“The marvel is mutual.” She hugged him back and knew they should be returning to the house. “Will I see you at breakfast?”
He brushed his fingers over her knuckles. “If only we could return here for breakfast or, better yet, never leave this place. You will think me a coward, but I do not want to face the people you call family.”
“I haven’t wanted to face them for years, but you have fortified me. I’m moving you to the summer cottage.”
Phillip began their progress across the field, hand in hand. “Does this summer cottage enjoy privacy?”
Hecate halted. “As a matter of fact, it does. A great deal of privacy. It sits across the park from the stream, shaded by tall maples and out of sight of the garden.”
They shared a smile, and Hecate’s steps were lighter as she resumed walking.
“Why am I to have the great boon of private quarters?”
“Papa’s arrival has thrown the arrangements into disarray, and you might recall that there’s some possibility another cousin will show up in the near term. I don’t have a specific date.”
“Cousin Johnny, late of the Canadian wilderness. I overheard your father’s announcement. Will you move DeWitt into the summer cottage with me?”
The discussion was mundane—who should be housed where?—but also novel. Guest accommodations were Hecate’s problem to solve, and yet, here she was, talking the situation over with Phillip.
“What is the benefit of moving DeWitt to the summer cottage?” She could see the inconvenience of assigning Phillip a cottage mate all too easily.
“I do not trust your lady cousins. Portia is trailing after me like a hound after a bitch in season and watching me from windows and stairways. She is a woman bent on mischief. DeWitt, as my chaperone, has foiled her plans already, I’m sure.”
“I am sorry. Portia has grown worse lately, as her mother has been distracted by other matters.”
“DeGrange? He has to be ten years her junior.”
“He’s also the great-nephew of a marquess and quite solvent. What matters age compared to those consideration?”
“When is your birthday?” Phillip asked as they reached the path through the woods.
“The week after next, as it happens. Yours?”
“October, the fourteenth or fifteenth. I’m never sure. I have to look it up each year in the parish registry and count the years to make sure I know my own age.”
Because he’d had nobody with whom to celebrate his natal day. Hecate stopped and hugged him again. “We’ll remark the occasion this year. Give you some memories to anchor the date on your mental calendar.”
He held her loosely, his arms around her shoulders. “And the week after next, perhaps you’ll be in Crosspatch Corners that I might do the same for you.”
The exchange should have been heartwarming, acknowledging a mutual desire for a shared future, but Hecate was also unsettled by it. To admit of that desire without speaking of matrimony was to admit of a vulnerability, a potential loss. A dream dashed.
Phillip had withdrawn both times when they’d made love. Had that been an insurance policy guaranteeing his freedom, or a courteous attempt to guarantee Hecate’s?
Falling in love with Phillip Vincent is not an investment to be assessed in terms of risk and reward. The warning in Hecate’s head was delivered in her mother’s voice. But then, Mama hadn’t been an expert on marital or romantic success.
“I’ll move DeWitt to the summer cottage with you,” Hecate said when they were strolling over the arched bridge. “Like you, I do not trust Portia, though for all I know, she’ll set her cap for Cousin Johnny, if he deigns to join us.”
“The conquering Canadian is to become Portia’s loyal swain? I will comfort myself with the hope that he and Portia become enamored.”
On the side terrace outside the conservatory, Phillip kissed Hecate farewell, a tantalizing reminder of pleasures shared and pleasure still to come.
“Into the house with you,” Hecate said, stepping back. Far to the east, the sky was acquiring a hint of gray. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”
“My darling lady, do not, for the love of spring lambs, come down to breakfast. Have a damned lie-in. Rest. Linger at your bath. Let the world for once spin forth on its own inertia. You have earned a respite.”
“While you will clear ditches and fell trees and work yourself to exhaustion.”
“The estate isn’t beyond salvaging,” Phillip said. “I’ll do what I can while I’m here, but I will also hope you have a spare key to the summer cottage.”
Hecate did not dare touch him again. “I do. Away with you. I will take a tray for breakfast, but rearranging guest quarters will take some managing.”
Phillip kissed her cheek, bowed, and slipped into the house. Hecate sank onto the wrought-iron chair near the balustrade and contemplated the past few hours.
She was changed—in love, hoping for a future with Phillip, confiding her worries and dreams in him—and she was the same. A glorified house steward expected to keep an entire horde of Bromptons from the River Tick and other sources of scandal.
The old Hecate could obliterate the new Hecate all too easily, and the Bromptons would aid in her destruction. Phillip would fight for her, but he could take the battle only so far. Hecate sought her bed on that thought, her mind awhirl even as fatigue dragged at her.
She was drifting into the nearer reaches of slumber, thoughts washing about in a fog of hope, worry, longing, and pride—she had a lover, and such a lover—when it occurred to her that Phillip was different.
The pleasure they’d shared had been amazing, a revelation in itself, but Hecate also realized that Phillip had never once alluded to her money as anything other than a means for her family to plague her. Not obliquely, not overtly, not in jest.
He did not see her money as a marital inducement, and that left her naked in a sense, without camouflage or a protective costume, but also free.
Wonderfully free.
Wonderfully, terribly free.
The summer cottage was a bit of heaven, at least to Phillip. He could not answer for DeWitt’s impressions, because that good fellow had taken to collecting a fishing pole and disappearing after breakfast, returning only when the dressing bell rang for supper.
Staff came and went discreetly, leaving a breakfast tray and tidying up. The house party moved into its second week, with Portia glaring daggers from behind potted lemons, the Corvisers losing more than a few pence at whist, and Isaac Brompton maintaining a bored distance from the other guests.
No great loss, though Brompton continued to treat Hecate with drawling condescension, while Lord Nunn had barely bestirred himself to preside over Sunday dinner. As long as Phillip spent much of his days in hard, useful labor, he could survive his first house party without running afoul of Society’s myriad unwritten regulations.
Though as to that, hard, useful labor was apparently an infraction in and of itself. “Oh, the Quality,” Phillip muttered, passing his scythe to Henry Wortham.
“You are the Quality.” Henry added the blade to the collection in the wagon bed. “Never seen a toff willing to toil in such earnest.”
“I wasn’t always a toff, and wearing a toff’s clothes doesn’t mean a man deserves the insult. How is Mrs. Riley?”