He held her with a look that made her want something she should never want. “Let me pass, please.”
Again he didn’t move.
“Perhaps you would wish to feel the point of my heel again.” She raised her foot and her hem and wiggled the toe of her silk slipper.
He glanced down at her hem after taking what seemed like an hour to rake his gaze down there, then held up his hands in mock surrender and stepped out of her way with over exaggerated gallantry.
She moved swiftly and smoothly away from him, walking with her head high and something inside her hot and simmering. When she was a goodly distance away she called back, “Give me a few minutes and then perhaps my future husband will have you thrown out into the streets right on your thick head.”
Feeling completely proud of her sharp-tongued self for a great parting shot, she marched past the rosebushes, a winner’s smile on her lips and her heart beating just a little too fast for her own comfort.
“George!” That deep voice called out to her. “My head isn’t the only thing that’s thick.”
Chapter Eleven
Never marry for money, ye’ll borrow it cheaper.
—Old Scottish proverb
Georgina sat in the corner of her bedroom, plucking rose thorns from her fingers.
“Ouch!” She held up the sharp thorn and scowled at it. She didn’t know rose thorns could be that thick.
Immediately she groaned and felt herself flush. She was still embarrassed, mostly because she understood exactly what he’d meant. When you were raised with an older brother, you knew about men and women, about intercourse. If you didn’t know about it, you’d never understand what your brother and his friends were talking about, grinning about, or joking about.
She dabbed witch hazel on her skinned palms and tried to picture John Cabot instead of a tall blond man with a face too handsome to be real.
When that didn’t work, she tried to imagine the Cabot fortune: piles of money gleaming in the light, golden and heavy, a few thousand gold bricks all lined up like German soldiers, stacks of stock certificates, mortgages, bank notes and bonds, and jewels in blue velvet boxes with the Cabot monogram, diamonds in particular, which were a wonderful investment and all that much better if they were set in platinum and dripping from your ears, neck, fingers, and wrists.
She smiled.Ah, avarice could bring such splendid thoughts!
But when she opened her eyes, all she saw was the flowered wallpaper of her bedroom and the way it was starting to show age and turn yellow. Even the patterned carpet that had been woven in Antwerp especially for Grandmother Bayard didn’t look rich in a room with old draperies and dingy cushions.
She tried to imagine the room completely redone with watered silk hangings, eighteen-karat gilt frames for the paintings, and French antiques. Just that night she had heard Phoebe talking about a bedroom suite she had seen that had once been used in Versailles.
Georgina would buy it before Phoebe. Yes, one of the first things she would do would be to refurbish all twenty-eight rooms of the house. As Mrs. John Cabot, she would have enough wealth and influence to bribe the importer, enough to buy anything she desired and still never even scratch the surface of the Cabots’ golden fortune.
She closed her eyes and concentrated on the images of the new rooms, Phoebe’s face, and the vast amounts of Cabot money. What she saw instead was golden hair limned in moonlight and a wicked male smile that made her flush. She snatched up the witch hazel and swabbed her heated face with it, thanking heaven that the path had been so dark in that spot, otherwise he’d have seen her digging her way out of the roses she’d walked into and her humiliation would have been complete.
If she had an ounce of sense, she’d have ignored that classically chiseled face, the man’s powerful stance, his amusing banter in that unbelievably stirring voice. She should have had him thrown out. The reason why she hadn’t was not something she cared to analyze at that moment.
“Ouch!” She sucked in a breath as she plucked out the last and the sharpest thorn. She blew on her finger, stood quickly, and tossed the witch-hazel cloth on her dressing table.
Leaning down, she peered in the oval mirror. There was no need to pinch her cheeks. They had plenty of color. She settled for tucking a strand of loose black hair back into the French knot at her neck, then she left the room.
Within a matter of minutes she was down the stairs and back in the gardens, but on the other side, following a different secluded path—the path that led to the gazebo and to her goal.
John Cabot was waiting there for her.
This was it!
For some reason she couldn’t explain, she slowed her steps, then stopped altogether. She could see the cupola of the gazebo and the whimsical but rusty weather vane that was perched atop it. It had a Bayard clock in the center, but its face was unreadable in the dark.
Oddly, the weather vane was pointing the wrong way. What wind there was had been and still was coming from the west, which meant that vane should have been pointing toward the east.
It seemed today that her life was filled with contradictions and impossibilities; clocks that wouldn’t keep time, foolish girls who used the Bayard gala to break engagements instead of bonding in one, servants who didn’t do what they were bid, deliverymen with voices that made her arms break out in goose-flesh and who asked her outrageously personal questions that she had actually answered, and now weather vanes that pointed into the wind.
She began to walk again, a little faster, almost as if she were running away, but the image of that brawny deliveryman went right along with her.
