“I have not had much cause for it,” she admitted.
When had she last experienced mirth? To her dismay, Pippa realized she could not recall. She jerked her gaze away from her daughter to find him watching her still, his regard not just warm but electric. He was looking at her in the fashion of a man who wanted what he saw before him.
He was looking at her as he once had, long ago.
She had convinced herself that look had been a lie. Over the years, she had forgotten that look. But she remembered it now. And she remembered more than that. The way it had felt, sitting with him beneath the stars as he showed her the constellations. How everything had seemed possible.
The love beating in her heart.
Roland had been her first love. George had been her second.
Dangerous thoughts. One day married to the Duke of Northwich, and already, she was falling beneath his spell. She could not afford to do so. Trusting George had proved her downfall. Trusting another man so soon felt not just dangerous but terribly foolish. Especially this man, for whom she had once felt so very much.
“I hope I shall give you a reason to laugh more,” her new husband told her, sounding as earnest as he looked.
Her heart gave a pang, but she could not speak.
“And to smile more,” he added, his gaze lowering to her lips.
She felt that stare in a tingle on her mouth, in the remembrance of the morning’s raw exchange, in a frisson skipping down her spine.
“I shall try,” she told him before she could think better of it.
And what was this, making promises to her husband of just one day?
Had her exchanges with George ever been so easy, so effortless? Had she ever ached for him the way Roland made her ache? She did not think so. How easy it had been to thrust aside those old feelings when she had believed the worst of him. No longer so easy to ignore or banish.
“And I shall make every effort to see that you do,” he said, giving her a wink.
His dark-brown eyes burned into hers, and for that sun-drenched afternoon in the Wylde Park fields, a seed of hope was planted within her.
Only time would tell if it grew.
Chapter 14
The night was warm, the sky velvet and dark overhead, brightened by the glistening marks of the stars. Roland lay on his back on the coverlet he had spread in the fragrant grass, on a knoll overlooking the stream and lake in the valley below the main house. Stretched out on her back at his side was his wife.
Such a strange word, monosyllabic, four letters, the meaning so incredibly significant and powerful.
He had been married to Pippa for three days, and already, he was happier than he had been in…
Since he had first met her in Oxfordshire.
Five years, to be specific.
Five years to the bloody month. It had been held in late June, Auntie Mil’s country house party. Although it felt as if a lifetime had passed since then, there was an undeniable rightness. Fate, his mother would have said, for she had believed in the mythical and the unseen. She had often told him that the world possessed hidden secrets, powerful forces. She had taught him to respect the journey of life, whatever it held. The good, the bad, the painful, the joyous.
Still, despite the deep and abiding sense of contentment pervading him at having Pippa here with him, his wife at last, there remained a dark cloud hanging over them. He had received word from Stone that the investigation was progressing nicely. However, progressing was not the same as catching the bastard responsible for attacking Pippa. Roland wanted to be certain neither she nor Charlotte would ever be forced to pay the price for George Shaw’s sins again. His inability to bring the villain to justice himself was a constant source of frustration for him.
“You are quiet this evening,” Pippa observed.
“I am drinking in the moment,” he said, putting thoughts of the potential danger still facing her aside for now.
He turned toward her, admiring her silhouette in the silvery moonlight. She had worn a crimson silk gown for dinner that evening, and he had spent the entire meal in an acute state of longing. All that creamy skin on display, the tiny buttons on the bodice he had itched to undo, her chestnut hair twisted into a coil high on her head—a sign her injury was healing. She grew more beautiful, and more difficult to resist, by the moment.
For the purpose of their sky watching, she had changed into a far less cumbersome gown, without a bustle so she might stretch on the ground and peer into the sky with him just as they had done so long ago in Oxfordshire.
“As am I,” she said softly, before turning her head so she was once more gazing up at the sky.
