Except maybe Nell Gwyn. And the king’s poor, long-suffering queen.
“Are you finished?” she asked.
“One moment.” Harriet tied the ribbon and stepped back. “You look lovely, milady.”
“Thank you.” Rose darkened her lashes with the burnt end of a cork and slicked on some lip gloss from a little pot. She considered a patch or two, but hadn’t the patience. In no time at all, she was downstairs, out the door, and hurrying through her father’s gardens.
On impulse she paused to pluck a few colorful blooms, gathering them into a makeshift bouquet. Still arranging them, she rounded the corner of the house.
And there was Kit.
Was there anything quite so masculine as a man in charge, giving orders? The greenhouse site looked chaotic, but somehow, at the same time, Kit seemed to have everything under control.
The air smelled of newly turned earth and freshly cut wood. Kit’s dark hair glinted in the sunshine, and a metal T-square flashed as he used it to point here and direct workmen there. He’d spread plans on an improvised table balanced across two sawhorses, and he kept looking down at them and back up.
She positioned herself in front of the table, so the next time he looked up, he’d see her.
“Rose,” he said briskly, then looked back down.
“Kit?”
“Hmm?”
She shifted uneasily, stepping closer. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I want a kiss?” she said, trying to tease one of those glorious smiles from him.
“No.” He waved at a man pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks. “Over there,” he directed, pointing with the T-square. Once again, he consulted his plans. “And you’ve no need to worry,” he added toward the neatly inked lines. “I’m not going to try to convince you we belong together, either.”
She should be relieved, but she wasn’t. Something was wrong. She held out the bouquet. “I brought these for you.”
“What for?”
“I’m hoping to celebrate you winning the Deputy Surveyor post.”
He finally met her gaze. “I lost it.”
“Oh, Kit.” The flowers fell to the ground as she moved around the table to lay a hand on his arm. “Tell me.”
“There was a problem at Hampton Court.” He glanced down at her fingers, then scanned the bustle of construction and sighed, setting down the T-square. “Wait here a moment.”
Rose watched him cross the site, looking confident as ever as he consulted with a short, hook-nosed man. Kit gestured with his competent, callused hands, and she wondered when she’d come to prefer them over the smooth, elegant hands of the aristocracy. He ran one of them through his dark hair, and she wondered when she’d come to prefer bold coloring over the pale English ideal.
When he returned, he led her around the house toward the gardens. “It was structural,” he admitted flatly. Their shoes crunched on the gravel path. “I ordered the building torn down. It was destined to eventually collapse.”
“You could have been killed!” She put her hand to her racing heart, staring at his profile as they walked, imagining her life without him and suddenly realizing it would be tedious and dreary.
When had their friendship come to mean that much to her?
But the gaze he turned on her was sad, not alarmed. “I was never personally in danger.” He stopped beneath the huge tree her father called his twenty-guinea oak. “I’ll still build it,” he said with a half-hearted shrug that didn’t fool her. He was more upset than he was willing to admit. “But I’ll do it right. And there’s no rush anymore, since I’ve no chance to make King Charles’s tight deadline.”
“And that’s why you lost the appointment?”
He didn’t have to answer. His hand slipped into his pocket to grip that little piece of his first building—that tiny symbol of his past success—and in the dappled light beneath the tree, his expression said it all.
Her heart broke for him. “I know how much you wanted that post.”
“I wanted the knighthood that went with it. I was hoping…” He sighed. “Never mind.” Looking more defeated than she’d ever seen him, he dropped to sit on the grass, his back against the massive trunk. “It was my fault,” he said resolutely, and then almost in a whisper, “but it may not have been my mistake.”
She sat across from him, carefully settling her skirts. “What do you mean?”
“Do you remember me mentioning the set of plans at Hampton Court didn’t match the ones I kept with me? It could have been my error reproducing them, but—”
“Someone could have made changes,” she finished for him. “Harold Washburn?”
“Perhaps.” He slipped the chunk of brick back into his pocket. “But I should have been there, checking, double-checking—”
“You had too many projects. You couldn’t be everywhere at once.”
“Which just goes to show that the king was right to test me, because the Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Works would have many more projects at a time than I’ve had these past weeks.” He pulled a long green blade from the ground and chewed the end, looking pensive. “But I’ve been…distracted. It could have been my error. And in any case, it was my project. My responsibility. Which was why I had to tear it down even though the problem would likely have stayed hidden for years—”
“Years?” She blinked. “Are you saying you could have finished the project and accepted the post—”
“I couldn’t.” At her frown, he tossed the green blade to the lawn. “Can’t you see, Rose? When the building collapsed—however far in the future—people might have died. It could have been the mother of the king’s children—or his children themselves. And even if it didn’t happen until I was long gone—not only from the project, but from our good green earth—I couldn’t have lived with myself knowing the possibility existed. Better to lose a post than lose my honor and my very soul.”
And suddenly it came clear.
Kit—her dear friend—was the most decent man she knew.
How could she not have seen it? How could she have chased after a title when something better
