She held out a hand to silence him. “Despite what the grannies may say about the beauty of redheaded babies,ginger hairis an oddity and a nuisance, and I’ve hated mine for as long as I can remember. It overtakes my head, obscures my face; no lady’s maid has ever been able to manage—tosubdueit. All bonnets and most fabrics only serve to make it... orange-er.”
“No,” he denied, intrigued. He came to sit beside her, staring at her head.
“Yes,” she countered. “For years, whenever I entered any room—be it church, or a shop, or as a guest to a tea—the bright, shining beacon of my hair was the first thing anyone saw. The great, audaciousorange-nessof it.”
He shook his head, frowning. “You imagine this.”
“Oh no, it has been said to me again and again. ‘But look at yourhair, Drewsmina.’ ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen hair quite thatred, Drewsmina.’ ‘But has your hair always been so very red, Drewsmina?’ ‘Was your father a leprechaun?’ ‘Perhaps your mother took something during her lying in to cause your hair to be so very—?’”
“Let me guess,” said Ian. “Red?”
“Orange,” she corrected. “And that says nothing of the assumptions about my temper.”
“I would suggest that you exaggerate,” he said tiredly, “but I’ve known the same single-minded fixation. Only with me, it’s, ‘There he stands, the traitorous duke who led his tenants in seditious riots.’ No matter where I go. The pub. The garrison that houses my former regiment. If I walked into the corner butcher’s shop, someone would proclaim it, I assure you.”
“I said it,” she admitted softly. “In Kew Palace.”
“Yes, but at least you said it about a poor sod you thought you’d never meet. If you’d known it was me, you would not have said it.”
“If I had known,” she whispered. “I would not have. I’m so very sorry.”
“Thank you,” he said.
There was a pause. He looked at the railing beside his hip and saw her hand, pink from the cold, splayed against the stone. He wanted to cover it with his own palm. To warm it. To possess it.
He wanted to feel anything but the loneliness of the last three years; the worry for his nieces; the desperation of his tenants.
He mustn’t touch her. It made no sense to touch her. Even so, he stared; he memorized her long fingers and the smooth ovals of her nails.
“One thing I’ve learned about people,” she said, “is that most of themreallystruggle—truly, they rack their brains—to think of anything useful to say.”
He laughed and looked into her face. Their eyes met. They were teal, her eyes. The color of the tall reeds at the edge of his pond.
“When I first began observing birds,” she said, determination in her voice, “I saw again and again how the orange breast of a common robin actually looked very pretty against the blue feathers of his wing. Are you familiar with robins?”
“Yes,” he said, wishing she would look at him again.
“Right. Well, I thought, if this robin can manage to make his orange body look so very nice in contrast to his blue markings, perhaps there is a lesson there.”
“Your blue gown,” he realized.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “Since that realization, I’ve commissioned so many gowns in blue. Not all of them, but more than any other hue. The correct shade of blue strikes a sort of harmony with my hair and makes it less of an oddity and more of a coordinated effort, I should say.”
“But I can barely see your hair,” he said, a complaint.
She opened her mouth to say something but then closed it.
“You’ve hidden it,” he continued softly, frowning at the braided coronet ringing head.
“Yes, well,” she finally said, “that is another technique. Not learned from birds.”
He nodded. What more could he say? He could hardly ask her to elaborate; enough had been said about her hair. And his passions. And likely every other thing. Had three years of seclusion made him...chatty? This had not occurred to him at Avenelle. At Avenelle, he’d hoped to never speak to anyone ever again.
He took a deep breath.
The sounds of the night—rustling wind, and buzzing insects, and scurrying mice—rose up from the garden below, animating the silence.
Her nose, he noticed, was red from the cold. The light through the dining-room door had been reduced to a dim glow, an ember fire in one grate. The staff had cleared the table. They were alone.
