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March 26 - March 28, 2025
He touched the tip of his tongue to the bowl, reflecting that it was far better than ten carriages with matched teams.
The Mackenzie brothers could be part of some mad and improbable conspiracy to ruin Mather, but she had the awful feeling they told the truth.
He was flirting with her, she realized. She was alone with only a female companion, she’d been blatantly staring at him, and this was Paris. He must have thought she wanted a liaison.
If he could feel Beth’s warmth beside him every night, he wouldn’t have the nightmares and the migraines. He was sure of it.
Isabella peered blearily about. “Ian, darling, what are you doing here playing Gilbert and Sullivan at the crack of dawn? I thought I was having a nightmare.”
“What was it like?” His words were so low she barely caught them. “Explain to me what loving feels like, Beth. I want to understand.”
Ian’s life was dictated by other people—events and conversations swirled past him before he could follow them; other people decided whether he’d live in an asylum or out of it, whether he’d go to Rome or wait in London. Events flowed and ebbed, and as long as they didn’t interfere with his interests, like finding elusive Ming pottery, he let them happen.
“We don’t fit in, you and me,” he said. “We’re both oddities no one knows what to do with. But we fit together.” He took her hand, pressed her palm to his, then laced their fingers through each other’s. “We fit.”
He was saying, We are adrift and no one wants us, not the real us. We might as well drift together. Not, Please marry me, Beth. I love you.
“Oh, you’re buying more Ming pottery,” she said. “A vase?” “Bowl. I know nothing about Ming vases.” “Aren’t they much the same?” His look told her she’d lost her mind,
One could learn a history of clothing, Beth reflected, simply by studying the portraits in this room.
Hart needed a kick in his ass sometimes, and if Beth wanted to do it, Ian would let her.
“Who is that?” Ian didn’t even glance at the painting. “Our father.” “Oh. He is quite . . . hairy.” “Which is why we all like to be clean-shaven.”
“Your being with me makes it stop. It’s like the Ming bowls—when I touch them and feel them, everything stops. Nothing matters. You are the same. That is why I brought you here, to keep you with me, where you can please make . . . everything . . . stop.”
She’d been the only thing real to him in Lyndon Mather’s box; everything else had been shadowy and wrong.
The woman was incredibly innocent. She’d seen what she’d seen in London’s slums, she’d been destitute and desperate, and yet she still looked for good in the Mackenzies. Unbelievable.
As he slid his lips over hers it didn’t occur to him that she’d given up a shade too easily.
“Is this what love feels like?” he whispered to her. “I don’t like it, my Beth. It hurts too much.”
“The upstairs maids will not be happy if you take over their job. They’ll consider it not your place. Very snobbish are upstairs maids.”
His own mother had been a victim of his father, terrified of him. Beth’s mother had been a victim as well, but Beth had somehow managed to transcend the horrors of her childhood. Her troubles had made her courageous and unflinching, characteristics that had been lost on the idiotic Mather. Beth was worth saving, worth protecting, like the rarest of porcelains.
