‘How you made me jump,’ she accused him as he came to the doorway of the glasshouse as if he might as well admit he was here now and had been so for some time until she finally noticed him.
‘At least an inch by my estimation,’ he told her unrepentantly. ‘You were so absorbed in your creations that half the peers in the House of Lords could have been parading through the flower beds and you would not have noticed them.’
‘I think I might have,’ she answered him with a smile and a chuckle for the picture he had put in her head of a troop of peers dressed in velvet and ermine and wearing their coronets as if for a state occasion as they filed through Miss Donne’s precious garden in solemn but puzzled lines.
‘I wish you would do that more often,’ he said and because he had smiled back and come a lot closer she was not quite sure what they had been talking about any more.
‘Arrange flowers?’
‘No, laugh and hum under your breath and forget to be grave and responsible for a while.’
‘I have to be, it is my job to be serious and take care of your niece.’
‘Not with Miss Donne in the house and me to take my duty to Juno seriously for once in her life. Sometimes I see the bright, fearless and courageous girl you must have been when you met your Daniel under all that grief and responsibility you have learnt since, Mrs Turner, and I envy him like the devil.’
‘He is dead,’ she said bleakly and it did still feel bleak, even with this swirl of high excitement inside her making her breath come short and her heartbeat race like a mad March hare simply because Alaric was so close once again and she had missed him so very badly.
‘I would never try to take him away from you because I am jealous he knew the young and reckless girl you must have been back then and I did not,’ he said in a low growl of a voice that told her he was being very serious indeed. ‘You are who you are because you loved him and lost him before we met and I would not change that part of you even if I could.’
‘You would not?’
‘No, why would I want to, I...l...’ His voice tailed off as if he recalled where they were and he was obviously uncertain how she felt about him. ‘I like you very well as you are,’ he substituted for the word her ears had been so eager to hear and never mind all those resolutions she had made while they were apart to treat him as her lordly employer and Juno’s uncle in future.
‘Like?’ she still said recklessly.
‘Definitely,’ he said with a warm and almost lazy smile as he bent his head to kiss her as if he was tired of words and not quite being able to say what he really meant.
‘I like you, too,’ she echoed incoherently, then nuzzled closer to his firm mouth after snatching enough breath to go on with. Ah, this was what she had been missing so dearly it felt as if she was only going through the motions every day she had had to live without him. Now she was greedy for his kisses and his nearness and his l—whatever that was.
His mouth was warm on hers and his hands felt like heaven as he explored her curves through silk velvet. Even his finely made evening gloves only made his touch seem all the more fascinating through them and the silken caress of her gown with him on the other side of it. She wriggled a little closer and pouted kisses against his mouth to ask why he would not let her right inside and do the same for her. She heard his breath speed up, felt him tremble like a finely bred racehorse under her urgent, reckless touch and hoped he was satisfied to see that sensual Marianne was alive and very present after all. He was definitely not satisfied, she realised smugly as she slid her leg between his and felt how very far he was from that state for herself.
‘Not here, Marianne, and probably not now,’ he told her raggedly and tried hard to step back from her and the danger they would be very impolite indeed in Miss Donne’s greenhouse if they did not put a little distance between them.
‘When and where, then?’ she insisted on asking wantonly as the little distance he had managed to put between them chilled her like midwinter.
‘On our wedding night and in our own bed, if I have my way,’ she thought she heard him murmur, but that had to be wrong.
Her mind was providing her with the words it wanted to hear out of her feverish need for him and his stubborn refusal to be less than noble about it, she told herself, as she stared up at him as if he had stuck a knife in her instead of maybe murmured something like a proposal of marriage. She shook her
