Lord help him, if he was alone with her now, feeling this new, unbidden hunger, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to resist her as he had the other night when she was gazing up at him with tears on her cheeks and adoration in her eyes. He might very well take advantage of the attraction he’d thought he’d sensed in her, too, for these feelings of his had suddenly become impossible to explain or deny.
How long had it been since he’d held a woman in his arms? he wondered ruefully. Not since Jane had died, and to be honest, he had stopped holding her long before that, when doors were routinely slammed in his face after nightfall.
Now he felt like a bear waking from a long, cold winter in the den. He was ravenous.
He all at once realized with a disturbing torrent of dread, that his world was about to become intensely complicated.
Madeline was sitting in the kitchen plucking a hen for dinner, when a knock sounded at the front door. She rose to answer it, but Agnes, who had not left them yet, answered it first.
It was John Metcalf. He was standing on the front step, nervously hugging his black tricorn hat to his chest. He said something to Agnes, and she invited him in. His apprehensive gaze fell upon Madeline, and she knew that she was the reason he had come.
Agnes turned toward Madeline. “You have a visitor.”
“Good morning, Miss Oxley,” John said.
Madeline reached around to untie her apron in the back. “I’ll be right with you, John.”
She went into the kitchen, glanced at the half-plucked hen that would have to wait, then laid her apron over the back of a chair and washed her hands in the rinse bucket. Smoothing some of the loose sprigs in her upswept hair, she returned to the front hall.
“What brings you here, John?”
“I came to see you, Miss Oxley. Mr. Coates said it was all right. Just for an hour.”
Her heart stumbled clumsily over John’s answer. “You spoke to him?”
“Yes. I met him on the road just now. He and his sons were planting in the field.”
“And you asked if you could…”
“Call on you, yes.”
Call on me? No one ever calls on me.
Madeline swallowed with difficulty and had to struggle to find her voice.
She wished that her thoughts didn’t fly directly to Adam in these circumstances. She wished she wouldn’t wonder how he would feel about John courting her. She supposed at the very least, he would worry that he was going to lose another housekeeper.
But maybe, just maybe, John coming to call on her would make her becomevisibleto Adam. Maybe Adam would see her as a woman for once, and notice that another man had found her attractive, even though she had a hard time believing it herself. “I see. Would you like to come in?”
John gave her an appreciative smile and followed her into the front parlor.
Agnes headed for the kitchen. “I’ll make some tea.”
Madeline sat down on the chintz sofa while John sat on the other side of the room in a green upholstered chair. For a few minutes, neither of them spoke, while John’s eyes wandered around the room, looking at the framed paintings on the walls, the brass face on the tall-case clock that ticked away in the silence. He gazed at the piano in the corner, then wiggled in his chair as he reached down to touch the rich, velvet upholstery on the seat.
“Mr. Coates has a fine house,” he said.
“It’s very comfortable.”
“It’smorethan comfortable. It’s a palace compared to most places around here. Maybe we should start calling him ‘Lord of the Marsh.”’
Not caring for John’s cynical tone, Madeline rubbed a thumb over her fingers. This was going to be a very long hour.
Adam stood under the warm morning sun, his boots firmly planted in the dirt, and removed his hat to wipe his forehead with a sleeve. The wind was nonexistent today. Everything was so damn still. Everything except the insects, which were humming and buzzing a steady cacophony.
Damn his thoughts, for buzzing a cacophony, too.
He hoped Madeline was all right at the house. Maybe he should go and check on things.
