“What is he wearing?” Helena pushed the draperies aside and squinted down at the garden. “Is that aredwaistcoat?”
“It’s not red,” Juliet whispered, her heart thudding against her ribs. “It’s scarlet.”
“Hmm. So, it is.”
His face was turned up to the window, the breeze ruffling his dark hair, and his hand, it was… it was…
A sob escaped her, and she pressed her fingers to her lips.
His hand was over his heart.
“How curious. Why is there a madman in a scarlet waistcoat standing in the middle of the garden, shouting about stars?”
Juliet pressed her palm against the window, her heart in her throat. “That’s not a madman, Helena. That’s Lord Cross.”
ChapterEighteen
Miles stood in the garden underneath the only lit window at Hawke’s Run, his hand over his heart and Romeo’s words on his lips, praying he wasn’t inadvertently wooing the Earl of Hawke.
“The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars
“As daylight doth a lamp.”
Above him the window opened, and a brown-haired lady who wasnotJuliet stuck her head out. “I beg your pardon, Lord Cross, but you’re standing on my geraniums.”
He jumped backwards, his boot heels sinking into the mud.
“No! Now you’ve trod on my—”
The window slammed closed. There was a frenzy of movement on the other side of the glass, then another face appeared in place of the first one. The lamplight in the bedchamber behind her cast her features in silhouette, but he knew the curve of her chin, the shape of her lips.
He’d stroked that chin, kissed those lips.
Juliet had come to the window to listen to him. It wasn’t too late, then, to make her see she held his heart in the palm of her hand—that he ached to turn himself over to her, body and soul. He drew in a slow, deep breath, let it out again in a sigh, then opened his mouth to give voice to Romeo’s words, and win the heart ofhisJuliet.
But nothing came out. Romeo’s speech, every line of it, had evaporated from his memory as quickly as the morning dew at sunrise.
No. This wasn’t happening. He just needed to think, to picture the words on the page. He squeezed his eyes closed, but the lines that had been so clear in his mind when he’d left Steeple Cross were now a confusing blur ofthou, andthee, andwherefore.
There’d been something about singing birds, and lazy puffy clouds, and… hadn’t there been a line about sailing upon the bosom of the air? “Er, mortals that fall back to gaze, and… something, then something else, and… white upturned eyes.”
White upturned eyes? That couldn’t be right. It sounded like something out of a Gothic horror novel, not a Shakespearean romance.
It had taken him twenty-nine years to find his way tothisgarden, to woothislady. Twenty-nine years, and he was making an utter mess of it. This was going to end with him standing in the mud in a ridiculous scarlet waistcoat, crushed geraniums under his boot heels, shouting nonsense up at a closed window.
Time and time again, words had failed him, but this time, it should have been different. This time, all the words he needed should have been on his lips, waiting for him to breath them into life.
Because this time, it washer, and theyhadto be.
He couldn’t lose her. Not after he’d taken her into his arms and into his heart.
He stood there, silent, his hand still pressed to his chest as twilight deepened, bathing the garden in a muted golden light, the first stars twinkling in a deep blue sky. And there, at the window above him,hisJuliet—the only lady who could tint his future with the same golden glow that made twilight so beautiful—was waiting.
And he’d been struck dumb.
Unless… a golden glow and twilit skies twinkling with stars was poetic, wasn’t it? Couldn’t he simply tell her about that? Couldn’t he tell her that every time he thought of her—her dark blue eyes, her grace and wit and kindness, her joyful laugh that caught him square in his chest—she stole his breath?
He’d been writing poetry to her in his head since the moment he met her.
