There she was.
God, she was beautiful. The fire burning in the hearth bathed her in golden light. Her hair was down, tumbling over one shoulder. Her dark eyebrows stood out in her face; her eyes were shadowed but, thank God, showed no signs of being swollen with tears.
He cleared his throat. “It’s me.”
“I can’t imagine that you somehow feel that your disquisition on my character gave you entry to my bedchamber.”
There was just a hint of a rasp in her throat. Jeremy’s gut clenched involuntarily. If he’d reduced her to tears, he would leave in the morning and never see her again.
“May I come in?” He held up the snowy bundle. “To deliver breeches.”
Her eyes flicked down and then back to his face. “I don’t think so.” She stepped backward.
“I was wrong,” he said. “I was jealous because Thaddeus caressed your cheek.”
She frowned. She apparently hadn’t noticed.
“Downstairs,” he clarified.
“He touched my face in passing, and you took it as an invitation to piss all over me and my life?”
One side of his mouth rose involuntarily because she was simply so delightful when she forgot to be a lady.
“No,” she said sharply. “You don’t get to feel better. Friends don’t speak that way to each other, and I was stupid enough to think we were friends. I won’t make that mistake again.”
“You are my friend,” he said.
“I may have been your friend, but you were not mine.”
He was silenced.
She reached out and took the bundle.
“I’m learning,” he said, hearing his hoarseness. “I won’t do it again. Ever. I don’t have other friends like you and I—I reacted badly. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“You do have friends. My brother North among them. Parth, who brought you to the castle, if you remember. Thaddeus. My aunt. Moreover, your father, who would love to be your friend and is worth your regard.”
“I was trying to talk myself into marrying you.”
“Better and better,” she said, biting off the words. “If you’ll forgive me, Lord Jeremy, it’s very cold standing before an open window.”
“I want to marry you.”
Betsy froze.
The light from the fire behind her cast rosy light on Jeremy’s face. If he had acted like a judge below, in the corridor, now he seemed a boy with true regret in his eyes.
“You want to marry me,” she said slowly. “Why?”
Snow had fallen on his shoulders. “Love, I suppose. I’m not certain how to recognize it. But I can’t marry you, Bess. I can’t.”
“Do you have a mad wife hidden in the attic?”
Her heart pounded erratically.
“No,” he said, a minute too late.
“A sane wife, then?”
“No.”
Despite herself, a sigh eased from her mouth.
“I’m the madman. I should probably be in an attic. I’ll end up there.” He hunched his shoulders.
She took a step back, and another.
“You’d better come in.”
Chapter Fifteen
Her bedchamber suddenly shrank to the size of a mousehole, all because of a large man, dripping melting snow, holding his hands out to the fire.
“Why didn’t you put on a coat and gloves? Or a hat?”
“I couldn’t call down for my coat or they’d wonder where I was going. As it was, I had to wait for people to stop climbing those bloody stairs. Every fifteen minutes, some other fool would set the steps creaking again.”
His broad shoulders were rigid and not because he was shivering. Apparently he was too manly to shiver, even though she felt like an icicle after a brief conversation at the window.
Taking up a blanket from the end of her bed, she marched over and pushed it at him. Then she pulled the eiderdown off, wrapped it around herself, and sat down by the fire, putting out one bare foot to make her chair rock before she tucked her legs under the coverlet.
And waited.
Meanwhile he looked at the fire, grim as could be, jaw set, and a vein ticking in his forehead.
“Madness,” she reminded him. “Yours, as opposed to the madmen in my family, or even the madwoman who fell in love with Alaric, or Diana’s mother, who shot you and will likely spend her life in the sanitarium.”
He raised his head and the edge of his mouth eased. “You’re trying to tell me that I’m only one amongst a crowd of madmen in Cheshire?”
“It could be the bog,” Betsy said. “Evil contagion caused by peat moss.”
“I caught mine in the American colonies.”
“On the battlefield, I expect,” Betsy said, curling her toes. She considered informing him that she’d decided not to marry either of them but rethought it. Jeremy ought to make this uncomfortable apology. Why should she let him off the hook?
“All jesting aside, Parth actually found me in Bedlam after that Vauxhall incident.” His voice echoed queerly in the room.
Betsy gasped before she could stop herself. “What were you doing there?”
“Lying about in a straitjacket, as I understand it. Drugged with laudanum. Supposedly incoherent and violent, though I have no memory of it.”
Betsy’s breath caught in her throat. Even through her shock, she realized that the worst thing she could do would be to dole out lashings of sympathy. He was glaring at the fire as if the flames were responsible for his failure of nerve. Or however he would describe that terrible experience.
“Did you murder anyone?” She put a fair amount of interest in her voice.
“Not so far as I know.”
That wasn’t the right tack. She tried again. “What brought on the attack?”
“Fireworks. They sounded like cannons, which is all I remember.”
“That makes sense,” Betsy said. “No Guy Fawkes Day for you. You’ll have to limit yourself to a peaceful bonfire in your garden.”
That brought his head about, if only so he could scowl at her, rather than the blameless logs. “I lost consciousness, Bess. Fell over like a log. More than a day passed before Parth’s household could rouse me.”
She nodded. Inside she was horrified and afraid for him, but she was used to playing a role. “How did they wake you up?”
His mouth twitched.
“Come on, then,” she said. “Now you have the dramatic announcement out of the way, let’s have it.”
“Sausages,” he said with a wry smile.
He smiled so infrequently that the gesture struck Betsy like a blow. She had to stop herself from throwing herself at him like a maiden encountering the prince in a bad play.
“Sausages,” she echoed.
“Fried them up and stuck them under my nose and I awoke,” he confirmed.
Betsy couldn’t help giggling at the look on his face. “It could have been worse.”
“It could have been better,” Jeremy countered, rocking back on his toes and shoving his hands into his pockets.
“True. Whisky has a manly air. On the other hand, sal volatile is given to fainting maidens. Legend has it that my great-aunt Genevieve was so horrified by her wedding night that she fell into a faint and was only roused by having a chamber pot poured over her head by her indignant groom.”