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“Recent.”
Guy chuckled. “For someone who claims not to know how to flirt, you are very good at it.” He brushed a knuckle against her throat. “I’d like to point out that your pulse is racing.”
“And I’d like to point out that my mother is watching.”
“Ah.”
Her eyes danced with laughter. Fighting his own smile, Guy backed away from her and turned to face the intruder. Lady Belinda stood with her hands clasped, chastening him with her serene, direct gaze.
He bowed. “Lady Belinda.”
“Lord Hardbury.”
He pivoted and strode away. The door to the drawing room gaped open, but his senses still burned with Arabella’s closeness, so he kept on walking, seeking the respite and release of his room.
Chapter 17
“Oh, what a work of art!”
Juno’s voice was threaded with awe, and she burst into activity, swiftly moving her charcoal across a leaf of paper.
Arabella did not need to look at that page to know what Juno was drawing.
Or whom, rather.
Arabella, Juno, and Cassandra had rounded a corner of the abbey ruins just in time to see Guy leap onto a four-foot-high crumbling wall, in a single bound like a cat. He paused, swaying in the sunlight, finding his balance, his face bright with simple, boyish fun. He was picturesquely framed by a high, distant arch, and a cluster of purple Michaelmas daisies rioted at his feet.
One gave Michaelmas daisies to say farewell.
“Beware distractions, Juno,” Arabella managed to say, though she might as well have been warning herself. That morning, she had thrown herself into organizing an impromptu outing for the small party of remaining guests in a vain effort to keep her mind off that oh-so-irrational kiss of the evening before. “Perhaps you had forgotten that your assignment today is to draw the abbey ruins.”
“Iamdrawing the ruins.” Juno’s swift, confident strokes did not pause, as Guy’s image appeared under her hand. “I just happen to be drawing that portion of the ruins that have an athletic man prancing about on them. I would just as likely draw a bird or a cat had one landed on that spot, but since Lord Hardbury has been so obliging as to make a spectacle of himself, well, who am I to ignore Nature’s bounty?These beauteous forms…” She glanced sideways at Arabella. “Poetry. Sorry.”
“So you should be.”
Guy was moving nimbly along the wall now, testing the stone, choosing his next move. A sky lark landed on a high wall nearby and he paused to admire it.
Breathtaking.
Good grief. More wretched poetry, and a nonsensical phrase to boot, but how else to describe this tightness in her chest? This bittersweet ache, as if all her breath had indeed been stolen, leaving her limbs light with a desperate need for air.
He could have been mine.
The thought jolted through her, with a sensation as physical as if she were falling.
A life with Guy could have been hers. A potentially beautiful gift had been bestowed upon her, but she had failed to see its worth, amidst her struggle to understand and control her own life. This breathtaking man and the life of joy he seemed to promise—they were as far out of her reach as that sky lark, and that was nobody’s fault but her own.
If she had gone about life differently? Become the amiable lady her father demanded, the lady of Guy’s dreams, less complicated, less combative, less herself?
But she didn’t want to be different. She didn’t want to change herself to please others. What she wanted was—oh, heaven help her, she was turning into a ninny!—but she wanted to be special to him. In truth, and not as a game.
“I wish I could do that,” came a voice from her side.
It was Freddie, watching Guy wistfully, her fingers absently tearing a Michaelmas daisy to shreds. Glancing around, Arabella saw that she had unconsciously drifted nearer to Guy, leaving Juno and Cassandra behind.
“Climb the walls,” Freddie clarified. “We went to see some acrobats and I’ve been practicing at home. I can leap and pivot mid-air, and even do somersaults and land safely.”
“If you had thought to wear your Turkish trousers today, you could have impressed us all.”
