She froze. Heknewthe reason. Did he not? She had wondered, but … Oh, surely he had realized the truth.
“Sometimes one does not,” she said.
“I beg your pardon,” he said almost simultaneously. “I … had no right to ask.”
They resumed walking and made their way beside the gardens toward the trees beyond them. Lydia was finding it a bit hard to breathe evenly.
“We decided not even to be friends,” he said, apparently moving on to another subject.
“We did,” she agreed. So why were they here?
“Which was utterly absurd of us,” he continued. “I missed you while you were gone. Though I did not even realize youweregone. When I got no answer to my knock twice on that one day, I assumed you wished to avoid me and I respected your wish. I stayed away from the village. I did not even attend the Easter services at church. But I missed you, Lydia.”
Perversely—utterlyperversely—she was hurt by the fact that he had not even known she was gone.
“It is hardly surprising you did not know I was away,” she said. “Just a few weeks before that you scarcely knew I existed.”
Oh, petty words, Lydia.
“Because you deliberately hid,” he told her. “Even though you went out and about, you made yourself virtually invisible. It was a remarkable performance.”
“And obviously a necessary one,” she said tartly. “As was my going away for a couple of weeks after … well, after we had agreed not to see each other again. You came anyway.Twice.My deliberatehiding, as you called it, and my going away to stay with my father for a few weeks stopped anything likethisfrom happening.”
“Thisbeing my calling on you again after you had been so unfairly singled out for gossip, I suppose,” he said, “and offering you marriage to shield you from it, and sitting beside you with my sister and her husband at church yesterday to show that we are friendly acquaintances even if nothing more, and persuading you to come walking in the park with me today. All and everything that has happened to you during the past few days ismy fault, I suppose. Yet as I remember it, Lydia, it wasyouwho suggested that we become lovers.”
“Oh,” she cried, stung. “I didnotsuggest any such thing. All I did was ask you if you were ever lonely.”
“You said a lot more than that, my girl,” he told her, “even if you could not force yourself to the end of any sentence you started.”
That wasit. She was horribly mortified. And how dare he remind her? He was not a gentleman. She was sorry she had ever thought he was.
“I am not your girl or anyone else’s, Major Westcott,” she said. “I am not agirl. I am twenty-eight years old.”
“And I am not a major,” he said. “I amMr.Westcott if you must be ridiculous enough to address me formally after what there has been between us.”
There.See? Not a gentleman.
“I am not your girl,Mr.Westcott,” she said. “And I would be obliged if you would turn around and take me back home. Better yet, I will take myself home. I do not expect I will get lost between here and my cottage.”
He clamped her hand to his side as she tried to jerk it free of his arm. And he had the gall to …laugh.
“Our first quarrel,” he said. “Wherever did that come from? I wonder. But do you think perhaps it means we are friends after all, Lydia?”
The man had windmills in his head. “Friends?” she said. “Friends?Harry, you are … You are … absurd.”
“Yes, aren’t I?” he said, grinning. “And I amHarrynow, am I?”
“But I suppose I am still agirl,” she said, refusing to be appeased. “May I please have my hand back?”
“Lydia,” he said, keeping her hand, “you are very much a woman.” And he spoke the words in a velvet voice, the provoking man. She felt it stroking down along her body, inside and out, until it reached her knees and turned them weak. How dared he? She glared indignantly at him.
“Verymuch,” he said in the same voice. “Forgive me. You did not explicitly suggest that we be lovers.”
“But you know very well that I did soimplicitly,” she said. “And it was notexplicitonly because I lost my courage. It does not matter. It happened anyway. But if you are a gentleman you will forget.”
“The funny thing about memory, though,” he said, “is that it cannot always or perhaps ever be commanded at will, can it? Perhaps you are right, though. Perhaps I am not a gentleman. If you wish to go home immediately, I will escort you. But please, will you consider strolling through the jungle walk with me instead? Let us change our minds and be friends after all, shall we? We do not also have to be lovers. Somehow that did not work out when we tried it, did it?”
She closed her eyes briefly and took a deep breath. Snowball was tugging on her lead, eager to move on, and Harry wasstandinghere, invading her space and her consciousness, and she desperately wanted them to be friends again, as they had started to be before she recognized the hopeless danger of their seeing each other privately and tried to turn him away. Only to make love with him instead—andthenturn him away.
