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Even in the dim light, he could see her growing smile. She’d been caught out.
“I ’aven’t the faintest idea what ye be talkin’ ’bout, sir,” she said.
His heart stuttered, her words confirming his suspicions. She had been watching him.
“I think ye do,” he said, taking another step toward her.
He knew he should stay away, take a step back instead of a step closer. But the attraction he felt for her was powerful and potent and impossible to resist.
He flashed a smile. “I do wonder now if—”
A ruffling and a creak sounded nearby, cutting him off, and Livvy gasped.
“Be it a ghost?” she whispered. He felt her hand clutch the fabric of his sleeve.
If only it were a ghost.
His heart jumped into his throat. “No, it be a person,” he whispered in response.
A very real and very tangible person.
Heavens above. They were going to be discovered.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“It’s up to brave hearts, sir, to be patient when things are going badly, as well as being happy when they’re going well…”
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
“August, I can’t be seen!”
Livvy’s distraught whisper shot warnings through August’s already harried nerves. The noise might not have been a person. It could very well be an animal in the night. An owl or a fox, perhaps.
But when whispered voices reached his ears, he grasped Livvy’s gloved hand in his own and tugged her at once into the shrubs nearby.
Knowing the gardens like the back of his hand, August sidestepped the mounds of azaleas tinted blue in the moonlight, hoping Livvy would follow his steps exactly as he paved the way toward a bundle of dogwoods pressed up against the edge of the stone wall bordering the garden.
There, he hunkered down, pulling Livvy beside him, squished between stone and branch as the whispered voices grew louder. “We’ll not be seen ’ere,” he reassured her.
“Be ye certain?” He could barely hear her whisper above the blood rushing in his ears.
How could he have been so foolish to bring this woman out there? If anything happened to her, if he was the cause of more rumors spread about her or her family, he couldn’t bear it.
“Yes,” he breathed out shakily. “We’ll be fine.”
Or so he prayed. The small shrubs they hid behind were tall enough to cover the tops of their heads, though the leaves had not yet reached their full potential. Still, if they held stationary, the invader would not see them.
Invader. He and Livvy were the invaders.
Together, they waited side-by-side, their breathing still heavy, hands still intertwined.
Their hands. Somehow, in the fear of discovery, August had maintained his grip on her hand. She hadn’t attempted to pull away either.
She must have simply felt more secure holding his hand, nothing more. But August…August was feeling something else. A powerful stirring in his heart that increased as he shifted in the dirt and his shoulder brushed against the woman beside him.
He’d been close to other women before, even kissed a few in the folly of his youth, but this was something different. This longing to be near Livvy, to know her further, was unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
“There be two of ’em,” Livvy whispered.
