By the fourth dance, Lavinia had ceased to fret about the depressing venue. More and more people were crushing into the assembly room, calling out greetings, depositing coats and hats higgledy-piggledy, undaunted by the lack of a proper cloakroom. Some newcomers joined the dancers, while others leaned against the walls and heckled them good-naturedly, tapping their feet and tipping back bottles of beer and spirits. Thank God so many young men had thought to bring their own refreshment. The first wave of partygoers had drained the jugs. Everywhere Lavinia looked: people enjoying themselves. No one complained about the crooked floor, or about the unpleasant humidity that, along with the smoke from the lamps, produced a visible fug. The musicians played with a lively tempo, more often than not, the same lively tempo.
The ball was a success.
And Neal—Neal waltzed like a prince. Or not precisely like a prince. He glissaded smoothly as any peer of the realm, but his revolutions and counterrevolutions seemed designed to dizzy her. Also, his facial expression wasn’t royal. No fixed little smile or lordly sneer. He laughed as they turned, as though his supreme gracefulness made him the victor in some riotous contest. She wanted to feel annoyed, but he never missed a step, never hopped, or kicked up his heels, or made a brusque or jerky movement. He was waltzing perfection, if waltzing was compatible with that uninhibited glee, the sort of glee one expected on the sports field, not in the ballroom.
Of course, this wasn’t a ballroom. Maybe his boisterous, muscular approach modulated brilliantly for an evening in a guildhall. Certainly, he was getting his share of appreciative heckles.
Spinning in Neal’s arms, Lavinia glimpsed a row of girls on the room’s perimeter. They wore garishly bright dresses and hardly seemed forlorn in regard to their unpartnered states. Forward was more like it.
“You’re a brave, fine man, Neal Traymayne,” one called out as they swept past, a buxom girl with thick dark braids and a daring smile. Her friends giggled and hid their faces.
But of course, Neal was a kind of prince in Kyncastle, one of the London Traymaynes. For the ball, he’d donned a dark coat—the same he’d worn at that horrid inn—and his cravat was fresh, white, and passably knotted. With those hundred-year-old boots, and that raffish grin, he looked a rough-hewn cavalier. Every girl in the valley no doubt hovered in her doorway and sighed when he came to visit, hoping he’d happen along.
She and Neal should dance with other partners. Appalling etiquette this, the two of them, coupled for the quadrille, waltzing every waltz.
It wasn’t that she wanted to keep him from the rustic maidens. Of course not. It was that she was also perfection at the dance. She’d languished a whole Season, denied access to the spheres in which she used to shine. Now she’d entered a separate sphere—small and a bit dingy, but vibrant all the same—and she could feel her blood humming, just as it had before. She couldn’t bear to bumble about with a lesser partner. It was too lovely, how she and Neal twirled together, his hand light on her waist, her torso arched back from his, everything about their position, their movements, elegant and exquisitely balanced.
She wanted to dance with him forever.
Just then, he swung them deftly into the center of the room, out of the path of a careening duo with flapping arms. From the shout that went up, she guessed they’d careened on to endanger a less-agile couple.
Neal laughed down at her, steering without seeming to calculate, relying on his impressive physical intuition. The same physical intuition that made it possible for him to descend sheer rock walls and skim the tops of waves.
“It’s like dancing on the deck of a ship.” He’d bent his head to murmur by her ear. He meant the floor, the rough, wide planks, the steep pitch. Even so, her whole body felt flush with the possibility of escape, of a future.
The two of them on a ship to France.
The duchess and her paramour.
Unlike the duchess in her story, she’d have to set sail without the plunder from her husband’s estate. She’d be penniless, depending on Neal, as she’d once depended on her papa, on George, on Cranbrook.
But no, she’d never even get that far.
Unlike the duchess’s paramour, Neal, for all his princely grace and piratical swagger, was not a ruffian king, a fugitive beholden to no one and nothing. He wouldn’t spirit her across the sea, live with her in Paris.
Unless.
She kept her eyes trained straight ahead, studied his cravat, the top of his tanned neck, the hard angle of his jaw.
Unless he fell in love with her. Fell senselessly, torrentially in love with her, the kind of love that permitted no reason, no moderation.
Then he would do anything.
The waltz ended abruptly, a scuffle by the piano causing Emily Polwhele to bang an off chord on the keys.
Neal tightened his hold, pulled her a fraction closer than perfect form allowed, then released her and scanned the room. A group of lanky young men with tankards had surrounded Mr. Barnett, demanding . . . something. The ringleader had an enormous Adam’s apple and the loudest voice. Volume was not clarifying.
“Crowdy so we’ll dance!”
Lavinia wrinkled her nose at Neal, who translated.
“The boys are wanting a jig,” he said as the fiddle struck up. Mr. Barnett began leaping about—he didn’t suffer from rheumatism for all he had to be nearing a hundred—and a portly man unceremoniously displaced an old woman from one of the Traymaynes’ chairs, settled a drum on his lap, and beat it for all he was worth with the palm of his hand.
Unsurprisingly, he wore a smock.
The old woman lifted her feet in rhythm, circling the piano as the young men cheered.
Neal raised a brow and gave Lavinia an appraising look. She shook her head. Jigs were not in her repertoire.
“You disapprove?” he asked as they drifted away from the uproarious skipping and kicking toward a gap in the spectators arrayed along the far wall.
“Of Emmeline’s ball becoming a barn dance?” She stopped by the window, where the wildflowers had wilted in their bottle on the sill. Had she forgotten to add water? With all the preparations, the afternoon had gone by in a blur.
No green thumb here.
She sighed. “The inevitability of the blow has somehow softened the impact.”
He smiled at the wryness in her voice. She’d hoped he would smile.
“Emmeline’s ball?” He watched her closely. The floor thundered as dancers stamped along to Mr. Barnett’s wild bowing. “Is this what it took to win her over? She wasn’t convinced by yesterday’s heroics, so today you arranged for her coming out?”
“More or less.” She smiled. Heroics. He wouldn’t admit that she’d saved his life, but he had just called her a hero. Not quite. But still.
“Bravo.” His eyes looked almost black in the low lamplight. “Every Kyncastle Traymayne is now in your power.”
“Are they?” She turned to fuss with the blossoms, so she could slant a look at him over her shoulder. “Only the Kyncastle Traymaynes?”
Balls—barn dances—they existed to facilitate flirtations.
George had liked to see her flirt.
Fills me with pity for my fellow man, who otherwise I’m inclined to despise. There but for the grace of God go I, that’s what I say to myself. Because those poor pups will never have you, not my Vinnie. My very own. Mine.
Neal wasn’t a pup. And George—George was dead.
She would silence him.
Neal’s smile stretched. “All the Traymaynes in Kyncastle,” he amended, and came closer with an idle step, peering over her shoulder.
He said in a changed voice, “You picked the orchids by the vicarage.” He touched the pink lip of a flower, bending it with a gloved finger.
Was he scandalized? She’d learned on their walk to Juliot woods that he didn’t dig up every wild plant he saw, and when he did choose a specimen, he took pains to leave everything around it intact.
“You didn’t pick all of them?” he said. The other bottles of wildflower arrangements stood on windowsills obscured by the crowd, and on the table in the makeshift refreshment room. Orchids featured prominently in each bouquet.
“For a good cause.” She couldn’t help but touch the same flower. Her gloved hand brushed his as she ran her fingers over the delicate lobes. The muted sensation maddened her, and she bent over to inhale the faint scent of vanilla diffusing from the petals before she withdrew. The white leather at her fingertips was smeared with pollen, a golden stain.
“For Emmeline,” he agreed, and then his brows knitted together. “But—this bittersweet might have contented her.”
He was scandalized. Chagrin changed to indignation.
“You grudge her the orchids? After you reneged on your promise?” she said. “I spent all afternoon organizing a dance because you went hieing off to Cornwall before you could show her a proper good time in London. It wasn’t very cousinly.”
Now he raised his eyebrows. Would he question what she knew about cousinly behavior? She had no siblings, but she did have cousins. A few of them. Whom she’d lorded over as a wealthy young beauty destined for a duchy.
Those cousins, it was safe to assume, had very much enjoyed her comeuppance following her papa’s reversal of fortune.
He didn’t, though, quiz her on her own family feeling, or failure thereof. The lines in his forehead smoothed and his eyes hooded.
“How fortunate she is, then, in her friends,” he said, and she was relieved to hear the teasing note in his voice. He wasn’t going to belabor his point about the orchids.
As he leaned against the wall, a lock of hair fell across his brow, and she itched to push it away from his forehead.
“The guildhall hasn’t seen such numbers since Joan Traymayne was tried for a witch at the court of assizes.” He pushed the lock back himself, mahogany brown hair against the fawn-colored leather.
“When was that?” She glanced around the room, imagining a bench of black-clad justices, a woman in rags, old and bent but with Loveday’s face. “They didn’t find her guilty?”
“They did indeed,” said Neal. “It was 1646, the only year the assizes were ever held in Kyncastle.”
“So she was hanged,” breathed Lavinia. Neal claimed an executed witch among his ancestors. Perhaps a jailed father wouldn’t shock him.
“That was the sentence. But the good people of Kyncastle decided instead to string up the judges.” Neal grinned with pride. “Just to teach them a lesson. They lived to tell the tale.”
She stared at him. Certainly, those judges would have recounted their version with considerably less relish.
“Did you note that iron hook with the wooden handle on the nail over the mantelpiece in the parlor? Legend has it, that’s the gaff my several-times-removed grandfather used to whack the chief justice of the Prince’s Council. Knocked his wig off.” He laughed. “I don’t think my mother would have married my father if his forebears had let a woman of the family go to her death for witchcraft.”
His having a witch in the bloodline wouldn’t have been enough to win her over? Lavinia bit her tongue.
“Emmeline didn’t share that bit of history,” she said. Where was the girl? She seemed to have a penchant for disappearing, but at her own ball? The last time Lavinia had caught a glimpse of her, she was standing by the piano with a look of utter desolation on her face.
The ball was a success. But the right people hadn’t yet arrived.
Neal shrugged. “I’m surprised someone didn’t tell you about Mistress Joan, as we call her. She’s a beloved figure in our family. Emmeline had other things on her mind, I’m sure. The two of you could have walked to Devon, what with all the back-and-forth.”
“I’m well aware,” she said. She had a keen sense of how much she’d walked. Her feet had been blistered before she started dancing.
He fixed her with that direct regard of his, so different from that of other men she’d known.
“I did regret the timing of the move, for her sake.” He said it in a low voice, difficult to hear over the music. “But I couldn’t delay any longer.”
Did he leave London out of delicacy, to spare Elizabeth Fletcher’s feelings? Or out of disgust after he spied—while planting rhododendrons in a garden square—a flock of ladies in bustled gowns with swansdown trim? Realization hit a moment after these pettier possibilities surfaced.
His mother’s illness.
The thumping of feet grew louder as Mr. Barnett bowed with even more vigor. The room was crowded enough that dancers kept colliding. Tomas might find his services in higher demand tonight than yesterday, when those little boys had nearly drowned themselves.
“Come along!” That forward girl—she’d danced close enough to catch Neal’s eye, thick braids bouncing. Those could whack a man and knock his wig off. “Come along, co!” she cried.
Neal tossed her a smile, made a small regretful gesture.
Lavinia frowned. “Why did you settle in London in the first place? You weren’t there very long.”
“A year,” he said absently. “January to January.” His gaze tracked the dancing now, and his fingers drummed his thigh in time to the music. “I went for Varnham,” he added, almost an afterthought.
His gardening business. He was the head of the nurseries, not a jobbing gardener. She should stop thinking of him as such, despite his brown neck and dirty fingernails.
Maybe he’d been engaged not to Elizabeth Fletcher but to Elizabeth Davenport. Not out of the question if one emphasized the business rather than the gardening side of things. A businessman would have just cleared the threshold of eligibility for Elizabeth Davenport.
Pointless considerations.
His foot was tapping. The music had gotten inside him. He was bursting with it. She should release him from his agony.
Go on, she should say. You want to dance, dance.
Maybe it wasn’t the music, though. Maybe it was that girl.
“But you live in Truro now,” she said, plowing on with the conversation. “And you’re still running Varnham.”
“We have several branches, but the main branch is in London.” With seeming effort, he refocused his attention on her. “I couldn’t have taken over the business without first spending significant time there. But that wasn’t my intention in going. I went to London for Charles Varnham, James’s father. The rest followed.”
She didn’t understand and must have looked her question, but the jig ended with a roar that made utterance a wasted effort. The crowd shifted, couples rearranging, more people herding toward the center of the room. Another jig started up, the tempo faster. Red-faced, Tomas emerged from the dense center of the crowd, beckoning.
Say it.
“Go on.” She turned to Neal, smiling brightly. “You want to dance.”
He observed only a moment of perfunctory hesitation.
She watched with a sinking heart as he joined the dance, stamping the rhythm on the floor in those old boots, his long, muscled legs swinging as he pivoted to give Davy a deliberate bump with his shoulder. Davy spun around, grinning, and cut a mad caper that Neal mimicked but with an added flurry of steps that proved impossible for Davy to replicate. He tried, gamely, tripping as he did so, to the groans of onlookers. What a funny style of dance it was. Far too loud and frenetic and leggy for London. High knees not being encouraged in the best circles.
Lavinia studied the dancers, picked out Loveday and Kelyn and the reedy blond Strout girls from the harbor, all smiling as they twirled, hands on their hips.
Suddenly, she felt as though she were standing outside it all, behind a thick wall of glass. She didn’t belong among these revelers, nor did she belong anywhere else. If Cranbrook found her, he’d soon discover he didn’t want her. Her mother might take her back, but back to what? Two poor relations were double the inconvenience. Returning, she’d only make things worse.
She’d belonged with George. His Vinnie. But even George hadn’t wanted to keep her.
She’d spent two years in hiding already, hiding from the truth.
George would never have married her. He’d made her feel so special. The golden god of her childhood looking upon her at last, seeing her.
You, Vinnie. It’s always been you.
But he’d let her dangle. He’d toyed with her. She’d been his plaything, nothing more.
The music sounded distant in her ears. She had to brace herself against the windowsill. No one knew who she really was. Not Neal Traymayne, certainly. But not her mother, either. Her papa. They’d both believed her to be a pretty, silly, capricious, but ultimately biddable young girl, their innocent daughter. They’d be appalled if they knew of her deceit. She’d lied to them, and to herself, for George, for love. Or rather, for dazzlement and delusion. For a fairy tale.
Now she was running from Cranbrook, and her parents would never understand what drove her. Visceral repulsion, yes. But she couldn’t sacrifice herself, even if she had the stomach to suffer the old goat’s caresses. For Cranbrook, only a virgin sacrifice would do. Fresh ingredients.
She felt a wave of nausea.
The air smelled of beer and mildew, damp wool and warmed flesh. Her breath came shorter. She should push her way to the door, keep running, this time down to the harbor, where she’d climb aboard one of the boats. Sail north, all the way to the north pole, present herself to the polar bears as a long-lost cub. Forget humankind.
Or sink.
A final madness to cap this mad week.
As she started forward, she saw the flash of rich pink silk out of the corner of her eye. Emmeline, crossing to the corner of the room. At first, she didn’t make out her companion, so absorbed was she in the study of her protégée. Emmeline couldn’t dance a jig in that form-fitting dress, but she could promenade like the best of them. Lavinia hadn’t seen finer mincing and slinking in all the beau monde. Her curls framed her face, which was luminous, soft and ravishingly pretty as a petal. She was smiling up at the tall, handsome man on her arm.
She was smiling up at Derwent Druce.
Lavinia’s breath stuttered. Druce had been an assistant in her papa’s architecture firm, a particular favorite, trumpeted for his talent as a draftsman and expected to one day accede to the partnership. He’d come often to the house with his drawings and would pass a mannerly quarter hour with her and her mother in the drawing room before he and her papa closed themselves in his study.
He would recognize her anywhere.
Heart hammering, she slid along the wall, head down, making for the antechamber, where hours ago she’d dusted a wooden table and arranged the bottle of wildflowers, the plates of ginger biscuits, the jugs of beer, the cups. It was a small, stuffy room, used for storage, with crates and barrels lining the walls. Mercifully, it was empty. She stood by the table, staring at the crumbs on a willow-pattern plate, listening to the sounds of fiddle and drum, of stamping feet and pealing voices.
It would all end here, now.
Emmeline’s sweetheart was the London architect. She should have guessed.
Attentive to the vicar. A girl like Emmeline was never attentive to a vicar.
But she couldn’t have guessed that the man tasked with restoring the parish church was Druce. Or could she have? Was that why she’d tried so hard to squelch her misgivings, to put the thought of the architect out of her mind?
Derwent Druce hadn’t been directly implicated in any of her father’s wrongdoing, but he had been tarnished by association.
He was exactly the London architect ready to leap at the chance to linger in a backwater. The fiddling stopped. Mr. Barnett had exhausted himself, perhaps, or taken pity on Emily Polwhele, who began to pound the piano keys, launching into a valse à deux temps.
“Muriel.” Tomas and Neal had appeared in the doorway. Absurdly, she stepped behind the table, as though she’d be less vulnerable—less visible—with the wildflowers and empty jugs between them. Neither man seemed to register the oddness of the motion. Both entered the room, Neal sitting casually on a barrel, Tomas coming right up to the table to address her.
“Has Emmeline confided in you?” he asked, brows knotted. “I have just observed a familiarity between her and a certain gentleman that made me wonder . . .”
“If she had, it would be a confidence.” To her surprise, she formed the words easily. No matter how vanquished she felt, it seemed her instinct for self-preservation would not desert her. “I’d hardly tell you.”
Neal laughed. “What did I say?”
Tomas shot him a look. “She is my youngest sister and charge,” he said, with unnecessary bluster, given the audience. Perhaps he imagined the gentleman in question already before him.
“I should know if she has developed an attachment,” he said. “And to Druce.” He shook his head. “Seems a decent chap, but he’ll go back to London and break her heart.”
Neal lifted a shoulder. “Maybe he’s serious.” He glanced at Lavinia. “She might end up in London with him.”
“And break her sisters’ hearts.” Tomas frowned. The idea of Emmeline taking up permanent residence in London didn’t sit well with him. They were more than close, the Traymaynes. They were downright clannish.
How stifling—and how comforting—it must be.
“You pay his salary.” Tomas tipped a jug of beer, verifying its emptiness. “Maybe you should talk to him seriously about the seriousness of his intentions.”
“What?” Lavinia blinked. Tomas returned to the doorway, poked his head out, then turned back to them.
“Derwent Druce,” he said, “the man who at this moment is hugging my sister and passing it off as a waltz, is an architect come from London to restore the church. The parties most directly concerned refused to contribute the requisite funds in full, and so my dear cousin stepped in with an offer of financial support.”
“An investment in conversation.” Neal kicked one heel against the barrel, two kicks per three-note bar of music. “Once the church is restored, no one will talk about how the church needs restoring. A new topic will have to be discovered.”
“He’d like to pass it off as self-interest.” Tomas grinned. “He’s embarrassed by his own generosity.”
“Stop it.” Neal closed his eyes, rested the back of his head on the wall.
“Embarrassed by his wealth, then.” Tomas watched Neal for a reaction and when none manifested, he sighed. “In any event, he’ll have suasion with young Druce.”
Lavinia studied Neal’s rugged profile, the black satin lashes against his cheeks the only frill. Perhaps plant nurseries could earn a man a better living than she’d imagined.
“Curnow hired him,” said Neal, eyes still closed. “What’s more, he’s in the suasion business. He’ll talk to Druce if that’s what you want. I’ve barely met the man.”
“He might stay in Kyncastle.” Tomas hung on to the doorframe, seemingly undecided as to whether he’d rather continue on in the antechamber or dash into the dance to pry apart the couple in question. “He had some trouble in London. You must have heard about it. You were still in town. Architect caught fleecing a duke. That was Druce’s firm.”
Neal opened his eyes. Lavinia’s hands were clenched into fists at her sides. She prayed that he wouldn’t look at her.
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said, and she could have kissed him.
“The plight of dukes, even the fleeced ones, has yet to keep me up at night,” he added dryly.
“Aren’t you the very daps of your mother when you make that face,” said Tomas, letting go of the doorframe and committing to the antechamber. “The architect, Yardley—he wasn’t playing Robin Hood. He starved the duke’s tenants and was selling jobs on the side, abusing his public office.”
Lavinia’s cheeks were burning. hungry babies in hampshire. Her father had raised the rents in the villages on Anthony’s estates without reporting the increase and pocketed the difference. The heart-wrenching accounts of the affected tenants had run in all the papers.
“Remind me how an architect starves a duke’s tenants?” Neal sat up on the barrel. “I thought a duke starved a duke’s tenants.”
Would they not stop? She wanted the floor to open, wanted to drop down a black chute.
Tomas put a boot on a crate and leaned forward, bending his knee. “This Yardley was a friend of the late duke and acted as his trustee. The son and heir brought the charges. He’d been engaged to Yardley’s daughter, so at first the attack savored of sour grapes. Then the evidence came to light.”
“The whole thing has a bad savor.” Neal’s heel had yet to miss a beat. “But Druce isn’t to blame.”
“No.” Tomas sank lower, then straightened his bent leg. “And he talked about it frankly at the church ale. We’d all had a bit to drink. Said the news had shocked him. Yardley was kindness itself, generous to a fault, he said.”
Lavinia’s eyes pricked. Her papa always had a smile and a good word. Everyone who knew him liked him. George, Anthony, Effie—they’d preferred him to their own father. Anthony and Effie—especially Effie—had suffered for it.
“Easy to be generous with someone else’s money,” observed Neal, with a hint of a sneer.
Tomas pushed off the crate. “He lavished it on his daughter, according to Druce.”
She couldn’t listen to another word of this. But she was penned in the room. Her skin crawled and she felt light-headed. Her papa stole food from babies so she could eat French chocolates. Was that how Druce imagined it? Was that how it had been?
“He’s a good fellow, I think. Druce,” mused Tomas, and went again to the doorway.
“They’re still dancing,” he reported. “But my wife is not. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to ask if she’ll honor me with her hand for the next waltz.”
Lavinia heard Neal’s feet hit the flagstones. She looked over as he approached.
“Will you honor me with your hand for the next waltz?” His grin faded. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head. Were the tears still standing in her eyes? She had to blink carefully. “Nothing. The ginger biscuits are all gone.”
He laced his gloved fingers together, searching her face. Concerned.
He was in her power. He’d said so, jokingly, and he showed his respect, his attraction, his esteem, his consideration, in so many small ways.
But he hadn’t fallen in love with her. Fallen so deeply in love that it wouldn’t matter if she were named Muriel, or Lavinia, if she were someone’s widow or someone’s wife, if she wanted him to follow her to Paris or the north pole.
“Cowslips are edible.” He plucked a stem from the bouquet, a thin green stem from which many yellow trumpet-like flowers depended. He held it out to her. Her blinking became less careful, more quizzical, as she put out her palm. She hadn’t realized the bouquet was part of the refreshment.
“The orchids look more delicious,” she said.
“They do, but they’re not.” He laughed. “You can take my word for it.”
She wouldn’t wonder how many plants he’d sampled, and about the resultant hives, boils, and blisters.
She separated one yellow trumpet and put it between her lips, drew it into her mouth.
“It tastes bright.” She let her eyelids drift down. For a moment, she was back in the glasshouse with the beautiful duchess, the first she’d ever known, George’s mother, and that large, vibrant woman was pulling a tiny sun down from the dark green leaves, holding it out to her, so she could sniff the cool rind, sharply sweet and clean. The cowslip tasted like citrus and morning light. When she opened her eyes, she saw that Neal was staring.
“Here.” She handed him a flower. “Do you know—if we plant one of these crumbs—” She gestured toward a plate. “We can grow a new crop of ginger biscuits?”
For a moment, he looked puzzled, then comprehension flared.
“Loveday.” He sighed, dropping the flower into his mouth. “She planted that caraway seed in a pot and watered it every day for a month.”
“You can’t pretend you weren’t pleased with yourself,” she said, because he was trying to hide a smile.
“You have to understand, I’m the youngest of five.” He pinched a crumb from the plate. “I was always getting told everything. I never got to do the telling.”
“So you told tales to your younger cousin?” She ate another flower, dry on her tongue and then that sudden tang.
“I taught her all I knew,” he protested. “But my stock of knowledge was small. When I ran out of facts, I had to rely on invention.”
She laughed and the breath rushed back into her chest. She liked laughing with Neal Traymayne. She wouldn’t mind staying in this dusty cobwebbed room with him. If she could keep him here, until the dance ended, until Derwent Druce was fast asleep in the vicarage, until dawn, when Tomas woke to harness the horses and drive them to Bodmin Station, they could continue a little longer as they were, mutually enticed, dreaming the same dream.
It was a dream, not a lie, this idyll as Muriel Pendrake. It was a tale she told because she’d run out of facts, or at any rate, facts that didn’t hurt. It was a last chance, and she wouldn’t feel guilty for taking it.
“I wish I could plant this crumb so it yielded a dozen ginger biscuits.” He threw the crumb back onto the plate, looked at her through his lashes. “But such a feat is beyond even Varnham. Are you still too hungry to dance?”
“I want to dance,” she said, coming around the table. “But not out there. Here.”
He hadn’t expected that, but he was equal to it. He gave a mock bow and reached for her, then cocked his head. “Ah, but Mr. Hichens has arrived. The night will go on in jigs.”
Out in the assembly hall, the hornpipe shrilled along with the fiddle, and the raucous shouts and thumps sifted dust down from the ceiling. Lavinia coughed. This was her proposition, though. She couldn’t back down.
A jig. Bother.
Slowly, she gathered her skirt and lifted it well above her ankles. She kicked up one white satin slipper and turned on the other, skipping in place. That was as far as memory served and space allowed. She looked up at Neal expectantly.
“Not bad.” He folded his arms, amused, tapping the fingers of one hand on his elbow. “But we can’t dance a jig in this clutter.”
Without warning, he leaned forward and gripped her around the hips, raising her clear off the ground. He set her on top of a barrel and stepped back, grinning his satisfaction. The gasp she’d been too startled to emit exploded as a laugh.
“We’re to dance on these barrels, then?” Better not to tell him she’d feared all Cornish festivities led to exactly this.
He sprang up onto the adjacent barrel. His head brushed the ceiling, and he flicked several times at his hair.
“Spider,” he explained, catching her look. “Never mind. I’ll have to stoop a little.” He began to strike his heels and toes on the barrel in time with the music, feet flying back and forth, and side to side, faster and faster, until he stopped with a stamp and grabbed her hands.
“We used to practice on hogsheads of pilchards.” He said, chest heaving. “We’d stink aloud of fish at the end of it, but we worked out dozens of steps, Jenni and Tomas and Loveday and I.”
“I will learn them all,” she vowed. That should take a while.
“We’d leap from hogshead to hogshead,” he said. “If you touched the ground, you lost.”
“I played a game like that.” She held his hands more tightly. “We were only safe on stone or wood, so we had to run between the fountains and the trees.”
“We?” His thumb found her palm and pressed.
“Effie, my friend. She and I.” The tension in her fingers relaxed. “We’d play all day in the garden whenever we could.”
Which was less and less often, until it was never. They’d grown apart, even as their fathers became more entwined. Effie had eloped, without a word. She hadn’t confided in Lavinia. But then, Lavinia had never confided in her, about George. Effie had been abandoned by her husband. Instead of welcoming her home, her father had locked her away in an asylum, or Lavinia’s papa had done it, or they both had. Competing stories circulated.
Fact: she’d remained there even after her father died, until Anthony had found and freed her.
Lavinia remembered every moment of that dreadful morning when Anthony stormed into the breakfast room to confront Papa. She’d listened, aghast, to the accusations before her mother forced her from the room. That morning ended her engagement. Toppled Papa from his pedestal. Life accelerated on its downward spiral.
Small wonder Effie hadn’t flown to her, eager to renew their friendship.
“This is your friend whose mother grew lemon trees,” Neal spoke quietly, both thumbs making small circles.
His memory was keen.
Talking to him was dangerous. She wanted to share more of herself than was wise. Maybe she was through with talking.
She took a breath and jumped to his barrel. He swayed backward and clasped her against his chest, but he didn’t lose his footing. He wouldn’t. He was the lithest man alive.
“We have to leap from barrel to barrel,” she said, mouth muffled by his cravat.
“Mmm,” he said. “Those were hogsheads we leapt between, twice the size of these barrels. And we weren’t full-grown.”
He was full-grown now. Hard and tall and full. Held close, she rose and fell with his breaths.
“I’ll return to my barrel, then,” she said, her reluctance an invitation, and tipped her head to look at him. His mouth met hers, that bright taste on his lips, his tongue stroking into her, the feeling inside her sweet and then sharp, an urgency that made her twine her arms around his neck, crush her breasts against his broad chest.
He felt it too. He deepened the kiss, one hand tracing down the side of her body, the swell of her breast, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hip, before he caught her beneath the buttocks and gathered her more fully into him. Oh, he was gorgeously thick and firm and strong, and safe. The barrel might splinter beneath their feet and send them crashing to the flagstones, but she’d leapt to him. She couldn’t be hurt, not in his arms.
Now his teeth were running lightly down her neck, and he was licking the curve of her shoulder, lingering there before kissing back up the front of her throat, burning kisses. His chin rasped skin warmed and wetted by his mouth. He bit the lobe of her ear and she moaned aloud, felt his smile on the soft underside of her chin as he nuzzled her, forcing her head back. As her back arched, her breasts pushed up, and his hand wandered over her collarbones, cool leather sliding down the slopes of her breast, then tangling in lace.
This, too, this could take a good while.
Provided Neal’s strength held.
And the barrel.
In fact, the situation was rather precarious. Physically. Not to mention that a few feet away, beyond the open door, the whole village of Kyncastle was assembled.
She opened her eyes as he dragged his mouth from her neck. His eyes were gleaming, lids heavy with desire, but that glint—his teasing look.
“This barrel is going to go the way of that stone wall,” he predicted.
“I won’t bear all the responsibility.” Her voice shivered only slightly. And he couldn’t hear the wild pounding of her heart. She sounded almost as teasing, as collected, as he did.
“Everything is ancient here and near to crumbling,” she said. “And you outweigh me by five stone.”
Gently, he put her from him, lifting and shifting her again without any apparent strain until her heels came down on her own barrel.
He wasn’t senselessly, torrentially in love with her. But the desiring, teasing, burning-hot look in his eyes was encouraging, to say the least.
If they weren’t in a musty, dusty, spider-filled storage room from the Middle Ages, he wouldn’t be heaving that sigh, crossing his arms. He’d be doing something else. To her. With her.
“Shall we join the dance?” he asked.
She stared at him, that blunt, rough face spangled with those luxuriant eyes, and considered her course of action.
Was it better to wait it out in the antechamber or make a dash through the crowd for the door? Both had their risks.
“We’ll stay right here,” she said. “If I’m to learn to jig, I prefer a private lesson.”
“Snob,” he murmured.
“What kind of snob kicks up her skirts on a barrel?” she demanded, crossing her left foot over her right, then her right over her left, adding a little hop once she had the way of it. Not a jig, exactly, but he couldn’t discount the effort.
He didn’t. He clapped his hands along with the music, grinning his admiration.
“My kind of snob,” he said.