Simply Unforgettable

currant cakes that were still warm from the oven. Who was it who had said that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach? Not that it was exactly his heart that was the affected organ, but she was certainly a good cook.

“I have decided,” he said when they had finished eating, “not to offer you employment as my cook. I am large enough as I am—or as I was yesterday.”

She smiled but did not say anything. And when he got to his feet to help her into the kitchen with the tray, she told him to stay where he was, that he had been busy enough all afternoon.

She had been reading, he could see. Her book was resting open and facedown on the settle beside the hearth. It was Voltaire’s Candide, of all things. She was reading it in French, he saw when he picked it up. She had said that she taught French, had she not? French and music and writing.

She was a prim, staid schoolteacher. No doubt she was a dashed intelligent one too. If he repeated those facts to himself often enough, perhaps he would eventually accept them as hard reality and the knowledge would cool his blood.

Who the devil would want to bed an intelligent woman?

Wally came to make up the fire, and Lucius nodded off in his chair soon after. Frances Allard did not rejoin him until dinnertime, when she appeared with a roasted duckling and roast potatoes and other vegetables she had found in the root cellar.

“I did not even help with the potatoes tonight,” he said. “I am surprised you will allow me to eat.”

“I did not help chop the wood,” she said, “but here I am sitting in front of the fire.”

Lord, they could not even have a satisfactory quarrel any longer.

“Candide,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of the book. “Do you always read in French?”

“I like to when the original was written in that language,” she said. “So much is lost in translation even when the translator is earnest and well educated. Something of the author’s voice is lost.”

Yes, there was no doubt about it. She was intelligent. He tried to feel his attraction to her wane as a result. He was attracted only because he was stranded here and she was the only woman within sight, he told himself. Under normal circumstances he would not afford her so much as a second glance.

They conversed without too much awkwardness or too many silences for the rest of the meal, but he found as it progressed and then as they washed and dried the dishes together that a certain melancholy had descended upon his spirits. It was not the black mood that had assailed him all over Christmas and even yesterday but a definite . . . melancholy nevertheless. Tomorrow they would part and never see each other again. By this time next week she would be simply a memory. By this time next month he would have forgotten all about her.

Good Lord! Next he would be growing his hair and wearing brightly colored cravats and spouting sentimental verse and sinking into a decline.

He set down a heavy pot he had just dried and cleared his throat. But when she looked up with raised eyebrows—and slightly flushed cheeks—he had nothing to say.

She led the way back into the taproom and sat on her usual chair. He stood before the fire, gazing into it, his hands clasped at his back. And he gave in to temptation. Not that he put up much of a fight, it was true. Perhaps he would do that later.

And perhaps not.

“And so,” he said, “you never did get to dance over Christmas?”

“Alas, no.” She chuckled softly. “And I was all prepared to impress the villagers with my prowess in the waltz. Mr. Huckerby, the dancing master at school, insisted upon teaching the steps to the girls, as he says it will almost certainly be all the rage within a few years. And he chose me with whom to demonstrate. As if my days were not busy enough without that. But I stopped grumbling once I had learned the steps. It is a divine dance. However, I was given no chance to dazzle anyone with my performance of it over Christmas. How sad!”

Her voice was light with humor. And yet in her words, and in what she had said during the morning, he gathered an impression of a Christmas that had been dreary and disappointing. A lonely Christmas, with only two elderly ladies for company.

But he had already given in to temptation and could not now deny himself the pleasure of pressing onward.

He looked over his shoulder at her.

“Dazzle me.”

“I beg your pardon?” She looked blankly up at him, though some color had crept into her cheeks.

“Dazzle me,” he repeated. “Waltz with me. You do not even have to wade through snow to reach the Assembly Room. It awaits you abovestairs.”

“What?” She laughed.

“Come and waltz with me,” he said. “We can have the luxury of the room and the floor to ourselves.”

“But there is no music,” she protested.

“I thought you were a music teacher.”

“I did not see either a pianoforte or a spinet up there,” she said. “But even if there were either, I would not be able to play and dance at the same time, would I?”

“Do you not have a voice?” he asked her. “Can you not sing? Or hum?”

She laughed. “How absurd!” she said. “Besides, it is cold up there. There is no fire.”

“Do you feel cold, then?” he asked her.