“Two, yes,” she said. “We would have used up all the snow making snowmen and had nothing else to do outdoors. We would have read all nine books from cover to cover. And I would have beaten you so many times at billiards that you would have had no self-confidence left.”
“There would have still been cards to beat you at,” he said.
“Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps. Yes, two weeks would surely have done it, Justin. We would have been mortally tired of each other.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Go away,” she said. “Please go away.”
But he lowered his head, his hands still behind his back, and found her mouth with his own. He slid his tongue inside and touched hers.
“I wish we had had those two weeks,” he said, withdrawing only a couple of inches from her mouth. “I wish we were mortally tired of each other, Rosamund. I wish it more than I wish anything else in life.”
She heard herself swallow.
“I’m going,” he said. “But not to find Annabelle. The others must be ready to start back. It’s a brisk day outside the shelter of the trees. You had better come with me.”
“Justin,” she said, “I wish I were the other side of the globe from you.”
“I know,” he said. “But you aren’t. Come on. I won’t offer you my arm or my hand. Will that help?”
“No,” she said.
“Come with me anyway,” he said. “What were you doing teetering along the top of a high wall earlier just like a twelve-year-old hoyden?”
“Taking a dare from Josh,” she said. “And enjoying my triumph when he fell off and I did not. It was a dreadfully undignified thing to do, wasn’t it?”
“Dreadfully,” he said. “I was careful to keep the Reverend Strangelove’s back to you all the time you were doing it.”
They both laughed.
“And wishing I were up there with you,” he said, “to show you that it could be done on one foot.”
“Oh, nonsense,” she said scornfully. “The surface is uneven. You would have fallen off and made a prize idiot of yourself.”
He chuckled and she joined in his laughter again.
Chapter 11
“It’s here somewhere,” Lord Beresford said. “Do you remember exactly where, Annabelle?”
“I think we are going in the right direction,” she said. “But I think we should be going back, Joshua. The others will be looking for us.”
“After only five minutes?” he said. “I don’t think so. Hold my hand—the slope is rather steep.”
“But I am not a child,” she said. “I don’t need to hold your hand.”
“There it is,” he said, taking her hand anyway and drawing her laterally across the bank that led down from the ruined wall of the abbey to the river. “Can’t you just imagine the hermit sitting here, Annabelle, in his sackcloth robe with long, matted hair and beard, and ashes on his head?”
“No,” she said. “It is a silly idea. Why would any man crouch inside a cave he could not even stand up in and freeze in the winter when there was a perfectly serviceable abbey within a stone’s throw?”
He grinned at her and released her hand in order to stoop down and peer inside the cave. “You have no imagination, Annabelle,” he said, “and no sense of romance. Here we could be dreaming up the ghost of our very own holy man, and all you can think of is his getting a red nose in winter.”
“He probably smelled too,” she said. “He probably never bathed.”
He straightened up and laughed at her. “What do you expect of the poor man?” he said. “That he would chip the ice in the river every morning just so he could have an invigorating bath?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe he even existed.”
