The Deception of the Emerald Ring (50 page)

That was supposed to make her feel better?

Looking back down at Letty, Geoff searched for the correct words to make her understand. "Mary was a storybook illustration, a stained-glass window, an Orthodox icon. She was never real. Not like you."

"Imperfect, you mean," translated Letty.

A sudden smile transformed Geoff's thin face. "In the best of all possible ways."

Letty's nose wrinkled skeptically. "I don't think 'best' and 'imperfect' keep much company together."

"That's where you're wrong. Perfection may be admirable, but it's not very lovable."

Letty's disbelief must have shown on her face, because Geoff repeated, "Yes, lovable. I love the way all your thoughts show on your face—yes, just like that one. I love the way your hair won't stay where it's put. I love the way you wrinkle your nose when you're trying to think of something to say. I love your habit of plain speaking." He touched a finger to her nose. "And, yes, I even love your freckles. I wouldn't eliminate a single one of them, not for all the lemons in the world. There. Does that convince you?"

"You're mad," said Letty, exhibiting that laudable habit of plain speaking he so admired. "You must have hit your head. No, wait, I hit my head. That must be it. This can't be real. Not me. Not you. Not—" Letty shook her head. "No."

"Why?"

"It's too ridiculous to even contemplate. Like a fairy tale. Everyone knows the prince would never really fall in love with the beggar girl. Not in real life. The prince falls in love with the princess, and they go on living in their gilded hall, with their gilded children, in their gilded chairs."

Geoff held up his hands, spreading open his fingers. "I seem to be entirely out of gold leaf at present."

Letty shook her head, brushing away his remark.

"I used to watch you with Mary," she confessed. "I used to watch you with Mary and wish it were me."

She had never admitted it, even to herself, but it was horribly, miserably true. She had hidden it behind a screen of self-righteous judgment, telling herself it was merely that they weren't suited, or that she disapproved of Mary's methods, but that wasn't the real reason. That had never been the real reason.

She had no right to judge anyone, not her sister, not Geoff, not anyone. Not when she had channeled jealousy into spite and pretended it was for their own good. She couldn't even say with any surety that her motives for barging into their elopement were entirely pure. Guilt rose in her, like bile at the back of her throat, tainting everything it touched. That night, if she had left them alone, if she had stayed in her room, Mary would have gone off with Geoff and they would have lived happily ever after. The family reputation certainly couldn't have been more tarnished than it had been by her.

But she had interfered—not out of a pure, disinterested desire for the good of the family, but because, in a hidden little recess in the back of her heart, she had wanted Lord Pinchingdale for herself. And she had known she could never have him.

It wasn't a pleasant realization, any of it. Those people who lauded self-knowledge had clearly never tried it.

"I knew that even if she weren't there—" Letty broke off with an unhappy little laugh. "It was useless. I might as well cry for the moon. You were that far above my touch."

Geoff's brows drew together in confusion.

"Because of the title?" he asked incredulously.

For a smart man, at times he really could be very slow. The thought almost made Letty smile. Almost.

"No. Because you're you. Clever and subtle and cultured " Letty waved her hands about in wordless illustration. "And I'm just plain old Letty from Hertfordshire."

Geoff's lips quirked. "Nineteen is hardly old. And if you're from Hertfordshire, so is your sister."

"Yes, but with Mary, it didn't stick. She looks right in a London ballroom; I don't. Your house makes me feel like King Cophetua's beggar maid."

Geoff tucked a flyaway wisp of hair back behind her ear. "You can redecorate."

"No," Letty protested, pushing irritably away. "That's not it at all."

It might be rather self-defeating to list for him all the reasons he shouldn't love her, but better that than to have him profess sentiments he couldn't really mean, that couldn't possibly survive once they left the enchanted green world of Ireland and returned to the overheated drawing rooms of London, where the spiteful whispers of their so-called friends would peck holes into any pretensions of affection he might have for her. They would return, and he would realize that she was nothing but a dowdy duckling, a glorified goose girl, stout and sturdy and utterly mundane.

Letty redoubled her efforts. "You don't understand. I'll never be sophisticated or graceful or have poems written to me. I'm not the sort of person you want at all."

Looking down into Letty's flushed face, Geoff said matter- of-factly, "Don't you think I should be the judge of that? As clever and sophisticated and whatnot as I am? Besides," he added, when Letty looked like she was about to remonstrate, "I'm not all that comfortable in a ballroom myself. And I've never had a single poem written to me. Unless you want to volunteer. Your poetic efforts could hardly be worse than mine."

Letty narrowed her eyes at him. "But you always seem so assured. So polished."

"You mean, so quiet," Geoff countered.

He waited a moment, watching her, allowing time for his words to sink in. Letty cast her memory back over the hundreds of times she had encountered him over the course of the Season, since his return from France. Her memory conjured him standing with his friends at the side of the room, leaning over Mary's chair, propping up the wall at a musicale. In every image, he was watching, observing, somewhere off on the fringes while other people laughed and danced.

"Oh," said Letty stupidly.

"I've always been more comfortable with books than people. Running off to France for years made the problem easy to avoid."

Letty felt a bit as though she had spent hours squinting at a book, trying desperately to read it, and someone had just come along and turned it right-side up. She knew, logically, this was the proper way to look at it, but her unfocused eyes were having trouble registering the words.

"So, when you came back "

"I felt just as out of place as you did. So I attached myself to your sister. She made a convenient altar at which to worship. It gave me a place and a purpose, where I otherwise had none." Remembering, Geoff stared off into the air above Letty's left shoulder, lips pressed together in an uncompromising line. "I misused her badly, although that was never my intention at the time."

"No," said Letty slowly. "Of course not."

Was he saying—he did seem to be saying—that he had never really loved Mary? He couldn't mean that. His devotion to Mary had become a commonplace, like Petrarch's love for Laura or Dante's for Beatrice, a yardstick by which devotion was measured.

But it was all, Letty realized, devotion from a distance, worship from afar. She had always had her doubts as to whether Petrarch loved Laura. How could he, when he didn't know what Laura liked for breakfast, or whether she broke out in spots once a month, or had an unfortunate tendency to giggle at awkward moments?

In short, whether she was real. Letty's eyes lifted to Geoff's with new understanding, taking in the familiar features in a new way. The small lines around his gray eyes, the patient set of his mouth, the thoughtful furrow of his brow, all little imperfections that had drawn her to him from the first.

"I'm not your gilded prince with the gilded chairs, Letty," Geoff said simply. "I couldn't be if I tried."

"I wouldn't want you to be." Letty's voice felt rusty.

"I'm not particularly bold or dashing or heroic. I'm happier at my desk than in a black cloak. And I've never entirely mastered all the steps of the quadrille." He looked soberly down at her. "But what I am is yours, if you'll still have me."

It was a gesture more eloquent than a bended knee.

Somehow, Letty realized, he had turned the tables. He had taken all of her imperfections and turned them into his. He had turned his own pride inside out and offered it to her, hilt first, like a knight surrendering his sword, placing the power of refusal in her hands.

Letty was humbled by the very generosity of it. Humbled, and so filled with love that she could scarcely find the breath to express it. She didn't care if he couldn't dance the quadrille; she had no use for black cloaks; and she didn't mind if he preferred books to people so long as there was room among his books for her.

"Gladly," she said, the word choking in her throat. "So gladly."

"Warts and all?"

"Goiters, boils, and carbuncles," Letty assured him eagerly.

"I don't think we need to go quite that far ." She loved the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, the lopsided tilt of his lips, the dark shadow of his hair above his brow. "Warts are quite enough."

"And smelly straw." Letty wrinkled her nose at the odor arising from their feet. "Quite a place for a declaration of love."

Geoff's eyes moved meaningfully to her lips, in a way that made color flare up through Letty's cheeks like a whole fusillade of rockets. "We do seem to make a habit of carriages." His hands slipped around her waist, drawing her closer.

Flushed with happiness, Letty glanced around her at the splintered slats and the bloodied straw. She wouldn't have traded the dilapidated old wagon for any number of gilded reception rooms.

"I don't think you can call this a carriage," countered Letty, tilting her head back up toward Geoff. "It's really more of a cart."

Geoff lifted both his eyebrows. "Does it matter?"

Letty lifted herself up on her tiptoes and latched her arms around his neck. "No," she said honestly. "Not in the slightest."

And that was the last either of them said for quite some time.

When they had time to reflect upon it later, the Viscount and Viscountess Pinchingdale were in perfect agreement that, for certain purposes, one wheeled conveyance was quite as good as another.

"Leaving?" I craned my neck in an entirely unsubtle way, but the angle of the door blocked the corridor from view. "But we haven't even had dinner yet."

I'd been counting on Colin being logy with large quantities of food before I made my approach. As a veteran of countless Thanksgiving dinners, I knew exactly how much pumpkin pie I could consume before stupor struck. A neophyte, unused to the soporific properties of turkey and stuffing, should be easy prey.

But not if he was leaving.

Blithely insensitive to atmosphere, Mrs. Harrington gave a little wave. "He had some other do to attend, he said. But Serena will be staying with us, won't you, dear?"

"Pammy was very insistent." Had that been a bit of a barb beneath the quiet cadence of Serena's voice? Probably my imagination. In the meantime, her brother was getting away.

I had to go say something to him. I didn't know if everything had been all in my head from the start; I didn't know if he had ever had the slightest bit of interest in me, or if he had realized that I had been snubbing him (even if only because I thought he was snubbing me). But I did know that if I didn't say something I was going to spend the rest of the evening feeling awful in a way that had nothing to do with Thanksgiving bloat.

It wasn't like I was following him to Ireland, or anything.

"Will you excuse me?" I levered myself off my perch on the side of the couch so abruptly that strands of Serena's hair fluttered with the movement, rising and settling like a flock of pigeons in Trafalgar Square. "Be back in a moment."

Propelling myself toward the door, I barreled out into the hallway. It wasn't a long hallway, just a narrow rectangle that spanned the house from the front door on one end to the garden door on the other. I didn't think Colin had gone out the garden way; o'erleaping garden walls went out of fashion several centuries ago, along with lutes and codpieces. I hadn't heard the front door open and close. Although, I warned myself, it was unlikely I would have over the hum of cocktail-lubricated conversation.

There was only one other place he could be. Crossing my fingers for all I was worth, I ventured into the little spur of hallway between dining room and kitchen, a narrow space that had been commandeered as a cloakroom. Sure enough, there was Colin, pawing through a row of identical coats on a portable aluminum rack, a look of intense concentration on his face. I blessed the blandness of raincoat manufacture. Minus identifying factors like that coffee stain on the sleeve or that slightly hairy mint at the bottom of a pocket, one Burberry looks much like another. I usually identified mine by dint of an elderly movie stub in the left-hand pocket, admitting one to a 9:40 showing of Legally Blonde.

Colin glanced up at the click of my heels against the hard-wood floors. "You're not leaving?" he asked politely.

"No, but I heard that you are." Given where we were standing, it wasn't exactly the world's most brilliant observation.

Colin whipped a Burberry off the rack. I hoped it was actually his. "I have other plans."

"Mrs. Harrington said."

This had all seemed much easier back in the living room. Being faced with a living, breathing man intent on putting on his raincoat made matters much harder. In all the conversations I had with him in my head, he generally stayed put and listened, before responding with eloquent lines like "How right you are."

People are so much more agreeable in one's head.

"Listen," I said, taking a step forward. "I just wanted to say I'm sorry."

Colin blinked, one arm halfway into his raincoat. "What for?"

"About your mother's accident. Why didn't you say anything? I would have left right away."

"At midnight?"

"You must have cabs in Sussex. Hotels, even. I could have gone to a hotel. You really didn't have to stick around because of me. I feel awful."

"Don't." Colin's eyes crinkled at the corners, like a polar ice cap cracking. "I wasn't able to find an earlier flight."

"If you had, I hope you would have kicked me out earlier."