“I’ve hurt your feelings,” she said, her voice cracking. “Kit, I would never…that is, I…”
“Mister Bainbridge, if you don’t mind. Sir works, too.” He sprawled to his back, his arm going over his eyes to hide whatever might lie in their depths. He wasn’t accomplished at hiding his emotions, as those many scuffles Penny had rescued him from attested to. Raine witnessing his dismantling would serve no further purpose; her rejection was already stripping him bare. “Leave me to my plans to climb higher in society by means of an advantageous but loveless marriage. My plans to seduce a maid beneath a”—he shifted his arm and stared at the tree above them—“towering elm.”
She muttered something he didn’t catch, then said clearly, “I’ll leave as you’re not willing to discuss this rationally, when you know I’m right. I wish I weren’t right, do you not know that? I’m sorry, I would never do anything to hurt you. We’re becoming friends, and I’ve never had many of those.” She sounded close to tears, and he felt close to them.
He heard her rise, shake out her skirt, hesitate, when he wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be alone. “It looks like I’m going to have a lot of time to devote to creating a detached escapement caliber, and I need you and your German, Miss Mowbray, so don’t think about wheedling out of finishing the translations for me.”
There. Well done. If he made her mad, she’d bolt.
Women tended to do that; he tended to make them.
She cursed beneath her breath, a most unladylike sentiment, and stalked away, the sound of her footfalls lessening until halting pianoforte notes and a chorus of bleating crickets were all that surrounded him.
He was going to finish the bottle of wine and slumber beneath the stars. Stagger into Devon’s agreeable abode at dawn and sleep until supper. Let the entire household think him a mad artiste because perhaps he was. Penny could make excuses for him and supervise the translations, while Christian spent the rest of the week repairing the duke’s timepieces in seclusion.
Then he would bolt for London himself.
Because his heart was breaking.
Raine didn’t believe that love could happen instantaneously. Intuition or fate or destiny, whatever one wanted to call it.
And there was nothing he could do to make her believe.
Like the nick of a blade against tender skin, his dilemma was painful but uncomplicated.
For years, he’d loved someone who, when given a chance, wasn’t willing to love him back.
Chapter 4
Raine huddled beneath the starched sheet in her attic bed, tugged a counterpane of higher quality than Tavistock had ever provided for his staff to her chin. Moonbeams, the same that had tumbled over Kit so generously an hour ago, poured in the small window, highlighting the dust motes drifting through the air and the despair filling her heart.
He might not talk to her again, except for his bleeding translations, a project she’d been dragging out to spend more time with him. What if he woke at dawn and decided to return to London? What if he woke at dawn and decided wenches were much less trouble than obstinate housemaids?
She sighed and touched her lips, still tingling from his kiss. Wasn’t that what she’d told him to do? Leave her to an independent future, a footman who may or may not ask for her hand. A man she considered a friend but nothing more. A man who’d given her nothing more than a tiresome kiss.
She didn’t want to live the rest of her life with tiresome kisses.
Not when there were ones powerful enough to melt copper if she only dared to accept them.
She closed her eyes and swallowed against the sting of tears. The hurt in his gaze had pierced something deep within her.
He was going to be doubly mad that she’d alerted his valet—who looked like no valet Raine had ever seen—to his possibly drunken state out there on the edge of the parklands. Where foxes and grass snakes and she wasn’t sure what else roamed at night. Maybe it wasn’t safe. Maybe he would get cold. The clouds had looked tempestuous like a storm might be rolling in. And…
Damn and blast. This felt like what she’d imagined falling in love would. Astonishing and distressing. Like stripping naked and diving into a calm pond. Glorious, until you looked to the shore and realized you weren’t alone and everyone was watching.
Kit might love her, too. Or imagine he did. That timid girl had made an enormous impression on him. Hard to believe when she’d been so lonely and fearful. But he’d been lonely and fearful, too. Like recognized like. It made her breath catch to imagine that brilliant boy gazing down from his window above and wishing he had the courage to talk to her.
Something he’d said when he met her shimmered through her mind.
So easy, and yet, ten years overdue.
A tear rolled down her cheek, and she scrubbed it away. His odd comment now made all the sense in the world.
If she tried, she could almost picture him. She remembered a young man visiting that summer. Quality clothing covering a gangly body, one in the midst of splendid promise. Beautiful features too big for his face.
Of course, he’d grown into them, into everything, beautifully. Become a gorgeous, talented, thoughtful man. A man suited to a highborn lady, someone who would add every advantage to his life, to his business. Even in Raine’s class, marriage was rarely about love and often about necessity or accessibility, property, or monies. She’d never expected love.
When Kit expected everything.
She snuggled deeper in the bed, her toes chilled, her skin clammy. There were a thousand reasons for her to push Kit away and only one reason not to. If she let herself love
