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‘I have no wish to discuss my body—and certainly not yours. And you have only just explained to me what goes on in the swamp that is your mind, Giles Redmond!’ She stepped back, her hands up as though to ward him off although he made no move to touch her. ‘I?
?What was that?’
That, he saw when he looked down, was the soft sound of a foot crushing an expensive straw bonnet, pressing silk ribbons into yielding turf.
‘My bonnet,’ Laurel wailed as she twisted to extricate her foot in its half-boot from the wreckage of her hat. ‘You dropped my bonnet on the ground!’
‘I did not intend you to step on it,’ Giles protested. ‘I will buy you a new one.’
‘That was a new one. I only bought it yesterday.’
‘After your encounter with me in the Pump Room?’ Even as he said it Giles realised that it was probably not the most tactful thing in the world to suggest that a lady might have been so affected by meeting him that she had rushed out and bought a hat to look beautiful in for his benefit.
‘Yes, immediately afterwards, as it happens. And do not flatter yourself that I wanted you to admire it, you arrogant man. I was so put out by that exchange that only a new bonnet would do to soothe my nerves. You are expensive as well as exasperating.’ She dangled the bonnet from one bedraggled ribbon. ‘Now I have to walk back through the streets of Bath without a hat, like some doxy.’
‘We will go back to the hotel and I will order you a chair to take you home,’ Giles suggested as he stooped to pick up his own hat and brushed a daisy flower from the brim, using the opportunity to get his breathing under control. Strategically holding the hat in such a way as to conceal his reluctantly subsiding arousal was probably also tactful. It should be a huge relief to discover that he could make love to Laurel with conviction, although the visible evidence was inconvenient. It seemed his body was just as undisciplined as any adolescent youth’s, responding more for the physical sex than the emotional tangle of his thoughts.
‘And how do I explain how this happened? I will not be able to show my face in the Sydney Hotel again after this,’ she mourned. ‘And Phoebe had promised such interesting entertainments there.’
‘Give it to me.’ Giles took the battered hat and impaled the brim on a small branch that was sticking out. ‘There.’ He jerked it free and handed it to her. ‘We were in the maze and the branch caught it, tore it off, it fell to the ground, you recoiled in shock, stood on the hat and so on. In fact, the management will probably feel so guilty about their faulty pruning that they will offer to buy you a new bonnet.’
* * *
‘You always were the best person for inventing excuses,’ Laurel remembered. Strange how thinking of the distant past and Giles as a boy reduced her anger with him as a man. In some ways he had not changed at all. ‘Expecting them to buy me a new bonnet would be dishonest. But the story would serve to save my blushes.’ She cast him a sidelong glance, wondering if he felt anywhere near as confused as she did. It didn’t show. ‘Giles, what happened just now?’
‘We kissed. I rather thought you had noticed.’
‘Of course I noticed, stop playing with words.’ She turned and walked down the path out of the central space. That was cowardly, but it meant she did not have to look at him. ‘I mean, why should we do such a thing?’ she asked over her shoulder. ‘We do not even like each other any more.’
‘Do we not?’ He fell into step beside her, still holding his hat. ‘We had a misunderstanding and we explained ourselves to each other. I rather thought that we could cry friends again.’
Once she would have been very happy with that, with being friends. What did she want now? And what did Giles want, swinging from anger and exasperation with her to teasing and kisses? ‘I do not make a habit of kissing men.’
‘No, I could tell that.’
‘Oh! You—’
‘That was a compliment, Laurel, not a suggestion that your embraces are not enjoyable. You are very properly inexperienced with lovemaking.’
‘A situation you are intending to remedy? Really, Giles, I do not know what your experience might have been in Portugal, but unmarried ladies in this country do not take lovers, not and remain respectable. I honestly do not know what came over me just now.’ He was silent as they came out into the open again, his expression as closed as if he had slammed a book shut. ‘Giles?’
‘I will tell you what came over us,’ he said, his voice harsh. ‘Simple desire. There is nothing wrong with that, nothing to be ashamed of. And naturally you would not kiss any man whom you did not trust.’
‘I can trust you?’
‘Of course,’ he said.
What was there in that to make him frown so? ‘You kissed me on the Downs before you knew who I was, what I was,’ she pointed out. ‘We were total strangers, so we thought.’
‘We were, but sometimes, surely, we can give way to instinct, to snatch pleasure where we may, provided we do no harm. It was the merest touch of the lips.’
It had been magical. An enchantment. And one that she was not sure had worn off yet, because otherwise, what was she doing allowing him to kiss her again? ‘But that might have caused harm. I might have fallen in love with you, gone into a decline pining for the handsome stranger who kissed me in the sunlight on top of the world.’
He seemed to take her tone and her false laugh at face value, thank goodness. ‘I suspect that two old friends, long parted, recognised each other without realising it, don’t you?’ There was a pause and that shuttered look came over his face again. ‘I would never want to hurt you, Laurel.’
But I hurt you with my lack of trust. Can you ever truly forgive that?
The hotel concierge was appalled that Lady Laurel’s charming bonnet had fallen foul of the undergrowth and a sedan chair was produced within minutes to whisk her the short distance home. Outdated they might seem, but sedan chairs continued to flourish in the spa town, snuggly conveying old ladies from hot baths to lodging houses, or ferrying gouty gentlemen up the hills, safe with the strong arms of the Irish chairmen.
