He slowed, staring at me a moment. “I meant it for a compliment.”
“Pardon?”
“Before. When I chastised you for earnestness.” He cleared his throat. “You took it for a compliment and I meant it as one. I was too embarrassed to say so.”
Too embarrassed? So he did care what I thought of him, a fact that delighted me more than it should. “Why would it embarrass you?”
He dug his hands into the pockets of his coat. “Because you possess a very strange charm. And you reveal to me a weakness in my fortifications against your sex. I’ve built a bulwark against guile, but have no weapon against sincerity.”
“I didn’t realize the sexes were in battle.”
“Always,” he replied with an arch smile. “The eternal one. Against marriage. Against the delusion that two people can make one another happy for a lifetime. It’s a dog of a life when two dissonant tempers meet, and ’tis ten to one this is the case.”
“Then you are a foe of love.”
“Never love. Only marriage. Miss Livingston might have once laid claim to my heart. I ran a great chance of being ostracized by my fellows for dedicating so much time to so trifling and insignificant a toy as woman, but All for Love is my motto.”
Kitty had hurt him somehow, I realized. Or some woman did. Which is why I decided not to cut his pompous self-regard to ribbons. “Kitty can be fickle.”
He ducked his chin into the collar of his great coat. “I would not give her the blame. I’m a stranger from the West Indies. I have no property here in this country, no connections. If I have talents and integrity, these are very spurious titles in these enlightened days.”
So Hamilton was a foreigner. That explained his slight accent—or rather, the way in which he suppressed one. That he wasn’t from the colonies was of no consequence to me whatsoever, but I noted the bitterness. “And yet, your origins have not prevented you from a trusted place in Washington’s inner circle. Does that not fill you with hope for your future?”
“I try not to think of a future. When I was a child, I wished for a war to improve my circumstance, and now war has been the whole of my life since the start of the revolution. So, I expect to mingle my fate with America’s should she lose her struggle.”
It was an admirable sentiment, if expressed with almost a sadness that made me wish to reassure him. “But what if we win?”
He gave me an indulgent look, as if he thought me hopelessly optimistic. “Then I will turn away from the corruption of the world and retire to a frugal life in the countryside roasting turnips, like the general Manius Curius Dentatus.” Another old Roman, I guessed. He seemed fascinated by them. But when he saw the name meant nothing to me, he smirked. “I begin to think I should loan you some books.”
“A musty tome will not tell me what I wish to know.”
“Which is?”
“Whether you could be content planting turnips.”
He dug with the toe of his boot in the snow. “It sounds like a lonely business.”
Now I couldn’t help but twit him. “Didn’t Dentatus have a wife to help him plant his turnips?”
He grinned. “I suppose he must have.”
“What was her name?”
Hamilton paused for a heartbeat. “Aquileia. A sweet and devoted woman—no coquette, not fickle in the slightest.”
“Would it be unkind to think you invented that name?”
His eyes lit with mischief. “You would have to delve into one of those musty tomes to find out.”
We had, by this point, reached the door of my uncle’s lodgings. But instead of opening it for me when we climbed the steps, Hamilton leaned against it to bar my way.
And he sighed.
“Why do you sigh?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. Not precisely. “I suppose you really are a perfect little nut-brown maid with eyes like a Mohawk beauty . . .”
“Do you mean that for a compliment?” I asked, fighting the blush that surely stained my cheeks.
“It does me no credit that you should have to ask.” He inched closer to me, and as the bow fastening my hood had come loose, he took the liberty of unraveling it completely. “I suppose your beaus in Albany have paid you better tribute. And that, like a coquette, you’ve shunned them and gloried in their broken hearts.”
With the ribbons of my hood in his hands, he tugged me until we were so close I thought he might kiss me. And caught up in the spell, I wanted him to. Desperately. “Sir, I hope you will believe me when I say I wish to be a mender of hearts rather than a breaker of them.”