“Damn the dinners!” Noble rubbed a hand over his eyes, and instantly Gillian’s heart went out to him. The poor man; she was such a trial to him.
“Trial?” he snapped, his eyes wild. “Trial? Madam, you are a plague! You are a tribulation! You are an ordeal by fire!”
“Well, really, Noble,” Gillian said crossly, her patience running thin, “I might be a trial, but I certainly am not an ordeal by fire.”
“You’ve set two fires that I know of in less than a fortnight. That, my dear wife, qualifies you as an ordeal by fire.”
Gillian compressed her lips into a thin line that said more than words ever could. Noble narrowed his eyes at her. “Do not don that obstinate look with me, my lady.”
He stormed around to the front of his desk and leaned over her. “Hear me and hear me well, Gillian. I forbid you to meet with the four women you brought to my house today. I forbid you to investigate the unfortunate incidents. I forbid you to leave the house unless you are in my company. And I forbid you to have anything further to do with my son!”
Gillian gasped, horrified by his mandates. She could live with the first two and tolerate the third, but not to have contact with Nick? Her son? A fury unlike any other she’d known welled up deep inside her and threatened to spill over. She pushed Noble back until she could stand up, and faced him with her hands fisted on her hips and her eyes blazing.
“Why?”
Noble stared at her neck, his hands twitching as if with the effort to keep from throttling her. “Why? Have you not been listening to me for the last forty minutes?”
“Why may I not see Nick?”
“Because you are an unsuitable influence. He is a lad of tender years, and I will not have him exposed to the seedier side of life before he is ready to see it.”
“The mistresses? He was not present, Noble!”
“It matters not. You took him with you when you had the harebrained idea to rescue me. You took him with you when you visited the man who was responsible for his stepmother’s death. You ran the risk of exposing him this afternoon to women of a lower class. Clearly you cannot be trusted with the responsibility of seeing to his upbringing, so I shall remove him from your sphere of influence.”
Gillian felt as if he’d struck her. He could rail at her all he liked, but to accuse her of being negligent where Nick was concerned — that was the outside of enough!
“I will not let you do this to me,” she shouted, and punched him in the chest in an attempt to drive home the point. “You can lock me away, you can forbid me to see my friends, but you cannot take my son from me.”
“He is not your son,” Noble roared at her.
“He became my son the minute you married me,” she yelled back, furious that despite all their intimacies, despite the fact that they loved one another, he still did not see them as a family. “You cannot take him away from me. I won’t let you.”
“You have no choice in the matter,” he snapped. “The decision is made. I will send Nick back to Nethercote in the morning. As you made a particular point about staying in town to be at my side, you will remain with me.”
“You will not destroy this family!” She pounded on his chest again until he held her hands still; then, with a wordless cry of protest, she ripped them from his grasp and stalked toward the door.
“Gillian, I did not give you permission to leave. I have not yet finished with you.”
“Oh, no, my lord,” she said as she threw open the door, ignoring the startled faces of the staff gathered immediately outside. “You very nearly are finished, but you have not yet destroyed us completely. If you do not want to annihilate what was beginning to be a family, I strongly urge you to take back your words. I shall wait in my sitting room for your apology.”
“Then you will wait for hell to freeze over,” Noble thundered. “Gillian, come back here!”
Gillian turned and pushed her way blindly past the servants and ran up the stairs. At the top of the flight she paused when she saw Nick hiding in the shadows and clutched him to her with a sob.
“I won’t let him take you away from me,” she whispered, hugging him as tightly as she could. “You won’t be alone again, I promise.”
Nick looked up into his stepmother’s eyes, and what he saw there warmed him down to the tips of his toes. He reached up to touch a tear streaking down her cheek and frowned at the wetness on his finger.
“My mother used to tell me a saying,” Gillian said, bending down and kissing him on the forehead. “She said nothing worthwhile is easy. You, my darling son, are very worthwhile. I will do whatever it takes to make us a family, whatever it takes to make your father realize that he can’t separate us. He’s hurt and angry right now, Nick, and when people are hurt and angry they very often lash out at those people near to them. Do you understand?”
An urge bubbled up deep in Nick. He tried to ignore it, but it pressed up and up, higher and more insistent, until he almost gave in to the urge. Instead he nodded his head.
“Good.” She pulled him into a hug again, and he let her warmth seep into him, comforting him. “I love you, my son,” she whispered in his ear, and with a final kiss she was off, running up the next flight of stairs.
The urge inside Nick pushed higher until he thought it would burst right out of his mouth. He watched the hem of her gown flap briefly as she turned the corner on the stairs, and then he gave in to the urge. “I won’t let Papa take you away,” he whispered.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nick sat at the top of the stairs, a small huddled form hidden in the shadow cast by the wall. He picked at a scab on his knee from an injury he’d received when he tried to ride his pony up the steps to the veranda at Nethercote. The trouble with adults, he decided, was that they didn’t come right out and say what was wrong, and how it could be fixed. He knew from the raised voices of his father and Gillian, audible even to him on the first floor, that they were arguing about something, and he had seen for himself that Gillian was crying again. But she didn’t tell him what was the matter; she just talked about his father being hurt and angry.
Before he had much time to dwell on the subject, he saw his father storm out of the library, snatch up his hat and walking stick, and, with a growl, stomp out to his waiting carriage. The servants were standing in a group in the hall. He wondered if they knew what the problem was between Gillian and his father, and how it could be fixed. He was about to ask when Rogerson, his tutor, separated himself from the others and, spying Nick, came to herd him back upstairs to the room used for his studies.
Rogerson put an arm around his shoulders. “It’ll be all right, lad.” Nick thought of Gillian and how nice she made him feel, and he fervently hoped his tutor was right.
“Lord Weston! I’m surprised to see you again so soon.”
“I’m in the mood for a little exercise, Jackson. Can you accommodate me?”
Gentleman Jackson grinned. “There’s an arrogant young blood in there just looking for someone to take him down a peg or two. Shall I tell him you’ll oblige?”
Noble allowed the attendant to peel off his coat and reached for the buttons on his waistcoat. “By all means. I’d be very happy to beat the arrogance out of him,” he said grimly.
“Well this is baffling!”
Crouch, Gillian noticed, had been hovering outside the not-quite-closed door of her sitting room. She smiled a little smile to herself. His interest and concern was really quite endearing, if a little stifling. She knew he was consumed with curiosity about the missive he’d just delivered to her.