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“I wasn’t speaking about the horse,” he answered, and this time his smile was a leer.
Ashton had already maneuvered his horse and came around to tell the young gallant, “I don’t think we have been properly introduced, nor do I think I intend that to happen.” So saying, he nodded to Felicia and made certain she started off by giving her horse’s rump a light pat.
A giggle forced its gurgling way out of her throat. She grinned at Ashton, looked back at the gallant Ashton had summarily dealt with, and giggled again. “You were quite dreadful to that poor young man,” she told him.
“He was ogling you and deserved worse than I gave him, and he dashed well knows it.” Ashton frowned. “It is my fault taking you about without even a maid or a groom in attendance. Men will get the wrong idea, you see.”
Her expression flitted over her features as apparent dawning lit in her brain, but instead of shock, she burst out laughing. “Oh! That is why he was so very forward. I wondered at it.” So saying she laughed again and added, “So then he thought me a veritable light-skirts, eh?”
He turned a shocked expression to her. “Felicia!”
This only made her laugh even more, and he found himself joining in on her mirth, at which point she said, “Come on, then, if we mean to ride before we lose the best of the day.”
“As you command, m’lady,” he returned grandly, giving her a mock bow from his saddle and trotting his horse up to ride alongside her.
“Be careful,
madcap,” he said. “You can’t canter him off now, as I see you mean to do, without a proper warm-up.”
“I have been riding for as long as I can remember, often without a saddle,” she answered with her brow up. “I know what I can and cannot do.”
Scott’s horse under him nipped playfully at her horse, and he reprimanded him. Felicia laughed, he presumed with the joy of being on horseback, and during that moment he realized he had never been happier.
Just what—what was happening to him?
~ Thirteen ~
FELICIA WAS WELL aware what her heart was experiencing and just what was happening to her. She had fallen hopelessly, endlessly in love with Glen Ashton. She knew so very little about him, about his life, his family, but she didn’t need to know details. She loved not only the look and cut of the man, but she loved the way his mind worked.
She had had ample opportunity to observe him in several complicated and exhilarating situations in which another man would not have so excelled. He had shown his mettle in each and every encounter they had experienced together, and she was more than impressed. She was thoroughly enamored. The only problem was, she wasn’t sure he felt anything close to what she felt.
She could see, for she was a woman with very good instincts, that he was more than a little attracted to her. She could see that he was holding himself back, for there had been several times she thought he was about to kiss her but then he did not. No doubt he thought her the innocent she was and did not wish to hurt her? Well, she was going to have to do something about that, wasn’t she? He was a man of the world. There was no doubt in her mind that his mistresses were widows, or even married, but never maids. His honor would make him resist her, and she didn’t want him to.
What then? Ah, she would have to be bolder than an innocent maid and perhaps find a way to break down that resistance of his? Yes, she would break down that sense of honor that kept him from taking her into his very desirable arms—that was the ticket, as her Scott would say.
“So, then, you rode over hill and dale all your life without a saddle, did you?” He smiled.
“Oh, not often, but, yes, very horsey, my family. It was natural for us, living in the country, and as a young girl it was acceptable to play the hoyden and have more fun than a prim miss might in London at her stitching.”
“I can just see you running amok, with that glorious hair of yours all around your beautiful face,” he said almost wistfully. He sighed. “But I see you know well how to play the lady, which you shall have to do in London, you know.”
“Play the lady?” She took no offense. “Indeed, I am a lady, but I have no wish to put on airs simply because I mean to have a season.”
She saw it then, she saw it in his smoldering eyes, in the way that his breath caught in his throat. He was leaning in towards her as though he was about to take her hand …
But she didn’t want him to take her hand. She wanted him to take her waist and bend to kiss her. She slowed her horse with just that intent and eyed him as flirtatiously as she knew how. Scott would have laughed right out loud, but Ashton didn’t laugh, not at all.
“You are many things, my beauty, a hoyden of a wild child for one, a lady who knows just how to carry herself, and an emerging woman.” He did, in fact, take up her gloved fingers, move the cuff from her wrist, and place a warm and lingering kiss there.
Shivers swept through her body, and she trembled at his touch. If his kiss to her wrist could do so much—what then when he kissed her lips? “So, you think that,” she stuck in breathlessly if only to try and ease herself, “I shall manage with the very pink of the ton?”
“I am,”—he inclined his head with a chuckle—“considered to be amongst the ‘pink of the ton’ and can tell you that for those of us who enjoy seeing past the veneer of the new debutantes hopeful of entering our world, you shall manage very well. In fact, you have the carriage of a duchess.”
He said that with such feeling that she glanced at him for a very long moment and answered, “Do you think I would care for the opinions of people who put value on all the wrong things—like that? It isn’t the fashion I choose to wear but the heart I carry.” She shrugged. “I don’t give a fig for who is ton and who is not, but I might enjoy attending their routs and balls.” She laughed at herself over this.
“Bravo!” He smiled warmly at her. “Now that is the duchess in you.”
They bantered in this style, about manners, hers and society’s. She ventured questions about some of the famous fashionables she had read about and listened raptly to his descriptions, until all at once she noticed they had reached the cottage in the woods.
