Page 61 of The Luckiest Lady in London

He poured a glass of wine for her. “How are they getting on without you?”

She peeled the skin from the grape in small strips. “Matilda has taken to directing the big move and my other sisters complain she is more draconian than I ever was.”

“She is the one who shared a room with you, is she not? She must have absorbed some of your generalship.”

The grape was now naked. She looked down with a frown, as if vexed that she might actually have to eat something.

“Do you want to give that to me?”

She didn’t. She put the grape in her mouth and wiped her hand with a napkin. As she was about to toss the napkin aside, her face changed.

Between them hung the moment he’d thrown his handkerchief into the wastebasket.

“I’d like to repair matters between us,” he said impulsively.

She yanked another grape from the bunch. “Why, I did not know relations were strained.”

Her words were full of condescending bite. He realized with more than a little startlement that she might be mimicking him, rather than some imaginary dowager duchess.

“I behaved abominably and for that I apologize.”

She fixed him with a flat stare. “Why?”

“Why apologize?”

“Why did you behave abominably? You never do anything without a properly thought-out reason.”

If only that were, in fact, the case. He had been going from one ill-thought-out reason to the next ever since he first laid eyes on her.

“I wanted to preserve our interest in each other. Since we are to be married a long time, God willing, it seemed prudent to not erode our delight in each other too soon.”

An easy lie, since he knew precisely why he stayed away from her: to preserve the fortress that he had made of himself, the foundation of which was sliding into an unseen abyss even as he spoke.

She snorted. “I’m disappointed, sir. You can lie better than that.”

He could not help smiling a little. “I love it when you take me to task.”

She served herself some cucumber salad and rammed her fork rather forcefully into the mound on her plate. “So this is how you repair relations then, by feeding me more lies.”

“No, this is what happens when you ask too many questions,” he said. “You should let my action speak for itself.”

* * *

Louisa set aside her plate. “What action?”

His hand, the one on which he wore the carnelian signet ring, toyed with his glass. She was reminded of the night she first saw him, of her—in hindsight, especially—utterly justified hesitation to lift her eyes to his face. As if her instincts had already sensed that he would prove to be the bane of her existence.

He rose with the grace of a big cat and came toward her. Quietly and efficiently, he removed her hat and maneuvered her onto her back.

“You’ve done this before and it doesn’t prove anything,” she said.

He gave no reply, except to push up her skirts.

“The crudeness of your method is excruciating,” she went on, keeping her tone clipped.

The grass was cool and fragrant beneath her, the sun warm on her face and the exposed band of skin above her stockings. She ought to feel a certain mortified titillation from the fact that he was making a spectacle of her where anyone could chance upon them, but she only felt like a very small raft on a very turbulent sea, buffeted from every side by both need and fear.

He had a powerful, effortless hold on her and he knew it.