Like No Other Lover (9 page)

They were both aware of the trickle of the river, the other voices. The sounds might have emanated from another universe.

She’d been wearing a blue dress that night. She’d been wearing green when he’d kissed her. In Tudor times prostitutes wore green dresses so the grass stains wouldn’t show on their dresses when they were taken ferociously outdoors.

He thought she was fortunate indeed to be wearing white muslin right now.

He wanted to sink into her. He felt a white hot desire that stole his breath again. He glanced toward Georgina, the key to his other passion, to his whole life. To calm his breathing, a search for sanity.

And then suddenly the intensity of Cynthia’s gaze flickered with a hint of trouble. “A…blue dress? I wore a blue dress?”

He could see her reaching for the memory of the ball, for a memory of him.

He closed his face abruptly, guillotining the moment. “You once had a fiancé?” he said abruptly.

She blinked at the abrupt change. “Yes, Mr. Redmond. I had a fiancé,” she said quietly, ironically.

“Did you tell him about your past, your family?” He was distantly aware that she had begun to feel restless and cornered, but the questioning seemed to have acquired an impetus.

“I did.”

“And is this why he cried off? Or did
you
cry off?”

“No,” she said curtly. “It is not why he cried off. It mattered little to him.” She fixed him with one of those enigmatic looks. Faintly cutting, almost pitying. “Though I bear responsibility for the reason he cried off, I did not end the engagement. Why on earth would I, Mr. Redmond? He
was
an heir.
Very
wealthy, too.”

She cast a quick gaze around the vast green sea of the Redmond estate, as if assessing it against her erstwhile fiancé’s wealth and thinking it perhaps paled. It worked precisely as she’d meant it to: he felt a swift surge of combativeness.

“Then what happened, Miss Brightly?”

She sighed. She turned away from him slowly, as though the conversation had made her weary. Tipped her face up to the sun, drawn by the warmth of it, perhaps, or instinctively seeking out pleasure in the midst of his uncomfortable questioning.

Then she changed her mind and put her face down again. Freckles and brown skin would not do, particularly since her beauty was her particular asset.

“Nothing that does me any credit,” she said evenly, almost wryly. He was aware of a tension in her: she found the words difficult to say, and he knew them instinctively to be honest. “And nothing that will unduly discredit your family should you learn of it, as it was nothing out of the ordinary, even if it was unpleasant. I comprehend this matters greatly to you—the safety and honor of your family. I promise you, I seldom lie. Something about being raised by a vicar. Shouldn’t you be speaking with Lady Georgina? She will be feeling neglected.”

A glance showed Miles that Lady Georgina was being shown how to make a whistle from a reed by Jonathon and Lord Argosy, and Violet was speaking with Lady Windermere and Lady Middlebough and Lord Milthorpe.

He wondered if the two women could be counted on to remember that Violet was an unmarried woman, and refrain from saying anything too fascinating—or, in the case of Lady Middlebough—too incriminating.

“Scarcely a minute or so has passed, Miss Brightly. It’s entirely possible Lady Georgina will survive my absence.”

Interesting how the two of them seemed to create their own time inside of time.

“Yes, but I’m not certain I will much longer survive your presence, Mr. Redmond. I am, as ever, interested in self-preservation.”

He smiled then. He touched his fingers to his head as though his hat sat there, though his hat sat upon the picnic blanket with the hats of all the other men, and strode abruptly off to join Lady Georgina and his sister, who welcomed him with smiles.

Cynthia leaned back against the sustaining trunk of the crack willow and exhaled.

On the way back, Milthorpe accidentally crashed through the grand spider’s web. Cynthia saw it: a sad, fluttering tatter from the hedgerow.

“Demmed spiders,” Milthorpe muttered cheerfully, and trudged onward.

Cynthia almost felt the destruction personally. She wondered what had become of the spider. She paused, stared at the flutter.

And suddenly Miles was next to her. “She’ll rebuild it,” he told her. He’d interpreted her troubled expression correctly. “She won’t think anything of it. It’s just a part of her life. Sewing her world back together again, sometimes even daily.”

He said it lightly. It sounded as though he were reassuring her.

Peculiarly, she did feel reassured.
Just a part of her life
. The savage tearing down of what looked to be an enormous undertaking would simply be taken up again, and would reappear in the morning as a new, complicated, fragile little net. It was the spider’s nature.

Cynthia looked up. From this angle she could see the underside of his elegant jaw, shaved spotlessly clean; she could see where his glossy dark hair touched his ears below his hat. It wanted scissoring. She knew a shocking rush of tenderness. She wanted to touch it. Was it crisp? Or feathery, like the wing of a bird? Or silky, like a spaniel?

She turned her head away with some difficulty. Unnerved.

Ahead of them, the handsome Lord Argosy’s curls beneath his own hat contrived to be both mussed and deliberate as one of those ruthlessly trimmed Redmond hedgerows or the slim cypresses arrowing up to the sky.

Everywhere, those trees created neat walls and divisions within the property, partitioning it in such a way as to perhaps make everyone feel more secure within its sheer grandeur, like aristocratic sheep in a very grand pen. Providing an illusion of order, and hinting that a certain amount of captivity—to fortune, to family name, to history, to duty—was also involved.

“Will she start the web over completely?” Cynthia was surprised to realize she was genuinely interested in the spider’s fate.

“She’ll use the half already made to build it, and it will be stronger than before, if not quite as symmetrical. More interesting, however. Did you know that spider silk is stronger in some ways than steel?”

Hmm. Perhaps
not
so fragile a net, then. And if this were indeed true, she wished that spiders were in the business of repairing shoes. She glanced down at her own.

Felt her resolve solidify again. She looked at the solid back of Milthorpe in front of her. She knew he was the man she should be walking alongside. Or Argosy.

“But it looks so delicate there, moving when the wind moves it.” She still sought reassurance from Miles.

“Perhaps that’s its strength. The flexibility. The fragility. Appearances…” He paused. “…are often deceiving.”

She was silent. Was this an apology? Was
she
being complimented obliquely? The thought disarmed her. Because if it was
indeed
a compliment…

It was quite simply the best she’d ever received. No one had ever before admired her for the things she liked best about herself. Because she was very careful to never show that part to anyone.

Strand by strand Miles Redmond was unwinding the cocoon she’d spun for herself out of observation, charm, and ambition. It was both compelling and extraordinarily unfair.

It then occurred to her that he might simply be speculating aloud about her the way he would any small, shiny exotic creature with legs. He wanted to understand her; he was hoping to coax more clues from her. After all, he was forced to host this gathering in the absence of his parents, and it was hardly a South Sea island, was it?

Well, he could bloody well put Lady Georgina beneath his microscope.

She took two quick strides forward. It was enough for her to fall into conversational parallel with Lord Argosy, a much more familiar, less unnerving specimen to
her
:

The London blood.

“Do you dance, Miss Brightly?” Lord Argosy asked without preamble. As though he’d been expecting her all along. He slid her a sidelong glance, then slid his gaze away again. His smile was secretive, pleased and inclusive.
We know we’re the best-looking people here
, is what it said.
Let’s enjoy being young and beautiful.

“But of course,” she told him easily. As though they were just picking up a conversational thread.

“Do you play?”

She paused, wondering if an innuendo lurked in the word.

“The…pianoforte?” she guessed, carefully.

“Yes! Please say that you do not. Or that you
will
not. I could not abide another indifferent recital, and I know if it rains this evening it’s what we will have. I have five sisters you know.
Five
of them,” he said glumly.

“Oh, no one would be able to dance while I play. Or, rather, a good deal of wincing would take place simultaneous with the dancing, and eyes would therefore be shut more often than open, and the dancers would collide with one another. I play quite, quite badly.”

“I’m relieved to hear of it. But perhaps I’ll request a song for the pleasure of hearing you botching it.”

Cynthia laughed, and he laughed, and his laugh was mercifully ordinary: merry and deep and male. Lord Argosy was pleased with himself but not insufferably so; life was good to him and doubtless always had been. And besides, all young aristocratic heirs were pleased with themselves. He was charming.

And he might very well be one of those lords who possessed a splendid title but was in need of a fortune to support everything that came with the title: lands and castles filled with spoils of ancient battles.

She would need to know more about Lord Argosy.

She threw a glance over her shoulder, toward the person who would tell her the things she needed to know about him. For some reason, she’d wanted to see if Miles had heard and was wondering about her laughter. Lord Milthorpe might possess comic possibilities. Argosy was a different matter altogether.

She saw two heads lowered in what appeared to be easy, quiet conversation: Miles Redmond and Lady Georgina, who “shared his interests.” Very dark, very light. He’d adjusted his pace to match her shorter legs, and they were strolling in tandem.

“Mr. Redmond! How very
interesting
,” Lady Georgina was saying enthusiastically.

And suddenly Cynthia was blindsided, weakened, by an urge to know what this was like: easiness and openness and quiet. Not flirtation and strategy and bartered kisses and hectic laughter.

She simply wanted to be courted again. She did not want to need to
court
the courting.

Ah, well. She hadn’t been born a Redmond, or any sort of aristocrat. And when she thought of how far she’d come entirely on her own, fleas came to mind: how their tiny bodies could leap astonishing distances, distances equivalent to miles beyond their size. She was merely resting between leaps, she told herself.

Why on earth did all of her metaphors suddenly include insects?

She squared her shoulders, as if shaking off the notion of them, and of the man who made her wonder about them.

And because she’d promised to be good and she thought she’d done a fine job of it for the day, she rewarded herself with a moment of imagining a distant future that included walking quietly side by side with a husband over some grand property. They would both have gray hair, and the green trees and lawns as far as their eyes could see would belong to them, and perhaps a spaniel named Lady Georgina would frolic about their feet.

She had a fortnight’s worth of hope of this particular dream still available to her.

“I do believe Lady Georgina plays well, however,” Lord Argosy was saying.

Of course she does, Cynthia thought.

“She will play, then, and
we
will dance,” Cynthia said defiantly.

Lord Argosy languidly stretched up his body and dragged his hand through a low-hanging branch of an ash tree. The glossy leaves rustled like pound notes. He might have been dragging his hand through the long, long hair of a woman.

Cynthia hid a smile. She knew he’d done that so she could admire the lean length of his body, and because his sensual urges had spilled over in her presence and he could not very well touch
her
. Yet.

Ah, the language of flirtation.

He had a dimple in his chin, a feature she generally found devastating. Such an interesting little addition to a face. A good square English jaw and a straight nose and dark eyes that were not extraordinary but did not cross or squint and were not disguised behind spectacles, and his teeth were splendid. He was symmetrical and expensive in every visible way. Centuries of handsome people mating with other handsome people had produced Lord Argosy.

“Do you
dance
well, Miss Brightly?”

“I dance
very
well,” she told him.

This
was
an innuendo, and Lord Argosy appreciated it with a smile.