His hand rested upon the frame. He did not look back when he spoke.
“Tomorrow. Four o’clock. The yellow parlour.”
“You will come?”
“I will.” A pause. “I find I am no longer capable of staying away.”
The door closed softly behind him.
Fiona remained where she was, leaning against the bookshelf, one hand pressed to her racing heart. A breathless, incredulous laugh escaped her—half triumph, half disbelief.
He was impossible. Exasperating. Quite possibly the most infuriatingly honour-bound man she had ever encountered.
And she was falling for him—completely, helplessly, without any sensible intention of stopping.
What was happening to her, she did not know.
Only that she did not wish it to end.
Chapter Six
“You are going to the stables? In this weather?”
Molly’s tone suggested Fiona had announced an intention to sail for the Americas in a teacup.
“The rain has ceased.” Fiona fastened the borrowed cloak about her shoulders—one retrieved from the castle stores after her own had been lost in the accident—and reached for her gloves. “The sun is attempting an appearance. And I have been confined indoors for nearly a fortnight. I require fresh air.”
“Fresh mud, more like. The grounds are a swamp, miss.”
“Then I shall traverse it with fortitude.” Fiona adjusted a stray curl beneath her bonnet. “I find I am in need of movement.”
Molly sighed the sigh of a woman long acquainted with futile protest. “Shall I accompany you?”
“There is no need. I am merely taking a turn about the grounds. I shall return before tea.”
Before tea. Before four o’clock.
Before she would sit opposite Christian in the yellow parlour and pretend she did not still feel the phantom imprint of his mouth along her throat, the memory of his thigh pressing between hers, the fierce restraint in his hands.
They had taken tea together each afternoon since the library. Perfectly civil. Perfectly correct. Mrs Blackley’s shortbread. The condition of the roads. Crop yields. Safe topics for the greater part, carefully managed.
A respectable span of carpet between their chairs.
It was intolerable.
He looked at her when he thought she did not notice. She would feel it first—the weight of his gaze—before catching him in the act. Heat, swiftly shuttered. Longing, masked by polite discussion of barley yields.
He was restraining himself. She knew it. He was attempting to be noble.
Some treacherous part of her wished to overturn the tea table and climb into his lap simply to see how quickly that restraint would fracture.
She had not done so.
She was a lady.
But she had thought about it.
Frequently.
