I added furrowed brows to the pursed lips. “You think I encourage the rumors.”
He tilted his head and paused. “What was the phrase?It was no great chore.” His ears pinked, eyebrows raised, with humor curving his lips.
“And what would you have done, had an acquaintance said the same to you? Insinuated thatyouwere a ... trollop.” Speaking the word out loud almost made me laugh. The absurdity! How positively wretched to call someone such a name, especially without knowing them at all.
Marlow considered a moment, his jaw moving. “I’d have called him out and stabbed him straight through.”
No doubt. “Honorable for a man. But a woman?” I tsked,crossing from one side of the gazebo to the other. “I do notmeanto encourage the rumors, but reason abandons me entirely. I cannot prove them wrong, so why not make a farce of it all?” I puffed out my cheeks and blew out a breath. “Perhaps Iamfoolhardy.”
Marlow paced the gazebo, then leaned around a column. He disappeared for a moment, his arm stretched out, then reappeared with a single white daisy in his hand. He twirled the stem between his fingers as he crossed the stone floor toward me, watching the petals. When we were an arm’s length apart, he handed it to me without a single word.
I brought it to my nose. Sweet, simple, beautiful. My heart squeezed at the gesture. “Thank you,” I said with feeling.
“You are not foolhardy, Georgiana,” he said. “You are clever and kind. Thoughtful of others’ needs. Your wit is ... unmatched.” He chuckled, shaking his head as though in private thought. “You are the exact opposite of foolhardy. You are singular. Remarkable. Brilliant.”
His eyes softened, and I felt his words move through me like warm tea, swirling and settling at the base of my stomach. “You do not have to say that.”
“No,” he said, shrugging. “I do not.”
I should thank him. I should tell him that I thought the same of him—that he was just as singular. Just as kind and brilliant. I admired his bravery and ambition to bolster the dukedom.
I would miss him greatly when I left.
His smile. His unruly mess of hair when he was home and unbothered.
His touch.
The way he looked at me—reallylooked at me—as he did now.
I had a terrible feeling that he felt exactly what I did. That his feet danced in time with mine to a song only we could hear.
“Sit with me?” he asked, meandering over to a little bench tucked between two columns.
I twirled the daisy’s stem between my fingertips and slowly nodded my head.
We talked for an age, knees angled toward each other from either end of the bench. He asked about my family, so I told him about Peter and Amelia and how things had changed at home since they married. Why I felt like I was always in the way, even if it wasn’t true.
He told me about Maggie’s wedding to Thomas. How good of a man Thomas was. How their children had completely changed the dynamic of the whole family but for the better. And how he wanted to be a better uncle to them—more present.
We spoke of regrets, of hopes for the future. We laughed at each other’s foolishness and grinned to think of what might come next.
Marlow walked me through the rest of the garden until the sun started its descent, and the air chilled, and then we took the grand staircase together. He left me at my bedroom door, and we dressed for dinner.
We joined the family—Maggie, Thomas, Gabriel, and Her Grace—around the table.
We laughed until our stomachs ached on stories from times past. Apparently, Marlow had had an affinity for wormsas a boy, much to his mother’s distaste, and would attempt to sneak them into the house at all hours.
“Gabriel, the snitch, never let me get away with it,” he laughed.
Gabriel’s face scrunched in protest. “Why couldn’t you have liked butterflies or ladybirds?”
Marlow looked at me and shook his head as though to say,Do you hear this? Youwould have helped me, wouldn’t youhave?
Afterward, we played cards in the drawing room, even Gabriel, retiring only when our eyes were heavy with sleep.
I didn’t let myself worry about the morrow.
I could only hope, for the first time in a long time, that it would come.
