At my stunned silence, he cleared his throat in a rare moment of shyness. “I had hoped to find some mistletoe, wait until Christmas, do this properly. . . .” He swallowed hard, fumbling in his pocket until his hand came out with a silver ring. “I know I said I wanted everything resolved about Edward, but it can’t wait. My entire life I’ve wanted a family. My father’s the only relation who might still be alive, and I’ll never find him; I know that. But I can have this. You and me, our own family.” His blue eyes, soft as the early-morning sky, found me. “I want to marry you.”
My heart wrenched. Who was the man I loved, exactly: The childhood servant? The brilliant surgeon? The single-minded hunter? He was still so young, still unsure of his path in this world, just as I was.
“Juliet?”
My stomach felt hollow. I loved Montgomery, but we had both changed since the island. He’d been forced to slaughter all the beasts he’d once called friends, which had hardened him. Would marriage bring a little of his softness back? And would I make a good wife? I hadn’t any domestic skills; I could barely sew a button. It was more than that, though. A wife had to surrender all her property and wages to her husband, had to seek his legal permission to sign a contract or in some cases, even to travel alone. I trusted Montgomery, but I’d been wrong about men before. . . .
“Juliet, did you hear me?” His voice was heavy with concern.
I gave a jerk of a nod. It was all I could manage.
“Is that a yes?” he asked, as his face broke into a smile.
My lips parted as I started to contradict him. I had nodded to mean I’d heard him, nothing more. The question of marriage was something I couldn’t answer so easily. Elizabeth had once told the professor marriage was a cage, and I wasn’t certain I entirely disagreed. . . .
I felt something cold on my finger and looked down to find him slipping the silver ring on my hand. My voice caught, still speechless, and he drew me into his arms and kissed my temple, my forehead, my cheek.
“I love you,” he breathed.
I stared at the ring. Good lord, how could I contradict him now? Did I even want to? Marriage was logical for us. I loved him. I wanted him. I thought of him constantly. So why did a part of me feel like I was a runaway train headed for broken tracks?
I pressed a hand to my corset, wishing I could ease it just an inch. Maybe my fear was only because this had come so suddenly; I’d never doubted my feelings about him before, except for when he’d left me in the dinghy, but we’d put that past us.
“I’m happy too,” I said. His question had caught me by surprise, but I could make it work. Just because my own parents had been failures in marriage didn’t mean I was doomed to repeat their mistakes. When I smiled, it was genuine. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”
My voice only trembled slightly, and it was easy to pass off as girlish nerves.
His hand tentatively found mine, his thumb absently tracing circles around the silver ring.
“The easiest decision of my life,” I whispered.
Though was it?
Montgomery’s fingers intertwined with mine, still flexing restlessly. Slowly I realized that the source of his agitation no longer had anything to do with Edward; his eyes were drifting over my neckline, gliding over my curves. I had the wild notion that he wanted his hands to be touching all the places his eyes were.
He leaned in to brush his lips across my cheekbone. My pulse sped at his touch, as my mind drifted to being married and everything it meant . . . especially the things that married couples did, alone, things that I’d done in a heady rush with Edward but that I’d take my time about with Montgomery.
My pulse fluttered, a bird without wings. Why was I suddenly so shy around him? It wasn’t as though we hadn’t kissed, hadn’t ever touched each other, and I was hardly innocent when it came to being with men. The house creaked and settled, reminding me that it was empty of servants and Elizabeth. Save Edward locked in the basement and Balthazar guarding him, it was just us.
I crossed to the door and shut it. Engaged to Montgomery James, with his heartbreaking blue eyes. . .
Montgomery pulled me to him and kissed me so hard the stitches reopened on his arms, and I had to set him down and stitch them up again, but he kept smiling and eventually I laughed too, despite my sins, despite his, despite knowing the King’s Club would be coming for us soon, and he kept kissing me, and time ebbed away before the work was done.
“My future wife,” he whispered against my cheek.
His smile only faded at the sound of footsteps on the stairs outside, followed by the sound of the study door thrown open. Elizabeth stood there, snow still caught in the web of her hair.
I gasped, wiping my face of his kisses.
“I was out looking for you,” she said as she took in the scene with a deeply wrinkled brow. “Now please tell me where you have been, and why Mr. James is covered in stitches, and most importantly, who the young man is locked in my cellar.”
THIRTY-THREE
ELIZABETH WAS THE CLOSEST thing to a mother I had.
The night that she had combed my hair and told me her memories of my parents had cemented a bond between us. A part of me longed to tell her about the proposal, yet Elizabeth already thought we were engaged, and judging by her face, she was far more concerned with immediate matters.
We followed her to the library, where she hung her coat by the door while Montgomery and I took our places uneasily on the sofa. My thoughts churned between the ring on my finger, the boy locked downstairs, and how we would possibly explain everything so that she wouldn’t immediately send for the police.
“Mr. Balthazar retired for the evening,” she said. “I found him guarding the basement door when I came home. You can imagine my surprise to find a man locked in the root cellar. I tried to question Mr. Balthazar, but the poor fellow was quite flummoxed by the whole thing, so I gave him one of the professor’s sleep shirts and showed him to an upstairs bedroom.” She knelt by the cold hearth, a strange expression on her face. “He changed his shirt in front of me. Not a modest one, your friend.” Her eyes slid to mine. “And not like any human I’ve ever seen.”
I hesitated. Elizabeth was clever—of course she would have realized, with her medical training, that there was something more than odd about Balthazar’s deformities. But did she suspect his true nature? Like her uncle, she had been staunchly against Father’s work, so I couldn’t imagine what she would do if she knew we’d brought one of Father’s walking experiments into her house, and had another far more dangerous one locked in the basement.