“Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “Are you engaged to dance this set?”
“No,” she said.
“Neither am I,” he said in some relief. “It is exceedingly warm in here, is it not?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Shall we stroll outside,” he suggested, “until everyone else is ready to leave?”
She hesitated for only a moment.
“Thatwouldbe pleasant,” she said.
And so five minutes later they were strolling along the village street, past the crush of carriages and servants waiting to pick up their respective passengers, past the shop, the churchyard, and the vicarage, and the church itself. She had taken his arm, and after a few minutes he clasped her hand in his, lacing their fingers and pressing her arm to his side.
“Being here for these last two weeks has reminded me of how very much more I enjoy the country than London or Brighton or any other large center,” he said. “I think I really must go home as soon as my mother’s house party has ended. Perhaps I will not have missed the whole of the harvest. And perhaps…Well, never mind.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “your dream really will come true one day soon. I hope so. You belong with people like these.”
“I would not have enjoyed these two weeks half as much, though, if I had not met you,” he told her, and was surprised by the sincerity of his words. They were the sort of empty, meaningless words he usually spoke when flirting
“The two weeks are not quite at an end,” she said. “There are still three days left. Oh, dear,onlythree days.”
Her tone was wistful. After those three days for her, of course, there was only a return to school and work to look forward to—though he knew from what she had said on other occasions that she genuinely enjoyed teaching. He knew too—she had just admitted it—that the idea of teaching for the rest of her life fell far short of her dreams.
They had stopped outside the church, in the shadow of an elm tree.
“Do you wish you could stay longer, then?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” she said. “All good things must come to an end, and it is time to go back. It is just that this has been the loveliest holiday I have ever spent, and there is a certain sadness in knowing that it is all but over.”
“Has it been made lovelier by the fact that I have been here?” he asked her.
Again it was the sort of question he would ask when flirting with a woman—and he would smile andshewould smile, and they would both know he meant nothing by it. But Susanna Osbourne was giving serious consideration to the question, and he waited for her answer as if it were somehow important to him.
“Yes,” she said softly. “I have valued our friendship.”
She was, he noticed, already referring to it almost in the past tense. Soon it would be fully in the past—it was very unlikely that they would meet again after they left here. He never went to Bath, and she almost never left it.
“Friendship,”he repeated softly, bending his head closer to hers. “It does not seem a strong enough word, does it? Are we not a little more than just friends?”
And what the devil did he mean by that? But unfortunately it was only later that he thought to ask himself the question. At present he was caught up in an uncharacteristic moment of seriousness and sincerity.
“Oh, don’t say so,” she cried, and he could hear distress in her voice. “Please don’t say so. Don’t spoil what we have shared. Don’t flirt with me.”
Oh, good Lord!
“Flirtation is the farthest thing from my mind,” he assured her.
Yet if it was not flirtation, whatwasit exactly? He had the dizzying feeling that he had inadvertently steered his boat into uncharted waters.
And then, because he had tipped his head downward and she had not moved, their foreheads touched. He closed his eyes and did not move. Neither did she.
He felt a sudden, deep melancholy again, even worse than he had felt yesterday after their walk to the waterfall.
He opened his eyes, moved his head slightly, and brushed his lips over hers.
But only for a brief, mad moment before lifting his head and gazing off toward the church. Their hands were still clasped tightly, he realized.
