“Good morning, Mrs. Tavernor,” he called, his voice pleasant and cheerful, as it always was. Lydia looked around in feigned surprise while her dog abandoned the stick game in favor of the greater excitement of charging toward the fence, growling and baring her teeth and then barking as though she considered herself the equal of man and horse combined.
“Good morning, Snowball.”
“Oh,” Lydia said, all bright with false amazement. “Good morning, Major Westcott. I did not hear you coming. It is a beautiful day, is it not?” It was actually blustery and chilly. Clouds hung low with the promise of rain at any moment.
“I find every morning beautiful when I wake to the realization that I am still alive to enjoy it,” he said, touching the brim of his hat with his whip.
And it struck Lydia that she had done him an injustice by thinking of him as good-looking but not outstandingly handsome. Actually he looked nothing short of gorgeous astride his horse. And virile. And several times more powerful—and appealing—than he looked when he was not riding. Though even then … He sat there now with graceful ease, as though he and his horse were an indivisible unit.
Snowball was incensed by them.
“There is no doubting how you came by your name,” the major said, addressing the dog.
“She was a gray, bedraggled puppy with ragged, matted fur when Mrs. Elsinore found her squeaking and crying on the back step of the vicarage,” Lydia told him. “She was shooing the poor thing away when I happened to come into the kitchen. I believe a vagrant we had fed earlier must have abandoned her and left without her. She looked dreadful, but after I had fed her some milk and washed her and rubbed her dry with a towel, I discovered she was white and fluffy and eager to live and to wash my face with her little pink tongue. That was early spring two years ago, and the snowdrops in the garden were just coming into bloom. I thought she needed a pretty springlike name and called her Snowdrop for a day or two. But she looked far more like a snowball, so that is who she became.”
Far too much information, Lydia, she told herself. She rarely spoke at such length to anyone except perhaps her new friends. Certainly not to any man. But she had talked more than usual last week too when he had walked her home, she remembered. And in the end she had spokenfar too much.
Isaiah had wanted her to find another home for the dog. He had not been a hard-hearted man—far from it—but he did not believe animals belonged inside a house. Definitely not his own. Lydia had defied his wishes for surely the only time in their married life.
Major Westcott looked intently at her as she spoke, and it was obvious to Lydia that today he was really seeing her. It was not a reassuring thought. She would far prefer to be invisible again. She could feel herself flushing.
“She has appointed herself your guardian and defender, then,” Major Westcott said, “out of gratitude for being taken in and loved.”
And oh. He smiled. Really it was just with his eyes and a slight lifting of the corners of his mouth. Not a full-on, dazzling smile. It did not matter. Her knees trembled anyway. Idiot woman.
“I have just been invited to a party in honor of Mr. Solway’s birthday tomorrow evening,” he said. “He will have reached the grand age of seventy, and his daughters consider it an occasion for celebration. One can only hope he will agree, since it is to be a surprise. Will you be there?”
“I will,” she told him. “I will be taking a cake I baked.”
“I will be walking there,” he said, “since Solway’s house is even closer to home than Tom and Hannah’s was last week. May I have the pleasure of escorting you home afterward, Mrs. Tavernor?”
Her first instinct was to refuse. Mr. Solway lived only a few houses along the street. Besides … It would be ungracious, though, to tell him his escort was unnecessary. He was looking steadily down at her, waiting for her answer, while his horse pawed the ground and snorted disdainfully at Snowball, who was still bouncing around on her side of the fence, defending her territory with the occasional warning growl. The horse did not otherwise move, however. Major Westcott had perfect control over it.
“Thank you,” Lydia said. “That would be very kind of you.”
He straightened in the saddle. “Until tomorrow evening, then,” he said. But instead of riding away immediately, he continued to look steadily at her, that half smile still softening his eyes and curving his lips. “What kind of cake?”
“Fruit,” she said. “With spices. And marzipan and icing.”
“I wish now I had not asked,” he said. “I may not be able to sleep tonight in anticipation.”
Lydia laughed in surprise at his answer and bit her lip as she stared after him while he rode off up the driveway to Hinsford Manor.
Why on earth did he want to escort her home tomorrow evening when the distance was really quite insignificant? It did not have anything to do with what she had said to him last week, did it? He was not … Oh, surely he was not thinking of taking her up on the offer she had not really made. He could not possibly …Shecould not possibly …
But he had looked very intently at her while they spoke.
He had said—as a joke—that he would not be able to sleep tonight in anticipation. Of eating a slice of her cake tomorrow, he had meant. But what abouther—in all earnestness?
How wasshesupposed to sleep tonight?
Whenever Harry dared to believe that perhaps he had fully recovered at last from his war experiences, something could be relied upon to reveal to him that he had not. That perhaps he never would.
The old, annoying nightmares had returned with a vengeance during the past week, and he knew why. He had felt guilty about being essentially unaware of Mrs. Tavernor’s existence for the past four years although he had seen her at least once a week at church and had even spoken to her and exchanged pleasantries with her outside her cottage during the year or so she had been living there. She had been a nonentity to him. Yet he prided himself upon his courteous attention to other people—people of all social classes and both genders. Courtesy should involve more than just amiable nods and smiles and rote comments upon the weather— and an essential unawareness of the other’s existence.
For years, however, he had deliberately and for his very sanity’s sake looked upon the French armies as one impersonal entity, to be obliterated from existence at every opportunity. He had never looked into the faces of individual French soldiers, either during battle or afterward, when large numbers of them lay strewn, dead, upon the ground between the armies.
Hadhe saved his sanity? Or had something been pushed so deep inside him that it would forever torment him?
