“Maybe not, but there is clearly something you and Miss Thorncroftdoneed to discuss.”
“Why do women always insist on talking about their problems?” he wondered out loud. “Why not do it the manly way, with pistols at dawn? Either one party or both is killed, and whatever issue they may have had is instantly resolved without a single sentence needing to be exchanged.”
“Because dueling is illegal, and the world would be a safer, calmer place if battles were won with words instead of weapons.” She nudged him again. “Go to her, you lummox. Before it is too late.”
“What do you mean, too late?” he frowned. “The house party has only just started.”
His twin gazed at him pityingly. “If you truly don’t know the answer, then I’m not sure you can be helped. Idohope that I am wrong. For your sake, as well as Miss Thorncroft’s.”
“You’re speaking in riddles,” he grumbled. But he couldn’t help but look at the door again. “Someone should check on her. Just to ensure she isn’t choking or in need of some other assistance. Since you cannot be bothered, I suppose it falls upon me as the host to ensure that Miss Thorncroft is all right.”
The corners of Brynne’s lips twitched. “I suppose it does,” she said gravely.
“You’re a brat,” he informed her before he pushed his chair back. “You know that, don’t you?”
“So you’ve told me a thousand times over. Oh, and West?” she said as he stood up and placed his linen napkin on the table.
He could feel curious eyes upon him, but no one in attendance would dare have the audacity to question his decision to leave the breakfast preemptively. Without meaning to, he glanced at Lady Martha. She was staring demurely at her plate, but must have sensed his shift in attention for her head rose and she met his stare with a pleasant smile which he made a passing attempt at returning.
Shewas the one he should have been chasing after, if he was to chase after anyone. That being said, Lady Martha would never quit a room before the meal was over. Nor would she leave him stranded in a pond, or allow him to ravish her in the stables, or hide with him in the bushes while a farmer shot at them for stealing a sheep.
And yet it wasEviehe was going to find.
The bloody bane of his existence…and the woman his blood still hummed for, even now.
“What is it?” he bit out, glaring at Brynne. He knew his twin was plotting something. She had that glint in her eyes. The kind that she got whenever she was starting a painting and was throwing all manner of colors at the canvas to see what stuck.
“Try, for once, to follow your heart instead of your head. I believe you’ll be pleasantly surprised with where it leads you.”
Not bothering to justify such drivel with a response, he traced Evie’s steps out of the solarium whereupon he promptly lost her trail. There was no sign of his quarry in the hallway or the foyer, but after a maid informed him that she’d seen a guest fleeing in the direction of the library, that was where he found her.
Surrounded by books, she sat perched on the windowsill, a breathtaking vision in violet satin with sunlight in her hair and a wistful smile curving her mouth.
“You changed your dress,” Weston observed gruffly as he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him to afford them the privacy he instinctively sensed that they were going to require. Because there was no reality, no world in this one or next, in which he could see her sitting there, like a stunning goddess of old torn straight from the pages of Greek mythology, andnotkiss her.
“You changed your shirt,” she said without looking at him.
“I changed more than that.” An oak floorboard, polished to a dull shine with beeswax and sealed with varnish, creaked beneath his foot as he walked to the middle of the library and stopped beside a round table piled high with books. “Thanks to you, all of the clothes I had on will likely need to be burned.” He stared at the slender line of her neck where a single curl lay nestled, glossy mahogany against sheer ivory touched with the slightest hint of pink. “Why did you run from me at the pond, Miss Thorncroft?”
“You called me Evelyn, before. In my bedchamber.”
“Did I?” he said, startled. He did not recall that particular detail.
“Indeed,” she said, keeping her gaze on the glass. Beyond the window, the sky had turned an ominous gray, signaling bad weather…both outside the library and within it. “And I did not run. I walked at a fast clip.”
Picking up a book from the table, he tossed it aimlessly from his left hand to his right. “I could have drowned.”
“One does not drown in twelve inches of water.”
“Twelve inches of mud, you mean, with water on top of it.”
“Yet here you are, alive to pester me.”
There was an edge in her voice he’d never heard before. Even from across the room, with her facing away from him, he felt its sharp bite.
“Are you angry with me, Miss Thorncroft? Is that why you left the breakfast? To sit and sulk by your lonesome over some imagined transgression of mine that I am unaware of?”
“I am notsulking.” Finally, she turned her head to look at him. Her expression was fierce, but her eyes, those big, beautiful blue eyes that a man very wellcoulddrown in if he wasn’t careful, were filled with sadness. “I’ve fallen in love with you.”
