“I’m sorry about your grandfather’s fall,” I said. “I just heard about it. It must have been awful for you to try and get back to him from so far away.”
Jamie turned his head and studied me. I held his bright blue eyes for a moment but there were too many memories in them. I turned and walked along the bank of the brook. He fell into step beside me.
“Thank you,” he said. “It was concerning.”
I glanced at him. “I’ll assume that’s typical British understatement and you mean terrifying.”
“Or that.” He nodded.
We stopped and stood in silence, listening to the stream for a few minutes. I refused to do the heavy lifting in this conversation.
“I never meant to lie to you,” he said. “The night I met you I had no idea I would fall in lo—”
“Don’t say it,” I interrupted.
“Why not?” he asked. Jamie held his hands wide in exasperation. “Why can’t I finally tell you after all these weeks that I’m in love with you?”
The breath left my lungs and I felt dizzy at his words, but I waved them away like they were a Times Square hustler selling an armful of fake Rolexes.
“Because what we had wasn’t real,” I said. “You weren’t real.”
“Everything I feel for you is very much real,” he argued. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you right away. By the time my grandfather was out of danger, weeks had passed, and I didn’t know how to tell you or what to say.”
“‘Hey, Molly’ would have been a fine start,” I said.
“Perhaps,” he agreed. “But I didn’t want to tell you who I really was over the phone. I know how skeptical you are about love at first sight, and the prince and the poor girl scenarios, and I could only imagine how you’d react if I told you I was a viscount. Believe me, I was desperate to be with you and look you in the eye and explain how very sideways everything had gone, but I couldn’t leave my grandfather, so...”
I stared at him. Suddenly, it all made sense. “I’ve been the registrar for the Museum of Literature for several years.”
He frowned, clearly confused by the abrupt change of subject.
“Not once have I ever been asked to escort a collection back to its home.”
“You don’t say?” He turned to study the brook and I was forced to remember how handsome his profile was, too. Damn it.
“It was you,” I said. “You’re the reason I’m here. You engineered this whole thing.”
He met my gaze, shrugged, and stepped closer to me. “To be honest, I imagined it would go differently.”
My mouth hung open. Very attractive, I’m sure. I snapped it shut.
“How? Did you think I would see you, find out your real identity, and throw myself into your arms?”
“Technically, you did end up in my arms.” He took another step closer.
I glowered at him with enough heat that he should have broken out in a flop sweat. He was not daunted and moved closer still.
“Do you have any idea of what you put me through?” I asked. My throat got tight as I remembered those first few weeks. I let all of the anguish show on my face when I said, “I thought you were dead.”
“I’m so sorry, love.” He pressed his lips together. His brow furrowed. It was clear he felt deep remorse. But after a beat, he studied at me from beneath his lashes, and there was hope in his voice when he asked, “Are you at least relieved that I’m not?”
That surprised a huff of laughter out of me, and he smiled in return. Truthfully, I was very glad he was still alive even though we were clearly not meant to be. I gave him a mock scowl and said, “I haven’t decided yet.”
Jamie was beside me now with only inches between us. He leaned down and said in a low, husky voice, “I’ve missed you, Molly Graham, and I’d like it very much if you’d consider giving us another chance.”
My pulse pounded so loud in my ears I almost couldn’t hear him. My hands were sweating, and my breath was short. I was sliding into a full-on panic attack. James Albert George Insley Whitmore, the viscount, was so far out of my league, I couldn’t even fathom a world where the two of us existed in the same space. I clung to my first line of defense.
“Why would I do that when you lied to me?” I asked.
“Because I am genuinely so very sorry for that but, more importantly, I love you quite desperately and I believe you still have feelings for me,” he said.
“Correction. I had feelings,” I argued. “But you’re you and I’m me and there’s no us in that equation.”
“Are you sure?” Jamie took my hand and tugged me close. It was like being a planet getting pulled into the orbit of the sun. I simply couldn’t resist.
He leaned down with his gaze holding mine, and ever so slowly, giving me plenty of opportunity to reject him, he kissed me. It was everything I had been longing for since the moment I saw him on the terrace.
His mouth moved over my lips with a gentle familiarity that made me ache. Oh, how I had missed him. I went to twine my arms about his neck but stopped myself. Instead, I put my hands on his chest and firmly pushed him away.
“Jamie, this is no good,” I said. I gestured between us. “I am the middle child of a high schoolteacher and a dairy farmer in Vermont. You are nobility, a member of the peerage, a man who could have any woman in the world.”
“Brilliant!” he said. His eyes were a fierce blue blaze. “Because I want you.”
My heart skipped. This was right out of a fairy tale. The bookish, chubby, awkward, smart girl who bags herself a prince, or in this case, a viscount. Too bad I didn’t believe in fairy tales.
“Hmm.” I was going to have to double down, because I couldn’t trust anything that I was feeling right now. “I can’t forgive the lying, Jamie. I just can’t.”
“Even if I promise I’ll never lie to you again?”
I shook my head.
He turned away and studied the stream. A part of me wanted to reach for him and tell him I’d changed my mind, but a bigger part of me knew that I could never be what he needed and getting deeper into a relationship with him, only to have it crash and burn, would be terrible for both of us.
“All right.” His bright blue eyes dimmed with resignation. “Thank you for listening. Since you’ll be here for a few more days, I hope we can at least maintain our professional relationship and be friends?”
He held out his hand.
It would have been rude not to accept his offer and my uptight New England upbringing wouldn’t allow that. When his fingers closed around mine, I felt a hot surge of awareness zip through me. I yanked my hand out of his and while it only lasted a second, I was sure I saw a fleeting look of satisfaction on his face as if he knew exactly how I reacted to his simplest touch.
“Friends,” I agreed. This, it turned out, was a mistake.
Charm. I had not factored that into my decision. Jamie was a charmer and when he directed that superhero slice of charisma at me, it was a test of my own inner strength to resist him. He appeared at my side at breakfast with a cup of coffee prepared exactly as I liked it.
“Forgiven me yet?” he asked.