“You know it would.” She burrowed her head against his shoulder again, nudged his hand aside with her own, and began to do up the buttons again.
“And it was wrong a month ago?” he said. “Yet you just said that you would not change a moment of it.”
“That was a little different,” she said. “For both of us. We can’t do it now, Justin. Not on the marquess’s land when you are here to betroth yourself to Annabelle. We should not even be here.”
He took her hand when it had finished buttoning the blouse, and squeezed it very tightly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You are quite right, of course. I’m sorry, Rosamund. Just don’t leave me yet, please. Sit with me here for a while.”
He set his head back against the trunk of the tree and closed his eyes. He could feel every heartbeat like a hammerblow against his chest. He breathed slowly and evenly and willed her not to move. Not like this. He did not want it to end like this when both of them were agitated. He had genuinely wanted to bring her here so that they could win some peace together.
What a mad hope that had been!
“Justin,” she said, her voice light, almost teasing, “did your mistress recover from her cold?”
“Jude?” he said. “She was bubbling with high spirits when I got back to London. She could not resist showing me the emerald brooch my successor had already bought her, though she swore to me that she had remained faithful to me until my return.”
“Did you give her the trunk?” she asked.
He hesitated. “The diamond bracelet, yes,” he said. “She almost gobbled it up. I believe she even forgot the brooch for a few moments. Nothing else.”
He did not tell her that he had found himself quite unable to give Jude the clothes that Rosamund had worn or touched or the perfumes with which she had enticed him.
“So you have said good-bye to her?” she said. “Were you sad?”
He had not even slept with Jude after his return, though she had clearly expected that such a service would be required of her in return for the bracelet and the large money settlement he had made on her. She had been wearing a red nightgown that hid nothing of her very generous curves, and the perfume that had used to drive him wild.
But he had still been feeling almost sick with longing for a certain snow angel who had melted out of his life apparently forever.
“No,” he said. “Didn’t your father or your brother or your husband teach you that you do not discuss a man’s mistresses with him, Rosamund?”
“But Papa and Dennis and Leonard never had mistresses,” she said. “I am as sure as I can be with Papa and Dennis, and I actually asked Leonard.”
“I hope he blistered you with his tongue,” he said.
“He laughed,” she said. “Perhaps he would not have if there really had been a mistress, but there wasn’t, you see. ”
“So I am the first depraved gentleman you have known,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “It is rather funny that Dennis has been warning me against Josh, isn’t it? He is supposed to be a rake. Are you? Have you had many mistresses, Justin?”
“That is too outrageous a question,” he said. “I refuse to answer.”
“On the grounds that the answer may incriminate you? Or that I will think you are boasting if you mention the actual number? Or can you not count that high? I think you must have had many,” she said. “You certainly have a large number of skills. Leonard did not know half as much.”
“Are you doing this deliberately?” he asked, nudging her head away from him again and looking at her laughing face with sudden suspicion. “You are, aren’t you? To lighten the atmosphere?”
“Well, you must admit,” she said, “that it did need lightening.”
Her eyes were dancing and her whole face was animated, the way he remembered from his first day with her. But how familiar and how very dear the sight of her had grown since then. He cupped her face with his hands.
“Yes, it did,” he said. “I suppose we should be getting back now, shouldn’t we? Are we worse off or better off for having come here? Was it very wrong of me to suggest it?”
“If it was,” she said, “then it was equally wrong of me to agree. Don’t let’s add guilt to everything else. It has been an hour I would not wish to erase.”
“Me, neither,” he said, kissing her once more, warmly on the lips.
She turned her head sharply before he was finished, and they both looked over her shoulder to where Lord Beresford was standing thirty feet away, a startled look on his face . . .
Rosamund got to her feet unassisted and brushed at the grass that clung to her velvet skirt. She kept her eyes on what she was doing and resisted the urge to launch into a speech of self-defense. Lord Wetherby had got to his feet, too.
