Was that a fond look he just gave her? If it was, it passed too quickly for her to be sure. “Camille is older than I am,” he told her when she sat back down. “She used to be the most stuffy, self-righteous, joyless person you could possibly imagine, and she was betrothed to a man who was all those things and more. He dropped her after what my family refers to as the Great Disaster—capital letters, I would have you know. She is now married to an artist and school-teacher, and they live in a big house in the hills above Bath, running a sort of artists’ school, live-in retreat from the world, performance center, party venue, name it what you will. They have nine children, six of them adopted, three of their own. Camille always looks ever so slightly disheveled and has a tendency to go about barefoot with a child astride one of her hips. The latest adoptees are twin baby girls whom no one else was willing to adopt together. She is as happy as it is possible to be. And more vividly beautiful than she ever was before, I might add. Joel, her husband, is equally happy. If what happened to uswasa catastrophe, then it worked out remarkably well for my elder sister.”
Lydia smiled. How wonderful Camille’s life sounded. Chaotic, perhaps, but also wonderfully …giving.And it sounded as if she must have a close partnership with her husband.
“And the younger of your sisters?” she asked. “Is she younger than you?”
“Abigail. Yes,” he said. “I am in the middle. Abby married my fellow officer and closest friend in the church here shortly before the old vicar retired and you came with your husband to take his place. It was a marriage of convenience made in haste to enable Gil to get his daughter back from her grandparents, who had taken her just before his first wife’s death while he was away, fighting at the Battle of Waterloo. They were refusing to give her back. The marriage quickly turned into what is now very obviously a love match. They have two sons of their own in addition to Katy, the daughter for whose sake they married. They live in Gloucestershire, where Gil has turned, quite improbably, into a farmer. Abby informed me while I was visiting them after Christmas that she considers her life as close to perfect as it is possible to be. I believe her.” He paused in thought for a moment. “I cannot say I have always considered it lovely to have sisters. I often thought them the world’s worst pests when we were growing up. But I am extremely fond of them now.”
He took another biscuit off the plate. “These are exceedingly good,” he said. “You really need to hide the rest of them, Lydia, or at least move the plate out of my reach.”
Instead she pushed it a little closer to him, and they both laughed.
“Temptress,” he said, but he took yet another before he got to his feet, scraping his chair back over the stone flags of the kitchen floor as he did so. “I must go outside and tidy up and then bring in some wood for your wood box. I see it is almost empty. I will need to get going then. I have promised to accompany my steward to the home farm this afternoon to adjudicate a dispute over whether we need an additional barn or a mere extension to the existing one. I have a hard life, Lydia.”
“You do not need to do anything more here,” she assured him. “You have already done a great deal.”
But he smiled at her and did it anyway. By the time she had cleared the table and washed up their few dishes, all was neat and tidy beyond the window, and he was approaching the house with an armful of wood. She held the back door open as he carried it inside, and then she hovered in the kitchen while he washed up outside again, drew on his coat, and came back to take his leave.
“I do not know how to thank you,” she told him.
“You already did,” he said. “The toast and cheese were just what I needed, and your ginger biscuits are delicious.Andyou are going to knit me a scarf. But no hat. Please.”
“I promise.” She smiled back at him. “Thank you, Harry.”
He stood just inside the back door, ready to take his leave. Snowball was sniffing his boots. There was a moment when he might have left without further ado, but he hesitated that moment too long and ended up setting his hands on her shoulders instead and brushing the sides of his thumbs along her jaw.
“Shall I return this evening?” he asked her, his voice suddenly low and husky, his eyes very direct on hers.
She felt her smile drain away as she swallowed and licked her lips.Say no. This must not go any further. Say no.
“If you wish,” she said.
“I rather believe I do,” he told her, and his eyes held hers before dipping to look at her lips. He tipped his head slightly sideways and drew her a little closer. Her heart felt as if it were about to beat right out of her chest—and her ears. He looked into her eyes again and then shut his own as he closed the distance between their mouths.
It was a soft, light kiss with closed mouths and no attempt to make anything more sensual of it. A kiss of friends? Lydia felt it all the way down through her insides to her toes as she set her hands on either side of his waist.
Then he was looking back into her eyes, his hands still lightly clasping her shoulders.
“Sometime soon,” he said, “perhaps this evening, I will kiss you properly, Lydia. Or perhaps, in the spirit of independence,youwill kissme.”
It seemed strange that last evening when he had asked her to invite him inside and she had tacitly agreed by leaving the gate open and not looking back, she had expected to go to bed with him. Yet now she felt everything was moving along much too fast. He was so much more … masculine than she had expected. So much more … real. And so much … lovelier. And oh goodness, what had happened to her vocabulary? He was so very … likable. What a very weak word.
But could she bear having this man as a lover? When she had conceived the idea, it had been entirely in the realm of dreams. She had wanted a balm to the ache of loneliness that seemed to be a part of her very being. She had wanted something to bring some vividness into her life. She had wanted toliveat long last. Yet the dream had been essentially impersonal, perhaps because she had known it stood little to no chance of coming true. She had not known how, in the world of reality, she would feel in his company or when he spoke to her and smiled at her. And touched her and kissed her. It had not occurred to her that the reality would so far exceed the dream that she would be unable to cope with it. How could she have known? She had done so little living despite the fact that she was twenty-eight years old and a widow. Almost all her living so far had been done in the interior world of her dreams.
Could she bear to step beyond dreams into reality?
She was terribly afraid that something would be irrevocably lost if they did become lovers—not only this specific dream but her ability to dream at all. And the tentative friendship that seemed to be growing between them would be lost too, this mutual sympathy and understanding. This very precious something she had never known before with either a woman or a man.
Oh, she had opened some sort of Pandora’s box a little over a week ago and had no idea what she had unleashed.
“Perhaps,” she said. Perhaps she would let him kiss her tonight, she meant. Perhapsshewould kisshim, though that at least seemed unlikely. She would not know how to go about it—strangely, when she had been married for six years.
She liked his grin. It came slowly now. It was so much more boyish than a simple smile. It set his eyes alight and showed just where laugh lines would settle into their outer corners as permanent wrinkles when he grew older.
“Until this evening, then,” he said, releasing her and turning to the doorway. “Snowball, why are you growling now of all times? I am leaving.”
“I think it must be for that very reason,” Lydia said. “She is sorry to see you go.”
“I have made a conquest of at least one of the ladies in this house, then?” he said. “And, heaven help me, it is the dog.”
