No Place for a Dame (15 page)

The pleasant memory had caught hold in his imagination. She could see it in the loosening of his shoulders and the softening of his gunmetal gray gaze. But all she could think of was his last sentence. Why would Louis presume to arrange Giles’s life for him?

“I would go to his room directly after lessons,” Giles continued softly. “As soon as I arrived, he would make me recite everything I’d learned that day. He took his role of big brother very seriously”—a slight smile—“but then, afterwards we would turn his bed into whole new worlds of make-believe.

“That book”—he nodded at it in her hand—“was often our script, the source of countless adventures. A pillow became the insurmountable Lachamoor Mountains, a blue scarf, the raging river Jesset. We would play for hours on end. I’m afraid I was not always mindful of his fatigue.”

She conjured up an image of Giles, not as the adolescent paragon she’d met, but years earlier, a sensitive boy worshipful of an extremely sickly older brother, aware that each time Giles saw him, it might be the last. She glanced away. Giles would not thank her for her pity.

“You must miss him.”

He gave her an odd, twisted smiled. “Thank you for using the present tense.”

She looked at him askance.

“His death happened so long ago. Most people would have said, ‘You must
have
missed him very much,’ as though as time goes along one stops missing the person who has died.”

A little warmth crept into her cheeks. “It is not my experience,” she said.

Her mother had died when she was five and though she could not recall with certainty her face or voice, she only needed to let her thoughts drift to remember how it felt to be held by her, the feeling of safety and contentment and love. She sometimes missed her with a yearning that
was visceral. Her father, though fond and bluff, had been more of an uncle than parent, a protector but not a guide. She shook off the melancholy moment. “And how have you done?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“As the would-be Wayfarer of Lachamoor?”

He grinned. Sitting there with his hair rumpled and his cravat slightly askew, she realized how young he still was and saw an echo of the sensitive lad who’d waged bloodless warfare on his brother’s counterpane.

“Poorly, I’m afraid. I am too lazy to commit myself to any crusade, hopeless or not. Villains terrify me. Noble sacrifices invariably entail self deprivation of some sort and as for perennially endangered damsels…? As loath as I am to point this out, generally I am the one doing the endangering.”

She couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing.

Chapter Fourteen

L
ouis used to say that I must live to have adventures for us both.”

Giles wasn’t certain just how he had become entrenched in this conversation, spilling out a history he had kept to himself for fifteen years. But he did not regret it. He tipped his chair back, clasping his hands behind his head and speaking with the sort of thoughtless candor one used with an old and trusted friend.

Avery had moved the chair alongside the hearth and was holding a poker. Every now and then she’d give the fire a good hard jab, sending a fountain of sparks sailing into the air to disappear up the flue. She watched the miniature fireworks display with quiet glee. She found pleasure in a great many things he took for granted.

When he’d sent for her, it had been with no other goal than to assuage Travers’s concerns—and his own guilt—with a twenty minute or so conversation. He would ask her about her stars. She would ramble on a bit. He would contrive to look interested. She would ramble on a bit more. Then she would leave. Of course, since it was Avery Quinn, she was bound to find something to rail about and, truth be told, that was
the part of the conversation he’d most anticipated. It was fun locking horns with Avery Quinn.

But instead, he found himself talking about things and people he hadn’t spoken of in years. Like Louis. How strange this conversation had become. Here he sat revealing his history to a beautiful young woman hiding beneath the guise of a fat and unhealthy-looking lad, a woman who seemed as impressed by his title and consequence as she was with head lice, who aggravated him at least once during every encounter, charmed him a half dozen times during the same period, and who increasingly roused even more increasingly inappropriate desires.

And, for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine having this conversation with anyone else.

“And just how were you to have these adventures for both of you?” she asked now.

Behind the lenses, her blue eyes gleamed as brightly inquisitive as a robin spying a worm. She exhibited not a whit of pity or sorrow or judgment, simply curiosity. It was oddly liberating. Perhaps that was why it was so easy to speak with her. Avery didn’t recognize sacred ground and that meant no topic was burdened by hallowedness.

His hands dropped from behind his head and he straightened a piece of paper on his desk. “I was to be his avatar. To rescue maidens, slay dragons, right wrongs.” He gave her a crooked smile. “I was to do all the things he would not live to do. Even before it became obvious he would not reach adulthood, he used say I must have adventures enough for us both. He made me promise to be his champion.”

She sighed, shaking her head slightly. “I see. Well, he was just a lad himself. You mustn’t think harshly of him.”

Her words caught him off guard. He’d expected her to show at least
some
sympathy for a boy who hadn’t lived long enough to see even his secondhand dreams come to fruition. “Of course, I don’t. Why would I think harshly of Louis?”

She eyed him as though uncertain whether he was being serious. “For asking you to live out his dreams rather than pursue your own. For assuming the life he would have led, had he been able, was somehow more valid than one you would have chosen for yourself.”

He stiffened. “That’s not how it was. Louis meant to exhort me to
being a better man, to give me an incentive to become that man. Because
he
was the better man.”

She contemplated this and he found himself growing irritated. She shouldn’t be pondering his pronouncements about a brother he’d known and she hadn’t. He hoped she had the good sense not to forward an opinion.

“I don’t think so.”

He should have known better.

He regarded her coolly, refusing to ask her to elaborate. He had lived for years with the knowledge that were Louis alive today, he would have been disappointed in him.

She thrust the poker into the heart of the fire and stirred it into a conflagration. She looked over at him. “I mean
literally
he wasn’t the better man because he wasn’t a man, at all. He was only what? Fifteen? Sixteen? He was a boy who had spent the majority of his life in a bed.”

He inhaled sharply, but she wasn’t looking at him, she was frowning, peering sightlessly into the hearth as she worked something out. “If he had been a man, he would never have asked you such a thing. He would never have presumed.
You
never would have asked such a thing.”

He scowled. “I am impressed you feel confident enough to make these assertions about a young man you never even met,” he said coldly, but he could not deny that her words made him reflect.

He realized he hadn’t
thought
about Louis or himself or their relationship since his brother’s death. Everything concerning Louis—Giles’s feelings for his older brother, his perception of him and their relationship, his assumptions about Louis’s character and identity—existed in stasis, formed by the memories of the thirteen-year-old boy Giles had been, none of it reexamined with the objectivity, experience, and understanding of the man he’d become.

And here Avery was questioning all of it. While apparently trying to set his house afire.

“I think…” she started to say, then stopped to stir the damn embers again.

“Pray tell what you think,” he drawled unwillingly. “I am on tenterhooks.”

She gave him a distracted smile, not a bit offended by his cool tone. “Louis wasn’t some selfless shriven saint sending forth his champion.
He was a boy taking a spot of comfort in imagining all the grand adventures his handsome younger brother was going to have. He was a little jealous perhaps, so he asked you to do them for him, too. I don’t think he ever meant it to be a sacred pact or a holy inspiration. I think Louis was a just boy who didn’t want to be forgotten.”

Her words caught unexpectedly at his heart.

“You don’t know what sort of man Louis would have become,” she said. “Are you the person today you thought you’d be at sixteen?”

She had him there. Was she right about Louis? Had he done his brother a disservice by thinking of him as a paragon? Had he unwittingly drained the personality—the
humanity
—from his memory of Louis? “God, no.”

She grinned. “Exactly. Had Louis lived and come to London, he might have decided heroism was too much work. Apparently you did.” The barb was not lost on him, but it was well timed, a bracing little reminder that he’d not find easy comfort or undeserved sympathy from Avery Quinn. He respected that.

“Louis might have settled for something less lofty but more fun.” Her blue eyes grew round in inspiration. “Maybe he would have become a
dandy
.”

How had she done that? What alchemy had she employed to turn atrophied grief into gentle humor? Despite the aura of sanctity he’d built around Louis’s memory, Giles found himself chuckling at the thought of his diminutive brother tricked out like a Bartholomew babe. Louis might have liked such a thing, at that. He’d always had a penchant for the dramatic.

“Or,” she continued, “he might have followed a course similar to mine and become a scientist.”

Giles shook his head. “Never. He couldn’t add a double column of numbers.”

“A gambler?”

“Now
that
I could easily see. He loved games of chance. Especially card games.”

“Was he any good at them?”

“A disaster.”

She laughed and he joined her, and when their laughter had run its course, he settled back, more at ease than he could remember being in
a long time. “Louis believed he had the most formidably impassive face in the kingdom but whenever he drew a decent card his left eyebrow twitched like it had St. Vitus’s dance and he would gulp. Audibly. He would have made a run at the tables and been broke inside a week.”

They smiled at one another, in perfect accord. Her lips softened into a natural curve. The fire fanned a rich color to her profile and licked her tousled auburn locks with a plummy sheen. He itched to test the texture of those silky curls.

“I would have loved to have watched him have a run, though,” she finally said.

“Liar,” he accused softly. Her gaze flew to meet his.

“You would have loved to have a run at the tables yourself. I could see it when I mentioned Louis’s betraying signals. Your hand moved towards your brows and you are trying not to swallow.”

“That’s not fair!” she burst out. “You can’t just watch people like that and then tell them what they’re thinking.”

She did not, however, deny it. “Why not?”

“It’s not nice.” She sniffed. “Besides, I am sure I would be able to cozen you if I’d a mind to do so.”

He feared his face betrayed how utterly ridiculous he considered this claim because her mouth formed an “o” of outrage. “I could so!”

“Hmm.”

“You don’t think I can. In spite of the fact that I have managed to fool your entire staff into thinking I am a man.”

“Oddly, my staff is not expecting to be ‘fooled’—which is one of the prerequisites to a successful confidence game. In a card game, the players expect each other to bluff. It is you who would be at a distinct disadvantage.”

Her magnificent eyes narrowed to sapphire slits, glittering between the dark banks of her lashes. “What hubris. Let’s see if you can back up your words with action.”

He wasn’t sure he was hearing her right. “Are you
challenging
me, Miss Quinn?”

“I am indeed, Lord Strand.”

“And what will we be playing for? Because without something of value to back the play, there’s no point in bluffing.”

She considered this a moment. “We shall divide the walnuts in the bowl on your desk equally. Whoever has the most nuts at the end of the game gets to name his prize.”

He smiled at her. He’d played similar games with other ladies before, but he would hazard a guess Avery had no idea the sorts of forfeits those games had entailed. “Aren’t you taking an awful lot for granted?”

She shrugged. “I doubt it. You’re a gentleman. I, however, am not. I’m not even a lady. If I were you, I should be the one feeling some trepidation. You have no idea what I’m capable of demanding. But I can assure you, you won’t like it.”

“You intrigue me. It might be worth losing just to find out what you have in mind,” he said. “But then winning will provide its own rewards.”

“You accept then?”

“I accept.”