Vincent sucked in a breath. “Thescarlet? You mean the—”
“Yes. The scarlet waistcoat with the gold embroidered suns.” For what he had in mind, only the scarlet waistcoat would do.
Vincent had gone white. “Yes, I… yes, of course, but… oh, dear. What does one wear with a scarlet waistcoat, my lord? Shall I fetch the gray coat? Or perhaps the blue would be—”
“No coat, Vincent.”
“No coat,” Vincent echoed faintly. “Yes, my lord.”
Vincent fussed and tugged him into respectably drab navy breeches, and only whimpered a little as he helped Miles into the scarlet waistcoat. “Well done, Vincent. Perhaps you’d better have a little lie-down now.”
“Yes, I… I think I shall, my lord.”
He left Vincent in a half swoon, and made his way downstairs to the library.
He’d promised Lady Fosberry he wouldn’t go to Juliet at once, but he could put the time until then to good use.
The volume was sitting in its place on the bookshelf where they’d left it the day before. He took it down, but as he was turning to the door to retreat to the privacy of his study, a folded paper fell out from between the pages, and fluttered to the window seat.
Juliet’s sketch. He recognized it at once.
He’d made an almighty fuss over that sketch, demanding to see it, then he’d forgotten it completely the instant his lips met hers.
Butshehadn’t forgotten.
He unfolded the paper, then dropped onto the window seat and sat there while the clock ticked off the silent minutes, staring at it.
She drew with a confident hand—loose, fluid pencil lines and delicate shading, a little rough in places, and a little disproportionate in others, but…
It was him.
He traced a finger over the chin and jaw, both angular and firm, but not hard or cruel, as he’d always thought them. His lips were fuller, too, with just the barest hint of a smile at one corner, and his eyes… they weren’t watchful or cold at all. Serious, yes, but with a certain softness to them, even a kindness, within a frame of long dark lashes.
This wasn’t the haughty, ill-tempered, arrogant Earl of Cross. Not the frigid, unfeeling man who’d brought more than one young lady to tears with a single cutting glance, or the arrogant nobleman whose mind, tongue, and heart were edged in steel.
His father had been that sort of man. He’d offended people, dismissed them, and he’d done it deliberately. He’d understood the difference between kindness and cruelty. He’d chosen cruelty, because he simply didn’t care whom he hurt.
But Milesdidcare. He’d just never known how to behave in a way that showed it.
But he wasn’t his father. At least, he didn’t have to be.
I see you, Miles. I have from the start.
And she had. She’d seen what nearly everyone else had failed to see.
Whathe’dfailed to see.
He gazed down at the man in the drawing, this man who was him, yet was unfamiliar to him at the same time.
Couldn’t Juliet fall in love withthisman? Wanthim?
He picked up the drawing, folded it carefully, and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket. Then he took up the book—Romeo and Juliet, of course—and left the library for his study.
And there, with his heart in his throat and a whispered prayer on his lips, he began to read.
ChapterSeventeen
Juliet stared listlessly out of the carriage window as she and Lady Drummond’s coachman made their way across the rain-washed countryside that lay between Steeple Cross and the Earl of Hawke’s estate, Hawke’s Run.
