She gasped. If the sun had been shining, he would’ve detected twin patches of scarlet blazing across her cheeks, he was certain. “Again, you’re sounding like one of my cousins.”
“Which one?”
“Take your pick.”
“I think it’s still Archie.”
“You’re being incorrigible.”
He shook his head and took a step forward, closing more of the distance between them. “I’m simply a man trying to figure out how tobe in the same room—or fairy glen—with the woman who has come to occupy his every waking thought and more than a few sleeping ones, too.”
“By making me your fool.”
“You could never be that.”
She set her gaze on the narrow valley below.
“I’m madly in love with you, Juliet.”
Her head whipped around. “Youloveme?”
“Aye.”
“Youloveme?”
“Erm, aye.”
She exhaled a sharp breath through her nose. “You certainly have an odd way of showing it. I spent all last night writing a poem to the woman you love.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“The dark circles beneath my eyes this morning could attest to it.”
“But you didn’t,” he insisted. “Not unless you wrote it to yourself.”
Her mouth snapped shut. She was thinking.
Which could be good.
Or very, very bad.
“I…I must go,” she said, moving toward the sheep scramble, her feet picking up pace with every step. “I need time with my thoughts.”
“I understand,” he said to her back. Juliet was a thinker. It was a large part of what made her Juliet.
And he loved Juliet. But…
“Juliet?”
She met his gaze over her shoulder.
“Allow yourself to feel, too,” he called out, his heart in every word. “What we have is more than what we’ve shared with our bodies.” He let that sit in the air for a moment. “Tomorrow evening…I’ll see you at the play?”
Though a storm raged in her eyes, she noddedbefore resuming her descent down the hill.
Clearly, she wished to walk alone. He could respect that, but still he followed at a distance. After he watched her disappear safely through the wide double doors of the assembly rooms, he cut left, choosing to forego the rest of an evening of making idle conversation with neighbors and dancing with winsome daughters.
He’d never been skilled at faking jollity, so it was better he took himself off for a night’s ramble.
