“You’d laugh.” She’d never told anyone outside her own family. Ever. Avoiding his eyes, she busied herself sprinkling sweet brown sugar on a slice of the egg-battered bread.
“I won’t laugh. I promise.” He sprinkled extra cinnamon on his. “Tell me,” he said, cutting a piece.
“Well, one day…” As a delaying tactic, she swallowed a bite of cream toast, then washed it down with some ale.
“Yes?” he prompted, looking amused.
“I’d like to publish a philosophy book,” she blurted out. “Not now, of course, but when I’m older. I still have much to learn first.”
“A lady authoring a philosophy tome.” Chewing, he considered. “It’s an ambitious dream.”
He was listening, and he wasn’t laughing. “I would publish it under a man’s name. Otherwise no one would read it.”
“Do you think so?”
“I know so.” She sipped, then rushed on. “I have an inheritance coming, you see, enough to print and distribute the book far and wide.”
He finished his slice and took another. “What is it you’re so burning to say?”
“I don’t know yet.” Perhaps that sounded rather foolish, but it felt so good to finally tell someone—someone who really listened. “I’m still learning, still changing my opinions. But I believe these things are important. Ideas can change the world. And…I dream of leaving my mark.”
“So do I.”
“But with science, am I right?” Ford was different, like her. She’d never expected to meet anybody like her. “You want to leave your mark with science. Science can change the world, too.”
“Exactly.”
He smiled, reaching to touch the back of her hand. She thrilled at the contact—until he opened his mouth again.
“I reckon it’s a rare fellow who’d let his wife’s fortune go to such a project.”
His words cut her to the core.
She’d thought he understood.
Disappointment swamped her short-lived giddiness. He was poking fun at her. Raising her tankard to hide her flaming face, she ordered herself to shrug it off. She focused on Rowan and Jewel still swinging in the distance, their lighthearted laughter floating to her on the breeze. Of course he would think like that, she reasoned—she should expect nothing else.
Ford was different, but not as different as she’d hoped. Men that different simply didn’t exist.
With a sigh, she lowered the tankard. “I realize most gentlemen marry for money.” And Ford would be no exception, especially given his obvious lack of the same. “But as far as I’m concerned, that isn’t a good reason to shackle oneself for life.”
She watched him rake his fingers through his hair. “That’s not what I said—”
“I knew what you were thinking.”
“Did you?“ he murmured, lifting his own tankard. A series of emotions crossed his face, but Violet couldn’t make them out. He took a slow sip of ale. ”Are you never planning to marry, then?”
Perhaps she’d dreamed of it for a minute—one brief, insensible minute. “My family isn’t a conventional one.”
“Question Convention.”
“Yes. I feel no compulsion to lead a typical woman’s life.”
He just gazed at her for a while. A long while, while she tried and failed to figure out what he was thinking.
“No,” he said at last, and paused for another sip. “Nobody would ever call Violet Ashcroft typical.”
That hurt, but she only stiffened her spine. “I’m aware of my eccentricities, my lord. And I realize they are the reason no man would want me except for my inheritance.”
He bristled. “Criminy, is it that much money?”
She couldn’t tell whether he was sarcastic or serious, and she didn’t get a chance to find out. Because in the next moment, two voices rang out from the riverbank.
“I dare you!”
“I dare you!”
And a moment after that, Jewel and Rowan flew from their swings into the water.
TWENTY-TWO
VIOLET JUMPED up from where they were eating. “The children!”
Splashes and screams followed.
Icy fear gripped Ford’s heart. Boots and all, he made a running dive into the river.
But the splashes were playful ones—on Rowan’s part, at least. And if Jewel’s shrieks weren’t exactly in fun, they weren’t pleas for rescue, either. It was obvious both children knew how to swim.
The shock of cold water helped Ford regain his wits as he gathered Jewel and Rowan to him, one in each arm. He should have given his niece more credit, he thought wryly. She was much too clever to leap to her death. And if she was less than pleased with the outcome of her prank, perhaps it would be a lesson learned.
Moments later he’d hauled them ashore, no harm done. But by the time they were back on the barge and sailing for home, Violet was on the verge of hysterics.
“We shouldn’t have left them!” she wailed, wringing her hands. Ford had never seen anybody wring their hands. Not in real life. He’d thought people only wrung their hands in plays.
And they hadn’t left the children—they’d been watching them the entire time. He’d been there within seconds, he reminded himself, struggling to hold on to logic in the face of hysteria. There had never been any real risk of drowning.
So why was his pulse still beating double-time?
He drew a deep breath. ”All’s well that ends well,” he told Violet philosophically, wondering if a philosopher had actually said that. But if she knew, she was in no state to inform him.
Jewel was equally hysterical. “There were fish in there!” Her entire body shuddered, and not from the wet and cold. “Fish! Slimy fish!”
Rowan was hysterically laughing at Jewel, and Ford…well, if he hadn’t felt a need to act as the lone voice of reason, he’d have been hysterical along with the rest of them.
“Of course there were fish,” Rowan crowed between snorts. “You goose,” he added with undisguised glee.
Ford suspected he’d been waiting to call Jewel a goose since she’d called him one on the swings. Pouring water from one of his boots, he rather sympathized with the boy.
Women. Ford would never understand them. For a moment back at the inn, he’d thought he had finally made sense
