“Only under duress.”
“So, walking with me counts as duress?”
“Certainly.” He clasped his hands again, tighter this time.
April felt her cheeks warm but didn’t look away. “You hide it well.”
As the path curved beneath their feet, his pace slowed slightly, and his hands dropped to his sides, fingers brushing the edge of his coat. “About last night,” he said, and the warmth in her chest faltered.
“Yes?”
“I won’t promise romance, April. It would be a falsehood. I don’t believe in manufacturing it merely to suit expectations.”
She looked ahead. “And you think I do?”
“No,” he said quietly. “I think you value honesty. And you deserve it. Even if it disadvantages me.”
She turned to him. “Then why do any of this? Why bring me poetry? Why be here at all?”
His eyes flicked to hers. “You are impatient.”
“You’re evasive.”
“Possibly.” He reached into his coat as if to gesture then stopped himself. “But today, I have a purpose. I would like you to meet someone.”
April frowned. “Who?”
“My aunt. Lady Darnell.”
“The one who keeps her pug in a bonnet?”
“The same.”
April considered him. Considered the man who would bring her poetry and confess only half of what he felt. And then ask her to meet his family without ever quite explaining why.
She said, “Well. If I am to be paraded before family, I shall require another book.”
“I brought two,” he replied.
This time, she did not hold back her laugh. “Is this the second book, then?” she asked as they stopped beside an iron bench. “Or do you keep a satchel of literary surprises tucked in your coat?”
Without a word, he reached into his coat and produced a small, leather-bound volume. He handed it to her. April turned it over in her hands and blinked.
“This is a treatise on horse breeding.”
“Indeed.”
“From poetry to pedigrees. You are a study in contradictions, Theodore.” April watched him to see whether he would react to her use of his first name. He did not.
“You seem surprised,” he said instead.
“You hardly struck me as a man who discussed hoof conformation over tea.”
“And yet many of my horses have won at Epsom.”
That did make her pause. “Truly?”
He inclined his head. “I breed them on my estate in Gloucestershire.” Then he added, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, “I also keep a castle there.”
