“Marriage,” Nick finished for her, vowing at once not to finish anymore of her sentences.
Her smile skittered away, and she nodded.
Once again, the parade of servers returned to clear their plates and set the course offromage. Nick dismissed the attendants for the night.
Mariana ran her fingers up the stem of her glass, and Nick had to look away. While he related to the impulse for more champagne, there was a different appetite that had been awakened and required but one meal to reach satiety.
One meal? No. Once with his wife had never been enough. Their Scottish honeymoon attested to that fact.
“About the Comte de Villefranche?” she began, pulling him away from thoughts that could reach no satisfying end.
“Yes?” he asked, clipped, curt. He shouldn’t feel annoyed that she’d brought up the mission. After all, she was his agent.
“I’ve given my encounters with him a bit of thought. He may be young and idealistic, and perhaps a bit brash, but he doesn’t strike me as a revolutionary bent on anarchy.”
“What sort of revolutionary is he?”
“The well-meaning sort, I think.”
“Thewell-meaningsort?” Nick asked, unable to hide his skepticism.
“Perhaps the misguided sort.”
“Are you willing to wager the lives of England’s sons on conjecture?”
Mariana held her tongue and averted her gaze.
“Don’t allow a handsome, young idealist to turn your head.”
“Handsome?Young?”
Nick detected the insinuation in her tone. “Impetuous,” he continued, hoping that settled it.
“Ah,” she drew out. The subtle lift of her eyebrows spoke of disbelief.
The Mariana who said, “Ah,” and kept the remainder of her thoughts to herself was new, the opposite of the gallivanting girl who stomped across the Skye countryside proclaiming her impending starvation to the world. He wasn’t sure which version he preferred.
She pushed away from the table and stood. Champagne glass in hand, she stepped toward a patch of peppermint dahlias in bloom. “While on his famed expedition to Mexico,” she began, changing the subject, “Alexander von Humboldt sent dahlia seeds to Paris, London, and Berlin.” She glanced over her shoulder, a glimmer of mischief in her eye. “Perhaps you encountered Humboldt on one of your Mississippi riverboats?”
“Humboldt and I don’t travel in the same circles.”
She returned her attention to the effulgent blossoms. “Kew Gardens has maintained a lively dahlia patch from Humboldt’s seeds.”
As Mariana continued with a botany lesson about the edible tubers—apparently ancient South American civilizations used them for food—it struck Nick that her education, and her need to educate, was a device intended to place distance between them.
“The effect of the candlelight on the flower petals is lovely,” she continued. “The way they absorb the light, yet reflect it with a soft, deep glow. Like little scraps of velvet beneath a night sky.”
“Have you become a poet, Mariana?” Given her response to turn away from him, would he have detected a blush in the light of day?
“If I didn’t know better,” she began, a hitch in her voice that only he knew, “I would think this the scene of a seduction.”
Unable to remain seated quietly when such words issued from her lips, he rose. “If you didn’t know better?”
She caught his eye over her shoulder. “Yes.”
“Are you so certain it isn’t?” He wasn’t so certain himself.
“Yes.”
