“Ah.”
Her eyes danced with laughter. Fighting his own smile, Guy backed away from her and turned to face the intruder. Lady Belinda stood with her hands clasped, chastening him with her serene, direct gaze.
He bowed. “Lady Belinda.”
“Lord Hardbury.”
He pivoted and strode away. The door to the drawing room gaped open, but his senses still burned with Arabella’s closeness, so he kept on walking, seeking the respite and release of his room.
Chapter 17
“Oh, what a work of art!”
Juno’s voice was threaded with awe, and she burst into activity, swiftly moving her charcoal across a leaf of paper.
Arabella did not need to look at that page to know what Juno was drawing.
Or whom, rather.
Arabella, Juno, and Cassandra had rounded a corner of the abbey ruins just in time to see Guy leap onto a four-foot-high crumbling wall, in a single bound like a cat. He paused, swaying in the sunlight, finding his balance, his face bright with simple, boyish fun. He was picturesquely framed by a high, distant arch, and a cluster of purple Michaelmas daisies rioted at his feet.
One gave Michaelmas daisies to say farewell.
“Beware distractions, Juno,” Arabella managed to say, though she might as well have been warning herself. That morning, she had thrown herself into organizing an impromptu outing for the small party of remaining guests in a vain effort to keep her mind off that oh-so-irrational kiss of the evening before. “Perhaps you had forgotten that your assignment today is to draw the abbey ruins.”
“I am drawing the ruins.” Juno’s swift, confident strokes did not pause, as Guy’s image appeared under her hand. “I just happen to be drawing that portion of the ruins that have an athletic man prancing about on them. I would just as likely draw a bird or a cat had one landed on that spot, but since Lord Hardbury has been so obliging as to make a spectacle of himself, well, who am I to ignore Nature’s bounty? These beauteous forms…” She glanced sideways at Arabella. “Poetry. Sorry.”
“So you should be.”
Guy was moving nimbly along the wall now, testing the stone, choosing his next move. A sky lark landed on a high wall nearby and he paused to admire it.
Breathtaking.
Good grief. More wretched poetry, and a nonsensical phrase to boot, but how else to describe this tightness in her chest? This bittersweet ache, as if all her breath had indeed been stolen, leaving her limbs light with a desperate need for air.
He could have been mine.
The thought jolted through her, with a sensation as physical as if she were falling.
A life with Guy could have been hers. A potentially beautiful gift had been bestowed upon her, but she had failed to see its worth, amidst her struggle to understand and control her own life. This breathtaking man and the life of joy he seemed to promise—they were as far out of her reach as that sky lark, and that was nobody’s fault but her own.
If she had gone about life differently? Become the amiable lady her father demanded, the lady of Guy’s dreams, less complicated, less combative, less herself?
But she didn’t want to be different. She didn’t want to change herself to please others. What she wanted was—oh, heaven help her, she was turning into a ninny!—but she wanted to be special to him. In truth, and not as a game.
“I wish I could do that,” came a voice from her side.
It was Freddie, watching Guy wistfully, her fingers absently tearing a Michaelmas daisy to shreds. Glancing around, Arabella saw that she had unconsciously drifted nearer to Guy, leaving Juno and Cassandra behind.
“Climb the walls,” Freddie clarified. “We went to see some acrobats and I’ve been practicing at home. I can leap and pivot mid-air, and even do somersaults and land safely.”
“If you had thought to wear your Turkish trousers today, you could have impressed us all.”
With a sigh, Freddie flicked away the dregs of destroyed daisy. “Lady Treadgold found them before I finished sewing them and took them away.”
“You ought to take them back again.” At Arabella’s meaningfully raised brows, Freddie’s expression brightened. “I’ll speak to Holly about arranging that. And if you can spare a few coins, I daresay Holly can find a maid willing to finish sewing them somewhere Lady Treadgold cannot see.”
A grin spread over Freddie’s face as they turned back to study the walls. Guy leaped across a gap and landed effortlessly. How lovely it would be to take an action with such easy confidence and without first having to consider the forty-seven different ways it might be done. How lovely if she had the right to explore his body again. How lovely if he searched for her, smiled at her, acknowledged her as special to him.
“It’s like doing a puzzle, choosing where to put one’s feet, calculating the leap,” Freddie said. “But it’s better than a puzzle, because one’s whole body is involved, and the risk of falling makes it more fun.”
“That’s the kind of thing Guy says,” Arabella pointed out. “The two of you are very similar, you know.”
Freddie didn’t respond, behaving as if she wasn’t listening. Arabella suspected Freddie heard everything and only pretended not to.
“You would know that about Guy if you spent more time with him, instead of riding off alone,” Arabella added. “And he wants to spend more time with you.”
Freddie shrugged. “What’s the point? I’ll hardly see him.”
“He’ll make time for you. He is trying to win custody.”
“He’s only trying to defeat Father. He doesn’t really care.”
“But he does. It matters to him, Freddie. Truly. For so many years, he has been horribly alone.” She sought the words, needing Freddie to understand, needing to give Guy this one gift: the happiness he sought from family. “He’s all heart, you know. Heart and muscle. He believes in things. He believes in them so fully he doesn’t have to think about them first. He already knows what to do.”
Her eyes followed him as he trod the wall. He would never be hers. How long would she be haunted by this strange nostalgia for a future she could never have?
She turned back to Freddie. “He believes in you like that. In family, in looking after other people. He’ll fight for you, with all his heart and muscle. He’ll fight for you to be happy.”
Freddie was looking at her oddly. “He doesn’t know what makes me happy.”
“Then tell him.”
What a hypocrite she was! Easy advice, when she had no idea how to speak her own truths to Guy, when she wasn’t even sure what they were. But if only she could touch him, as he had touched her last night, and then…
Seduce him. There was an idea. Would it be such a terrible thing to do? In less than a week, he would be gone, and they both understood the rules of honor no longer applied; he would feel no obligation to her, and she would feel no shame. A passing pleasure. A souvenir. To let herself pretend that he was hers, if only for one more hour. Of course, if he rejected her, that would be terrible.
Freddie beheaded another hapless daisy and set about shredding this one too. “I told him I don’t want to marry, but he just said of course I want to marry, but that I could choose to whom.”