Page 50 of The Subtle Craft of Courting Kate

“And it’s not all entailed, you know. The land surrounding Longthorpe Manor.”

Kate’s head swiveled toward him. “It isn’t?”

“No. In fact, Longthorpe began rather modestly, as far as country estates go. Most of the land was acquired in parcels, a bit at a time, across a century or so. Much of it was added to the entailment so that the land remained one parcel, to be passed down through the hands of each successive duke. But around my great-grandfather’s time, the estate suffered some financial difficulties. The family came through them, of course, but it was a near thing, and the entailment meant he had little in the way of assets to sell which might have eased his financial burdens. So although he continued to acquire more land, he kept it separate from the entailment, just in the event that the family faced such difficulties again in the future.”

“Oh,” Kate said. “But I thought—Longthorpe is still just one property, and Devon owns it, does he not?”

“It acts as one property,” he said, “because as the duke, Devon presently holds the whole of it. Most of it—the entailed bit; eighty percent or so of the property as a whole—will always be in the hands of the duke, whoever that happens to be. But certain prime acreage belongs to Devon in his own right, and he is free to sell it or parcel it out as he sees fit. I thought I might ask him to sell a bit of it to me. So that I might build a house of my own in a place that is so close to my heart.”

Kate managed to wrench her lips into a weak facsimile of a smile. Which would be worse, she wondered—to lose him to distance, or to have him nearby in perpetuity, but always in the company of another? So close to that happy home that he would share with his wife, with their children. Somehow, despite that wretched ache in the vicinity of her heart, she dredged up a soft, bland, “That sounds lovely.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” he mused, but his gaze had drawn off into the distance, as if he could see it through the milling of the crowd. Already built, already his. A future that could not help but to come to fruition. “I was thinking…a bit west of the village. That hill near the pond where we used to swim as children.”

She knew the one. Her fingers, cold even beneath her gloves, tightened their clasp. A walk of perhaps fifteen minutes from the village across the lush green fields, where she drove her sheep out to pasture. The sunsets in the summer were extraordinary. And at the advent of nightfall, when the world had stilled to a hush, the sky that stretched out over the valley below looked like a sea of stars.

Would they ever watch the sun set upon that hill again? Or would his wife take the place there upon the hill beside him that had once belonged to her?

In that long moment of silence that had fallen between them, Kate swallowed through the lump in her throat. “Elliot, I—”

“How are you finding the book I lent to you?”

Heat flooded Kate’s face in a dizzying rush. “I—I haven’t read it,” she said, averting her gaze to her lap. A week, now, since she had woken that morning with her hand wrapped around its spine beneath her pillow, with only the vaguest memory of how it had gotten there. More dream than memory, really. The foggiest recollection of warm fingers brushing her hair away from her face. The sensation of floating rather than walking back to her room. The strong, steady heartbeat beneath her cheek.

A whispered, Sweet dreams, Katie that had followed her down through that silky veil between sleeping and waking.

“I don’t think that’s quite true,” he said, his tone faintly teasing. “You’re blushing like you’ve read more than you’d care to admit.”

Kate made an irritated little sound in her throat, neither acknowledgement nor denial. It was just that she hadn’t had any real concept of precisely how lascivious such things could be. How descriptive. How provocative. How…anatomically unlikely.

“I hope you had the good sense to hide it well,” he remarked casually. “Because if your mother were to find you in possession of it, she would certainly make her objections plain, and I will have to deny providing it to you.”

“Of course I have hidden it!” she declared with an agitated flutter of her hands. “And—and it isn’t the sort of thing one ought to be speaking of at the theatre anyway.”

“No one can hear us above this din, so who is going to know?” he asked lightly. “Although if you keep blushing like that, everyone who has got a pair of opera glasses convenient may suspect that our conversation has wandered toward the somewhat less than perfectly appropriate.”

Perversely, the thought only made her face burn hotter. What the devil had happened to her? She had never been given much to blushing before—before now. Before London. “Then perhaps you ought not to have led the conversation in such a direction.” And they certainly were being observed. Kate drew a swift, cleansing breath in through her nose and pasted a bland smile to her face in deference to the audience who, even if they could not hear them, could certainly see them.

“I was curious,” he said. “I spent a good deal of time choosing one, you know. I thought that one was suitably tame—”

“Tame!” Kate gasped.

“Oh, so you have read it, then.” He cast that cheeky grin at her once more, and that odd lump in her throat dissolved beneath a familiar, helpless laugh. The same sort he somehow always managed to provoke in her, as effortlessly as breathing.

“I—perhaps I skimmed a few pages,” Kate admitted, stalwartly resisting the urge to hide her face in her hands.

“I knew it,” he crowed. “You little liar!”

“It’s a mystery that I have somehow restrained myself from strangling you before now,” she said as she scrubbed the reluctant smile from her face, still mortified beyond measure.

Elliot chuckled. “The theatre would not be the best of places to start,” he said. “Too public. People would talk. No, you’ve got to have privacy for a good strangling.” His shoulder touched hers in that playful nudge to which she had long become accustomed. “I do love to make you laugh, Katie.”

Kate ducked her head and fiddled with the strings of her reticule as the words produced a terrible little ache in her heart. She knew that. She had always known that. She only wished—

She only wished he loved more than that.

∞∞∞

Rebecca had been wrong. It had taken until the second interlude for the crowd to descend upon them. Possibly, Kate speculated, no one present had wanted to appear overeager in their pursuit of Elliot—but the natural consequence had been that their box had seen visitor after visitor practically from the moment the curtains had been drawn until the moment they opened once more.