any measure of evasion, in the absence of a direct summons, the cook and the master of the house—one who wasn’t fanatically devoted to the art and science of gastronomy—could pass months without catching sight of each other.
At the church she’d mostly had a view of the back of his head, a view that had been further obstructed by an inconveniently placed pillar. He’d sat at the foot of the pulpit, while she’d stood at the very back, in a huddle with the other servants—the distance between them sixteen rows of pews and the whole structure of the British class system.
The hothouse was located behind the manor, in a cluster of other utilitarian structures—the kitchen complex, the brewery, the dovecote—and separated from the rear gardens by a boxwood hedge almost ten foot high. Not the sort of place where one expected to see the master of the house loitering.
But when she looked up from the spread of potted herbs set on propped-up planks, he was only a few feet away, on the other side of the glass panes, walking slowly, a cigarette between the index and middle fingers of his left hand.
He came to a stop, his profile to her. He was thinner than she remembered, and older than he’d looked in the photograph that had been in the newspaper, which now she judged to have been taken at least half a decade ago. Faint shadows darkened the underside of his eye. His forehead was creased. A groove carved from the side of his nose to the corner of his mouth.
Some lovers were fortunate enough to grow old together. They’d grown old apart. She did not think him any less handsome. She only wished that she’d been there when the first line on his face had appeared, so that she could have stroked and kissed and cherished it.
He was to depart Fairleigh Park within the hour, not to return until after the New Year. But she would not be here when he came again. She’d be settled down in Paris, on her way to gastronomic immortality.
She suddenly realized that she was exposed to his view, with nothing between them but clear glass panes that had been wiped down just two days ago. She sidled toward a tall trellis overgrown with cucumber leaves. Her movement caught his eye. He looked in her direction just as she slid behind the trellis.
Her heart pounded. Through the gaps in the leaves she could still see him. He stared at the spot where she stood behind the trellis. Then he took a step toward the greenhouse. Then another step. Then another.
She recognized the look on his face for what it was: desire, beneath all the outward paddings of respectability. Not quite the roiling desire she’d sensed when he’d come into her room that night at the inn, but desire all the same, fully formed and intent.
Her breath was in tatters. Her heart hurtled itself every which way, an occupant of Bedlam hell-bent on breaking out. The handles of the snippers dug into tender places between her fingers, so tightly did she clutch them.
She didn’t want it, she thought rebelliously, almost angrily. She didn’t want him to be the kind of man who fancied his cook. With Bertie it had been different—they’d had the love of food in common. But Stuart Somerset was indifferent to her food. And all he knew of Madame Durant was that she’d slept with his brother: an easy woman.
His gaze swept the hothouse—and located the door. No, please, not this way, not discovered because he wanted to see the slutty cook.
He stared at her again. What could he see of her? The hem of her dress? The frill of her apron? The tip of her fingers hooked over the trellis to keep herself steady? And why, for God’s sake, did he want anything of Bertie’s cook?