“I would never!” He touched his chest and pretended to look hurt.
“Ha!”
“I mean…” He shrugged and then winked. “If you were to suggest something I did not wish for, I would tell you as much. Honesty, remember.”
“But how would I know you weren’t doing so just to prove that you can? To assert your authority, because you worry that I am taking it from you.”
He rolled his eyes. “Two weeks of being free and she is already starting to act like a tyrant.”
“Oh, you have not seen anything yet,” she grinned.
“I cannot help but feel that I have made a grave error here. Unleashing a monster into the world.”
“Mean.”
“Accurate, I think is the word you wanted to use.”
She scoffed but he could see her smile as they walked. “Are you being serious? About a honeymoon?”
“Eventually,” he said, because he was being serious. “We are married, and we did miss the chance to have one. Besides, it is expected.”
“And since when do you care about what is expected?”
“I don’t,” he agreed. “Maybe I am just trying to do right by you.”
“And since when do you care about doing right by me?”
“Fine, no honeymoon it is. If you’re going to act like that.”
Sophia was dressed in typical half-dress; she had on a soft yellow muslin gown, over which she wore a spencer jacket of burgundy,as well as a bonnet to keep her hair out of her eyes. It was casual and not at all dressy, further proof that she had stopped caring what everyone thought of her.
Gabriel eyed her closely as they walked, and more than once he looked to her arm dangling freely beside her. There was a large part of him that wished to link it, to pull her close, to show her just how he felt. But he stayed that notion…no sense overdoing it when things are going so well.
“Let me think about it,” she said with a sly smile.
“Take as long as you need.”
He continued to eye her sideways as they walked. He looked at the smile on her face, the glimmer in her eyes, the way that she glowed in the soft sunlight. More and more, he was finding it impossible to ignore her beauty, just as he was finding it impossible to ignore what that beauty was doing to him.
His heart began to thump. His tongue swelled in his mouth. He wanted to take her arm, just as he wanted to take her hand and hold it. Confusion reigned supreme inside of him because he had never felt this way about someone before and had no idea how to act.
It simply isn’t me. My entire reputation is built on short courtship, rakish behavior, and not caring one wit about the feelings of others. Women, especially.
This felt like the antithesis of everything he knew about himself, and he was still fighting within not to care that he was changing. Change was good… he had to believe that it was.
Suddenly, Sophia turned stiff and came to a stop.
Gabriel lurched forward in surprise, and when he turned and saw the look on Sophia’s face too -- it contorted in fury – he assumed immediately that he had done something wrong.
“Sophia…” he started carefully. “What… what is the matter?”
She was not paying him any attention. Rather, she looked back down the path, the anger on her face increasing by the second so that he thought she might literally explode from it.
Gabriel followed her gaze and found immediately what had taken her focus.
Not so far down the same path that they walked were a young lord and a young lady. The young lord was typical, the type who always walked with his nose pointed in the air, no chin to speak of, and a look about his stance that suggested something was wedge up his backside. The young lady was dressed well for the circumstance, a lavish gown of blue and green, beyond what a park like this one called for.
However, it was not so much the way the young couple looked that had Sophia’s attention, but how they acted… or how the young lord acted.
