“Such as?” he asked when she made no effort to elaborate further.
A tiny frown wrinkled her brow. “Heavens, how can I be expected to say on only a moment’s notice?”
“All right, then. I see I shall have to be more specific. What would you say to us playing a variation of twenty questions?”
She sent him a curious look. “Do you still have that many questions to ask me after our conversation this afternoon?”
“Most definitely,” he said, realizing he could fill a book with all the questions he had for her and still not be done.
“And shall I have a chance to ask you twenty questions in return, my lord?” she ventured.
“If you like.” He smiled agreeably.
“Then, by all means, proceed.”
He paused for a moment, then began. “What is your favorite color?”
She rolled her eyes. “That is an easy one. Purple.”
“Your favorite play?”
She swallowed another mouthful of soup, then patted her lips with her napkin. “Shakespeare or other playwrights?”
“Either, but Shakespeare will do.”
“Twelfth Night. It’s by far his wittiest and most romantic.”
“Leave it to a female to be swayed by romance.”
“Leave it to a man not to be,” she quipped, a twinkle glinting in her hyacinth eyes.
He smiled at her riposte before pausing to quaff a mouthful of wine. “Based on that remark, I presume you prefer Mozart to Beethoven?”
“Actually, I like them both. But were I forced to choose, then yes, Herr Mozart would be my preference.”
He paused, eating another spoonful of soup while she did the same. “What of literature? Pray do not tell me you are a devotee of the Minerva Press.”
An incriminating blush stole over her cheeks. “I have read my share, but then what young lady has not?”
He chuckled and ate more soup.
“Do not laugh. Some of the tales are quite elucidating.”
“Oh, I am sure.”
“If you are going to belittle my tastes,” she said in mock affront, “then you can save the rest of your questions for another woman.”
The smile eased from his face, turning into something far more serious than he’d intended. “But I have no questions for any other woman. You are the only one who holds my interest at present. The only one who fascinates me enough to want to know more.”
And she does fascinate me, he realized. Far more than she should. Far more than is good for either one of us.
His gaze locked with hers, watching her dark pupils dilate inside their rings of velvety blue and her lips part on a sweet susurration of breath.
He forced his eyes away. “As for belittling your tastes,” he continued in a thick voice, “that was not my aim. Pray forgive any offense I may have caused.”
“None taken,” she said softly.
With a nod, he picked up his wineglass. “What other authors and poets do you enjoy? Miss Austen, perhaps? Even the prince regent cannot find fault with her stories.”
“I am afraid I have not had the pleasure of reading Miss Austen’s work, but I do have a partiality for Sir Walter Scott. I find Blake and Wordsworth quite captivating as well. And then there is Goethe, although I have to take care not to read his Faust late in the evening for fear of suffering nightmares.”
“Talk of the devil can do that sometimes,” he agreed. “So you know Goethe, do you? Not a typical choice. I find that far too few Englishmen, and even fewer women, take the time to seek out the Continental authors.”
She paused for a moment, an odd expression crossing her face before it disappeared. “My interests are wide and varied, you will find.”
“I suppose a governess has more reason than most to broaden her education.”
Rather than comment, she raised her glass of wine to her mouth, playing the rim against her lower lip for a moment before she drank.
He had to pull his eyes away again.
“Feel at your leisure to borrow whatever you might enjoy from the library,” he offered, as she set down her glass. “My brother was an avid reader, and I admit to a love of the written word as well. I collected a number of volumes during my travels, which I have since added to his shelves here at the house—to my shelves, I mean,” he corrected.
He fell silent, his thoughts going suddenly to his brother. Despite the past few months, he couldn’t walk into the library without remembering Peter, without feeling like an interloper for blithely using his brother’s possessions as if they were his own.
But Peter would not have begrudged him, he knew. In his life, Peter had been a generous man, and nothing about his death would have altered that fact. Even after Nick’s estrangement from their father, Peter had never held it against him, taking pains not to lose touch. Nick remembered how eagerly he’d looked forward to Peter’s letters and the connection they gave him to the home and people he had left behind.