“I am not,” she said.
“Yes you are,” he said. “Or afraid of getting snow in your face or losing some of your dignity. You are a coward.”
“Oh, I am not,” she said indignantly, bending quickly and grabbing up a handful of snow to take him off his guard. But when she whirled on him, a shower of snow hit her squarely on the nose and his laughter mingled with her sputtering gasp.
“You might as well throw it, since you have it,” he said. But he ducked as soon as she released her snowball and it sailed harmlessly over his shoulder. “The first round goes to me.”
A breathless, laughing, giggling snowball fight occupied the next five minutes as they stood twenty feet apart recklessly hurling the soft snow at each other. Justin Halliday had a far surer aim than she had, Rosamund decided almost immediately. Her hood had blown off her head, and snow was dripping down her face and inside her collar. And she could not seem to stop giggling.
“Are you prepared to hoist the white flag?” he asked a moment before releasing a snowball directly at her right cheek and hitting his mark dead on.
“Never,” she said breathlessly, but as she moved to scoop up more snow, her feet skidded awkwardly and she sprawled sideways right into the thick of it.
He was laughing when he came over to help her up. “Poor Rosamund,” he said, hauling her to her feet with a firm hand. “You look rather like an angel, you know-all white. Except that angels are not supposed to spit snow and mutter expletives that are on the verge of being unladylike. Do you admit defeat now?”
“I had better,” she said, “since I believe I have as much snow inside my clothes as outside. You win, Justin.”
“I’ll give you a rematch tomorrow,” he said. “What is my prize to be?”
“Not a kiss,” she said hastily.
“And glad I am to hear it,” he said. “It would be a somewhat icy kiss, I fear. You can pour tea for me after you have changed. How does that sound?”
“Fair enough,” she said.
Altogether, she thought, cheerful despite her cold and discomfort as they made their way back to the house, the hour outdoors had lightened the tension between them considerably. She would be able to handle the rest of the day with ease.
Good sense and sanity had been restored.
“I shall pour your tea as soon as I have changed and warmed up,” she said to him when they were on their way upstairs. “Perhaps even two cups, if you are very good.”
“Really?” he said. “And what constitutes being very good, Rosamund?”
He was smiling when she looked across at him, just as he had been all the time they were outside. His face was reddened by the cold. His blue eyes were twinkling.
But her tongue delayed just a moment too long over a glib reply. And his smile faded just a little, and his words hung in the space between them, and his eyes dropped for just a moment to her lips.
“Drinking the first cup without spilling a drop,” she said. But she said it too late.
Oh, dear, she thought a minute later, standing with her back against the closed door of her bedchamber. Oh, dear. Dennis should have chained her to the seat of his carriage the day before. He really should have.
Chapter 4
Books had been found—nine of them. Very clearly, the Earl of Wetherby thought, they had not been contributed to the house by Price, or if they had, they had been intended as decorations or as doorstops or paperweights. Their subject matter did not seem quite in Price’s line—or in his either, for that matter.
Despite the unsuitability of the books, he and Rosamund Hunter were each reading one, seated silently engrossed at either side of the fireplace.
Engrossed! He would not have been surprised, he thought, focusing his eyes on the book before him for a moment, to find that it was upside down in his hands. It was time to turn a page. He turned one just as Rosamund did the same thing with her book. He looked up and met her eyes for a fleeting moment.
It was deuced uncomfortable. He had suggested the books after dinner rather than cards because there had been far too much awareness and tension between them the evening before. She had agreed with an eagerness that had suggested she was having similar thoughts.
They had conversed with great animation over dinner. She had told him about the neighbors with whom she had associated for the nine years since her marriage, revealing a wit and a keen observation of human nature that had kept him laughing much of the time. And he had told her something of his boyhood, when he had been made much of, a son at last after two daughters and a full seven years after the second of those. He had grown up surrounded by doting females.
“It took me quite by surprise,” he had told her, “when I went out into the world and discovered that there were some women who actually disputed my claim to be God’s great gift to the female branch of the human race.”
She had laughed.
Anyone coming in upon them during dinner would have thought them the heartiest of good friends. And in a way they were. It was very easy both to talk and to listen to Rosamund Hunter. It was the silences that were the trouble. Silences between friends were supposed to be relaxed and easy affairs. Obviously he and the lady were not friends.
