“I did,” she told him. “In the same house actually. He was my father’s ward after losing his parents when he was five. I was very fond of him. He lived with us until he was eighteen, when he inherited his title quite unexpectedly from a relative he hardly even knew of.”
She had been fond of him and yet had avoided his company last evening?
“That must have been a pleasant surprise for him,” he said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Very.”
Pleasant for McLeith, he guessed. Not necessarily for her. She had lost a lifelong friend. Or had she had tender feelings for the man? He was at the garden party. He had arrived late, but Joseph had seen him just before he strolled down to the river. McLeith had been talking with the Whitleafs. He wondered if he ought to tell her but decided against it. He did not want to spoil her enjoyment of the boat ride. And she must be enjoying it. She had called it heavenly.
What a disciplined, restrained woman she was. And yet again he thought of the image of armor. Was there a woman behind the armor? A woman of warmth and tenderness and perhaps even passion? Yet he already knew that she possessed at least the first two.
Butpassion?
It was an intriguing possibility.
She lifted one hand away from the other after a while, slipped off her glove, and touched her fingers to the water. Then she trailed them through it, her head turned to the side, all her concentration upon what she did.
He found the picture she presented curiously touching. She looked lost in her own world. She looked somehow lonely. And even though she lived at a school surrounded by schoolgirls and other teachers, he supposed it was altogether possible that shewaslonely. The Countess of Edgecombe and Viscountess Whitleaf were her friends, but they had married and left both her staff and Bath.
“I suppose,” he said at last, surprised by the reluctance he felt, “we had better turn back. Unless, that is, you would like to row past the city down to Greenwich and on out to sea.”
“And away to the Orient,” she said, looking up at him as she brought her hand back inside the boat, “or to America. Or simply to Denmark or France. To have anadventure. Have you ever had an adventure, Lord Attingsborough?”
He laughed and so did she.
“I suppose,” she said, “the adventure would not seem such a magical thing when night came on and I remembered that I do not have my shawl with me and you developed blisters on your hands.”
“How very unromantic of you,” he said. “We will have to save the adventure for another time, then, when we can make more sensible plans. Though romance does not always have to be sensible.”
The sun shaded her face less efficiently as he turned the boat in the middle of the river. Somehow their eyes met and locked and held before she looked away rather jerkily andhelooked away just a moment later.
There was a curiously charged feeling to the air around them.
He was almost certain she had been blushing as she looked away.
Good Lord, what hadthatbeen all about?
But it was a redundant question. It had been a moment of pure sexual awareness—on both their parts.
He could not have been more astonished if she had stood up and executed a swallow dive into the river.
Good Lord!
By the time he looked back at her, she had donned full armor again. She was stiff and stern and tight-lipped.
He rowed the rest of the way back to the jetty in a silence she did not attempt to break and he could not think of a way of breaking. Strange, that—he was normally quite adept at making small talk. He tried to persuade himself that nothing untoward had happened after all—as indeed nothing had. He hoped fervently that she was not feeling as uncomfortable as he.
But, good Lord, they had merely been sharing a joke.
…romance does not always have to be sensible.
His sister was standing on the riverbank close to the jetty, he could see as the boat drew closer. So were Sutton and Portia Hunt. He had never been more glad to see them. They gave him a way of breaking the silence without awkwardness.
“You have discovered the best part of the garden, have you?” he called cheerfully as he tied up the boat, stepped out onto the jetty, and handed Miss Martin out.
“The river is picturesque,” Wilma said. “But both Miss Hunt and I are agreed that Mrs. Corbette-Hythe’s gardener has been remiss in not having planted some flower beds here.”
“May I present Miss Martin?” he said. “She is owner and headmistress of a girls’ school in Bath and is staying with Viscount Whitleaf and his wife for a short while. My sister, the Countess of Sutton, Miss Martin, and Miss Hunt and the earl.”
