She swallowed. “Do you promise not to interrupt me again?”
“I swear it. Tell me the rest of your idea, won’t you?”
“Very well.” She withdrew her hand from his warm grip, and resumed her place in the window seat. “When I was younger—oh, it must be five years ago now—my eldest sister Euphemia came up with a game to keep us amused during the long winter afternoons in Buckinghamshire. She was brilliant at coming up with ways to entertain us.”
Dear Euphemia. How she missed her.
“What sort of game?”
“Just a simple sketching game. Euphemia would assign each of us a partner—I nearly always got Helena, who is a year younger than me, while poor Emmeline was left to manage Tilly, our youngest sister, who is, er… quite high-spirited.”
He smiled. “A high-spirited Templeton?Shocking.”
“Isn’t it? Now, Euphemia would mark the time, and we’d take up our pencils and draw our partner’s face. Whoever had the best likeness was given some small token or other—I don’t remember what now, but I remember doing the drawing, and looking intently at Helena’s face.”
“That’s quite clever.”
“My sisters are all clever, my lord.” They couldn’t boast of wealth, property, or even respectability, but they did havethat. “We’d all become dreadfully silly and make faces at each other and so forth, as young girls do, but if we altered the rules a bit, and presented it as a parlor game—”
“And assigned Barnaby and Lady Cora to be partners—”
“They’d be obliged to gaze at each other for a not inconsiderable length of time, in order to draw each other’s faces in detail.”
“Long enough for Lady Cora to fall in love with Barnaby?”
As to that, she couldn’t say, but it was a curious question, coming from him. Perhaps he wasn’t quite the cynic he pretended to be. “You don’t believe in love at first sight, Lord Cross. Remember?”
“It’s not first sight, Miss Templeton. But no, I don’t believe in it. It’s utter nonsense. Outside of plays, people don’t fall in love on the strength of one glance.”
“How can you know?” How could anyone know anything about the way another person fell in love? “Why should it be time alone that determines whether two people fall in love?”
He shrugged. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“But that’s just it, my lord. Lovedoesn’tmake sense. Two people can become attracted to each other at a single glance, so why can’t they fall in love the same way?”
“Fiercely, intensely attracted. Fascinated, even.” He swallowed, the impeccable knot of his cravat bobbing. “But that’s not love.”
“Lord Barnaby would say itis.”
“Are we to take Barnaby’s word for it? What does he know about love?”
Had he moved closer? The space between them seemed to have narrowed. “Well, I-I imagine he knows quite a lot about how he fell in love with Lady Cora.”
“But surely, it can’t be as simple as that? There must be more to love than a consuming, passionate desire between two people.”
Consuming, passionate desire?Goodness. “It’s either terribly, terribly complicated, or terribly, terribly simple.”
“Which do you say it is, Juliet?” He leaned closer, his hands on the window seat on either side of her, his fingers brushing her hips. “Have you taken your lessons on love fromRomeo and Juliet?”
“N-no.” He was so close she could see the shadow of a beard on his cheeks. She wanted to touch it, feel the rasp of it under her fingertips. “I don’t think there is such a thing as lessons on love. I think there are as many kinds of love as there are people, and that each person falls into it in their own way.”
“Do you speak from experience?” His eyes held hers, so dark and deep, like a pool of water at night. “Have you ever fallen in love at first sight?”
She thought she had, once. “I-I believe in love at first sight, I’m just not certain if…”
“What?” His voice was so soft, barely above a whisper. “You’re not certain of what, Juliet?”
Juliet.She sucked in a shaky breath at his rough murmur of her name on his lips. “I’m not certain if I believe in it for myself.”
