She pictured him at the mirror, running a blade over his ruined cheeks, his hair in damp disarray and collar open, exposing his chest.
It was easier to picture him sprung from the darkness just as he was. Clean and dark and presentable. Never disheveled or rumpled.
Suddenly, her hand itched to glide through the strands of his tamed hair. To pull it and muss it and play among the glossy strands.
“Are you all right?” He never looked at her once, just stood by her side, scanning the promenading elite as if he expected to find an assassin in their midst.
Starting, she tore her gaze from appreciating him. “I find myself amazed, Mr.— er— Gareth.” They were in public, but no one was paying them any mind. She felt alone enough to dare the intimacy of his first name. If she were honest, she needed the connection. “Does Bainbridge think that was some sort of proposal? To match his tiepin with my dress and dance with me more than once? What does a lady even do with that?”
That muscle ticked in his jaw as he rolled his shoulders in the semblance of a shrug.
Felicity craned her neck to look up at him until he finally seemed to feel her stare and glanced back.
A bemused wrinkle appeared between his brows, as if he were shocked that her question wasn’t a rhetorical one. “I… wouldn’t presume to imagine what a lady of your station might do in any given situation.”
“How very politic of you.” Her lips twisted in a rueful smile as she tried to hide her disappointment. It was not that she expected any sage advice from her personal guard, he was just the only person she knew in her vicinity at the moment.
“May I speak freely, Miss Felicity?”
“Only if you sit. I shall hurt my neck staring up at you.” She scooted down the bench to make way for him, and he sank next to her, attempting a respectable distance.
The world really didn’t make furniture large enough to accommodate men like him.
Their knees touched, and Felicity couldn’t seem to move hers away.
If he noticed, he didn’t make it obvious. Instead, he glared in the direction of Bainbridge and his cadre of gentlemen, maybe six in all, who were hanging upon his every word. “Is there a chance this Bainbridge has ulterior motives?” he ventured with apparent caution.
“Such as?”
“How would a match with you benefit him?”
At this question, she frowned. “I don’t know; he did inherit my father’s title of Baron, but he tucks it under his own far greater one of Earl. He’s possessed of vast estates and a good name. I can only think he’s offering out of a sense of kindness or duty.”
His stony features shifted only in barely perceptible increments from grim to dire.
“You don’t agree?” she assessed.
“I don’t trust kindness and duty as motivations for anyone, especially men like Bainbridge.” He flicked his gaze to her, squinted, and looked back at Bainbridge as if his eyes couldn’t land upon her for too long.
“In your professional experience, how does one go about assessing another’s motivations?” she puzzled.
“You could try asking him.”
At his dry suggestion, Felicity made a sound of consternation in the back of her throat before she drew back to take in his entire expression.
A muscle in his cheek tightened, lifted, and his grey eyes glinted with something more soft than sharp.
He was teasing her.
“Don’t be a cad,” she admonished with a smile, before following his gaze to her cousin. He was a rather stunning individual. All lithe and lovely in a bespoke grey suit. His skin perfect, his jaw angular, and his teeth astonishingly straight. Half the women in Christendom wanted Bainbridge as their lover. The other half had reportedly had him already.
She blew her cheeks out on an eternal sigh. “I hate asking uncomfortable questions more than just about anything in the world. I’m always afraid people will be hostile or humiliating. Especially someone like Bainbridge, with his famously sharp wit.”
“I’ll not tolerate so much as an unkind word.” As was his way, the declaration was spoken in low matter-of-fact tones, but his eyes were as cold and hard as tempered steel.
Felicity had to swallow twice before she replied. “I… I am glad of your company today, Gareth. I think you’ve helped me a great deal.”
His gaze flicked down, spearing the grass between his feet. His hands laced together across his knees with a white-knuckled grip.
“The morning was so chaotic with Mrs. Winterton’s illness and all, I didn’t have the chance to thank you for finding my spectacles and watch,” she persisted.
“Was nothing,” he mumbled at the ground.
“It wasn’t nothing to me.” She laid her hand over his forearm to emphasize her point. “If they are lost, so am I. I hate not being able to see, but the lenses get so foggy in the glasshouse. You quite saved me from being blind for days whilst waiting on the optician. And this watch is a treasured gift from Mercy.” With her free hand, she fondled the brooch above her breast.
He brushed her words off with a shrug, but a crimson stain crept above his collar and spread across his entire face until his very ears tipped with it.
A man like Gareth Severand blushed? Had there ever been anything more endearing on this entire earth?
He grunted and shifted in his seat, pulling his arm from her grip. “Your suitor/cousin is returning.” He thrust his chin in that direction.
The bite in his voice really did make a blood connection with Bainbridge sound like some sort of perversion.
“He’s a distant cousin,” she found herself defending.
He merely made an indecipherable noise in the back of his throat.
Felicity stood, creating space between herself and Gareth. That distance felt cold. Something like abandonment.
How very odd.
“I do appreciate your patience, darling.” Bainbridge
