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‘And if my sense of honour demands I go and confess all?’ Adam shook the pan over the heat and set it down again.
‘You wouldn’t.’ Surely he was teasing her? But the grey-green eyes were serious and steady. ‘That would be dreadful.’ To have avoided all those reluctant, horrified suitors only to find the one man she had ever found who she liked forced to offer for her—that was the stuff of nightmares. ‘I don’t want to marry you, and you certainly do not want to marry me. Promise me you will not tell Charlton.’ He shrugged and Decima came round the table hastily to grasp his wrist. ‘Please, promise, Adam.’
His other hand closed over hers. Under her fingers she could feel the beat of his pulse, hard and steady like his eyes. Then he smiled. ‘I was teasing you, Decima. I promise.’
Furious with him, she shook off his hand and whisked round the table, banging plates down to emphasise her irritation. But it was not all anger; part of it was the humiliating awareness that she had lied and would like nothing more than to be married to Adam Grantham. But only if that was what he wanted, too.
She tried to maintain a lofty silence, marching off to take the invalids their breakfast, then settling down in an affronted flounce of skirts to eat her own. After a minute she realised that Adam was watching her with a decidedly satirical twinkle in his eyes.
‘What?’ she demanded inelegantly. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘You are a very bad sulker, Decima; I can only conclude you do it rarely. My sisters are all champions at it, so I am a good judge.’
‘No, I suppose I don’t. Truth be told, I always used to spinelessly do what was required of me or just pretend horrid things were not happening. I never did anything as positive as sulking. Is it effective?’
‘It’s a game,’ Adam admitted with a grin. ‘Emily and Sally would sulk and pout and wheedle and I would pretend to be hard and uncaring and then, nine times out of ten, I would give them what they wanted. They were only practising the tricks they now play on their husbands.’
Decima chewed thoughtfully. ‘Without wanting to criticise your sisters, that seems rather…unsatisfactory. I don’t think I would want a relationship where I had to pout and wheedle to get things. I would rather discuss it and argue my case.’
‘As you do with Charlton?’ he enquired.
Decima felt herself flush. ‘As I intend to do in future, yes.’
‘Leave the dishes,’ Adam said as she began to gather them up. ‘No housework on New Year’s Day. Wrap up, and we’ll go and look at the horses.’
It was all right for men, Decima thought wryly as she went to put on her thick shawl and check on Pru. They just issued orders and the women and servants did as they were told. For a moment she was tempted to announce that she intended to sit by the fire with Pru reading all day, then she remembered what Adam had said about playing in the snow.
‘Pru, I?
??ll be outside if you need me,’ she called, seizing her gloves and running downstairs in her heaviest boots.
Adam was already in the stables as she made her away across the yard. She began to skirt the treacherous slick of ice where Bates had fallen, then looked at it with new eyes. Every year she and Augusta skated on the frozen mere half a mile from the house; how was this any different?
She took a run up and slid a full twelve feet, arms waving until she caught her balance. Laughing, she went into the stables to join Adam.
The clear ripple of amusement brought him to look over the door of the stall where he was forking fresh straw. It was even more charming than her giggle. Damn it. Why couldn’t the woman do something to give him a disgust of her? Last evening, respectable and staid as it had been, had done nothing to put his unruly feelings back on track.
At first it had seemed to work just as he had hoped: formality, social chitchat and unexceptional subject matter had reduced Decima to a shadow of her vibrant self.
She had agreed politely with everything he’d said, followed all his conversational leads, never ventured a single opinion of her own and had sat, hands folded, feet together by the hearth. If it were possible for a tall, attractive woman to become invisible, she had almost managed it. It should have made him feel safe. Instead, he hated it. It was as though someone had snuffed a candle, leaving him alone in the darkness.
He pushed away the enormity of what that implied. ‘What is so amusing?’
Decima twinkled at him as she went towards Fox’s stall. ‘I’ll show you when we go outside. Hello, handsome!’
Fox put his head over the half-door, pushing expectantly at her caressing hand. ‘Yes, I have sugar. This is outrageous cupboard love, you wretch.’ She turned to Adam, still rubbing the one spot on the big stallion’s nose that seemed to reduce him to a blissful trance. He found himself watching her hands. ‘I have been thinking of breeding from my mare, Spindrift. You wouldn’t consider putting Fox to her?’
She said it so practically, without the trace of a blush. Adam swallowed. ‘He is a big horse—seventeen hands.’ Now how, exactly, did one put this without becoming coarse?
‘You think the foal would be too large for her?’ Decima regarded Fox, head on one side. ‘She is sixteen hands, I am sure that would not be a problem. Of course, we would have to draw up a proper agreement and I would naturally pay the correct fee for a successful foal.’
‘She’s a large mare.’ It was all he could think of saying.
‘She needs to be,’ Decima countered with a grimace. ‘What do you think? Obviously you want to be careful about bloodlines, but I can let you see Spindrift’s. She’s one-quarter Arab.’
‘Yes. I don’t see why not. We’ll discuss it.’ It was a feeble answer, but Adam turned back abruptly to his task. The thought of putting his stallion to her mare produced such a flood of primitive emotions in him that he didn’t think he could face her. Decima appeared to have not the slightest idea of her own effect on him, of the earthy sensuality she exuded when she was not being the prim and proper spinster miss. Even when she was being prim and proper, come to that. Surely men had made overtures to her before, surely she was aware of the effect she had?
They finished in the stables and went outside. ‘Now, tell me, what made you laugh?’ Anything to stop thinking about her, tall, slender, lithe and naked in his arms.
