“I thought hell was supposed to have no fury like a woman scorned, so why are you not bitter?”
In silent tacit agreement, they’d retrieved their horses to amble beside them in the direction of home. “Because it turned out that that first kiss, which I had believed could not possibly be beaten, was quite a substandard kiss. More a wash than a kiss, so I got over him much too quickly to have been really in love. Thanks a great deal to Edgar Garrick, who knew how to do it properly.”
“You fell in love with a man called Edgar?” Guy seemed appalled by the thought. Or jealous. The eternal optimist within her hoped he was jealous, because that offered them some potential. “Ed-gar.” He then put on a comical falsetto which she presumed was supposed to be her. “‘Kiss me, Ed-gar!Oh, how you make my young heart pound, Ed-gar.I love you more than life itself—Ed-gar.’” He made a disgusted sound and dropped the falsetto. “Now there is a name that thoroughly ruins the moment.”
“Firstly, his parents gave him that dreadful name and he went byEd, which was much more tolerable. Secondly, his wandering eyes made him too unreliable a fellow to waste my time falling in love with. Probably because he practiced his craft at every available opportunity with whichever willing woman came along. He was too charming by half, the floozy, and buzzed from girl to girl like a bumblebee does flowers. But, in my defense, I kissed him before I realized that. And it was memorable enough to render the kisses of the next two gentlemen who came along as bland by comparison.”
“Precisely how many men have you kissed?” Guy’s eyes were looking resolutely ahead but his jaw was clenched, convincing her that he was just a little bit jealous. Although he had nothing to be jealous of as his kiss came at the very top of her rankings.
“Not as many who had wanted to but probably more than I should have.” She shrugged, enjoying his irritation. Nothing riled a man up more than the competition of other men and, despite the depressing fact that a viscount was unlikely to compete for her in anything other than an affair, it was nice to know that he cared. “Remember that I am a farmer’s daughter who grew up watching sheep or cows or horses indulge their passions openly without a care in the world, so I am not as easily shocked as most ladies are by the physical. A few stolen kisses here and there are tame in comparison to what was happening in our farmyard—and it is hardly my fault that I am such a fine specimen of womanhood that men want to kiss me, now, is it?” She flicked her hair and batted her lashes in the ridiculous way that Miss Maybury always did and his jaw relaxed a little.
“If all these men keep wanting to kiss you, why haven’t you married one of them? Or have Ed-gar’s talented lips ruined you for all other men?”
“Much to my astonishment, nobody has asked.” She flicked her hair again to make him smile. “Apart from the year that I secretly courted Stumpy Peter at thirteen—my brothers’ cruel nickname for him, not mine—all my flirtations have been short and sweet. And because… well…” Seeing as they seemed to be friends again and friends should always be honest with each other, she admitted to the truth. “None of them felt right to want to explore the acquaintance further. I figured I wouldknow when it was love”—Lottie touched her heart—“in here. Because everything would feel just right once I had found my soulmate.” She knotted her hands together and sighed at her folly. Wondering why it was that her stupid heart had decided that in all her three and twenty years and close to three and ten kisses, only Guy felt just right when he was out of her reach. For eternity at least. That errant idea, as scandalous and improper as it was, was suddenly food for thought. “I am too selfish to settle down for less than those all-encompassing, all-consuming, overwhelming, passionate romantic emotions that supposedly only come with true love.” The exact sort she was feeling for him. Which she supposed meant she was destined to end up with her heart broken very soon.
“Oh, good grief, you’re a romantic!” He said that like it was an insult and she remembered that he’d had his heart broken too.
“Iama romantic. Unashamedly so. I fail to see what is wrong with that? I want what my parents had—what I hear your parents had—I want to be someone’s everything and have them be my everything in return. Don’t you?”
The storm raging in his eyes said that he did but his frown tried to convince her otherwise. He also, tellingly, deflected rather than answer her question. “Fairy tales are for fools.”
“Then I am proud to be a fool.” Lottie stuck out her chin and mirrored his expression of disdain. “But then I am a ray of sunshine who believes that dreams do, sometimes, come true and you are a crochety storm cloud with no joy in his soul.” She nudged him with her elbow, seeing as they were walking together so close. “Why is that?”
“Because I am a realist and not an idiot.”
Lottie sighed at that depressing response. “What was her name?”
His jaw clenched momentarily and then, to her surprise and relief, he huffed. “Florinda.”
“Florinda!” She had to laugh at that awful moniker. “And you had the nerve to make fun of the name Edgar.” She could not resist putting on her deepest voice and deepest scowl to parody him and lighten the honest moment enough that he might feel less uncomfortable about it. His wholebody had stiffened as he mentioned her name and it still hadn’t relaxed. “‘You seem the sensible and unromantic sort, so be mine,Florinda.’” She rearranged her tongue and mouth after saying the name and then attempted an octave lower for levity’s sake, raising her hand to the sky.“But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Flo-rin-da is the sun.”Lottie pulled a face. “It has too many jarring and harsh syllables to trip off a breathless tongue.”
“Once upon a time I found her name exotic.” His lips twitched. “But I was young and foolish…”
“Weren’t we all at some point.” She nudged him again. “Did you grow too tall for her? Or was she not a fan of storm clouds?”
He was silent again while he deliberated exactly how much to confide, and for a moment she thought he would clam up and deflect again, but he surprised her. “If you must know, she left me for a duke. An older and significantly richer duke.”
“Ah…” She didn’t want to let on that she had heard as much from his aunt and mother.
He slanted her an awkward glance. “Publicly. On my twenty-first birthday too.”
“So you wereveryyoung and foolish.”
“Very, and rushed in like a whirlwind, for goodness’ sake, too blinded by my passions to notice that she was only using me as bait to hook a bigger fish.” He growled at his old self. “Like an idiot, in front of most of Mayfair, I proposed in the middle of my birthday ball—and Florinda left it on the arm of the other man. It was all over the papers, so you probably read about it. Or saw the caricature.” His shoulders slumped as if the weight of it all was still too heavy to bear.
“They mocked your heartbreak in print?”
“Indeed—The Courting Jesterwas too hilarious not to.” Poor Guy. They hadn’t told her any of that. “I’ll give you three guesses who the weeping jester holding the ring was.” He shrugged, attempting to make light of it and she was so moved she wanted to smother him in an embrace and weep for him. He had been used and humiliated in the worst possible way andthat explained why a packed house party of society’s finest was not his idea of fun. Or why he did not trust easily. Or why he thought love was for fools. “That’s dreadful.”
“It was a long time ago and I am over it,” he said, not looking the least bit over it. “Although I am understandably jaded by the experience.” Then he became all twitchy, and awkward, as if he regretted revealing all that and that split her heart right in two. As if he should somehow be ashamed of, or blame himself, for what that vile woman did to him. “Shall we ride the rest of the way? I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked up quite the appetite thanks to our race. That apple was no substitute for a proper breakfast, and I would like to eat mine in peace before the hordes wake up.” Quick as a flash, he had his foot in Zeus’s stirrup before she caught the back of his coat.
“Stop.” Lottie yanked him away from the horse and spun him around, and like a fox caught in a trap his eyes told her he wasn’t happy to have his escape thwarted. “Don’t you dare deflect or attempt to run away again because you are panicking about looking stupid. I do not think less of you because you got your heart broken. If anything, I am delighted to discover you possess one as you’ve kept it so well hidden! Now that I understand why, and you have allowed me to see some of the real you, I am not going to allow you to build another wall to shut me out again. Any more than I am going to allow you to carry all that hurt and shame and anger around inside of you where it has quite obviously been festering, as that isn’t healthy.”
His eyes narrowed, a sure sign that his temper was about to erupt and a storming-off was imminent, so Lottie reached out to take his hand and laced her fingers through his to prevent one. “Like it or not, I am your friend now and I am an even better friend than I am a horsewoman.” He cocked a disbelieving brow, but it showed her that he was calming down. “Talk to me about it. Let it out. Lance that boil. Rant and rave all the way home if you need to. But you have to let it out to let it go, Guy.”
“Easy for you to say when your reckless stupidity is not immortalized in print, Lottie.” It was a half-hearted rebuff and, noticeably, he had dropped the formal “Miss Travers” that helped underpin his barricade.
“It hasn’t been—yet—but I am the Infamous Galloping Governess of Hyde Park, remember, so I daresay it is only a matter ofwhenand notifat this stage that my name makes the papers. Then we’ll have even more in common than we do already.”
