With This Kiss Part 4

Grace managed to avoid Colin for the three short days of his leave, and when the following Wednesday came, and her father bellowed for her letter so that he could forward it to the Admiralty, she said, very simply, that she would write no more letters.

Her father always maintained that he was nothing more than a battered old pirate, with a great scar across his throat and a tattoo under his eye. But Grace never saw him that way, and when he opened his arms, she flew into them and nestled against his heart.

"Perhaps that's best, sweet pea," he said, encircling her in a hug so tight that she could hardly breathe. "You can't write to the man forever, after all."

She shook her head, feeling her hair rumple against his chest. "It's getting embarra.s.sing."

"Someone else should take up the torch," he said.

Tears p.r.i.c.kled Grace's eyes. "Lily hates writing. She'll never do it."

"He's an old man of twenty-five. We should have stopped it when you became a young lady."

"He's not old," Grace said, sniffing a little.

"But he's not a lonely boy any longer. No more letters, Lady Grace, and that's an order from your father."

She nodded and let a tear or two darken his silk neck cloth before she pulled away and stood up straight.

"I saw you talking to McIngle a few nights ago." Her father very kindly ignored her tears as Grace dug a handkerchief from her pocket.

"I like him," she said, managing a wobbly smile. "He has such an interesting face."

"It's not all about faces. He's a good one. I would have taken him on my crew in a moment." That was her father's highest praise.

"But Colin . . . I . . ."

Her father drew her back into his arms. "He asked for her hand before he left, dearest."

For a moment Grace didn't even hear what he said over the ringing in her ears. Then her heart started beating again, a sort of death march. She'd known it. She'd known it the moment she saw Colin's eyes meet Lily's. She saw the joy in his face.

"What did you say to him?"

"The same thing I say to anyone who asks. No daughter of mine will marry before she is twenty, no matter how dear a family friend her suitor may be. And frankly, that goes double for Lily. I want her to be a bit steadier before she contemplates a match. Your mother and I are firmly against youthful marriages; you know that."

"It worked for the two of you," Grace managed. But her voice wobbled.

"Not at first," her father said. "Not at first."

At that moment, Lily herself drifted into the room, looking as fresh as if she hadn't danced away the night. "The world seems so dark," she said, pausing. "Colin has left to rejoin his ship."

Grace took a deep breath. "You'll see him on his next leave."

"But it won't be the same, will it?" Lily said. "Colin dances so beautifully. I feel as if I'm flying when we waltz."

"I thought the two of you looked lovely together."

Lily narrowed her eyes. "I thought you left the ball before he arrived. He should have asked you to dance before me!"

"I didn't give him the chance," Grace said hastily. h.e.l.l had no fury like Lily if she thought her older sister had been spurned.

"He should have found you," Lily said indignantly. "You've been writing him for half your life. That was remarkably impolite of him. Perhaps I'll write him and say so!"

The duke wrapped an arm around each of them. "I'll write the lad and let him know that you won't be writing any longer, Grace."

She nodded.

"I shall write him instead," Lily said. "I promised. And he is a family friend, Papa."

Grace's heart warped at the idea of not taking up her pen to write Colin. What would she do with her life? Sometimes she felt as if she lived merely to find the funniest moments and put them onto paper, to capture a face so amusing that it would make Colin laugh in the midst of battle.

But she didn't touch her pen. She cried a great deal that week, but she didn't write a word. By Sunday, she had pulled herself together. She couldn't live merely to write letters to a person who rarely bothered to answer her.

She had obviously created a romance in her head and heart that didn't exist. She was always imagining what he was thinking in response to her letters, but she must have been wrong. Perhaps he didn't even keep her letters.

That saddened her, but it also made her angry. If someone had written her, written her every month for years, she would have searched him out immediately on her return to England. She would have danced with him all night, if she could. She would have thanked him herself, not just sent a message through her sister.

She wouldn't have proposed to someone else. Not ever.

The crate came the next morning. Inside was a simple wooden box, marked with her name. She opened it cautiously, finding rumpled pink silk with a slip of paper on top. Her name was written on the paper, with a simple Thank You.

For a moment she felt sick, physically ill, as if the ground was pitching under her feet.

"Oh, look!" Lily crowed, looking over her shoulder. "I knew Colin couldn't be so impolite as to not thank you for all those letters. He should have asked you to dance, but this is even better." She plucked up the silk cloth that lay on top before Grace could stop her. Below was a neat line of small round bladders. "What on earth are those?"

"Please let me do that," Grace said. But she was too late; Lily had already grabbed one of the bottles. "It's a pig's bladder filled with paint."

"A bladder? Ugh!" Lily cried, dropping it. "It's all wired shut, Grace. How on earth will you get the paint out?'

Grace took it back. "You pierce the bladder with a tack and then replace the tack to keep the paint from drying out."

In all, there were eleven different colors. One was cadmium red, but there were others that she hadn't seen before: a beautiful deep green, the color of a cedar tree. A blue that was so clear that it looked like a summer sky. Another blue that shaded into violet, the color of twilight over the sea.

She scooped up the box and trotted up the stairs, heading for her bedchamber.

The duke stepped out of the library, and she heard Lily explaining the gift. She froze at the top of the stairs when her father called her name, looked down, and saw him standing with his arm around Lily. They looked uncannily similar.

"No letters," he stated.

"I do have to thank him."

"A brief note that will advise Colin it is your last letter."

She nodded.

"I'll write him for you," Lily said cheerfully. "But only once, unless he replies. I would never write the way you did, Grace, without getting responses. You were far too kind to him."

Grace made it into her bedchamber and closed the door before she started crying, which was quite an achievement.

In all her years of correspondence, she had received at most one letter every few months. Of course, some of Colin's letters might have gone astray. But she had stopped pretending that he was writing her as often as she would wish.

Yet, if he was in love with her sister, he might well write Lily. The pain hit her so hard that she actually sank to her knees on the carpet, clutching the wooden box, wondering how one lived with a broken heart, especially when one's beloved is married to a sister.

It was humiliating to think about how she wrote him long, boring letters, as if she were his maiden aunt. Worse, each one had been a love letter, though he hadn't known that.

At last she got to her feet, walked over to her writing desk, and wrote a short note, thanking Colin for the paintbox and explaining that her father felt it was no longer appropriate for them to correspond. Then she sat down and made the best painting of her life.

It was a miniature, no bigger than her palm. But she painted it on a small square of canvas, so that, if wrapped in silk and carried in his breast pocket, it wouldn't fade or chip, like the watercolors she'd sent him before.

It was a portrait of Lily, laughing.

Grace worked all night, surrounded by candles that kept burning out, so she had to replace them, rubbing her eyes. She had to finish. She had to put Colin out of her mind, give him this last gift.

Then it was finished. Lily gazed out of the picture, with all her laughing exuberance, her innocent seductiveness, the sweetness that stopped her from becoming vain.

It was very tiresome to love one's rival, she thought before falling, exhausted, in bed.

When she woke up, late in the afternoon, the painting was dry enough to be sent off. She wrapped it in silk and then a soft piece of vellum, and went downstairs to give the packet to her father to be dispatched to the Admiralty.

When she unwrapped the vellum to show him, he held the miniature very delicately in his huge hand and stared at it in silence for a moment.

"You have a great talent, Grace."

She knew he was right. She had captured Lily. It was the only thing she had to give Colin, since he didn't want her.

The duke reached out with his other hand and caught her against his side. "All this love you have inside you, sweet pea . . . it will make some fellow very happy."

She nodded. She was exhausted, but she also felt clean and emptied out. Her love wasn't gone, but she was ready to let it go.

She had built an imaginary thing between herself and her childhood friend. But adult relationships didn't spring from letters. They came from the sort of happiness that Colin had felt when he saw Lily across the ballroom, and when he kissed Lily's hand.

That was an adult relationship. Someday, someone would feel that for her. But it wouldn't be Colin.

"Thank you, Papa," she said, resting her head against his shoulder.

"I won't allow him to marry Lily," he said, touching the painting with a finger. "He couldn't see what lay before him. I won't give him another of my girls to overlook."

Grace shrugged. "It's all right, Papa. I've put him behind me."

The duke wrapped up the painting again. "Colin has to be the stupidest man I know." He paused. "Actually, I have a lot in common with him."

Grace sat down on the sofa and drew up her feet under her. "Do you mean because you went away to sea and left Mama behind?"

"Exactly," her father said, going back to making a neat package of the painting. "I was worse than Colin, actually, because I was already married to your mother, and I knew I loved her."

"But she told you to leave," Grace said, repeating the story that they all loved. "She told you to leave and never come back, and you didn't return for seven years."

"That's right," the duke said. "Given my profound stupidity in obeying her, I can hardly say anything about Captain Barry's idiocy." He looked up, and suddenly he looked like a pirate again. "Of course, if he comes around here and tries to woo either of my daughters, I'll disembowel him."

Grace laughed. "Sir Griffin wouldn't like that."

"He wouldn't, would he?" The duke's laugh welcomed a fight with his closest friend.

"I think I'll go take a bath," she said, tired to the bone.

"I'll send this out," he said. "And I'll put in a note from myself as well."

Grace continued up the stairs. She didn't really care what her father wrote in that note.

Eight.

In which the Duke of Ashbrook plays a game of billiards with Lord Griffin Barry, shortly after Griffin's son Colin asked for James's daughter Lily's hand in marriage.

They had played three rounds in the kind of easy silence that falls between men who've known each other for years, tumbling about when they were boys, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder as men.

James watched Griffin pocket three b.a.l.l.s in a row before he said, at just the right moment, "Your boy asked for Lily's hand in marriage before he left."

Sure enough, the cue bounced against the felt, nearly gouging a hole in it. Griffin uttered a curse and straightened, pushing a lock of hair out of his eyes. "Colin, I take it?"

James nodded. "The same."

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, he was only on sh.o.r.e for three days."

"Infatuated. It's a common condition. Half the men under thirty in the city of London have fallen under Lily's spell."

Griffin put the cue down and turned away, walking a step toward the fireplace, running a hand through his hair. "He told me . . ." He stopped for a moment, his back still turned. "He told me that he couldn't sleep but dancing with Lily helped."

"I cannot allow him to marry Lily," James said, keeping his voice even. He loved Griffin as his own brother, but children came before a brother. Before his own life.

Griffin poked at the fire. "And if Lily is the only thing that allows Colin to sleep?"

James felt a chill in the back of his throat, as if he'd swallowed a gulp of crushed ice. Almost nothing would drive he and Griffin apart . . . but this could do it.

But before he could answer, Griffin turned around. His eyes were burning with anguish. "He's dying," he said flatly. "Being at war is killing him. When Colin comes home, he can't sleep for the dreams. He won't tell me the details, but I think he sees dead men walking in the streets of London. The other day a ham-handed footman dropped a platter in the hallway and Colin was out of his seat, back against the wall, before the sound died away."

"h.e.l.l," James said. When they were pirates together, years ago, there were men who thrived on the smoke and blood of battle, and there were others whose souls unraveled, who couldn't bear the unnecessary death. "I thought he looked . . ."

"He looks like one of those dead men walking," Colin's father said. "Phoebe cried all night after he went back to his ship. I couldn't console her. I never imagined that I'd have a child in danger-and in such deep despair-and be unable to help him."

James came over and gave him a rough, one-armed hug. "Colin is going to survive. He's a brilliant sailor, obviously. Isn't that the second commendation he's received? Or the third? And he doesn't only keep himself alive, Griffin, he saves his men. Every time. From what I've heard, they talk about him in the Admiralty with awe because he never loses a man."

"Oh, he loses them," Griffin said. "Not at the rate of other sea captains, but he loses them. And he doesn't forget them, the ones under his command, his responsibility, who are gone. That's why he doesn't sleep."