For Elise (21 page)

“She has started calling me
‘Lord Grenton,’” Miles said to Mama Jones, pacing around her small room, something he did more often lately. “How utterly ridiculous is that?”

“Ella calls you Miles when she speaks of you here.”

“And what does she say when she speaks of me? Do her comments fall more along the lines of ‘That Miles, I certainly don’t despise him,’ or ‘Miles is the worst person I have ever known in all my life?’ Because, in all honesty, I am no longer sure which opinion she holds of me.”

“You can find out for yourself,” Mama Jones said, a look of mischief in her blue eyes. “She’ll be here in a minute.”

“Why do I have a nagging suspicion that you arranged this?”

“She was back to her usual blank faces and hollow voice when she was here yesterday,” Mama Jones said, unaffected by Miles’s accusation of meddling. “Somethin’s got her hiding again. I can feel in m’ bones it has to do with you. So I told her to come later than she usually does. Said my old bones needed rest and a great deal of nonsense like that.”

“I think you could teach Wellington a thing or two about strategy, Mama Jones.” Miles chuckled, shaking his head.

“Take a look out the window, Miles Linwood,” Mama Jones instructed with a laughing smile. “She’ll be comin’ down the walk any minute.”

Miles complied. With the growing feeling that Mama Jones had the world’s most amazing sense of timing, he spotted Elise, with Anne at her side and a footman not far behind, walking toward the house.

“You are correct, as always,” he said, watching Elise’s approach.

“I know full well how hard it can sometimes be caring about her when she works so hard to keep a person at a distance,” Mama Jones said. “But it’s not coldheartedness or even true anger that makes her push people away. She’s lonely and afraid and doesn’t know what else to do to protect herself and her sweet little one.”

Miles met Mama Jones’s eyes. “If I cared less, I might be able to shrug and walk away. But I could never do that. And I never will.”

She nodded as though she’d known the answer all along. “Then brace yourself, Miles Linwood. She’s likely to fight you over whatever it is that’s sent her running this time.”

He turned back to the window. She’d very nearly reached the cottage. Watching her approach, he could see that she was indeed very closed off again, her expression empty and unreadable. What had gone so wrong? She was curtsying and referring to him by his title and, he was absolutely certain, avoiding him as well.

This was the girl with whom he’d slipped out at night searching for will-o’-the-wisps and watching for falling stars. She alone knew he had been paralyzingly afraid of water for a large part of his childhood. Only to him had she confessed, at the tender age of five, that she was beginning to forget her mother.

Grow up, Elise. Grow up and solve your own problems.
His own voice echoed in the recesses of his memory, harsh and uncaring . . . and weary.

It was Elise’s voice that followed, small and frightened.
I need your help. Please, Miles. I am in a great deal of trouble.

The memory remained vague and incomplete. Still, he could actually see her standing beside his father’s desk in the Epsworth library. Tears rolled down her face, her terribly young face.

“Oh heavens, what did I do?” Miles closed his eyes tightly against a wave of guilt.

“Come in, Ella,” Mama Jones called out, recalling Miles to the present. He hadn’t even been aware of Elise’s knock.

“Mama Jones.” Elise greeted her mother-in-law with that tone of eerie solemnity she’d acquired during her years away, apparently not even noticing him at the window.

Anne caught sight of him quickly, however. She moved toward him, arms outstretched. Elise held her back.

“I have tried to explain to her that you cannot be forever spinning her about, but she doesn’t seem to fully understand.” Elise’s tone was apologetic and unnecessarily humble, as if she were begging the pardon of the Prince Regent himself. She lowered her eyes, her posture that of a servant before her employer, of a tenant before a landowner.

“We need to talk, Elise.”

Her eyes darted up again, confusion and apprehension in her gaze, quickly replaced by an empty expression. “Of course, my lord.” His title was beginning to sound far too comfortable to her.
That
would have to stop.

“Blast it, Elise,” Miles muttered in frustration. “Must you keep
my lord
ing me?”

A barely noticeable quiver shook her chin before her lips clamped closed and her entire frame seemed to tense. Elise’s eyes dropped once again to her hands clasped in front of her. She was retreating again.

“Mama Jones, will you watch Anne for a moment, please?” He glanced quickly at the older woman rocking and watching them. “I need to speak with Elise.”

“Take her for a walk, Miles Linwood. Talk till you’re blue in the face.”

“It might come to that,” Miles acknowledged. Then, consigning all of Beth’s advice to Hades, he took Elise’s hand and marched her from the cottage.

Elise attempted to pull free of his clasp, but he didn’t allow her to. Mama Jones had a small garden behind her cottage, and he tugged Elise to the low retaining wall at the far corner of it. He brushed off a light coating of dirt, then laid out his handkerchief for her to sit on.

Elise sat. Miles actually breathed a sigh of relief when she stopped trying to pull free.

“You said you would not hold my hand anymore,” Elise said, her voice barely louder than a whisper. Miles couldn’t determine her feelings on the subject. Was she as disappointed by the necessary distance as he had been? Did she care?

“Yes, well . . . don’t tell Beth,” Miles answered, squeezing her fingers. Her hand felt so right inside his, he could hardly imagine never holding it again.

“Beth?”

“She reminded me that we really ought to be more circumspect in our attention to one another.” Miles sighed. He probably ought to be sitting a little farther away from Elise and certainly shouldn’t still be clasping her hand. There was comfort in Elise’s presence that he had sorely missed in the two days since he’d enforced a distance between them. She had, in those same two days, pulled away from him emotionally as much as physically.

“Beth said that?”

“She pointed out that we are no longer children.”

“And you are now a marquess,” Elise added in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Which puts me in mind of something else about which I wanted to talk with you.” He faced her square-on and made no effort to hide his exasperation. “At what point, Elise, did I become
Lord Grenton
to you? You have been calling me that lately, and it makes no sense. I have always been
Miles
. And you’ve been
my lord
ing me half to death. I am apt to go loose in the brain box if you keep it up.”

“But you
are
Lord Grenton.” Elise seemed to grow even more tense. “I am only being proper.”

“
Proper
? Elise, you are my oldest friend. There is—”

“You said yourself,” she interrupted. “Circumstances have changed. Our relative positions in Society dictate a certain formality. Like you said.” She hopped off the low wall. “I understand, Miles. I know our positions are not equal as they once were.” Elise walked a little away from him, her back to him. “I am learning to accept it, but having to continually discuss it is . . . is—” She took a shaky breath. “Oh, I don’t know how to explain.” She waved her hands in frustration. “I know we are no longer social equals, and I assure you I will not embarrass you. Only, please, do not force a detailed discussion on the topic. I can only bear so much without—”

“No longer social equals?” Miles cut across her in confused astonishment. Then, in a sudden flash of understanding, the past two days made sense: the curtsies, the
my lord
s, the posture of servitude that had returned to her demeanor. Elise believed he had brought an end to their closeness out of a feeling of superiority or aristocratic arrogance.

“I am the impoverished widow of a man Society is not even aware ever existed.” She quickly covered the break in her voice with an increase in solemnity. “You are the Marquess of Grenton. Even a simpleton would recognize the discrepancy.”

“Elise—”

“I am sorry for any embarrassment I have caused you,” she went on, apparently unaware he had attempted to cut off her self-deprecating apology. “I am finding it difficult to think of you as anything other than Miles. But I will try.” Emotion broke her words. “I do not wish for you to be ashamed of me.”

“I have never in all my life been ashamed of you, Elise Furlong.
Jones
,” Miles added when he realized his oversight. He turned Elise around so she faced him. With all the authority a marquess ought to possess, he continued. “You are a kind and giving person. You may have ordered me about mercilessly throughout our childhood, but you also displayed a level of compassion I have not seen in another human being.” Miles cupped her face in his hands, determined to be understood. “We were born equals. We are equals yet. And I am proud to call you my friend.”

“Truly?”

Miles dropped his hands to her shoulders and closed his eyes against the pain her doubt continually caused him. Every step forward was followed by a step backward.

“Good heavens, Miles,” Elise said abruptly. “The look on your face just now was precisely the one your father wore when he came to Furlong House to tell me his pointer had killed my little kitten.” Sadness crept into her eyes. Either she was not making the effort to force it back, or she was simply unable to do so.

“Actually, it is the look of a man who is beginning to realize how badly he hurt his dearest friend.”

She was silent then. Miles could sense her defenses rising again.

“I should have helped you when you came to me, Elise.” Miles still hadn’t let go of her shoulders. “I was distracted, overwhelmed. I would have—”

Elise stepped back from him, tense and standoffish once more.

“If you had come back, given me another chance—” Miles ran his hand through his hair and pushed on through his frustration. “Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you ask again instead of running away?”

“I was fifteen, Miles. Fifteen. I
had
already asked, a dozen times at least.” Her back was ramrod straight, her fists clenched beside her. But Miles knew instinctively it wasn’t anger that gave her such a formidable stance. This was how she looked when she was holding back something: a word, an emotion. She was fortifying her wall, which, Miles realized, meant she felt more than she let on. “I was little more than a child, and I was terrified. When I came to you that final time, I was desperate. I was in no position to make a rational decision, but a decision had to be made. There was no one who would help me. I did the only thing I could think of.”

“You were in that much trouble? That much danger?” Miles asked. “Enough to leave?”

“Leaving seemed like the only option.”

“Did leaving solve your problem?”

“No. Jim did.” A look bordering on reverence crossed her features. “By the time he found me, I was hungry and very, very ill. I was too weak and too poor to do anything to save myself, and I was alone. I was so utterly alone.”

Guilt and regret crashed over him in alternating waves. He had failed her. He ought to have been there. She should never have been in that situation to begin with.

“But Jim found me, and he helped me.”

Gratitude warred with jealousy in Miles’s chest. “Helping you was always my job.”

“Yes, but you weren’t there.”

How those words stung.

“I don’t wish to talk about this, Miles,” she said quickly and turned away. “I cannot expect Mama Jones to watch Anne any longer.”

“Elise,” he called after her before she had gone more than a few steps.

She stopped and turned back to look at him.

“What was the problem you were running from?”

“It doesn’t matter now, Miles,” Elise insisted. She’d shut him out again. “Jim took care of me and hid me away until the danger had passed. And in his home, I learned to take care of myself.”