“Nonsense. You are besotted, and there is no more dangerous condition known to man. We shall walk. It will soothe your agitations and distract you from composing sonnets to her eyebrows.”
Theo scowled but stood. “I was thinking more of her mouth, actually.”
“God help us,” Jasper muttered, leading the way outside.
—♥—
Hetty was attempting to readA Vindication of the Rights of Womanupon a shaded bench in Green Park. It was not her usual fare – she preferred poetry, or a bit of gothic nonsense – but on this particularafternoon, she had selected the volume in hopes that Mary Wollstonecraft might knock some sense into her muddled head.
The sun was warm, and the branches of a linden tree cast gentle shade across her bonnet. From time to time, the muted clatter of hooves or the swish of fine muslin marked the presence of other, better-behaved members of Society. It ought to have been peaceful. It was decidedly not.
She had read the same paragraph no fewer than five times – possibly six – and not a single word had taken root. Each rational argument was interrupted by the wholly inappropriate memory of Theo Winslow’s mouth pressed to hers.
Hetty snapped the book shut and glared at the linden tree. “This is intolerable,” she muttered beneath her breath.
As if summoned by the very force of her indignation, Theo’s laughter rang out across the path. She would have known it anywhere, even if she were blindfolded and a hundred miles from Town. He was striding along the gravel path not twenty yards away – hat in hand, coat unfastened, hair as heedless as ever – speaking to another gentleman and laughing with that same bright delight he had possessed since childhood. She sank lower on the bench and raised her book to peek over the top inconspicuously.
Hetty had never thought Theo handsome. His nose was far too long, his eyebrows far too expressive and thick – indeed, they behaved with a wilful life of their own – and his hair had never met a brush it liked. It stood, as ever, in bold rebellion against pomade and fashion alike.
In a most aggravation fashion, Hetty now found herself noticing things she had, until recently, quite ignored: the breadth of his shoulders, for instance, which had most assuredly widened since their childhood skirmishes over chessboards and plum tarts. His voice too, deeper than she remembered, had acquired a rough warmth, like whisky left to mellow in a beam of afternoon sun. When he laughed – not his rakish chuckle, but his true laugh, with his head tilted back and his mouth wide open – it struck an odd chord within her in that even the sternest passage of Wollstonecraft could not suppress. His dimples, which she had once mocked without mercy, now struck her as entirely unfair – but more than that, there was something about the way he moved through the world, unbothered and unbowed, so unashamed to be wholly himself. And his eyes – blast them – were still that same infuriating shade of blue. They had always been so, of course, but here, in this dappled park, with her book quite forgotten now and a most inconvenient flush warming her cheeks, Hetty was forced – reluctantly and quite resentfully – to admit that Theo might, in fact, be rather beautiful.
And so, with great dignity, Hetty straightened her spine, returned her eyes most sternly upon her book (though she could no longer have said what book it was), and muttered very quietly and with all the sincerity of a woman thoroughly undone: “Damn and blast it all.”
—♥—
Jasper had been entirely correct: movement was indeed an effective remedy for a troubled mind. A brisk circuit of the park underneath the afternoon sun and a few well-aimed barbs at his friend’s expense had done much to restoring Theo’s composure. Fora blessed interval, he had even managed to dislodge from his thought all memory of Miss Tolliver’s mouth: its softness, its warm, and the scandalously eager manager in which it has responded to his own. Alas, such peace was not designed to last and departed the very moment Jasper Deverell gave a low hum of interest.
“Tell me, Langley,” Jasper drawled, coming to a halt with the air of one about to make mischief of the most inconvenient kind, “is that not Miss Tolliver herself beneath the linden, pretending very hard indeed not to be observing you?”
Theo followed the line of sight and promptly regretted it, for he found that it was indeed Hetty, seated primly upon a green-painted bench with a book in her lap and a look of such fierce concentration, one might assume the page contained instructions on how to commit murder. Her spine was very straight, her bonnet tilted just so, and her mouth – curse her mouth – was drawn into the precise little line she reserved for situations that tested both her temper and her restraint. He knew that expression, and it did not bode well.
“She is reading.”
“Is she?” Jasper replied. “How noble. One might even believe it, were she not glaring at the same page as though it had insulted her mother.”
Theo glanced away. “She is not glaring.”
“She is most assuredly not reading,” Jasper declared. “No one reads with their nostrils flared like a war horse on the eve of Waterloo. That is not the posture of a woman lost in prose. It is the posture of a woman preparing for battle, and I daresay, Langley, you are the opposing regiment.”
“She’s likely readingA Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”
“Good Lord. Then you are well and truly doomed.”
And yes – before you, dear reader, begin to wonder how on earth Theo could have known what book Hetty held so discreetly – permit me to interrupt the narrative. Perhaps he simply knew Hetty too well, or perhaps, like all men possessed of more confidence than caution, he had learnt to recognise the particular set of a lady’s shoulders that suggested she was in the midst of a feminist treatise – which, naturally, brings us to the matter of Theo’s impulse, that most ungovernable of male afflictions.
It struck him with all the subtlety of a cavalry charge, this urge. It was not malicious, precisely, nor even mischievous, but born of that peculiar masculine instinct which compels a gentleman to provoke the very woman whose favour he secretly most desires. Yes, since time immemorial, men of otherwise sound mind have tossed pebbles at governesses, launched arrows near heiresses, and made utter fools of themselves before women who read Latin for leisure, all in the inexplicable service of their affection – and so Theo, being no exception to this tradition, opened his mouth and invited doom. “Miss Tolliver, I believe you dropped your composure somewhere about two days past in the gardens. Might I assist in retrieving it?”
There was a beat of silence, and then, as though prompted by an omniscient narrator declaring, ‘and now, she strikes,’ Hetty rose to her feet. She lifted her arm, and without so much as a flinch, launched her book directly at Theo’s chest. It struck him with considerable force and was caught only by the sheer reflexes of years playing cricket.
“Marvellous aim,” Jasper observed, his grin positively feral. “Had she aimed for your head, I daresay the match would now be official. Nothing signals romantic intent quite so effectively as a direct blow to the skull.”
Theo, for once, said nothing. He merely stared after Hetty as she rose with regal disdain and proceeded down the path at a pace that bespoke not flight, but a strong desire to be anywhere else on earth but near him. The sight of her spine – ramrod straight, proud as a cavalry officer – struck him with a strange, unexpected fondness, and he could not help but laugh.
Jasper clasped his hands behind his back. “Well then. Shall I name it love, or war?”
Theo shook his head, still laughing as he stared after her. “At present, I should say it is both.”
“Excellent. I have always been fond of a good siege.”
