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She took another bite of her biscuit, a half smile lifting her right cheek. “Maybe. But your insistence that you will not marry is a curiosity. You’re heir to the earldom. You have responsibility as such. Is there something amiss with you that you do not want passed onward through the line?”
He looked directly at her, letting the full glower he knew sent men quaking in their boots shower down onto her. “There is nothing wrong with me. Nothing. This conversation is over, Juliet.”
Her mouth clamped closed, her lips pulling tight. She wasn’t quaking, but she also didn’t say another word.
Good enough.
{ Chapter 7 }
Blast.
She needed her bonnet.
And she’d forgotten it in the carriage Evan had rented in Preston after the rain of the day had suspended the joy of riding horses north. Long clouds bursting with downpours had rolled across the land the past days, giving them one day of horses, one day of carriage, one day of horses and today again in a hired carriage.
She wished the skies would make up their mind.
The rain had finally ceased early this evening, and she’d been breathing in the earthy smell of the wet ground when she’d stepped out of the carriage in Penrith, not thinking on her wrecked hat.
Juliet moved across her room at the carriage inn and pulled wide the drapes on the window.
The other bonnet she’d brought with her on the journey had been left behind with the first carriage stuck in the mud, so now she was hatless. The best she could hope to do was to try and reshape her crushed blue poke bonnet this evening so that it would, at the very least, properly sit on her head again.
The Scottish border coming soon, they were now only days away from Whetland Castle and she had to prepare. Appearing in front of Evan’s grandfather with a crushed bonnet would not do.
Juliet had shed so much of proper decorum since her downfall that she rarely thought back to those times when her mother and her governess had taught her everything about propriety. Back to when needlepoint and learning French and helping her mother create shell artwork would fill her days.
But she knew showing up at Whetland Castle in her wrinkled pelisse and carriage dress would be suspect enough. If she appeared a wild woman without a hat atop her head, one could only imagine what the earl would think on her.
Probably that his grandson had hired a whore to pose as his betrothed.
She looked out the window positioned along the rear of the inn. It wasn’t quite dusk, but the sun was sinking below the rise of distant mountains. This land was so different. Sharp and craggy, peaks and valleys, and then flush with wild flora.
There, down the hill by the river that snaked along the village, sat their carriage in the stable yard. If she hurried down and retrieved her bonnet now, she could wet it and try to reshape the wool before Evan appeared with their dinner. That would give the hat time to dry, and for her to attempt to fix it again before retiring if her first attempt was unsuccessful.
She grabbed her pelisse, shrugging her arms into it as she left her room and hurried down the tight stairwell to the ground floor. Sliding out a door at the rear of the inn next to the long length of the bar, she stepped outside and inhaled until her lungs were so full, she had to cough.
She loved this air. Clean. The smell of green and trees and leaves turning color. At the Willows the air was clearer than in London, but it didn’t have this snap of purity in it.
It had always been a dream, to see this land, for the beauty of it that had been professed to her time and again. It didn’t disappoint.
Evan was lucky that he got to breathe this air all the time.
And just like that, thoughts of him were in her head again.
She was long past blushing in her life. But the memory of their kiss still tinged her cheeks with unexpected heat. She’d tried to not dwell upon that moment, and even more importantly, never spoke to Evan on the fact that their lips had touched.
Nor did he. Thankfully.
Since the kiss, he’d been nothing but a gentleman these past days as they travelled onward. While the conversation with him had held a remarkable ease, it had stayed firmly in polite territory. Neither of them dared to broach the topic of the heat that still obviously simmered between them. She could barely look at him sometimes without her heart quickening at the memory of his hand burying into her hair and sending prickles onto the back of her neck.
No.
Mouth shut on that topic. Mind shut on that topic.
If neither of them mentioned it, the sparks couldn’t light to fire. That was the best—only—course of action.
Shaking her head at herself, Juliet made her way down the hill to the carriage and then opened the door of the coach, stretching inward to try and reach up onto the back cushion to snatch her bonnet without having to let the steps out.
