Chapter Twenty-Eight

Derek had studied romantic interludes in the context of art and the multiple ways it had impacted people throughout history, but now, faced with a real-life example, he had many questions.

Could attraction come from other emotions? Could the body manifest the feeling in order to mask or distract from fear and anxiety? Was it possible for his lungs to actually stop breathing? His chest felt solid, as if it no longer possessed the ability to expand and contract.

It had seemed so logical to teach her knitting this morning, to see if this attraction still existed when the moment wasn’t fraught with tension or weighed down by impending doom. Now he wasn’t so sure. What was better? Not knowing if he was truly feeling something for this woman, or not knowing if there would ever be something he could do about it?

“You have to hold it gently,” he said, talking to himself as much as to her. As much as he wanted to drop the yarn and simply hold her hand, he’d never been a man given to impulse. “Allow the yarn to move as it needs to.”

He adjusted her hands once more, running one finger along the edge of the yarn to show her the proper looseness. Her hands were small but strong, roughened in a way that confirmed she’d done a great deal more than kitchen work in her life.

For now she was holding the yarn correctly, so he had no excuse to remain at her feet, leaning into her space. He shifted back to his seat and picked up his needles. Knitting was fairly simple once one got the pattern down, but it was awkward at first. Likely he would have to adjust her hold again, but he refused to artificially create a reason to feel her small hands in his. It wasn’t the time.

It may never be the time.

Keeping his movements slow, he demonstrated the basic stitch. It took her a few more minutes and a handful of corrections by him, but soon—rather faster than he would have liked, in all honesty—she had the hang of it.

“Unraveling it is a bit more difficult.” He shifted his hold on the yarn to pull his stitches out. “You may need to have two sets of stitches going so you knit one and unravel the other as you go.”

They sat there, knitting and unraveling, as the morning drifted by. Her movements got smoother, and eventually he was showing her more advanced stitches.

“How did you learn to knit?” she asked as she whipped out another row of simple stitches.

“My grandmother. She lived with us, but her eyesight and her health were failing. There was little she could do besides sit in her rocking chair and knit. She couldn’t see the yarn well anymore, but she could feel the stitches.”

“Why you?”

“Why not me?” It didn’t seem very polite to say that the rest of his family hadn’t had the patience to sit around with a cantankerous old woman who had spent half her time grumbling about what she could no longer do and the other half barking at people to do it for her. “She didn’t handle her immobility well, and my family couldn’t block it out, I suppose. I started watching her knit as a form of distraction. It was easy enough to ignore her ramblings if I had something to study.”

Jess lowered her block of knitted yarn to her lap and stared at him.

Derek shifted in his seat but kept working, though he wasn’t paying attention to what stitches he was making. “One day she realized what I was doing and handed me a set of needles and a ball of yarn. She became a bit less difficult after that. Teaching me gave her a purpose, I suppose.”

His father hadn’t loved the idea, but he enjoyed the yelling of his mother even less, so he’d allowed Derek to continue. Neither his father nor his brother—nor even Derek, truth be told—would have guessed that one day, that would be the skill he would use to test his bond with a woman.

“Do you still knit?” Jess yanked on the end of her yarn with enthusiasm, grin widening as the entire business unraveled. As the last stitch gave way, she let out a soft laugh.

Would she laugh in truth if he admitted that he did, in fact, still knit? It had been a source of mockery in his own home until his mother had scowled everyone into silence. What would Jess think?

“Yes,” he said, after taking a deep breath. “I do. At first it was to finish the blanket my grandmother had been working on. It seemed wrong to leave her last work incomplete. I found the project relaxing.”

It was more than that, of course. Knitting followed a set of rules. Unlike painting or drawing, which needed that extra little flourish to become art instead of simply lines, knitting was all about the tension of the yarn and the consistency of stitches. The talents that made him a connoisseur of art instead of an artist made him good at knitting.

“I learned cooking as a distraction.”

His fingers paused as he looked up. Jess’s needles clicked on, her entire attention focused on them. Should he say something? “From your mother?”

A burst of wry laughter shook her body. “Goodness, no. Mother never gave up hope that we would all one day return to the palace, so she did everything she could to maintain that lifestyle. She tried to make that four-room cottage a twenty-room palace.”

She fell into knitting again, but this time Derek remained quiet. Like paintings that revealed themselves over time, she required patience. Grasping for more might yield results, but he would lose the nuance, the little details that told him more than her words did.

“It wasn’t only my family in that cottage. Some of my uncle’s advisors and our personal servants came, too, aware they’d be the first targeted after we disappeared. Everyone was tense and solemn, except for Ismelde, the palace cook.”

“Your cook knew enough state secrets to be in danger?” Derek couldn’t hold back the question. Advisors and secretaries made sense, of course, but cooks? Had the maids come, too?

“No,” Jess said with a shake of her head. She stopped knitting and twined the yarn through her fingers. “She was from a village on the Rhine. She was afraid what the French would do to her. As a child, I found her happiness far more enjoyable than everyone else’s gloom. Cooking was more fun than trying to learn how to take tea and behave at court, especially since I had to pretend the crops were the other people.”

“Ismelde taught you to cook, then?”

Jess nodded. “She was amazing. Even with our limited resources and rudimentary kitchen she managed to produce the most splendid meals. Desserts and puddings were rare, but they were her favorite.”

“No wonder you enjoy cooking.”

She was silent and still for a moment before she pulled the yarn from between her fingers and began knitting again. “Actually, I hate it.”

Derek placed his knitting aside and leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees so that his face was level with hers. “But you’re a cook.”

“The end of the war made me vulnerable, so I had to leave London. I knew that should Verbonne ever become its own country again, someone was going to want what I had, even though I wasn’t even sure what it was. That’s dangerous, you know, having a secret you can’t even bargain with because it’s a secret even from you.

“Ryland did a good job convincing everyone I was someone else, that he’d found me somewhere else, but it was a story that couldn’t hold if someone really started looking.” Jess shrugged. “Becoming a cook was the best way to hide.”

“How did you end up at Haven Manor?” Derek didn’t know everything about the history of the ladies working at the secluded country estate, but he knew they’d been hiding children who would ruin important reputations.

“Kit was in London on . . .” Jess flashed a grin. “We’ll say she was here on business. She ran into a bit of trouble. I helped her out of it. In return she gave me a place to go.”

Derek knew there had to be more to it than that, but that wasn’t what he was most concerned about at the moment. “Why a cook, though?”

“Cooks stay in the kitchens.”

“You felt a need to hide among a group of people who were already hiding?” Derek asked with lifted eyebrows.

She sighed and let her work fall into her lap. The pale eyes she lifted to him were flatter than any he’d ever seen. The spark of life and determination he always saw in her was nowhere to be found. “I know Ismelde probably didn’t survive that night. She wasn’t valuable enough to imprison, and her thick accent was one no Frenchman would want in his household. Cooking reminds me of what I lost. It reminds me how quickly everything changes.” She poked at the yarn. “It reminds me not to become too attached.”

Her face tilted toward him, her normal smirk back in place though the spirit wasn’t yet visible in her eyes. “Besides, the only cooking Daphne does is boiling the mess out of something before smashing it into submission. Kit can make stew. Eating their cooking for years on end wasn’t an option.”

Derek laughed with her, though it took a bit of effort, given the pain slicing through his heart for Jess’s loss. “Tell me about living with them.”

To his surprise, she did. Her yarn and needles were forgotten as she shared about the way they’d forced her to interact, their friendship non-optional. She talked of the children they’d cared for with a bit of awe and fear but also affection.

He shared his favorite travels and paintings.

She spoke to him in seven languages.

By the time the clock in the main hall chimed noon, Derek knew a great deal about her that he hadn’t at the beginning of the day. Most of all, he knew he’d never again meet a woman like Jess. Even the greatest goddess ever painted couldn’t impress him more.

The thing was, despite her confidence, he didn’t think she saw herself as someone impressive.

He reached one hand across the space between their chairs and placed it on top of hers. She looked up at him through her lashes but didn’t move her hand. “Jess, I—”

A throat cleared from the doorway, causing Derek to jerk back hard enough that the chair rocked on two legs for a moment before crashing back down.

“Jess, you’ve a visitor,” Miranda said, not even bothering to hide her fascination at the scene she’d walked in on. “Ryland refuses to let him past the front hall.”

Jess stood, the knitted lump falling to the ground as she adjusted her skirts. Derek stared at her, but she never gave him so much as a glance. “I’ll be right there.”

Not looking at Derek required every last bit of Jess’s effort. She wanted to look his way, offer him some sort of reassurance, but any attention she bestowed on him would only make the situation worse.

Miranda grinned as she stepped aside to let Jess through the door. Despite the discomfort, part of Jess was thankful for the interruption.

She was less thankful for the fact that as soon as this apparently unwelcome visitor was taken care of, Miranda would be in Ryland’s ear, as well as everyone else’s, about what she’d seen.

Jess didn’t care what they did with that information as long as they didn’t say anything to Derek. If Ryland even thought to make life difficult for the scholar, Jess would cut him down with a plethora of embarrassing stories about him. They wouldn’t make Miranda love him any less, of course, but what wife would be able to resist teasing her husband about the time he had to go a week in trousers that were five inches too short and an entire person too big in the waist because they were the only ones Jess could procure?

Jess entered the front hall to see Ryland standing, feet braced, arms crossed, and icy glare directed at a very docile Leonard Merkins.

Ryland’s gaze shifted as Jess approached, turning on her with the same hardness. It was almost enough to make her flinch. No wonder Merkins wasn’t being his normal obnoxious self. “You enlisted his assistance?”

Jess kept her expression blank, refusing to let him see how his glare affected her. “He can ride fast and draw well. Besides, he owed me a favor.”

Those grey eyes narrowed further. “You’ve helped him before? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you didn’t need to know,” Jess said. This was the worst part of working with Ryland. He always assumed he was right and that he should know everything. Honestly, Jess didn’t know how Miranda put up with it. Turning her back on Ryland, Jess reached a hand out to Merkins. “Do you have the drawings?”

“Yes.” His teeth snapped together as he talked. “But if you’re working with him on this, I don’t think I want to give them to you.”

“I’m not working with him,” Jess said, giving Merkins a hard glare. “I’m simply using his house.” It was only a partial lie. Ryland’s assistance thus far had definitely been on the side.

“If you don’t want to find yourself staying here indefinitely as well,” Ryland said in that low, gravelly voice that had made more than one grown man sweat, “you’ll hand over what you came to deliver.”

Merkins held out a leather portfolio. “There’s several sketches in there. It would have been suspicious if I’d only done one of the paintings, so I did a few more. I’ve no use for them, so you might as well keep them.”

He sneered at Jess but avoided looking at Ryland again. “Whoever told you those paintings had significance lied. The only reason the previous earl bought that painting was that it matched the view from his front porch.”

With a cocky smile, he spun toward the door.

“You don’t mention this,” Ryland said to Merkins’s retreating back.

“Of course he won’t. If he does, I’ll happen to mention why he owed this to me.”

Jess had her own version of intimidation.

With a huff and a few muttered words that were likely not complimentary, Merkins left.

“What a brilliant show,” Miranda said as the door shut behind Merkins. “Do you think you could use that on the gardener at Marshington Abbey? I don’t think he’s doing everything he could be for the roses.”

A laugh gurgled in Jess’s throat as Ryland’s hard exterior immediately dissolved. He ran a hand over his face before giving his wife a look so soft Jess felt like she shouldn’t be witnessing it. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Good.” Miranda grinned at him and then cut a glance in Jess’s direction. “While you’re at it, you should remind Jess to make sure she sets up some sort of early warning system to notify her when someone approaches if she intends to have more private moments with Mr. Thornbury.”

Ryland’s face, which moments before had been honed granite, broke into a grin.

“I’m going to look through these pictures.” Jess held up the portfolio and then turned on her heel. “Perhaps this will be the one that breaks the code for us.”

Heat scorched her cheeks as she walked back to the study. They needed to find the location of the bowl soon. Not only because her brother’s fate required it, but because if the past three days in this house had been difficult, the next were going to be impossible.