He was still thinking about that when he carried the picnic basket up the bank, following Joan. Once in the clearing, they put down the cloth—flowered yellow cotton, instead of blue—and pinned it to the ground with rocks.
“Are you hungry?” Joan inquired. “I’m sorry I took so long after the rehearsal, but I wanted a bath after collapsing onto the stage in death throes. It was frightfully dusty.”
They began to pull the boxes from the picnic basket. Today’s offerings were different from yesterday’s.
“Mmmm,” Joan said, appreciation a purr deep in her throat that made his nerves tighten. “Cook sent along pot pies, and they’re still warm. And lemon tarts!” Her delight sent flecks of sensation down his spine.
She rooted out a corked earthenware jug and gave him a mischievous grin. “Plum jerkum!” Pulling out the cork, she poured a rosy liqueur into the tin cups.
“How intoxicating is it?” Thaddeus asked.
“Very,” Joan said. “Viola and I tried it neat once, and later we threw up. This, however, is Aunt Knowe’s version, which is mixed with cider and should be no stronger than wine.”
Thaddeus looked down at the fizzing cup and saluted her with it. “To your performance of Hamlet.”
Joan grinned at him. “Thank you.”
Sparkling, tart liquid slid down his throat. Even though he knew perfectly well that brandy hardly affected him, he chose to interpret the heady feeling that spread through him as inebriation rather than—
Than some sort of illicit emotion inspired by Joan’s eyes.
And her smile.
Joan took two small pot pies and a napkin and lay down on the opposite side of the cloth, propping up her head with a pillow.
He started picking up the boxes that were between them and placing them to the side.
Joan was on her back, ankle crossed over her knee, staring at the shifting leaves overhead. When she noticed what he was doing, she turned her head lazily. “I’d like more to eat, even if you don’t.”
“I’m not packing away the food. The boxes are in the way of my pillow.”
A smile played with the corners of Joan’s lovely mouth. “I see.”
He placed his pillow, very precisely, next to hers. “If you don’t need a tree to lean against, neither do I.”
When he had lain down next to her, not touching but close, Joan said, “You haven’t truly experienced a picnic until you watch the leaves.”
Thaddeus stared up at them. They were leaves. Shifting into patterns that sorted and resorted in symmetrical patterns—mathematics had been one of his favorite subjects in university—but ultimately, just trees.
A plump tail flicked across a branch and then scampered down the tree on Joan’s right. At the bottom of the trunk, the squirrel stopped and sat up.
“He’d like pie,” Joan said softly.
The young squirrel had an extraordinarily fluffy tail that curled up and over his head in an exuberance of fur.
“Why isn’t he more afraid of us?” she asked.
“He’s too young,” Thaddeus answered, equally quietly. “He’s no more than a baby.” Cautiously, he came up on one elbow and rolled some crumbs not toward the squirrel, but off to the side.
The baby gave them a look, scampered over, snatched up the biggest crumb, and left with a flip of his tail.
“You like animals, don’t you?” Joan said, turning her head to look at him. A ray of sunlight caught her hair so it glowed amber.
“Yes.”
He couldn’t look at her any longer without kissing her, so he rolled onto his back and put an arm over his eyes.
A rustling suggested Joan had inched closer to him, but she didn’t touch him. He could smell her, though: She smelled like sparkling plum cider, a hint of buttery pastry, a touch of something indescribable that was Joan.
“Are you all right?” Her breath touched his ear.
He discovered he was holding his breath as if she were a shy forest creature whom he was trying to coax closer. He let the breath out. “Of course.”
“Your father’s unkindness must be very hurtful.”
“I wish he had simply run away years ago, the way your mother and father did,” he said, keeping his voice even. “But he’s not brave. I realize now that he probably began to feel ill two years ago, when he started badgering me to give up the inheritance. Any courage he has is fueled by knowledge of his imminent demise.”
“Here, have a bite.” A warm, flaky pastry touched his lips, and he took a bite without moving his arm from his eyes.
“My father, the duke, told me that my mother’s courage came from being unloved,” Joan said. “He didn’t love her, and he said that no one in her family had cared for her either. So when she met the Prussian, her life reshaped itself around that one fact: love. At least, I hope the Prussian loves her.”
“If she looked like you, he is probably prostrate at her feet,” Thaddeus said wryly.
He felt her withdrawal even though she wasn’t touching him. She was on her side, head propped up on an elbow.
“I hope for her sake that he cared for more than that,” Joan said. “Beauty is fleeting, skin-deep, etcetera.”
“Only if you think of ‘beauty’ as encompassing merely physical traits such as hair and skin. That squirrel had a beautiful tail, by any measure.”
“A royal tail,” Joan said, her voice softening.
“But his face is beautiful,” Thaddeus pointed out. “The way he turned his head slightly away and still watched us, the scrappy shine in his eyes, four long, springy whiskers on each side of his mouth.”
“Hmm.” Pastry touched his lips again. He took another bite. “I would give you jerkum but I’m afraid to spill plum-colored liquid on your shirt. Down in the laundry, they’d have to lather it over and over.”
“How do you know?”
“Aunt Knowe had each of us, the boys too, work in the laundry room for a day. We did the same in the buttery—she finds new beer fascinating—and the stables, and the kitchens. We learned how to lay a fire and scrub a hearth. How else could we run our own households someday?”
He absorbed that in silence. To him, running a household was a matter of giving orders. He learned that lesson at his mother’s knee. The Wildes obviously had a different concept. Likely a better one, he admitted.
Everything he knew was learned by rote. A rule, memorized, like a part in a play: The Duke of Eversley.
Something sharp poked him in the side. “Time to sit up,” Joan said cheerfully. “You can’t watch the leaves—”
He rolled over, his mouth coming down on hers without opening his eyes. It was as if he had mapped her territory in space. He knew where her body was in relation to his. Joan’s mouth opened to him as naturally as if he were a flaky pastry, but the sound she made in the back of her throat? That raspy note of excitement? No pastry was worth that.
Thaddeus sank into their kiss as if nothing else existed but the moment and the lady. Their tongues curled around each other, dancing in a rhythm that turned the desire in Thaddeus’s body into a thunderstorm that blotted out rules.
All of them memorized, not learned.
He pushed the thought away. He was drunk on Joan’s taste and smell, the sunlight, perhaps even the sparkling drops of plum liqueur.