Page 69

“I see that my friends have conspired against me, but you should know that I was on the point of returning to you,” he said.

“Were you?” She slanted him an amused glance. He could have no idea of her impatience. “A word would have been nice. I did not know the state of your feelings.”

“You must have guessed,” he said, gazing warmly at her.

“I did not know that your engagement had ended until last week.” She nudged him with her elbow.

He gave her a quick comprehending look. “So, you came for me.”

“Are you shocked?”

“Merely a little frustrated that this is not the place for all that I want to say to you.” He looked about. “Who are all these people? I thought London was deserted in August.”

“Those people are our ambassadors,” she said. “We must keep walking so that they will see us together and … talk.”

“Ah,” he said. “That’s your plan. You will restore me to some sort of acceptance. It won’t be easy. I’ve made enemies now. There will be people who choose to believe Hugh, and whatever ill-repute sticks to him, he still has friends, like Tyne.”

“But you have friends, too. This afternoon show, the duchess tells me, is the ladies’ battleground, where we go to outdo our rivals and lay siege to manly hearts.”

“You have no need to lay siege to my heart. You won it long ago.”

She smiled at that. “But you did not know, did you, until the night of the ball?”

His expression turned serious. She quite liked this freedom to study him.

“Yes, that disastrous night. It serves me right for my single-mindedness and determination to have everything go according to plans I made months earlier. And I was angry with you, that is I thought I was angry with you. I told myself that if I worked only for Amabel and planned for her, I would forget you.”

“Did you?”

“Not for a minute. Custom required me to open the ball with you, and your grandmother let me know that she expected nothing less. But I knew that for Amabel, who was, after all, expecting my proposal, to see me open the ball with you would be difficult.” He gave a rueful laugh. “Possibly, the worst proposal ever offered a woman. I rushed it so that she could have her moment.”

He fell silent, and Cassie reflected how this talking and sharing of feelings was new to her. She had done nothing of the kind with Torrington. She would have confessions of her own to make sometime in their future, now that they had a future.

“You think that if you had danced with me first, you would not have proposed? You were in a very difficult place. I knew that you had raised expectations that it would be most ungentlemanly of you to disappoint.”

“If her sentiments were as deeply engaged as I had led her to believe mine were, I was bound.”

He looked out over the park. “We came here sometimes as boys, at night, or very near night, in summer, just to play in the woods and climb trees. Wenlocke, before he was kidnapped, lived in his mother’s house, not far from here. He knew his way around. Sometimes there were fetes and fireworks or music. I wanted to be like the people we saw from our hiding places. Courting Amabel was a way to enter that glittering world.”

There was disillusionment there, and Cassie understood. She, too, had been dazzled by someone from that world. Raven was opening his heart to her, unburdening himself of wounds that lay there.

Oarsmen rowed their boats on the lake, boys launched tiny sailboats from the shore, and a very small girl and her mother fed the ducks.

“Do you think of me as a gentleman?” he asked abruptly, turning to her. The question was earnest, pressing even. Her heart lurched. She could guess what had been said to him, the wound it made.

Cassie stopped. Slowly, gently she put her hand on that wounded heart. “Unquestionably,” she said. “I have never met a finer.”

He covered her hand with his. They stood still as others passed around them on the path. They would certainly get themselves talked about. At last one rude comment compelled them to walk again.

“Ramsbury was quite determined to prove I was not a gentleman, but a cad who had wronged his daughter. However, Amabel does not want to marry me. She merely wants compensation for having been engaged. Their lawyers prolonged the argument as long as they could, but in the end, they didn’t have a winning case.”

“The duchess told me that her duke and your grandfather are formidable opponents.”

“They are, and I am grateful to them. It is only right that it took some time to become disentangled from my own folly.” He turned to her. “And until I did, I could not come to you.”

“Do you call it folly?” she asked.

“It kept me from you,” he said. “It took me long enough to know my feelings. I suspected myself of terrible disloyalty to Amabel.”