“It is only… I wonder. When walking with me or helping me with the children, or… during any of the numerous ways we have interacted, have you ever considered… I mean, your intentions… have they ever been…” Bother. This more difficult than she’d anticipated. She closed her eyes. It helped. “Courting me. I know our friendship has not been a courtship, but I… would not be opposed to it. Should you be so inclined.” There. She’d done it. And the world had not collapsed. Her revelation had, however, ushered in an unnerving silence. He had no answer for her, or he had one he knew she would not like, and his silence showed an unwillingness to bring her either pain or humiliation.
So silent not even the donkey brayed. Though he did look at her from the corner of his eye as if looking at her full-on would transfer her humiliation to him. Cowardly ass.
But something swished at her skirts. She opened her eyes and looked down.
A little orange fox, its black paws braced against her legs, looked up.
“Shh.” Sir Nicholas stopped her hand from flying to her mouth. “Miss Dean, meet Felix. Felix, meet Miss Dean.” His voice was low and calm. Meant to calm her or the fox, she could not tell. Whichever, though, it worked. Her pulse slowed, and the hard curiosity in the fox’s intelligent eyes softened.
“G-good evening, Mr. Felix,” Jane whispered.
“Hold out your hand.”
“He will not bite?”
Sir Nicholas’s bare hand slipped over hers, large and warm and strong. He guided her hand gently toward the animal, who stretched up, lengthening its white neck as its tiny nose sniffed her fingers. Felix wiggled his nose, reared back as if he’d found something questionable.
“Here. Let me…” A few flicks of the man’s capable fingers freed the buttons of her glove, and he tugged it off. Skin to skin. Electric. The pads of his fingers rough of her wrist. Her pulse flew against her skin as if trying to get to him. And when he intertwined their fingers, his hand atop hers, and guided her toward the fox once more, she had to close a sigh tightly behind pressed lips. Thank heavens he did not seem to notice. “Try again.”
She held her breath as Felix sniffed once more. His ears twitched, and when the fox butted his head against her hand, Jane gasped.
But Sir Nicholas chuckled, releasing her hand to pat the fox’s head. “Finally back, are you, boy? Deuced horrid timing, though.” The fox darted away, and Sir Nicholas dropped his head, scratched the back of his neck just above his red cravat.
If there had been nothing but silence before the fox, now the world seemed to be composed entirely of noise. The flick of the donkey’s tail. The clop of the goat’s hooves. The wind through the trees. The beating of her heart.
“Miss Dean,” he finally said, “I cannot deny… I have considered it. Many times over the last year. I have even… desired it. We would rub along well together, I think. In a variety of ways.”
“But?” She heard the objecting in his voice, the eventual and unavoidable slip fromI desireto reasons he should not.
“We are quite different creatures, are we not?”
“You mean because I’m a bastard?”
“No!” His hands were on her then, one palm on her cheek, encouraging her to turn toward him, the other on her shoulder, a solid weight, a reassurance. “God, no. I do not care about that. Besides, you’re a duke’s sister?—”
“Half sister.”
“And I doubt he would approve of a man like me courting you. A mere baronet.”
“You are titled.”
“A title that only exists because my grandfather made excellent weapons for the king. I’m analchemist. Alaborer. Your kind waste no love on mine.”
“Because of my birth, I am not one of them, either. Not truly. And I labor, as well. These differences do not matter.”
“I…” His exhale quivered somewhere between a snort and a growl. “I am in no position to take a wife. The king offered me my father’s old munitions contract, and I refused it. My annuity is not enough to keep you in any sort of comfort.”
“I do not need comfort.” Just security, the knowledge her brother or future husband would not rip away the very ground she stood on over and over and over again.
“You say that, but?—"
“Do you snore?”
“No.”
“Are you secretly cruel?”
“No.”
