Page 30 of The Duke’s Suspicion

Did he expect her to believe he spent his days cooking and serving? She took up a cold leg of chicken and pointed it at him. “An officer.”

“It is not the life of ease you imagine it to be,” he said, joining her on the sturdy bench.

A sudden memory of touching him yesterday morning, his solidly muscled chest disguised beneath layers of wool and silk and linen, made her fingertips tingle. Reflexively she reached for her journal with her other hand, finding it on the bench between them and moving it to her lap. “No. No, I haven’t been imagining any such thing.”

“It bothers you.” His voice was matter of fact as he began to pile food on a plate. “That I’m a soldier.”

Did it? She rather suspected it ought to bother her more.

What right-thinking Irishwoman would admit her fascination with an English duke and a British soldier? Surely this was a betrayal of Henry’s memory and the cause for which he had given his life.

But even as she thought it, she knew Henry would have been the very last person to fault her. The person she seemed to be most in danger of betraying here was herself.

“You were a soldier,” she corrected, daring once more to contradict him. “Now you’re a duke.”

“May not a man be both?” He set the full plate before her.

Ignoring it, she took a bite of chicken instead, chewed thoughtfully, swallowed. “I daresay a man may be most anything he chooses. Men are fortunate in their freedoms, and wealthy noblemen most of all.”

“Am I harboring a radical, Miss Burke? A leveler?” His voice teased, but his tight jaw and narrowed eyes told another story. Her elder brother was a barrister, and she had once seen that very expression on his face in the courtroom as he interrogated a criminal. The tension only heightened when Tristan added, in a wary voice, “Perhaps a Jacobin?”

Laying aside the chicken, she picked up her fork and stabbed a shade too violently at the contents of her plate. Something that might have been aspic jiggled. “Two days ago, I was accused of being an Irish rebel. I had no idea a botanist touring the countryside to examine the local flora was assumed to be a dangerous creature. Perhaps I ought to study the moral of Captain Whitby’s story about the poets more carefully.”

His lips curved into a smile. But only after his eyes had scoured her face, leaving her certain he had ways of reading whatever secrets were written on her soul. Her fingertips tightened automatically around the spine of her journal. When he spoke, his soft voice curled around her like the heat of the fire, sending off sparks of—alarm? Oh, let it be alarm.

“Wandering women are the most dangerous kind,” he said, looking for all the world like the kind of man who thrived on danger.

She swallowed hard, though she had not taken another bite of food. “Must everything—everyone follow the same straight line, the same narrow path?” she asked once she trusted her voice. “In nature, one sees little respect for such artificial boundaries. Even the tamest farm animals break down fences, and plants’ roots tunnel under walls. Only in humans do we seem to expect domestication as the natural state.” She prodded at the abandoned chicken leg. “Perhaps some people—some women—are simply not meant to stay at home.”

He gave her words a thorough weighing before he spoke. “And you are such a woman.”

Not a question, steeped in curiosity and judgment. A simple statement of fact. Of understanding, too? But not even her family really understood. The prickle of awareness along her spine intensified until it took every ounce of willpower she possessed to keep from leaping to her feet. As if she could shake free of the sensation of his touch. As if she could outrun her longing for it.

Instead she drew a shaky breath and dug her fork into a piece of apple pie, fully expecting Tristan to chide her for eating dessert before she had finished her meal. But if he were tempted to do so, he held his tongue. Her second breath rattled a little less, and the third felt almost normal.

The spicy-sweet tang of the first bite of pie made her give an involuntary hum of pleasure, but it caught in her throat when he said, “Which, I confess, makes me curious about the fact that you spent the whole day, and evening, sitting in one place.” He walked his fingers around the edge of his still-empty plate as he spoke.

She coughed and said, “I’ve told you—”

His fingers left the plate to brush aside her words. “The flower, yes.” He did not, however, raise his eyes to hers.

Clearly, he found her interest in the rare, short-lived bloom an inadequate explanation. And when she thought back over their previous encounters, she believed she understood why. He imagined her restlessness a mere physical behavior, not a manifestation of her deeper…peculiarity.

“When I told you I am not always ladylike, I did not refer exclusively to an excess of bodily energy—”

The corner of one dark brow lifted; she did not need to see more to imagine its sardonic arc.

Oh, she ought not to be discussing bodies at all. Certainly not with a man. Not when they were alone. Alone in a room so dimly lit they had to sit close enough to touch just to see one another’s faces. No, she would not blush. She absolutely would not blush.

She blushed.

“My—m-my mind—” Could he feel the flame spreading across her cheeks? Certainly, if he lifted his fingers to her cheeks, or brushed his lips across…

“Your mind is prone to wandering, too?” He spoke in the sort of soft, soothing, coaxing voice she imagined a physician might use when examining a patient bound for Bedlam.

“No. I mean—well, yes. It does. Terribly sometimes. Or rather—” She sucked in another breath. From the sudden frown on his face, visible even in profile, she guessed that this time she wouldn’t be at leisure to take three. “I would not say it wanders, exactly. Wandering implies aimlessness, a leisurely drift from place to place, or subject to subject. My thoughts seem to bounce along, rather like a trotting horse.”

Those words captured his full attention. He was still leaning forward, bent toward his plate, but his head turned enough that he could fix her with one eye. The firelight caught the hard turn of his jaw, gleaming along the growth of a day’s beard. It must indeed be late. Would the stubble feel rough to touch? Or smooth yet sharp, like the edge of a knife…?