The Notorious Lady Grantham: A Grantham Girls companion novella Read online

  Her heart began to pound with dread before her mind fully formed his name. She forced her feet to move, leaving the parlor and descending the stairs to the entry hall. She didn’t want to open that door, but if she didn’t, he’d only ring again, summoning Winters, which would be worse. The ghosts of her past weren’t content to stay in her mind tonight. This one had come to deal with her face-to-face.

  Hand trembling, she reached for the doorknob, the metal ice-cold under her fingers. A frigid breeze and a flurry of snowflakes swept in as she opened the door, and there, standing in the hazy glow of the gas lamps, snow dusting his shoulders, stood Archie.

  “You’d better come in,” she told him.

  “I would have thought,” she began once she’d shown him into the parlor. “That you’d be with your family on Christmas Eve.”

  “The children are in bed. I’ve debated about it all week, and in the end, I found I had to come.”

  He said nothing else, and for a moment, they fell into an awkward silence.

  “I’d ring for tea,” she finally said, “but I’ve given the staff the holiday off.”

  “I didn’t come for tea,” Archie said, looking around the room.

  “I can’t imagine what you’ve come for, Lord Wrexham. Unless it’s for one of my girls? You did come to London to find a new wife, did you not? I’m afraid I have no young ladies who might suit at present.”

  Gen knew she was goading him, but if there was to be a confrontation, she’d prefer to just get to it. Hash out the past so that she might be able to finally begin putting it behind her.

  “I had thought to find a new wife when I came to London,” he said. “But that’s not going to happen now.”

  She waited for him to explain, but he didn’t, still looking about himself with a distracted air.

  “This is a good room,” he said at last.

  “Thank you. I like it. But somehow, I don’t think you came here to compliment me on my interiors, Lord Wrexham. I confess, I’m still struggling to find an explanation for your appearance.”

  He hesitated, looked down, and then reached into his coat to withdraw something from an inside pocket. It was a piece of paper, folded once. He held it a moment, staring down at it. Then he strode across the room to her and held it out.

  “I came to bring you this.”

  Hesitantly, she took it, looking for some explanation in his eyes but finding nothing but that polite distance he’d hidden behind ever since she’d met him in London.

  The thick paper was battered, the corners worn soft with age, smudged by frequent handling. She unfolded it and found herself staring at her own face through the veil of years. Geneviève Valadon as a girl, with her hair down and her eyes alive. Archie’s drawing…the girl he’d captured on paper, the one she hadn’t known existed until she’d seen her reflected in his eyes.

  “Why did you bring me this?” Her voice was barely a whisper, but in the quiet of the room, he heard her.

  “I thought you might like to have it. You, as you once were. You, as I knew you then.”

  “But—”

  “I’d just like to know why,” he said.

  But she was the one meant to be asking why. Why had he kept this all these years? Why did he bring it to her now?

  When she looked up at him, for the first time, that chilly distance was gone, as if the mask he’d been wearing had slipped. His eyes were urgently imploring her for an answer she didn’t have. “I don’t understand.”

  “Was it Leo? Did you decide to go back to him?”

  She blinked. “Leo? Leo was arrested. I have no idea what happened to him after that.”

  “Then, why? Why, Gen? Why did you leave?”

  “Me? I left because everyone I had in Paris was gone. Leo was arrested, my mother was dead, and you abandoned me!”

  “Why didn’t you wait for me? I left you instructions. I told you how to reach me. I left you money to pay for the flat, so you could escape your mother’s lover.”

  A pit opened up in her stomach. “No,” she whispered, shaking her head. That horrible moment in the Place du Tertre was coming back to her, clinging to the tree as she vomited, her eyes tearing and her throat burning. The feeling of betrayal knifing through her body, the pain threatening to devour her whole. “No, you didn’t. You just left. You lied to me and you left, Archie.”

  “Victor was supposed to wait for you—”

  “Victor was sacked. When I went back, he’d been sacked.”

  Archie stared at her blankly as her words sank in. She stared back, absorbing them too. Oh God, he’d left word for her. He hadn’t meant to just disappear…

  Abruptly, her knees weakened and the room closed in.

  “Gen.” Strong arms came around her, pulling her up against a broad, solid chest. “Come, sit down.”

  Then she was on the sofa, and he was next to her, her hands in his as he rubbed them briskly.

  “It’s all right,” she protested, pulling her hands away and straightening her spine. “I’m all right.”

  “I’m not,” he muttered. “You never saw Victor? You never got my letter?”

  She shook her head, swallowing hard against the painful lump forming in her throat. Her heart was pounding so hard, she could feel it in her fingertips and temples. The danger of fainting had passed, but she was still reeling from the revelations of the last few moments. It felt as if the solid ground beneath her had suddenly turned to water.

  “You shouldn’t have left him with the money. He was sacked for stealing from the till.”

  Archie muttered an oath under his breath and raked his fingers through his hair, sending it into disorder. His hand was shaking. “There wasn’t time to sort out something else…”

  “But why did you go? Why didn’t you wait for me?”

  “My brothers died,” he said with a toneless finality. “Both of my brothers, and the wife of my eldest. Their ship sank in the North Atlantic on the way to New York. And when word reached my father in England, he collapsed with a heart attack. In one fell swoop, nearly my entire family was destroyed, and my father was on the verge of death. My father’s man of business had finally tracked me down in Paris. There wasn’t a moment to lose if I wanted to see my father before he died. I’m so sorry, Gen. I didn’t know how to find you, and I couldn’t wait for your return.”

  In the silence after his explanation, the tick of the grandfather clock was almost deafening. Gen drew in an unsteady breath and rose to her feet. “I can’t offer tea, but I can offer whiskey, and that seems more appropriate under the circumstances.”

  Her hands were shaking too, she noted, as she splashed whiskey from the decanter on the sideboard into two cut crystal tumblers. She drained hers, then refilled it, before returning to the sofa. Handing him his glass, she sat down next to him again.

  For several long minutes, they sat side by side in silence, drinking, staring into the fire. This knowledge—that he hadn’t lied to her, hadn’t betrayed her—should have been a relief. Instead, it only felt like a new kind of pain. What was she supposed to do with all of this? Her, him, and all these lost years? Her hatred had turned to granite years ago. It was no easy thing to move off her soul, no matter what the truth was.

  She’d spent years nursing her righteous fury, indignant in her pain and grief, imagining him blithely living on, oblivious to the carnage her life had become. But he’d suffered his own grave losses. He was as wronged as she was, both of them cheated by fate and by death.

  “I am sorry about your family,” she said at last.

  “Thank you. And I’m sorry about your mother. You said she passed away.”

  “She killed herself. That day.” Closing her eyes, she tipped her head back. Oh, this was all too much. All at once, the door holding her past at bay had burst open, letting everything spill out. For the first time in years, she could clearly see Suzette in her mind’s eye. She could hear the tone of her voice. She could almost smell that sweet perfume she used to wear. />
  “Gen…my God… I don’t know what to say.”

  “It was a rather dreadful day.”

  “Is that why you left Paris?”

  “That, and the police were looking for me, on account of Leo. He and André were planning to bomb the Palais Garnier, to make some ridiculous political statement. Instead, they got themselves arrested. As I’d been seen with them while they were hatching their idiotic plans, the police thought I was involved.”

  “Perhaps that’s why,” he mused, gazing into the fire.

  “Why, what?”

  “Why I could never find you,” he replied. “I went back, after I’d gotten things sorted at home. It had been a few months, but not so very long, yet I couldn’t find a trace of you anywhere. No one I spoke to who knew you knew anything about where you’d gone.”

  She turned to stare at his profile, still all angles and edges, burnished like marble with time. “You went back to Paris to look for me?”

  He turned his head and met her gaze. There was Archie, her Archie from Paris, at last. Every bit of armor had been stripped away, and his expression was utterly vulnerable, utterly devastated. “I wandered Paris for months. I sat in the Moulin de la Galette until they nearly threw me out. I traced every street and alley of Belleville. I bought the Paris paintings in my collection while I was there, desperate to hang on to something of the Paris we’d shared. When I found Pierre Jaccoud, and the painting he’d done of us dancing that night, I nearly fell to my knees and wept. It was proof. Proof you’d existed. Proof it had been real. Proof I hadn’t fallen in love with a ghost.”

  How was it possible for her heart to feel so hollowed out, yet go on beating? She could barely breathe through the pain and could barely think through the confusion. Nothing that she’d believed about him for all these years was true. He’d loved her. He’d meant every word he’d said. He’d intended to keep every promise he’d made to her. But fate had stepped in to set them on divergent paths. And now, here they stood, on opposite sides of a great divide not of their making.

  What was she to do with all of this? These complicated emotions and wretched pain and anger? Was she just supposed to put it away? Forget it all? Pretend the years hadn’t altered her? How could she ever release the bad, yet still hang on to the good? And how could she ever begin to knit all these broken pieces of herself and him back together into a whole? It seemed impossible.

  She didn’t realize she’d started crying—if this dry-eyed, racking gasping could be called crying—until Archie took her face in his hands.

  “Shh, it’s all right, darling. Don’t cry.”

  His voice and his words were calm and soothing, but he was every bit as undone as she. She could feel it in the tremble of his fingertips where they curled around the back of her neck, and she could hear it in each unsteady breath he released, his forehead pressed to hers. Their worlds had just been ripped asunder, and right now, it seemed there was no one for them to hang on to for salvation but each other.

  Then Archie placed a hand on the side of her face, tilted her head back, and kissed her. Her breathing halted in her chest. He was the first man to touch her in so long, and he’d been the last man who had. Now she knew why. Yes, she’d excised men from her life because they were a practical impossibility, but in truth, it was because of this—Archie had put his brand on her seventeen years ago, and she’d known, deep down inside, that no one else would ever be able to erase it.

  The kiss was soft, gentle, undemanding, and yet it shattered something hidden within. The iron grip she’d held on her life for so many years began to slip, and she had no idea what lay below should she fall.

  Even when the kiss had ended, Archie stayed close, his fingers stroking her face. When she tried to speak, her breathing hitched, and all that came out was another strangled sob. Her hands fisted in the sleeves of his jacket, seeking anything solid to steady her as the world shook to pieces around them. Archie, ever patient, ever kind, just waited, his thumb stroking gently across her cheek.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” she finally whispered, voice shaking. “I don’t know how to undo the past and what it’s made me into.”

  Archie shook his head. “We can’t. It’s happened, for both of us, the good and the bad. It’s made us both who we are. All we can do is move forward.” Leaning in, he brushed his lips against the corner of her mouth. “Please do it with me. I don’t think I can bear losing you twice in my life.”

  He kissed her again, and while the kiss didn’t fix anything, didn’t undo the damage done, didn’t restore what was lost, it contained another kind of magic. Nothing looked quite so impossible from inside this kiss. It eased the pain enough to allow new and better feelings in.

  This time, Archie’s kiss was edged with hunger and need, his fingers gripping the back of her neck to pull her closer. When his lips parted and his mouth slanted over hers, Gen let him in, surrendering, for the moment, to desire.

  “Gen,” he murmured, dropping kisses along the arc of her cheekbone, back to her temple, his warm breath heating her skin. “I know we can’t fix everything that’s been broken, but we can find some comfort together now, can’t we?”

  Words were impossible, so she simply nodded and lifted her arms to wrap them around his shoulders, to draw him to her and give herself over to him. She wanted Archie. She wanted to comfort him and ease this ache inside herself.

  When they came together, it was not as frantic lovers long kept apart. It unfurled slowly, each kiss lasting longer, going deeper, as his hands moved to explore her with slow, gentle strokes, until her body had caught fire for him.

  Breaking away from her mouth, Archie stood up from the sofa, towering over her, and held out a hand to help her to her feet. He turned her around and methodically began unfastening her gown. The black velvet dress slowly peeled away, revealing her pale shoulders and arms. Next, he unfastened her petticoat, and then, reaching around her body, deftly released the hooks of her corset. His lips pressed into the back of her shoulder, and Gen’s knees felt weak. So long since she’d been touched by him—since she’d felt this languid heating of her blood under his hands. She didn’t think these feelings possible anymore, but it seemed as if they’d been lying dormant in her blood for years. All it took was his touch to bring her back to life.

  She felt his fingertips skate up the back of her neck, tangling in her hair. “May I?”

  When she nodded an assent, he began to pluck the pins from her tightly bound hair. Slowly it loosened, then released, tumbling down over her shoulders in a rush. She never wore it down. During the day, it was up. And at night, Molly, her lady’s maid, made quick work of taking it down and braiding it for bed. Gen avoided even glancing at herself in the mirror during those moments, because it was the only time she looked at all like the Geneviève of old. Having it down made her feel intensely exposed…vulnerable. Even more so than removing her clothes had.

  Behind her, Archie bent to press a kiss to her hair. “You smell just the same. I’ve never forgotten.” His hands slid up her body, over her chemise, until his palms covered her breasts. “Ah God, Gen, how I’ve missed you.”

  She lifted an arm, reaching behind her to run her fingers through his hair, and her breasts pushed forward against the delicious pressure of his hands.

  He pulled her in tighter to him, and she could feel him, the hard pressure of him against the small of her back. Quicker now, he undid the ribbons holding her chemise closed, and it soon joined the pile of fabric in a puddle around her feet. When she would have stepped clear of it, Archie bent and lifted her effortlessly into his arms, just as he had their first time together.

  This time, he laid her on the rug in front of the hearth and stood for a moment, staring down at her bare skin in the flickering light of the flames.

  A sudden flare of self-consciousness had her raising an arm to cover her breasts. No one had looked at her naked body in years—certainly, no man—and she wasn’t nineteen anymore.

 
Archie shook his head. “Don’t hide yourself from me, Gen. You’re just as beautiful as you ever were.”

  “I’m older.”

  “So am I. Older than you, in fact.” His raised eyebrow and smirk were so reminiscent of the one she remembered from Paris years ago, her heart gave a pang of longing.

  “You’re still unfairly handsome,” she whispered. “You haven’t changed in any of the important ways.”

  “Neither have you, not in my eyes.”

  Made bold by the hunger in his eyes as he gazed down at her, she moved her arm, lying naked before him. He didn’t take his eyes off her as he rapidly stripped off his own clothes.

  Yes, he was older. Nearly forty, if not over. He’d thickened and broadened, the lankiness he’d had as a young man replaced by the solid muscles of maturity. He was still in remarkable shape, his stomach flat and his chest firm. There was a bit more hair than she remembered, some of it sprinkled with silver. His skin, so smooth and unblemished before, now held the odd dark mark or crease. But the subtle traces time had left on his body had only made him more beautiful, not less.

  She opened her arms to him. “Come down here.”

  Archie lowered himself to the rug beside her, his hand coming up to cup her face. “This is still every bit the precious gift it was years ago. Perhaps even more so, because I never thought I would see you again.”

  Those words were just as intoxicating at thirty-six as they had been at nineteen. Gen’s wounded heart softened, yearning for Archie to make it complete. If she did this, opened herself up to him once again, she’d be leaving herself vulnerable in a way she hadn’t been in years, and it terrified her.

  Archie read the fear in her eyes, leaning in swiftly to kiss her. “Don’t be afraid. One step forward at a time, Gen, each one together.”

  Again, his kiss was the balm that momentarily banished fear and eased pain. Maybe this was the secret, she thought, as she wound her arms around his neck and allowed him to deepen the kiss. Maybe she didn’t need to know how to heal them all at once. Maybe she just needed to try, one small step forward at a time, and let the healing take care of itself.