She slowed to a walk, yet her feet still somehow managed to propel her across the room as fast as one of Jackson Shaw’s racehorses. “Papa, it’s Daisy,” she choked out. She beseechingly wrapped her arms around Chesney’s legs, with a trembling bottom lip and large eyes round with worry. “She’s climbed up a tree again and gotten stuck. You have to get her down!”
“That cat will find its own way down in an hour or so. It always does,” he answered firmly.
Robert slid a sideways glance at Mariah, who wisely kept staring straight ahead, and mumbled, “Always, huh?”
Chesney placed a loving kiss on his daughter’s forehead. “Now stop worrying about that cat and go find Nanny. Tell her I said you could have an extra sweet roll this afternoon.”
Clara beamed, then turned to run from the library without a worry in the world.
“Walk.”
She walked slowly until she reached the hallway where, thinking that she couldn’t be seen, she launched into a bouncing, high-stepping skip as she hurried away.
Robert rolled his eyes. Women would be the death of him yet.
“Robert, join me upstairs in my study. The women won’t come looking for us for at least another hour.” Chesney nodded his head politely at Mariah. “Miss Winslow, it was a pleasure to see you again.”
“And you, my lord.”
Chesney took both his glass and the bottle, then headed toward the door. Clara burst into happy song from somewhere down the hallway, and he paused to shake his head with fatherly pride.
He glanced back at Robert and Mariah. “Clara worries about that cat, but it’s been stuck in a tree every day for the past fortnight, yet it always manages to get itself down.” He grinned as he stepped from the room. “I’d have to be a nodcock to climb up after it!”
Robert pinned a narrowed glare on Mariah, her lips twitching with suppressed laughter.
“You will pay for that,” he warned.
“Undoubtedly.” She nodded with mock gravity, her bottom lip trembling as she forced out, “Uncle Robert.”
Damned minx.
“I do hope your arm isn’t too painful,” she offered, an apologetic tone lacing her voice. “If I had known…”
He lifted a brow. “You still would have sent me up that tree?”
“Oh, most certainly,” she heaved out in a sigh, as if she simply couldn’t have helped herself.
“Mariah—”
She touched his bicep, silencing him. The teasing glint in her eyes dulled into quiet sincerity, and she admitted quietly, “But I am glad that you shared your memories of your father with me.”
The genuineness behind that comment surprised the hell out of him. So did the demure way she folded her hands in front of her as she dropped her gaze to the rug.
“And thank you for listening in kind about my mother,” she added. “I find that it helps sometimes to talk about her.”
“I suppose it does.” Although he hadn’t yet gotten to that point himself. Oh, sharing with her how wonderful Richard Carlisle’s life had been was far easier than he’d suspected, but he wasn’t prepared yet to reveal the truth about his death. If he ever could.
“I can’t do that with Evie or Papa, you see, because they have their own pain over losing her. I assume it’s the same for you, with your family.”
“Certainly.” Except that he’d never tried to talk about his father with them. And never planned to.
She gave a slow nod, turning her head slightly toward him but not yet raising her gaze to look fully at him. “We might never be anything more than adversaries,” she confided softly, “but you can trust me with this.” Then she lifted her gaze, and the compassion for him on her face struck him like a blow. “If you ever need to talk about your father and what—”
“I don’t,” he interrupted, the force of his reply silencing her.
A tense stillness settled over the library, broken only by the muted ticking of the mantel clock that pulsed on like a relentless heartbeat. She wordlessly held his gaze, clearly not believing him.
But instead of challenging him, she whispered gently, “All right.” She let her hand fall slowly away from his arm and retreated toward the door. “Then I’ll go and leave you men to your kittens.”
He rolled his eyes and drawled with a grimace, “Thank you.”
She paused in the doorway to look back at him. “Chesney isn’t completely right, you know,” she said, almost as an afterthought, “about leaving a cat to climb down on its own. Oh, usually they get down just fine.” A knowing but melancholy smile pulled faintly at the corners of her mouth. They both knew she wasn’t speaking of cats. “But sometimes they need help.”
With a lingering glance at him, as if she still hoped he would stop her from leaving and share everything about that night, she disappeared into the hallway. Moments later, he heard her voice rising sweetly as she joined Clara in song.
With a fierce curse, he tossed back the glass of whiskey in a harsh, gasping swallow.
Damn that woman, with her prodding and pressing! She didn’t understand the first thing about what he’d gone through, how it ate at him even now. How he’d never be able to purge from his mind the sight of his father falling from his horse, striking his head, then lying so still as a puddle of blood seeped onto the cobblestones beneath him. How every time one of his family mentioned Richard Carlisle it felt as if that night had happened all over again.
He didn’t need her platitudes and that nonsense about unburdening himself by sharing his grief—for Christ’s sake! She didn’t kill her mother, and he wasn’t some helpless cat stuck up a tree.
Robert had killed him as surely as if he’d pulled the trigger himself. And he was in hell.
CHAPTER EIGHT
One Very Long Week Later
Robert sank heavily into the leather chair in front of the fire at White’s. He heaved out a sigh as he let his head fall back, but the knotted frustration inside him didn’t ease away.
The past three days spent escorting the ladies across London had been excruciating. He’d managed to sneak away this afternoon only by claiming that he had an important appointment at the club, then sending a message to his cousin Ross to meet him here so that he wouldn’t technically be lying to his mother.
As if having to escort Mariah to his sister’s tea hadn’t been bad enough, the week had only grown worse from there. Daily afternoon drives with her through the park in the barouche. Breakfast with Lady Sydney Reed. Dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Chatham and thirty of their closest acquaintances. A morning call on Lady Elizabeth Mullins and her aunt, Lady Agnes Sinclair, where Robert learned firsthand that the stories about her whiskey-drenched tea were indeed true. Lunch with Mrs. Peterson and her niece Iphigenia Dunwoody, a very near-sighted, very nice—and oddly colorless—girl, for whom Mrs. Peterson clearly had designs on him, much to his terror and to Mariah’s delight.
Today, though, had been the last straw.
An entire morning spent shopping on Bond Street. Good Lord. If he had to see one more display of shoes and parasols, he would go mad. He couldn’t even sneak away for ten minutes’ peace into the bookseller’s to study Peveril of the Peak, the new novel by Walter Scott, without his mother sending the footman to fetch him back to the milliner’s so he could give his opinion on several bonnets the two women couldn’t decide between on their own, only for them to reject outright every choice he made.
That was when he sent the message to Ross and dared to make his escape. And he hadn’t looked back.
“Cognac,” he called out to the attendant.
“Good God, you look awful.” Ross Carlisle, Earl of Spalding, sank into the chair opposite him. “Bring the whole bottle,” he ordered the attendant, with an amused gleam in his eyes at his cousin’s expense. “This could turn into a wake.”
“Very funny,” Robert muttered.
Kicking his long legs out in front of him, Ross sent him a slow grin.
“Mock me all you want, but I needed you to save my life.” He shot Ross a pointed look. “And you still owed me for saving yours that day in York.”
“You mean from the Scot?” His sandy-colored brow jutted into the air, his blue eyes sparkling. Although the Spalding side of the family had darker features than the Trent side, they all possessed the same blue eyes. And the same penchant for stirring up trouble. “I would have been just fine on my own.”