Chapter 19

Nineteen

THE CONSERVATORY

Ian was again holding my hand as we walked up the front steps of Duncroft.

The door opened before we got there, the bright light from the white foyer streaming out, the shadow of the long, straight body of Stevenson filling it.

It was at once beautiful and akin to the poster of a horror movie.

He stepped aside.

We stepped in.

“How is she, Ian?” Stevenson asked with open concern before he even closed the door.

I loved it that he called Ian by his given name. It made it seem like they were family like I thought it should be, not staff and employer, when they essentially lived in the same home.

“Good. Better. Resting,” Ian answered. “They’re keeping her there tonight. She’s going back to London tomorrow.”

Stevenson didn’t hide his relief.

“I believe she’s mostly packed. Brittany and Rebecca are on for tonight,” Stevenson told Ian while closing the door.

He turned to us and held out his arm.

I understood why when Ian shrugged off his overcoat and handed it over.

All while Stevenson kept talking. “Do you want me to ask them to finish packing for Mrs. Fernsby-Ryan?”

“She’d want you to call her Lou, Stevenson,” I said.

Stevenson nodded to me on a warm smile.

“Give him your coat and purse, darling,” Ian prompted in an undertone.

I started to do that, finishing, “I’ll pack for her.”

“You’re joining me for a drink in the Conservatory first,” Ian declared. “I need a smoke.”

“It’s not much and they don’t mind,” Stevenson said low, giving me a smile and a wink and taking my coat and bag.

Ian reclaimed my hand and pulled me to the back of the foyer.

I avoided looking at Persephone as we walked by. I didn’t want her to get any ideas. She could have her Elysian fields. Lou and I were staying in the here and now for a while.

We hit the seating area in the Conservatory, which was dark. He let me go to move to the drinks cabinet, then I saw a tablet light in his hands, and shortly after, the Tiffany lamps, all of them, illuminated the space.

I hadn’t noticed the tablet before, and I wondered if all Ian’s favored spaces had been smart-ified. Neither the Carnation nor the Rose Room had.

Or maybe they just hadn’t gotten around to setting up the whole house.

“Champagne, wine, Amaretto, or something stiffer?” Ian asked.

“Amaretto,” I ordered, throwing myself on the couch and only realizing how badly I needed that couch when I was on it.

Ian handed me my snifter, his highball was definitely loaded with whisky on ice, and he folded his long body beside me and reached to his cigarette box.

He lit up while I sipped and watched.

It was horrible and alluring at the same time, the way he went about his habit.

After he returned the lighter, he murmured, “It’s a turn-off, I know. I smoke only at Duncroft, only in here, and only because my father knows I do and detests it.”

I lifted my snifter in salute, “Then carry on, milord. Got any lines of coke I can snort? I’m sure Richard would detest that even more.”

He gave me a small smile. “Sadly, no.”

The smile died and his head turned, then abruptly, he stood up, all before I noticed we were no longer alone.

Portia, Daniel trailing her, emerged from the foliage.

“You’re back,” she declared, her gaze doing what was now customary, bouncing back and forth between Ian and me.

“In the flesh,” I pointed out the obvious.

“And you’re in here relaxing and having a drink and not coming to talk to me?” she demanded.

“What do we have to talk about?” I asked.

“Lou has a brain tumor!” she shouted.

I sat very still, mostly because I was controlling myself from losing it with my sister, and if I moved, that control would snap.

“Calm the fuck down,” Ian said with quiet menace.

“Excuse me, but my stepmother is dying,” she snapped.

Daniel rounded to her side. “She’s not dying, Portia. You heard Ian when he told us what was happening, and we looked it up when we got home. It’s a glioma. It’s benign.”

“You can tell me how to behave when a member of your family has a brain tumor,” she retorted.

“When someone has a glioma, stress can cause seizures. Did you read that when you were looking it up?” Ian asked sardonically.

“We—” she started.

“And what stress has Lou been experiencing recently, Portia?” Ian drove his point home.

“Oh my God!” she cried. “Now I’m responsible for Lou’s tumor?”

“No, but you do bear some responsibility for the episode she endured tonight,” Ian replied.

“Portia, let’s go somewhere and get a drink,” Daniel intervened.

Arm stiff, she pointed to the drinks cabinet. “There’s alcohol right there.”

Daniel looked beleaguered.

Ian took a drag from his cigarette, blew the smoke to Portia’s right side, not in her face, but his intent was clear, and he instructed, “Duncroft lesson, petal. With plenty of space available, we’ve all claimed our own. This and the Brandy Room are mine. In case you’re interested, Mum’s are the Viognier Room and the Sherry Room. Dad’s are the Whisky and Wine Rooms. Daniel is partial to the stables and the Bordeaux Room. We respect each other’s space. And if you intend to spend any time in this house, you’ll do the same.”

“Will I get my own space?” she asked snottily.

“It’s been a generation since anyone used it. Mum flew in the face of convention and wanted her babies close. But the Nursery is available in the northwest wing,” Ian drawled.

Portia’s face turned red.

I sipped Amaretto.

Suddenly, her attention came to me, and she watched with bizarre intensity as I swallowed the almond liqueur.

“What’s your space?” she whispered in an ugly voice.

I didn’t get the chance to answer.

Ian did it for me.

“I’m particularly fond of the time she spends in the Hawthorn Suite.”

Portia looked like her head was going to explode, so I shifted my efforts from trying not to lay her out to trying not to laugh.

“Fuck it. Fuck this. It’s been a shitty day. I’m going to get drunk,” she declared, turned and flounced out.

Daniel, either being a decent person behind the seemingly clueless puppy dog he’d been since I met him, or having learned that day I held power and it’d serve him well to curry my favor, looked to me and said, “I’m really sorry about Lou, Daphne. That’s terrible news.”

“Thanks, Daniel,” I replied. “But according to her, although it’s going to get hairy, she’ll be okay.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he muttered.

Ian, demonstrating he had a soft spot for his brother, or perhaps being like me and capitalizing on the rare times Daniel wasn’t acting like an asshole, offered, “Would you like to have a drink with us?”

“I should probably make sure Portia’s okay,” Daniel said. “She doesn’t know how to act when she’s feeling too much.”

“Sadly, I’ve noticed that,” Ian returned. “Though it appears she feels too much on a constant basis.”

Daniel gave him a look I couldn’t decipher, though I was mildly surprised to note it wasn’t unpleasant, before he nodded to his brother, dipped his chin to me and took off.

Ian folded back into the couch.

“Is that true about the space?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“You picked the best spots, though this is kinda creepy, especially at night.”

“The better to have the damsels I lure here cowering in my arms.”

I shot him a smile and relaxed deeper into the couch.

Ian shifted to one hip, lazily hooked one knee over the other and reached out to wrap an arm around mine and draw them up to the couch so I was curled into a cocoon of Ian.

It was a smooth as hell move.

I loved it.

I was also a lot more comfortable this way.

He then said, “There was a debutante named Adelaide. She was sheer perfection. Her coming-out season, a triumph. It was rumored the Prince Regent himself was enamored of her, and if it wasn’t for his pesky marriage to Caroline, he’d have fallen over himself, royally of course, to offer for her hand. However, it’s likely this would have been rebuked because everyone said the moment she laid eyes on Augustus Alcott, she was lost. This being good for her, because Augustus told his mates he would stop at nothing to have her. He didn’t have to make any grand gestures. He offered, and she and her family didn’t hesitate to say yes.”

“And?” I asked to urge him to continue telling his story.

I loved story time with Ian. Yes, even when the stories were scary.

“He brought her to Duncroft, and it was some time, they were very busy at first, before her missives flooded her friends. ‘My home is the jewel of Britain,’ she said. ‘I live in a palace of dreams,’ was something else she shared. She was so proud of her new home, and Augustus proud of her, they threw balls and hunts, and everyone travelled all the way from wherever they were to this distant house to make certain they didn’t miss them. The bedrooms were filled often, and everyone spoke of how very clever Adelaide Alcott was, showing off what she called Britain’s jewel, and entertaining in rooms she had decorated in precious stones.”

“So that was Adelaide’s idea,” I remarked.

“Yes,” he confirmed, and carried on with the story. “Amused at her cleverness, Augustus turned his attention to the family’s quarters. The southeast wing, ground and first floor. Trees and spirits. While Augustus created his legacy, Adelaide turned to the rest of the house. Flowers and birds.”

I sipped.

Ian continued narrating another tale of his home.

“They had one ongoing argument. You see, she loved being in this house, Augustus loved being in his wife.”

I grinned.

“As such, she gave him eight children. They both doted on their brood, but Augustus thought Adelaide doted on them too much. She put them among the trees, and at the barest whimper, would leave their bed to see to her babies. He preferred her in his bed, so he moved the children’s rooms to the northwest wing. This didn’t make her happy and they fought, but she could no longer hear her children in distress, so her attention was no longer divided. As Augustus and all highborn people knew was the right way of things, their nannies took care of them when it was needed, not their mother. And Augustus again had her undivided attention in order to go about the business of giving her more.”

“Please tell me this story doesn’t have an ugly ending,” I begged.

“No, darling. They wrote love letters to each other until Adelaide died at sixty-seven. And when I say that, I mean Augustus wrote her his last letter on the day she died. They’ve been kept. They’re under lock and key, partially because they’re fragile, mostly because they’re raunchy as fuck.”

My mouth dropped open.

I snapped it shut to ask on an actual giggle, “Really?”

Ian sipped whisky then shared, “He was partial to going down on her. He called her ‘nectar’ his ‘life force.’ My favorite quote, ‘I sit here, my darling, my bride, my wife, with the taste of you still on my tongue, your song of pleasure in my ears, and I want nothing more than to bury my flesh in yours, and I was in that heaven but ten minutes ago.’”

“That’s both sweet and hot,” I stated the gods’ honest truth.

“Mm,” he hummed his agreement.

“They loved each other?” I asked, the wealth of hope in those words surprising even me.

“The good kind of besotted, darling,” he answered. “Augustus may have moved the children, but Aunt Louisa found other letters. Letters from Adelaide’s mother, her mother’s friends, all of them admonishing her, and urging her to press Augustus to stop being so ‘unseemly’ in their open devotion to their family. They picnicked in the parkland and took holidays together. Augustus taught his own children to ride, his sons to hunt. They had many friends. They had a great many parties. They filled this house with love and happiness.”

“So it isn’t all dead women and grossness.”

He smiled. “No, not all dead women and grossness.”

I went cautious when I asked, “Did you have love and happiness here?”

His long legs still angled my way, he twisted so his back was to the couch, resting his head there, and he took another drag off his cigarette.

Blowing smoke straight into the air, he kept his eyes aimed to the hanging plants and glass ceiling when he said, “Danny and I were close. Inseparable before we went to school. Once at school, we were still tight, even if we made a lot of friends. We’d play rugby on the front lawn and track mud in because we both liked to ride in the rain. Mum’s old-school British. Reserved, keep calm and carry on and don’t touch the queen’s person. But she threw extravagant birthday parties for us every year, always has a huge Christmas bash and gave us a ridiculous amount of presents. And she helped us with our homework personally. She was interested. I felt loved. I knew my place in her heart.”

“Your dad?” I asked quietly.

He turned only his head on the couch to face me. “Earliest memories, idyllic. He doted on her. Like he didn’t believe she was real. As if she might vanish in an instant, like a dream. Same with us. We were happy. Then, and I can’t know if it was the first she knew of or the first he had, but it was the one she couldn’t abide, she learned he was stepping out on her, and she called him on it. He was outraged. I remember that argument and I remember he said more than once it was not her place to question him.”

He took another drag, blew out the smoke, then looked back to me.

“It turned to shit after that. She withdrew, even from us in some ways. And he seemed to make it his mission to show us what a ‘real man’ was and drilled that into us both.”

“And what’s his version of a real man?”

“One who does what the fuck he wants, when he wants to do it, and no one has the right to tell him any different.”

“Are you going to kick them out of the house?”

His brows shot up. “Hell no. It’s their home.”

“Does your dad think you will?”

He sighed.

Deeply.

“His allowance will be defined by me. That doesn’t exactly say, ‘Do what you want when you want.’ I’m not going to make them live like paupers among splendor, but part of me understands a man’s son controlling his finances would be humiliating. Which is why he should have found some way to make his own money.”

“Like you did,” I noted.

He nodded. “Even when my son, if I have one, turns thirty-eight, I won’t need to rely on him. Far from it. As it should be. My grandfather saw the writing on the wall. He knew the covenants. He was an architect. When his time was up, he moved my grandmother to a beautiful home he designed himself over on the coast, continued his work at his firm, and I don’t think he took another penny from the estate. Same, in a sense, with my great-grandfather. He ended his career as an admiral in the Royal Navy when he was in his sixties, and he retired in Cornwall.”

“Impressive. You come from good stock.”

His eyes twinkled.

It was fabulous.

Yeesh.

He seemed too good to be true.

However, the twinkle died. “Granddad was disappointed in my father. I have two uncles and an aunt. One is a solicitor. One is a retired pilot in the RAF. My aunt’s still a practicing psychologist. But Dad always lived off the estate. The only one of the four. In fact, my uncles and aunt all moved out for college and never came back. Dad went to Oxford. All the Alcotts do. But he didn’t do anything with the degree he earned.”

“Did you go to Oxford?”

He nodded. “And Eton. Same with Danny.”

“And again, I’m impressed.”

This time, he shook his head. “Don’t be. The Alcotts have endowed both. We had guaranteed places.”

“I bet you were a good student.”

“You’d bet wrong. I spent more time taking my mates’ money and investing it in the stock market, and losing most of it, than I did studying while I was at Oxford. It was a game to me, but I was fascinated with it.”

“That losing streak obviously ended.”

One side of his mouth went up. “It did.”

“Hm.” I took the last sip of my Amaretto.

When I did, Ian took my glass.

He reached to the table to set it down, crush out his cigarette, set his glass aside.

Then he came back to me.

“Come here,” he ordered gently.

I looked at his face and my chest got tight.

Because it wasn’t first kiss time.

It was something else.

“Ian—”

“Please, come here, sweetheart.”

I’d been holding it together. All that was me told me I needed to keep holding it together.

But when Ian lost patience and pulled me into his arms, I gave up the fight.

Shoving my face in his sweater, my shoulders racked as the sob came.

Ian gathered my hair in his hand and held it at the nape of my neck as he held me, and I cried for what Lou was going through.

“D-dad would lose his shit,” I stammered. “He wasn’t the greatest husband. B-but he loved her the way he could. H-he’d hate he wasn’t here to be there for her.”

“I’m sure,” he murmured.

“It’s not an ‘easy procedure,’” I mumbled into his chest, referring to how Lou described her upcoming surgery.

“I expect not.”

“She just doesn’t want me to worry.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

I tipped my head back and looked at him with watery eyes. “I’m worried as fuck.”

He shoved my face back into his chest. “I know.”

I cried more, he held me through it.

Eventually, I got my shit tight, turned my face, and rested my cheek against his chest, but otherwise didn’t move.

Ian’s thumb stroked the side of my neck.

“Thank you for being so cool,” I said.

“You’re most welcome.”

“We’re not going to kiss tonight, are we?”

“I taste of cigarettes and your friend has a brain tumor, so no. I don’t think our timing is right.”

“Ugh,” I grumbled.

He stopped stroking my neck so he could squeeze me with both arms.

I was still grumbling, even if the words were, “It’s annoying, but I’m glad you want to make it special.”

“Mm.”

“I need to go check if the girls have got all of Lou’s things packed, and then I want to call Lou’s mum. She’s probably beside herself and it’s a long trip. She won’t be here for at least another hour, and I want her to know Lou’s okay.”

“All right.”

His arms loosened, and I pushed away and up to my feet.

I looked down at him. “Thank you for tonight, and especially for earlier. When Lou was seizing. At the hospital. I was a mess, but you knew exactly what to do.”

“It was my pleasure, darling.”

I sensed he told no lies.

Which was beautiful.

“So far, this visit has been a trip, but I’m sure glad I met you.”

His big body jolted with surprise at my words, and I took advantage.

Bending, I placed one hand on his chest, one on his jaw, and my mouth on his.

Ian didn’t pull away.

He sifted his fingers into my hair and curled them into my scalp.

And then my kiss turned into Ian’s as his tongue slipped into my mouth.

He tasted of smooth, expensive tobacco, smoother, more expensive whisky, and Ian.

I was addicted in a flash.

Our tongues danced, but he was a strong lead, carrying me away into a shadowed, secluded corner where he could see about making it so he could do as he wished with me.

And then he pulled away.

Instead of climbing into his lap, like I wanted to, I brushed my lips along his jaw, straightened and made note that post make out, Ian was the best Ian of all.

“I’m taking up smoking,” I announced.

He burst out laughing.

No.

I was wrong.

Ian laughing was the best Ian of all.

I smiled while he did it.

And then I blew him a kiss before I wound my way out of his lair.