Drops of Gold(45)

Layton’s chuckle joined hers. “You are refreshing, Marion.” He smiled as she dabbed her eyes. “Bridget could never have laughed in the midst of her tears. At the end, there, the tears never stopped.”

“My mother always said, if given the choice between crying and laughing, she’d much rather laugh.”

“A philosophy I believe you embrace as well.”

“Religiously,” Marion admitted, her smile still watery but a little easier to conjure.

Layton’s face grew quite serious. “Teach me, Marion,” he said, hand cupping her jaw. “I need to laugh again.”

“I have heard you laugh,” she said, heart suddenly fluttering in her throat.

“That has been your doing.” His thumb lightly brushed her cheek. “You are changing us all, performing your miracles.”

His eyes fastened on hers, and his hand remained gently against her face. Not another word escaped him as he watched her, though she heard his breathing pick up pace. Hers followed suit. His gaze dropped for a moment to her lips before his jaw seemed to set and his eyes closed.

“I should go,” he said with something like a frustrated sigh.

“It is getting late,” Marion conceded, torn between wishing he would stay and feeling grateful that the tension he seemed to bring into the room would leave with him.

Layton nodded and stepped back. He took a long, deep breath. Marion did the same, but it didn’t help. Her heart still fluttered, her mind felt muddled.

“I will scrape my junk off your linen and return it to you,” she offered with a smile.

“Keep the handkerchief, Marion,” he said, his look still intense.

“Keep it?” Snippets of a conversation with Caroline about gentlemen and handkerchiefs echoed in her mind, and her heart began pounding harder. He wanted her to keep it? As a token of some sort?

A sort of strangled moan resonated from Layton’s throat. He crossed to her in two long strides, pulled her to him in a single fluid motion and kissed her, lips to lips, gentle, anxious, and far too short-lived.

“Keep it, Marion,” he whispered as he pulled away then spun on his heels and left.

The spicy scent of him lingered after he’d gone. Marion lightly brushed her fingers along her lips. He’d kissed her! Kissed her on the mouth! And had given her his handkerchief.

Marion wrapped her arms around her waist, letting the tiniest of squeals escape as she spun in a circle. As improbable as she might have thought it an hour earlier, it seemed Layton felt the same as she did. Maybe, just maybe, he loved her too!





Chapter Seventeen



Layton knew he was scowling. He hadn’t slept a single minute of the previous night, his mind too full of Marion. Marion. Though he’d tried to convince himself otherwise, Layton was in love with her. She made him smile and laugh, somehow managed to free him now and then from his usual despondency. And what had he done? He’d kissed her! Therefore, Layton was scowling.

He, who had always prided himself on being a gentleman, had kissed a gently bred young lady who resided under his roof and hadn’t a relative to her name to protect her. “If I ever hear you’ve mistreated a lady, young or otherwise, I’ll box your ears until you cry like a little girl,” Father had told each of his sons in turn before they’d left home for school at the start of each term. He’d always smiled as he said it, but they knew he meant it.

The only time Father had ever taken a switch to Layton had been after just such an occurrence. With Bridget, actually. When Layton was eight, Bridget had bested him quite soundly in a rock-skipping competition and had boasted of it for an overlong time, it had seemed to him. So he’d pushed her in the river. Father had tanned his hide after making him apologize to Bridget and Mr. and Mrs. Sarvol. It was one of the more humiliating encounters of his young life. But, to Father’s credit, Layton had never misused a female since. That is, until Marion and that kiss.

Ah, that kiss. It had been utterly earth-shattering. Any doubts he’d harbored about his feelings for Marion had disappeared in that moment, not simply because he’d enjoyed kissing her, which he certainly had, but because the impossibility of their story having a happy ending had hit him so forcefully, and the realization hurt more than he could have imagined. It still hurt. If he’d felt less for her than he did, the pain wouldn’t have been so intense.

She came from a genteel family, that much had been established. But genteel was hardly sufficient to overcome the unavoidable scandal that would arise from a marriage, for that was what he truly wished for with Marion. He had been out of society for so long that his own standing wasn’t enough. They’d be ostracized. Bridget’s untimely and somewhat suspicious passing would be brought up again. He’d gone to London briefly the autumn after she’d died to see to some business matters, and he’d more than once stumbled on a conversation speculating on what had led to Bridget’s death.