The two servants exchanged nervous looks.
“Ah. Dinner is served?” one of them hazarded, and removed the last cover from the dinner plate, to reveal potatoes, French beans, and half a small roast duck.
Half. It was a blasted conspiracy.
Waving the servants away, Rafe pulled out his chair. The empty chair opposite smirked. The half fowl said nothing. The image of Thea’s bright blue eyes filled his mind.
“All be damned,” Rafe muttered, and replaced everything onto the tray and hefted it into his arms.
The door to Thea’s parlor was ajar, so Rafe kicked it open and barged in, to see Thea alone at her dining table. She leaped to her feet, dropping her soup spoon with a clatter, and fidgeted with her dress. It was an elegant gown in pale green; it had long sleeves and a modest bodice and still managed to reveal acres of creamy, touchable skin. Matching green ribbons were woven through her hair, and her complexion flaunted a new glow from her outdoor adventures that day, as if she had brought home the sunshine.
“No talking.” Rafe dumped his tray and offloaded his plates onto the table. “We will dine together, because you don’t like to dine alone. But I don’t like talking. So no talking. Understood?”
She nodded rapidly, her lips pressed together in an exaggerated manner. Once she had resumed her seat, he poured wine and sat too. In silence, they dipped their spoons into their soup and ate.
The vegetable soup was tasty, and Rafe tried hard to ignore Thea, but it was difficult when she sat across from him, and might or might not have an alluring dusting of pale freckles on the skin above her bodice, and so his eyes kept drifting back to her.
Which was why he saw her fierce frown as she pushed away her empty soup bowl. He followed her gaze: She was glaring at his glass of syllabub as though it had accused her of cheating at cards. Then she gave her head a little shake as if to clear it, half smiled into the air, and turned her attention to her roast duck and beans. Yet as she ate, her gaze wandered back to his syllabub. Again she frowned; again she shook it off.
This ferocious internal argument continued throughout their meal, until Rafe could bear it no more.
“What?” he demanded. “What is it?”
Her eyes opened wide. “I never said a word. You don’t like talking and I’m not talking.”
“You are thinking. I can hear you thinking.”
“Then I shall think more quietly.”
“You seem upset.”
Again, she frowned, first at his side of the table, and then at her own, and sighed. “I’m not upset. I am merely…confused.”
“About what?”
“I cannot help but observe that your meal includes syllabub and raspberries.”
“So it does.”
“But mine does not. That is all.”
She carved the last of the meat from her half of the bird, shoved it into her mouth, and chewed with dignified fury.
Rafe examined the table. “True. Your meal is entirely devoid of syllabub and raspberries, or indeed, syllabub and fruit of any kind.”
“No doubt there is an excellent reason why the earl has syllabub but the countess does not.”
“You want dessert, call a servant for it.”
“No!” Her knife and fork clattered to the plate and she tidied them. “I do not wish to antagonize them. I can live without syllabub.” She heaved a sigh that would put the most tragic of martyrs to shame. “I suppose all the best countesses must suffer deprivation.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.” He shoved the glass across the table. “Have mine.”
“I can’t take yours!”
“Take it!”
“How noble and self-sacrificing of you, my lord! To go without dessert! So stoic. So honorable. So—”
“Shut up and eat your blasted syllabub.”
With an impish smile, she did just that, with such blatant pleasure it was sheer torment to watch. Rafe gulped at his wine, but it failed to dull his desire. She seemed unaware of him, all of her senses engrossed in her sweet solitary pleasures. And he… Damn it, he was jealous! Of a blasted spoonful of blasted whipped cream!
The glass scraped empty, she dabbed at her lips with her serviette and smiled at him.
No, she didn’t simply smile. She cast her smile over him like a fisherman cast a net. It wrapped around him and made him long to draw near.
He stood so abruptly the table rocked. “I bid you good night.”
She leaped to her feet too. “Must you go so soon? We could…”
“What?”
“Um. Play billiards?”
“You don’t know how to play billiards.”
“If you please! I excel at the game,” she protested. “That is, I shall excel, once I learn how to play. I can teach myself, from a book, but it would be much more diverting to play with someone else.”
Rafe wavered. It would indeed be a pleasant way to pass the evening. He would enjoy teaching her, watching her frown of concentration, her triumphant joy when she sank a ball. Perhaps she would need guidance positioning her cue, and he would stand behind her, wrap his arms around her as he showed her how to find the angle. He would press his lips to the fragrant skin at her neck, perhaps nip at her ear so she would leap backward in surprise, and then run his hands up—
“Play with Sally and Martha,” he said.
“They’re staff.”
“I shouldn’t think you’d care about that.”
“I don’t. But those are the rules.” She nudged the empty plate in front of her. “Rules are so unspeakably silly, don’t you think? You know, when Pa made his first fortune, we moved to a nicer part of town, and I wasn’t allowed to see my old friends anymore. So I made new friends. Then Pa lost his fortune, and we moved again, and my new friends weren’t allowed to see me. I started again. Made new friends. And again Pa got rich, and again we moved, and so on. All these rules about who can be friends with whom and who can marry whom, when we’re all just people, aren’t we? But not you,” she added with a wan smile. “You’re not people.”
“Right.”
Rafe spoke automatically, seeing only her faltering smile, the way she straightened her shoulders as if bracing for more disappointment. He dragged his eyes off her, onto the empty plates between them, the debris of their fleeting domesticity. He didn’t want to be yet another person shutting a door in her face. True, his original plan was to ignore her, but that was an eon ago, back when she was nothing but a name.
“Never mind,” she said brightly. “I shall be quite content to read. How do you usually pass the time after dinner?”
“I read.”
“Then perhaps you might enjoy one of the books I collected today.” She gestured at a trio of books on the small table by the settees. “It makes no sense for you to sit over there reading, and for me to sit here reading. It’s a waste of…” She trailed off as she glanced at the empty fireplace.
In cooler weather, it would indeed be wasteful to sit in separate rooms with separate fires. In winter, if they sat together reading by the fire, would the light of the flames pick up the mix of colors in her hair? Would her ears and nose turn pink when she ran in the snow? She would throw snowballs at him, of course, and he would not hesitate to retaliate; he’d aim to hit her, to make her squeal and laugh and jump back up to throw snowballs at him again. Eventually he would run at her, tackle her, and they’d fall into the snow together…