Page 124 of Kathryn

They rode home in the moonlight.

“What a beautiful sky,” Katie said, trying not to recall her frantic ride down this very path earlier that day.

“Yes. Very beautiful.”

Katie turned at her husband’s odd tone and found him looking at her.

“You aren’t even looking at the sky,” she chided in a foolishly breathless voice.

He merely regarded her with an intense, almost brooding, stare.

“You are making me shy,” she said a moment later.

He turned away. “I apologize for staring.”

“What?” Katie shook her head. “No—you don’t have to apologize. It is true that I feel shy, but I—I like it.”

He turned back to her. “You like it when I stare at you?”

“Yes,” she said, her face hot in the cool night air. “I like it a great deal. I only mentioned it to explain why I was becoming so red and fidgeting like a child.”

“You look silver in the moonlight, not red.”

“I am relieved to hear it,” she said, flustered by his caressing tone. “Tell me, why do you sound so surprised that I would enjoy your eyes on me? Gaining a man’s attention is the entire point of a London Season, after all.”

He turned away, his lips tightening and his jaw firming in a way that usually presaged a cool silence. But this time, he surprised her. “My first wife disliked it when I stared at her. She said it was freakish.”

Katie flinched at the word freakish. “Surely she did not use that word?”

“She used precisely that word.”

“Oh, Gerrit—” Katie stopped, biting her lip.

“Oh, Gerrit?” he repeated. “That sounded like a prelude to something more.”

“It was,” Katie admitted. “But I—I don’t know how to put it in words. Not yet.”

“I will wait patiently until you do.” His stern mouth curved up slightly and he turned to face her. “And enjoy looking at you in the meantime.”

She gave a startled laugh, his compliment and smile all the more intoxicating for how rare they were.

“I am very fond of your laugh, Kathryn.”

“It is nice to have things to laugh about.”

“Why have you not had reason to laugh? I am not the most perceptive of men, but I believe I’ve noticed a—a sadness, for lack of a better word—in your eyes at times.”

Katie’s chest tightened at the dangerous turn in the conversation. Talking about the shadows in her eyes would lead to that wretched summer five years ago. And until she told Gerrit the truth about that—

“You do not need to confide in me, Kathryn. I did not mean to sour the mood.”

“The mood isn’t sour,” she hastened to assure him. “You are right that I am sometimes melancholic. Although far less so these past few weeks.”

Did she imagine the dark stain on his cheeks at her words?

Katie cleared her throat. “As for my oh, Gerrit,” she said, moving the conversation toward safer ground. “I was lamenting that people often say the most hurtful things to those they are the closest to.” Hy’s face rose up in her mind, but Katie shook it away. This was about Gerrit, not about her. Besides, Katie deserved what Hy said to her. Gerrit did not deserve being called a freak. “Your first wife said something that shaped the way you perceive yourself. If she’d said something pleasant, that would be one thing. But to say your attention was freakish? That is not only cruel, but also wrong.”

“I am glad to hear you do not mind my attention, Kathryn.” She was about to correct him—to remind him that she’d said she liked it—but he was not finished. “Because I find it difficult to look at anyone or anything else when you are near.”