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This was why she teased him—the way he half-smiled, something kindling in his eye.
“You’re a pest, Pea.” He pushed his chair back and stood up from the desk. “The spinney is the best place. But you really must wear shoes.”
The Count led the way and Pea almost skipped along at his side, feeling far too happy for something as simple as blackberry picking. But she had got him away from his desk.Again. The evening sun was golden on his skin. The light breeze ruffled his hair. And as they walked, he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing those densely muscled forearms.
Pea stopped skipping and tried to look less like a little girl.
Perhaps she didn’t manage it, because the Count snatched the basket she was swinging from her hand, muttering that she’d probably take someone’s eye out.
“Do you think I’m silly, Count?” she asked quite seriously.
“What kind of a question is that?”
“I’m ditzy and daft and strange. I know what people think of me.”
“So why are you asking, if you already know?”
“So you do? You think I’m silly?”
“What I think is silly is that you still call me by that schoolboy nickname. Use my real name.”
“But I can’t call youLeo. You’re not a lion. They’re all predatory heat and lazy fire… You’re more like a…a vulture. All hunched and stony eyed. Or a snake—”
“Seriously, Pea? A snake? A vulture?”
He had stopped walking, and he looked stung. Pea grimaced. “Sorry. No. I don’t think that at all. It’s just my tongue running away with me. Silly old Pea, right? Ignore my nonsense. Everyone else does.”
The Count—Leo—grunted and carried on walking. Pea walked at his side, chastened. Why had she said such stupid things? Maybe he wasn’t a lion—and they were lazy creatures anyway—but he could be a…panther… All dark and dangerous coiled intensity, powerful bunched muscles and an unyielding gaze…
A gentle shoulder bump from his massive figure made her nearly lose her balance. “At least I’m not a vegetable,” he said. And it was the grin as much as the teasing that left her momentarily speechless.
“I thought I was a seed!” she said, recollecting her wits and hurrying after his long-legged stride.
“Worse. You’re a legume.”
The spinney wasn’t too far from the end of the walled gardens, on the other side from where her cottage nestled. It was a small lumpy patch of hawthorn and brambles and scrubby plants just past some huge, ancient oaks. Leo told her it had once been a mediaeval rabbit warren, back in the earliest days of Thornley Castle.
The day was hot, even as evening lengthened the shadows and softened the light from searing to golden. Sweat prickled Pea’s skin, and the air itself was hot to breathe. The grass they walked over was tawny yellow and gave off the scent of old hay, and fat hoverflies caught the sun in shades of amber as they darted and hung in the thick air.
There was little shade at the spinney. The hawthorns were already sporting red berries that promised the mellow months of autumn, but everywhere the blackberry brambles sprawled and clawed, decadent with bursting black fruit.
Pea took the trug back from the Count—Leo—and hung it on her arm. She began to gather blackberries, and Leo did the same nearby. The white of his shirt was blinding in the sun, and the golden tan on his arms was the same tawny shade as the heat-bronzed grass. Feeling her eyes on him, he glanced over, and Pea turned her attention back to her task.
“I wonder how Thornley Castle got its name,” she said drily a moment later as she sucked the sting of a bramble thorn from her finger.
“We’ve been here two minutes and you’re already bleeding. I’d say it’s a record, but it probably isn’t.”
She held her hand out toward him. “Want to kiss it better?”
He managed to both glower and blush at the same time and turned back to his chosen blackberry bush. The way he tore the fruits from the stems, Pea suspected they would be nothing but mush.
She suppressed a smirk, but she couldn’t ignore the flutter low in her stomach. The urge to provoke him only grew as they worked. He was right there, so close, his tall, strong figure so hard to ignore. And something inside Peony was calling out to breach the silence that hung in the hot, stilted air between them, to bring them back to the intimacy they had shared in the cottage the other day. She was hungry for it. That little taste had made her desperate for more, and she hadn’t stopped thinking about it.
There was no breeze. There was just the hum of bees and the rich, sharp scent of blackberries. And there was the inescapable awareness ofhim, of his body and his softly curling dark hair and the corner of his jaw. And of his large hands moving surely and deftly through the bushes, his normally immaculate fingers now stained with purple juice.
He stepped closer and dropped a handful of berries into her basket. She looked up at him, and she seemed to get sort ofstuck, looking at him, as though she needed to say something, but every word she’d ever known flew from her mind. Maybe shewasjust a silly girl. A girl with a crush that had never really gone away.
Leo’s lips curved into a rare half-smile, and he glanced at her mouth. “Are you actually collecting any, or just eating them all?”
