Grim frustration shot through him. Still, nothing but an impasse. She accepted his kisses and his cock, but not his love. “You are a liar, Nellie. A scared, beautiful little liar. You do not trust yourself with me. Do not trust your ability to resist me.”
Her chin went up. “You are deluding yourself, Jack. I will never change my mind. At the end of these thirteen days, I will leave you, and you will have no choice but to accept it.”
Like hell she would.
He struggled to maintain his outward calm. “We shall see about that, Nellie. Tell yourself that if it makes you feel better. But in the end, the proof is right here, between us. The proof is in your kiss. In your touch. The way your body responds so sweetly to mine.”
With that, he offered her a bow, and then he stalked from the room before he said something he would regret.
Chapter Sixteen
TWELVE DAYS REMAINING,and once again, Jack was right, though she would swallow every last drop of her pride before she would admit it to him.
The morning hour was early as Nell walked on the gravel path surrounding the lake. She was on her way to her customary feeding of the ducks and swans, basket handle draped over her arm.
In the quiet of the summer sun rising high on the day, rich with golden promise, she could acknowledge it to herself. She had spent the rest of the day before hiding from him and the unwanted truth. She did not trust herself with him, and nor did she trust her ability to resist him.
Because she had none.
She rounded the bend in the path where the hedges gave way and the lake spread out in all its majesty. But it was not the beauty of the lake which gave her pause. Rather, it was the man.
Wearing light linens, a jaunty hat covering his dark hair, sat the man who had haunted her dreams. The man she could not seem to stop running from. The man she could also not seem to stop runningtoward. He was seated in the grass as if he had not a care, a lanky arm draped over his bent knee.
With the backdrop of the sparkling lake behind him and the lush, verdant flora, he could have been a painting. She could stare at the view before her and never grow tired or bored of it.
And that is entirely the problem, my girl,she told herself.
“Jack,” she said, stopping a safe distance from him. “What are you doing here?”
Though he had only been visible to her in profile, he turned to face her now, flashing her the half grin that never failed to make her melt. “We have trod upon this tired ground before, darling wife. I live here.”
So he did.
How strange it all still felt. Almost surreal.
“You are being deliberately obtuse,” she accused. “You know very well I meant what are you doing here by the lake at this time of the morning?”
And during the hour she always fed the ducks and swans, no less.
“Sketching,” he told her, holding up a small book which had been hidden in the grass at his side. “Would you believe I found my old books and charcoal? Someone saw them neatly crated and stored in the attic. I wonder who it could have been.”
It had been her, of course, and they both knew it. What he did not know was all the occasions upon which she had ventured to the attic, which smelled of old beams and centuries’ worth of occupants, and which invariably sweltered in the summer months. He did not know how many times she had gone there, opened that crate, taken out his books and flipped through the pages and pages of sketches.
Flowers, trees, the lake, the swans and ducks.
Many of them were of Nell. Common scenes, all of them. Nell reading in the library, her walking in the garden, her asleep, hair fanned out in wild disarray on her pillow. She had looked at those sketches and the anguish had been every bit as real and strong as on the day they had parted.
Each time she had placed them back in their crate, she had promised herself it would be the last she would seek them out. And yet, she always returned.
She forced the memories from her mind now and approached him tentatively, knowing she would only reinforce his assertion that she did not trust herself to resist him if she maintained a distance. “I requested the servants crate up all the personal effects that you neglected to take with you. I had no notion of what was there. If you found it now and have chosen to reacquaint yourself with an art you always enjoyed, I am pleased for you.”
“Are you?” He raised a dark brow, studying her. “Then why do you look as if you would like to club me over the head with the nearest rock and then roll me into the lake?”
She could not stifle her shocked laugh at his suggestion. “You are suggesting I look murderous to you?”
“Perhaps not precisely murderous.” He stroked his jaw in contemplative fashion. “But irate enough to do me bodily harm, certainly. Do not pretend as if it would be the first occasion upon which you would do me violence. You have already scratched me like an angry cat and slapped me twice.”
“All well-deserved,” she told him tartly. “Consider yourself fortunate it was not worse.”
