She had also been very aware as she kissed him of his masculinity, of the intimacy that had lain just a heartbeat away, though his lips had not moved against hers, and his hand had not touched her.
It was his masculinity she most feared.
Or, rather, her own damaged femininity.
“It is a lovely house,” she said after a while. “I can understand why you are so attached to it. The rooms are square and high-ceilinged and almost stately, are they not? And the windows fill them with light.”
The back windows looked out on the vegetable garden and the wooded slope, while those in front faced onto the flower garden and the rest of the park. The house was enclosed by beauty. And yet all the splendor of the sea and the coast lay just a mile or so away.
“I fell in love with it the first time I came here to visit,” he said. “There are some places like that, though there is not always a rational explanation of why they grab the heart when other places, equally lovely or even more so, do not. I am very fond of Glandwr and of the cottage where I now live, but they do not cry outhometo me.”
No place had ever done that to Anne, though she had grown up happily in her parents’ home in Gloucestershire and had felt as if her cottage at Lydmere was a blessed sanctuary. And she loved Claudia’s school, where she now lived. But it was nothome. Again she envied Mr. Butler that he had Ty Gwyn and hoped the Duke of Bewcastle would agree to sell it to him. Ty Gwyn was a place where a person could set down roots that would last for generations. It was a place where one could be happy, where one could raise children, where one could…
But Mr. Butler would live here alone.
And she would never live here. There was no point in weaving dreams about it.
“The house feels blessedly cool,” he said when they had seen every room and were standing in the tiled hallway again. “Shall we eat our picnic tea in here? Or would you prefer to sit out on the lawn?”
“In here,” she said. “Let me fetch the basket.”
“We will take one handle each,” he said.
She ought to have opted for the lawn, she thought ten minutes later as they set out their little feast on the small table in the morning room. It was true that they had become overheated by the sun. But outdoors there were more sounds from nature to distract one’s attention and more to look at and less awareness that they were a man and woman together and that there was something going on between them that both of them were aware of and uncomfortable with.
Something that made the air about them taut with tension.
His cook had made little meat pasties for them and cucumber sandwiches and an apple tart. She had included generous slices of cheese and the inevitable lemonade. Anne arranged it all on the table with the dishes that were also in the basket. She poured their drinks.
They ate in near silence, and when they did talk, it was on the sort of inconsequential topics that strangers would have chosen. They must have spent ten whole minutes discussing how long they expected the hot, sunny spell to continue.
“I heard one member of the chapel congregation remark to someone else after the service last Sunday,” he said, his eye twinkling, “that we are bound to suffer for all this sunshine and heat with terrible weather later on. The eternal pessimist, I would say.”
She had been there with him again.
“But they were all speaking Welsh,” she said.
He looked arrested for a moment.
“And so they were,” he said. “Perhaps I understand more of the language than I realized. Goodness, soon I will be a full-fledged Welshman. Before long I will be playing the harp. But no.” He glanced down at his empty sleeve. “Perhaps not that.”
They both laughed, and some of the tension dissipated.
Finally she talked about the house.
“If it becomes yours,” she asked, “will you keep everything as it is?”
It was fully furnished.
“For a while, yes,” he said, sitting back as she cleared up the remains of their picnic and put everything away in the basket before crossing the room to stand looking out the front window. “I fell in love with it as it is, and it would be foolish to change everything merely because I could. I would make changes gradually as I became convinced that I wanted something different. The prevailing browns in the hall can be gloomy on a gray winter’s day, for example. They might be the first to go.”
She watched the sheep grazing in the meadow and felt the pain of a nameless longing tighten her chest. The longing to see the hall as it would be, perhaps? And the certain knowledge that she never would.
“What would you change if it were yours?” he asked.
“Nothing much,” she said. “It has been well and tastefully furnished. But perhaps I would replace the reds in this room with primrose yellows. It is a morning room with windows facing both south and east. It is the room in which one ought to be able to start the day in a sunny mood—even a stormy day in January.”
“Perhaps,” he said, chuckling, “I will change the predominant colors in here to primrose.Ifthe house is ever mine, that is.”
