“I don’t believe you,” she said with quiet conviction. “Forgive me, Your Grace,” she added, ignoring his exasperated sound, “but I think you are far too modest about yourself. Indeed, I have seen much in you to admire during our short acquaintance. I have certainly found nothing in you to condemn.”
“But you will,” he whispered, and pressed his thumb to her lips to stop her from further arguing the point. He closed his eyes, pulling her closer, so close his lips nearly brushed her cheek. “You will.”
There was something in those few whispered words, something so raw that it hurt her to hear them. She said nothing more. Instead, she reached up to brush back a lock of hair from his brow.
At the touch of her hand, his eyes opened and he pulled back. Her hand fell to her side, and he let her go.
“Now that I know what you think of me,” he said, “I might have to mend my wicked ways.” He smiled at her, but it was a smile that did not reach his eyes, and she had the strange feeling a door had just been slammed shut between them. “You’ve such a good opinion of me, I fear I shall have to make the effort to live up to it.”
His voice was careless and offhand, as if his strange mood had passed, but Prudence was not fooled. She could still feel the tension in him, though they were no longer touching. She wanted badly to know more, to open that door again and find out what was on the other side of his shuttered smile, but she sensed this was not the time for more questions.
“If you mean that,” she said instead, “would you begin by passing that box of biscuits? I’m terribly hungry.”
With those words, his tension seemed to ebb away, his smile widened into a genuine grin, and Prudence was glad she’d set her curiosity aside.
“So, you like Browning, do you?” he asked as he complied with her request.
“I do. But Tennyson’s my favorite. I love ‘Lady of Shalott.’”
He made a sound of derision. “Women always love ‘Lady of Shalott.’”
She made a face at him. “So?”
“‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ is a deuced better poem.”
“Better?” She paused long enough to eat a biscuit, then said, “I don’t see how you can say it’s better. It’s about a tragic battle. Into the jaws of death, and all that.”
“Exactly so. What could be more exciting?”
“But hundreds died.”
“Bravely and well, as the poem says.”
She began to laugh. “And you call me a romantic?”
He paused in the act of dunking a slice of cheese in the mustard pot. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you are a romantic, too.”
“That’s absurd,” he scoffed, and ate his bite of cheese. “I haven’t a romantic bone in my body.”
“So you say, but ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ is all about the romantic ideal of honor and bravery. You’re a romantic who just doesn’t want to admit it.”
He started to argue with her, then shook his head as if giving it up. “How did you develop such a love of poetry?”
“My mother.” Prudence smiled, remembering. “She had a great passion for poetry. When I was a little girl, she and I would often go for picnics in summer. I would draw or sew, and she would read aloud to me. Keats was her favorite, but she would always read Tennyson because I liked Tennyson best.”
“What about your father?”
Her smile faded. She swallowed painfully and looked away. She knew she ought to tell him the truth about the circumstances of her birth, but she just couldn’t bear to see his manner toward her change, which it surely would when he learned she was born on the wrong side of the blankets. “I never knew my father.”
Before he could ask any questions, she changed the course of the conversation. “But as many outings as my mother and I went on when I was a girl, she never taught me to fish.”
He shook his head and sighed. “Your education is sadly lacking. Fishing is the greatest sport there is.”
“I cannot fathom what is so exciting about standing by a stream, waiting to hook some poor helpless animal who’s only swimming about his home, minding his own business.”
He grinned at that. “Allow me to enlighten you on the subject, then. Before the day is over, I will have taught you to appreciate the art of pulling in a nice fat trout. That, my dear Miss Bosworth, is the true stuff of poetry.”
“Hmm,” she said with skepticism, and drank her last swallow of wine. “We’ll have to see about that.”
Rhys knew he had done some very stupid things in his life. Dosing himself with absinthe during those months he’d spent in Paris, for example, had been very stupid. Becoming utterly besotted with his third mistress the year he was twenty-one also ranked high on his list of idiotic moments. And of course there was the fact that he’d spent his entire inheritance, a particularly stupid endeavor since a considerable portion of that money had gone to the absinthe and the mistress.
But by the time he had assembled a fishing rod and threaded the line, Rhys decided blurting out to the heiress he intended to marry what a sod he truly was had to be the stupidest thing he’d ever done. What the hell had he been thinking? This was romantic seduction, and therefore not the time for honesty. Rhys wanted to give himself a kick in the head.
He shot a swift glance at her as he tied the fishing hook to the line, watching as she put the remainder of their lunch back in the picnic hamper. The sight of those big brown eyes looking up at him with utter disbelief in his idiotic confessional was a picture still quite vivid in his mind. Being one of those naive innocents who abounded in this world just waiting to be taken advantage of, she hadn’t believed him. Thank God. He vowed that from now on he was keeping mum about his flaws.
By the time he’d baited the hook with some pickled corn kernels from their picnic hamper, she had finished packing up lunch. “So how does one do this?” she asked, moving to stand beside him.
“The first thing I’m going to teach you is how to cast.” He handed her the rod and showed her how to grip the handle, then moved into position behind her, all sorts of wicked possibilities running through his mind. He reached around her to place his hands over hers on the rod so they could cast the line together, but the moment he did so, he realized this was not going to work. The brim of her hat kept him much too far away. If she kept it on, he wouldn’t be able to pull her back against him and hold her and smell the wonderful lavender fragrance of her hair. And he wanted those things a lot more than he wanted to fish.
“As much as I adore your hat,” he said, “I think you need to remove it.”
“I do? Why?”
Because I want your body as close to mine as possible.
“Because I can’t teach you to cast if you’re wearing it. The brim’s so wide, I fear it will hamper our efforts.”
Prudence accepted his reason without question, bless her trusting heart. She pulled out her hat pin, removed the confection of red straw, ribbons, and bows, and wove the hat pin through one side of the crown before tossing the hat onto the grassy bank near their feet.
“I’ll cast it,” he told her, once again bringing his arms up around her shoulders and placing his hands over hers on the rod. “All you have to do is follow my move.”
“I see.” She nodded. “A bit like dancing, isn’t it?”
“Exactly.” Hooking the line with one finger, he opened the bail and pulled her arm back along with his, then flipped the rod forward. She moved with him, and together they sent the baited hook and its accompanying weights flying out over the lake. The weights landed with a tiny splash and sank, taking the bait down. When he sensed the weights had hit bottom, he closed the bail.
She turned her head to look at him over her shoulder. “Now what do we do?”
“We wait,” he answered, and as they stood there, he wondered how long he could get by with embracing her this way in the cause of catching trout. He breathed in the scent of lavender and decided he’d get by with it for as long as she let him.
Slowly, trying to be subtle about it, he let go of the fishing rod to ease his arms beneath hers and slide them around her waist. Despite the generous curves of her figure, she was so much smaller than he, and so soft, that he decided heaven wasn’t up on high somewhere, it was right here.
After a moment she stirred, as if to remind him this wasn’t a proper position for them to be in. Rhys, however, had no intention of letting propriety get in the way of something that felt this good, and he tightened his arms around her.
She capitulated at once, relaxing in his hold. Her token resistance gone, she leaned against him, her back against his chest and her shapely bum nestled against his thighs. The pleasure of it was so sweet, he actually had to bite his lip to keep from groaning aloud, and he hoped like hell the trout weren’t particularly hungry.
“Do you fish often?” she asked.
“Yes, actually, I do,” he answered, valiantly forcing himself to make mundane conversation even as the thick, aching heaviness of lust flowed through his body. “I have…” He paused and swallowed hard. “I have quite a passion for it.”