“It does, doesn’t it? Short and plain.” She waved her free hand before her, as if she was a vendor displaying her wares. “That’s me.”
Brittle. That would be another word he would use to describe her. But he would keep that one to himself.
He really took her measure for the first time. It was true, she was short in stature. And petite, waifish even, not a curve on her. Indistinct brown hair and gray eyes. She had the lovely kind of skin, translucent and clear, that young ladies likely envied, yet she wasn’t the sort who would draw his eye in the normal course of events.
But did that matter? Perhaps those very qualities made her the perfect match for him. Miss Fox would never invite gossip or excite scandal, unlike—
He stopped the sentence in its tracks. It wouldn’t do to think ofherin the moment he was coming around to Miss Fox.
“Short, yes,” he began, “but to the point. I was thinking more along the lines of classic and English.” He could stop there, but he wouldn’t. A bit of kindness might blunt her sharp edge. “I think another word could be used to describe you.”
“And what word would that be, my lord?”
“Pretty.”
A deep blush spread from her modest décolletage, and he intuited this was no contrivance to display maidenly modesty. Miss Fox didn’t want to blush, but couldn’t help herself. It was possible she’d never been called pretty. How very young she appeared, how very vulnerable. Likely no one ever noticed her vulnerability, hidden as it was beneath her prickly exterior.
The birds trilling in the trees and the mellow sway of the breeze through the canopy above, they strolled in silence, and unease dissipated beneath the gentle persuasion of a lovely spring day.
They rounded a bend in the path, and she emitted a squeaky, high-pitched, “Yip!”
“Miss Fox, are you injured?”
Her hand disengaged from his arm as she struggled to his right with an adversary he couldn’t make out. “My skirts have been caught by a tenacious gooseberry bush,” she said as she continued to wrestle with her verdant adversary. “The Green Park is quite a wilderness.”
Jake stepped forward, intent on helping Miss Fox, when a familiar figure snagged the corner of his vision. In the distance, the figure stood bent over a sketchpad, charcoal a whir across paper. Two weeks ago, he wouldn’t have given that figure a second glance. Today, it stopped him in his tracks.
Olivia. His gaze drank her in like desert sand consumed the first drops of a monsoon rain.
“She is the sort who draws the eye, isn’t she?” a voice with an edge of tempered steel cut into thoughts he had no business having.
Of course. Miss Fox had noticed. “My apologies, if I—”
“No need to apologize, my lord,” she said, hands patting and smoothing her rescued gown, pretty blushes a thing of the past. “I’m made of sterner stuff than that.”
He didn’t think she could have said anything that could have made him feel more like a cad. But Olivia stood in his line of vision, and he was powerless to look away. She hadn’t yet noticed them, immersed as she was in the world she was creating on that piece of paper. He found himself in the strange position of envying a piece of paper. This was the man she reduced him to.
Of a sudden, her hand stilled, mid-stroke, and she froze, her gaze trained straight ahead of her. Suspense held his breath tight in his chest. One by one, she slid her materials into a black leather case before unexpectedly pivoting to face him and Miss Fox. Her gaze darted back and forth between them, once, twice, and she swallowed, drawing his eye toward the undulant column of her ivory throat. He’d licked a bead of sweat up its length only yesterday.
His mouth went dry. Only another lick would satisfy this particular thirst.
As he and Miss Fox drew close, he saw that Olivia understood what he was doing in the Green Park with Miss Fox. Hands at her sides, bland smile pasted onto her lips, she awaited their approach, her entire countenance placid and unmoving.
“Lady Olivia, how remarkable to find you here,” he said once they’d drawn within comfortable speaking distance.
“Indeed,” she returned. Her bland, little smile, the mask she employed for Society, hadn’t budged a jot. She didn’t want to give anything of herself away in front of Miss Fox. Or him.
How unlike the Olivia he’d known only yesterday. For all the world she looked as if she’d succeeded in purging her system of him. A pit opened up inside him, and a roil of nausea flipped his stomach over.
As they stood in an uneasy triangle, awkward silence charged the air. Neither lady appeared willing to speak to the other, and judging by the fact that their gazes rested on indistinct points in the distance, neither appeared willing to look at the other, either. “Are you acquainted with one another?” he asked, choosing a direct approach.
Olivia’s lips quirked to the side, and her gaze, at last, found his. The pit in his stomach no longer felt bottomless, not with her eyes meeting his, her mask for Society unable to reach there, not with him. “We’ve exchanged a pleasantry or two,” she said, “but never beenproperlyintroduced.”
Another silence, awkward and confused, expanded between them. Miss Fox shifted uncomfortably at his side, and Olivia’s eyes rolled to the sky. “Lord St. Alban,” she began, her voice longsuffering as if she was addressing a particularly imbecilic pupil, “I believe this is where you introduce Miss Fox to me.”
The exasperated huff in Olivia’s tone was impossible to miss, but he also sensed her pleasure in giving him another Society lesson. “Of course, my apologies”—He was forever apologizing today—“Lady Olivia, may I introduce Miss Fox to you?”
Olivia inclined her head, and Miss Fox dipped into a shallow curtsy before her social better. “My lady.”
