Or someone.
Mara.
From their courtship, he knew that his wife had a habit of walking when she was troubled... and last night they hadn’t exactly parted on the best of terms.
Grabbing the knife he’d just been using to cut his roast into mincemeat, Ambrose bolted from the dining room.
Chapter Eleven
That evening, notready to face Ambrose again so soon, Mara chose to skip dinner once again and go for a walk instead. The wind ruffled her hair as she followed a lesser traveled path around the outskirts of the orchards, the cool wind undercut with a sweet breeze that hinted at warmer weather soon to come.
Already most of the trees were beginning to grow shy green buds. Before those buds grew into leaves, she would be on her way to London, having placated Kitty enough that her sister’s offer of room and board remained available to her... in spite of whatever issues had arisen between Kitty and William. Issues that Kitty had refused to elaborate on, other than to say the decision to divorce had been made, and she cared not to discuss the matter any further.
They’d been through a lot, she and her sister.
More than two defenseless girls should ever have to endure.
But Mara wasn’t about to allow the shadows of her past—or the surly duke in her present—ruin her future. Her father and her husband be damned, she was finally going to do whatshewanted to do. And she wouldn’t feel guilty about it or jump through obstacles like some trained circus pony. Short of physically binding her to Southwick Castle, what could Ambrose do to keep her here?
Make love to me in the light of the moon and then crush my heart to dust in the darkness.
“Nothing,” she said with a fierceness that had the unfortunate habit of only making itself known when he wasn’t around. “Absolutely nothing.”
Once, not so very long ago by the standards of time (and yet so long ago by the standards of emotion that it almost felt like a different lifetime), she and Ambrose had walked through an orchard together. Peaches, she recalled. A rare treat that required dedication and determination to grow, as the fruit wasn’t native to England’s colder summer and rockier soil. History books on horticulture credited Alexander the Great with bringing the first peach tree to England after conquering Persia, and from there it had become a symbol of wealth to have a peach tree flowering in one’s garden.
The orchard that she and Ambrose had visited during another courtship outing was part of Kensington Gardens, a place of great beauty and prestige that had been denied to her when she was the daughter of a viscount with no political or social affiliation of note, but opened for a private tour without question when she arrived the Duke of Southwick’s arm.
“What are you doing?” Ambrose had asked her, his mouth quirking in bemusement when she’d stopped just inside the gate and extended her fingertips out to the side, her entire body trembling at the sheer joy of being surrounded by such opulent greenery.
“Trying to decide,” she’d replied.
“Decide what?”
“On where to go first.”
“That’s easy,” he’d murmured, draping his arm around her waist and giving her an entirely different reason to tremble. Their chaperone for the day was an elderly second cousin with diminished vision who had already settled herself onto a nearby bench to take a nap in the shade... leaving the duke’s hands free to wander where they willed. “We can go wherever we like. The grounds, Lady Marabelle, are yours, for as long as you’d like them.”
Some men charmed the objects of their affection with jewelry.
Others with trinkets, or furs, or even horses.
But Ambrose... Ambrose had given her Kensington Gardens. Of all the places available to him in London, he’d brought herhere. And maybe it was an absent gesture. An idea plucked from obscurity. But she liked to believe—she wanted to believe—that it meant something. That he was beginning to know her, as she’d always hoped that a man one day would. The quiet, hidden parts of her that no one else seemed to care about. Her interests and her hobbies. What made her smile. What lifted her heart. What brought her joy.
“Why don’t we start at the native ferns?” she said, her smile hardly able to fit her face. “Then make our way toward the climbing roses. I read inMansfield’s Flora and Fauna Dailya new variety was recently grafted that is specifically resistant to the red spider mite!”
“How fascinating,” Ambrose said dryly, and Mara blushed as she realized how she must have sounded.
“I’m sorry. I... I have an unnatural affinity for plants. I didn’t mean to bore you.”
“Bore me?” Blue eyes captured hers as he stepped in front of her and lifted her chin on the crook of his gloved knuckle. “You could recite the alphabet a thousand times over and never bore me, Lady Marabelle.”
Her blush deepened; a warm pink wave spreading from her cheeks to her chest. “You’re merely saying that to humor me.”
The duke’s mouth twisted in an amused smirk. “I am a remarkably busy man. I haven’t the time or the inclination to say things that I don’t mean.”
A busy man who had devoted his entire day to her.
How wonderfully foreign, the notion that she was worthy of being made a priority.
