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He lowered his head in sheepish submission. “If I apologize, will you forgive me?”
She refused to look at him, refused to be cajoled by his little boy charm. “Why should I?”
“No reason at all except it might make you feel better.”
“It would take a lot more than that to make me feel better.”
She spun around, coming up hard against his chest. When had he stepped so close? When had she forgotten how to breathe? She had but to lift her chin to touch her lips to his. To kiss the dimple at the corner of his mouth. Reach a hand to caress the stubble upon his cheek.
“How about this for starters?” he said, his voice dropping to a mischievous purr.
He did what she could not. Lowered his head to brush a kiss upon her lips. He touched her nowhere else, yet even that slight contact ignited a flame low in her belly. His breath came warm and soft and the flame roared higher, racing outward until every particle in her body simmered.
“You said you didn’t want to marry me,” she murmured.
His gaze traveled over her face as if he memorized her, sending the heat within her soaring before he stepped away, his practiced scoundrel’s smile offering a promise of more if she dared. “One’s got nothing to do with the other.”
fourteen
“It worked like a charm.” Elisabeth laughed. “By the end of the argument, Cook was fully on the side of Mrs. Landry, our housekeeper. And they were both dead set against me. Neither one answered me in anything but monosyllables for a month, but at least they didn’t kill each other or quit altogether, which would have been far worse.”
Elisabeth kept company with Madame Arana, who sat stitching away at her needlepoint amid the group gathered in the drawing room for the evening. All but for Helena, who’d disappeared after supper and had yet to return.
The ladies’ conversation veered wildly from the price of wax candles and the proper wages for a housemaid who doubled in the kitchen to whether Helena’s grandmother had ever tried the spa at Lucan for her digestion.
Elisabeth’s eyes sparkled as she talked of accounts and economizing and how to stay on top of idle servants. She waxed poetic on sheep and wool profits, the use of turnips for winter fodder, crop rotation, and the school she’d begun at Dun Eyre for the education of the tenants’ children.
It all sounded so damned domestic. Complete and utter drudgery. But she laughed, gesturing as she spoke, her hair escaping its pins to curl in ringlets against her neck. Her face aglow. Alive and excited and full of ideas. Her enthusiasm infectious.
“If you think Tom Newcomb will ever hear of you planting his fields in anything but potatoes, you’re mad,” Brendan interrupted.
She squared round, keenness still shining in her gaze. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you speak of home like that.”
He shrugged. “Like what?”
“Like you belong there.” She cocked her head in a questioning pose, brows low as if she studied a bug beneath a magnifying glass. She must have found what she looked for. She smiled proudly. “Actually, Tom’s talking round the others to try Mr. Adams’s proposal. We hope to have them all on board by the next planting season.”
Brendan sat back, rubbing his chin, watching her in conversation. At one point he caught Rogan’s eye upon him, the harper giving him a wink and a grin as if he knew where Brendan’s lascivious thoughts were leading him. Right off a cliff edge.
Brendan’s watch said twelve before Madame Arana rose from her seat, exclaiming at the hour, Rogan lingering only long enough to tap out his pipe, take a final glass of whiskey, and wish the pair of them a cheery good night.
And then they were alone.
The night folded in on them, the candlelight softer, voices muffled, even the fire burned low and sultry in the grate. And yet, neither one made a move to leave. To pull themselves free of the clumsy awkwardness of this new awareness.
“I had no idea you took such interest in estate matters,” he finally ventured when the silence stretched too thin.
Elisabeth played with her empty wineglass, eyes downcast. “I assist Mr. Adams in his office. We discuss his plans and read over the latest articles on husbandry together.” She looked up, a challenge in her gaze. “He listens to what I have to say. Respects my opinions.”
“Yet Shaw wanted to replace him.”
She flushed. “Gordon didn’t understand. He saw Dun Eyre as a stepping-stone to better things. I see it as the only thing. I didn’t understand that before. It took almost losing it to make me see how much I love Dun Eyre.” Sadness colored her once-animated face. “Gordon was suitable in so many ways, I should have been a ninny to have refused his suit.”
“Did you love him?”
“You asked me that once before. Do you remember?”
The music room at Dun Eyre. “I do. Has the answer changed?”
