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 seem empty.
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 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 Charles 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 Charles’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 God’s green earth—I couldn’t have lived with myself knowing the possibility existed. Better to lose a post than my honor, my integrity, my very soul.”
And suddenly it came clear. Kit—her dear friend, her almost lover—was the most decent man she knew.
How could she not have seen it? How could she have chased after a title when a better man was waiting right here for her? A man who put others’ safety before his own cherished goals? A man who made her heart quicken with a mere glance and her knees melt with a single kiss?
A man—perhaps the only man—she could honestly talk to about anything.
“Will you marry me?” she asked.
A thundercloud swept over his face. “That is damned cruel.” He scrambled to his feet. “Do you know, Rose, I’m usually amused by the way you tend to say whatever comes into your head.” Clearly disgusted, he began to walk away. “But that was just plain cruel.”
Jumping up to run after him, she grabbed his hand and jerked him to a halt. “I meant it, Kit.”
“What?” He swung to her, glaring.
“You’re the best man I know. I want to be your wife.”
He focused hard on her, searching for the truth, perhaps finding it but unable to believe. It seemed he was also unable to talk. He opened his mouth, but a long moment passed before any words came out.
“I’ll never be Deputy Surveyor,” he finally said slowly. “I’ll never be a knight, let alone a baron, or a viscount, or an earl—”
“You’ll be Kit Martyn, the man I love.”
His eyes cleared. The tension drained from his face. He took a step closer, and her heart raced.
“No more kissing other men?”
She might have been offended if he wasn’t suddenly looking at her in that way that made her stomach dance. “None of them were any good at it, anyway,” she said flippantly.
He threw back his head and laughed. “Do you promise to always speak your mind? I do so love that.”
“Will you kiss me, already?”
The next thing she knew she was in his arms, his lips locked on hers.
And nothing had ever felt so glorious.
SIXTY-ONE
THEY STUMBLED together toward the summerhouse, more Rose’s idea than Kit’s. “Privacy,” she murmured against his mouth, her lips nibbling his with a skill that threatened to drive him insane.
He might have been the first man she’d enjoyed kissing, but she’d taken to it quickly.
“This isn’t a good idea,” he mumbled although he kept going. “If we step through one of those doors”—there were four entrances to the round building—“you’re unlikely to come
