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‘I—er...’
‘You will? Excellent.’ Giles’s smile was polite, but she could remember that look all too well. It meant trouble.
‘I will not be long, Lord Revesby,’ she managed with dignity. At least she had got the use of her tongue again. Laurel scolded herself silently all the way upstairs to the bedchamber for failing to come up with a convincing pretext. What could he want with her company? Presumably he would enjoy twitting her about her unmarried state because it seemed he was suffering from the delusion that his exile had been all her fault. ‘Binham! I need to—Oh, you are here already.’
Her maid was laying out a pelisse and bonnet on the bed. ‘Yes, my lady. I saw his lordship approaching on foot and I assumed he was calling to take you walking, it being such a lovely day.’
Did you, indeed? And what do you know about Lord Revesby?
It seemed as though everyone was conspiring to throw her together with Giles—Nicol and Binham and even her aunt, who could surely have produced some acceptable reason why Laurel was not free that morning.
She came downstairs with her best society smile, the one she produced when her stepmother had dragged her away from the schoolroom and Jamie’s lessons, or the library and the company of a good book, in order to make stilted conversation with callers.
‘Charming. You look like a sprig of spring foliage.’ Giles was at the foot of the stairs, waiting for her.
‘Does that mean that you consider this outfit too green?’ she demanded, society smile slipping. Compliments from Giles had always needed examining with care and now she was not prepared to believe a single flattering word he uttered.
‘Not at all.’ He was suspiciously straight-faced. ‘If the hat had been green itself and not simply cream straw trimmed with matching ribbons, you might have looked rather like a topiary figure, but as it is, you hardly resemble one at all.’
‘I knew Stepmama was wrong about making the entire pelisse green and not just the bodice,’ she confided before she recalled that she did not like him or trust him and that he had just insulted her, even if she did agree with him.
Nicol was holding the front door open with what, in a butler, was a positive smirk. He obviously saw himself as matchmaking now he had a young lady in the house, or perhaps he was hoping for lavish tips from a host of gentlemen callers. Laurel thanked him frostily.
You should be on my side, she thought. Then told herself to be fair because he doubtless thought he was.
One of the attractions of Laura Place was that it was so close to the Sydney Gardens, a short stroll away along Great Pulteney Street. Laurel had heard of them, of course, famously the largest pleasure gardens outside London, and Phoebe had promised that there would be an eligible programme of evening entertainments for them to attend. For daytime, she had explained, the hexagonal grounds held walks, a labyrinth, a sham castle and grottos.
Giles offered his arm and Laurel reluctantly slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow, put up her parasol—green again, although by some miracle he refrained from commenting on it—and allowed herself to be guided up the incline towards the Sydney Hotel, through which one gained admittance to the grounds.
‘Why have you called?’ she asked abruptly, cutting through Giles’s polite small talk about the weather. ‘Why have you asked me to walk with you?’
‘For the pleasure of your company?’ he suggested.
‘Giles, we last met nine years ago in the midst of an appalling family row when I refused to marry you because I found out that I had been grievously misled in my opinion of your character.’
‘Grievously misled? You sound like a maiden in a melodrama, Laurel. You discovered no such thing, simply misunderstood something that you had no business overhearing. Instead of finding out the truth you promptly threw a tantrum and caused chaos. It was a miracle that your godfather or your father didn’t end up putting a bullet in me and that my father did not have a seizure. No, let me finish.’ She almost recoiled at the sudden hardening of his voice. ‘We need to discuss it and clear the air, certainly, but I am not going to do that either in your aunt’s house where you can storm off and leave me, or here and now on the street.’
I could storm off and leave you here, halfway down Great Pulteney Street.
She almost said it, but curiosity and a sense of fairness, admittedly deep-buried where Giles was concerned, stopped her. Matters had deteriorated into a shouting match almost immediately so she had never heard an explanation—or an excuse—from him. It might help her to hear what he had to say. In fact, hearing him flail about trying to find an excuse for his behaviour might be positively amusing, she told herself, struggling to keep her brittle defences up.
They passed through the entrance to the Sydney Hotel where Giles paid their admission and into the foyer which opened into the gravelled area surrounded by pavilions and booths that would, Laurel supposed, be packed during the evening entertainments. Now, mid-morning, a couple strolling in the distance and a gardener sweeping the grass with a besom broom seemed the only inhabitants.
‘There, I think.’ He pointed to a rustic seat in the dappled shade under a spreading lime tree. ‘We should be undisturbed.’
Speak for yourself, Lord Revesby. I am already exceedingly disturbed.
She kept reminding herself that this physically attractive man, whose body heat she could feel where their arms rested together, was Giles, her childhood friend, the young man who should have grown up to be her husband, the young man who had broken her heart.
Had he?
She caught the thought. No, it had not been a broken heart. She had loved him, but not as an adult woman with a heart to lose, with a mature understanding of what marriage might be. This had been a betrayal of something much purer and simpler—friendship. Perhaps that was why it was so difficult to forgive and forget.
Chapter Seven
‘It was all because of what you overheard, eavesdropping that afternoon in the barn,’ Giles said as soon as they had sat down on the bench.
So, he was going to attack this head on, was he? ‘Of course it was.’ There had been nothing before, nothing that had sullied her perfect trust and faith in him. ‘I was not eavesdropping,’ Laurel said, defensive. ‘It was hot and I went in to find some shade and to see if the stable-yard cat had brought her kittens in there. I sat down, right at the back under the hayloft, and the next thing I knew, you and Gray started talking in the loft right above my head.’
