“To the house,” Fiona Chisholm said in urgent response, and she hurried off, Lady Cecily right at her heels.
As for the duke, his pace back to Finovair was much more measured. Catriona, snug and warm in his arms, could find no reason to complain.
Chapter 7
By the time Bret reached the drawing room, Miss Chisholm and Lady Cecily were nowhere to be found. “Your friends seem to have deserted us,” he said to Catriona as he set her down upon an ancient chaise longue.
“Perhaps we were meant to follow them to Fiona’s room?”
“Oh, but I could not venture into a lady’s chamber,” Bret said, placing one hand over his heart for emphasis.
Catriona gave a look that was dubious in the extreme.
“And at any rate,” he added, “I don’t know where her room is.”
Catriona cocked her head, then said, “Do you know, neither do I.”
He grinned at that. “We seem to be stuck here, then.”
“On our own,” she said, a small smile touching her lips.
“You’re not concerned for your reputation?”
She tilted her head toward the door. “The door is open.”
“Pity, that,” Bret murmured. He perched on the table directly across from her, testing it first before settling his entire weight; like everything in Finovair, it was chipped and rickety.
“Your Grace!”
“I think you should call me by my given name, don’t you?”
“Absolutely not,” she said firmly. “And at any rate, I don’t know what it is.”
“John,” he said, and he tried to remember the last time anyone had called him such. His mother did, but only occasionally. His friends all called him Bret. He thought of himself as Bret. But as he looked at Catriona Burns, who had already shifted herself to a sitting position on the chaise, he wondered what it would be like to have someone in his life who would call him John.
“I heard Lord Oakley call you Bret,” Catriona said.
“Many people do,” he said with a small shrug. He looked down, finding it suddenly awkward to meet her gaze. The conversation had made him wistful, almost self-conscious—a sensation to which he had never been accustomed.
But this feeling that seemed to wash over him whenever he was with Catriona—it was growing, changing. He’d thought it lust, then desire, and then something that was far, far sweeter. But now, swirling amid all this was an unfamiliar longing. For her, certainly for her, but also for something else. For a feeling, for an existence.
For someone to know him, completely.
And the strangest part was, he wasn’t scared.
“I couldn’t possibly call you Bret in front of the others,” Catriona said, pulling his attention back to her face.
“No,” he agreed softly. It would be improper in the extreme, not that anything in the past day had been proper, normal, or customary.
“And I should not call you Bret when we are alone,” she added, but there was the tiniest question in her voice.
He brought her hand to his lips. “I would not want that.”
Her eyes widened with surprise, and—dare he hope it?—disappointment. “You wouldn’t?”
“John,” he said, with quiet determination. “You must call me John.”
“But nobody else does,” she whispered.
He gazed at her over her hand, thinking he could stare at her forever. “I know,” he said, and at that moment something within him shifted. He knew—and by all that was holy, he hoped she knew, too—that their lives would never be the same.
Catriona stopped at her small garret before making her way to Fiona’s bedchamber for tea. She needed a moment. She needed a thousand moments.
She needed to breathe.
She needed to think.
She needed to find a way to face her friends and speak like a normal human being.
Because she did not feel like a normal human being, and she very much feared that Fiona and Lady Cecily would take one look at her and know that she’d been kissing the Duke of Bretton in the sitting room with the door open, and before he’d finally pulled away, his hands had been on her skin, and she’d liked it.
Good God above, she’d liked it.
If he hadn’t stopped, she didn’t know if she could have done so. But he had lifted his lips from hers, cradled her face in his hands, and looked into her eyes with such tenderness. And then he’d whispered, “Say my name.”
“John.” She’d barely been able to make a sound, but he was staring at her lips; surely he’d seen his name upon them.
He’d taken her hand, helped her to her feet, and said something about her joining the other ladies before they became concerned. Then he bowed and headed to the nearest exit.
“You’re going outside?” she asked. “It’s freezing out there.”
“I know,” he replied, his voice a little strange. He bowed, then said, “Until supper.”
And so Catriona made her own way through Finovair’s twisty halls, gathering her thoughts, tidying her appearance in her room, and then finally locating Fiona’s sparse bedchamber.
Tea had already arrived, and Fiona and Lady Cecily were deep in conversation. Fiona was expertly pulling a seam out of an ancient blue gown. Lady Cecily was sucking on her finger.
“I’ve stabbed myself,” Cecily said.
Fiona shook her head. “I told you to let me do it.”
“I know,” Cecily replied. “I just didn’t want to feel so useless.”
“I should think,” Catriona opined as she took a seat next to Fiona on the bed, “that given all we’ve been through, we’re entitled to feel anything we please.”
The two ladies turned to her with identical expressions. Expressions which, Catriona was alarmed to realize, she did not know how to interpret. Finally, after she could no longer stand it, she turned to Fiona (since she could hardly be so rude to an earl’s daughter she’d met only the day before) and said, “What?”
“You’ve fallen in love with the Duke of Bretton,” Fiona said.
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Catriona tried to scoff. But her voice did not come out as briskly as she would have liked.
Fiona stared at her from behind her vexing little spectacles, lifting her auburn brows as if to say—
Well, Catriona didn’t know what she might be saying, or rather, implying, since it wasn’t as if Fiona could speak with her eyebrows. Still and all, Catriona knew she had to nip this in the bud, so she said, very firmly, “You can’t fall in love with someone on so short an acquaintance.” It was what she believed. It was what she’d always believed.
“Actually,” Lady Cecily said softly, “I think you can.”
That got the other ladies’ attention, so much so that Lady Cecily blushed and explained, “My parents have a love match. It has made me a romantic, I suppose.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Catriona, grateful for a change of subject, voiced the obvious question. “What do you suppose they are all thinking?”
“Our parents?” Fiona asked.
Catriona nodded.
“They’ll be angry, of course,” Fiona said slowly, “but once they realize it’s only Taran who has taken us, they won’t worry for our lives. Or our virtue,” she added, almost as an afterthought.