“If there is one.”
“Oh, there’s always something. We might just have to venture a little further from the vendors to find a free table.”
True to his word, Reuben discovered an empty stone table nestled in a fragrant green corner where two elderberry hedgerows met.
Gladys settled herself on one of the squat, curved stone benches. Reuben took the seat next to her, rather than the bench opposite.
“Well?” he asked. “Are you picking up notes of oak and caramel and desperation?”
“Did you even taste yours?” she replied with a lift of her brows. “The primary flavor is toasted barley, balancing out the malt. The slight bitterness in the aftertaste is the perfect touch to round out this particular blend of roasted grains and fermentation.”
He blinked in astonishment. “You do like ale!”
“I told you so, didn’t I?”
“You didn’t tell me you’d be the only person here who really would be able to distinguish nuance several pints later.”
“We’ll see how it goes,” she said with a small half-smile. “This is only my first mug.”
“I’ve no doubt you can do whatever you set your mind to,” he said with confidence. “I should cease being surprised that you keep impressing me more with each passing day.”
Cheeks flushing, she took a drink rather than respond. She reminded herself to stick to the plan. This was not courtship, but vengeance. The only way to regain a small piece of the autonomy, power, and dreams he had stolen from her.
Enacting her well-deserved revenge was turning out to be much harder than expected. Oh, not Reuben’s part. He was even easier to ensnare than she’d dared to hope. The problem was Gladys. And the fact that the more time she spent with her sworn enemy, the less she hated him.
Belatedly, she recalled her hourglass and quickly placed it at the center of the stone table.
“I had dared to hope you’d forgotten,” he said ruefully.
She almost had. Such was the danger of his company. The hourglass was meant to worm inside his head, and now served just as much for her sake. It was becoming increasingly evident that she could only resist him in short doses. An unchecked hour from now, she would still be able to distinguish notes of barley from malt, but might no longer remember the reason she was supposed to hate this handsome scoundrel with every ounce of her soul.
They finished their ale samples at the same time.
“Shall I retrieve the next round?” Reuben asked.
Gladys leapt to her feet. “My treat. Will you guard the table?”
“With my life.” He gave a cheeky salute.
She wasn’t supposed to care about his life, the same way he hadn’t cared about hers. But as she hurried away from him to wander amongst the vendor booths, her feelings were very much in conflict.
On the one hand, he was exactly as she remembered. A spoilt, pleasure-seeking libertine with nothing but time on his hands and predictable selfish desires to indulge.
On the other hand, he was so much more than that. He was surprisingly studious and surprisingly clever and surprisingly thoughtful and surprisingly sweet and surprisingly… not all that bad, if one wasn’t hoping to marry him.
And since Gladys most emphatically did not wish for a connubial future with Reuben or any man, if they had met under any other circumstances, they might have wound up right here where they were today, toasting each other with glasses of ale without the least thought of old hurts and fresh revenge.
All because the damnable man wasn’t seducing her or even courting her. His methods were far more devastating: he was becoming her friend.
She purchased a pair of ales and made her way back to the table as slowly as possible, in the hopes that the hourglass would run out in her absence.
The sand had barely fallen at all. Either the rake had been up to tricks whilst she was gone, or time simply stood still when spent with him, despite the sensation that every minute rushed by breathtakingly fast.
“What did you choose?” he asked with interest.
“I settled on a selection of…” She launched into an unnecessarily detailed explanation, hoping to bore him out of the look of disconcerting admiration currently on his face.
No such luck. With each word, he seemed to find her even more fascinating than before.
