without you taking the trouble to point them out, Sir Adam.’
‘No doubt,’ he replied amiably, and proceeded to guide her past a particularly persistent puddle.
Infuriating wretch! How dared he be so irritating and look so devastatingly handsome while he did it? Yet she suspected that even if he had been born as plain and homely as a man could rightly be, he would still have commanded the attention of any room he walked into—and why on earth wouldn’t he take the hint and turn his charm and wit and undoubted looks on some other unfortunate woman and stop plaguing her with them?
She had resolved to avoid the man when she noticed how his eyes heated whenever she met them, but he now seemed determined to force a meeting on her. A craven part of her wanted to wrench her hand from the warm contact on his russet coat sleeve and run away before she let herself consider the flesh-and-blood man underneath it, and reawakened some of the wicked fantasies that had been disturbing her dreams since he had come home. If she had ever met a man who inspired such contrary emotions in her she was very certain she would have recalled him, and a seductive voice whispered how very satisfying it might be to be constantly surprised, exasperated and seduced by such a faulty and unforgettable gentleman for the rest of her days.
Utter rubbish, of course, and the sooner her life returned to its usual mundane serenity the better. Until Sir Adam had come home from the wars the unchanging routine at Windham had been so soothingly predictable—and novelty, Serena decided huffily, was vastly overrated.
‘The news from Spain is decidedly mixed, is it not?’ she finally asked, in the hope of introducing a topic even he couldn’t bend to his own ends. The storming of Badajos by Lord Wellington’s Peninsular army had cost so many deaths Serena wasn’t sure whether to cheer or weep, and felt vaguely ashamed of herself for using it as a means to deflect a possible proposal and the discomfort and distress it would cost her to refuse him.
‘Very,’ he replied, seriously enough to make her feel much better, so it was a shame she merely felt guilty for reminding a former soldier of what his comrades had so recently endured. ‘Old Nosey’s not that good at sieges, I’m afraid,’ he added, and she had little doubt he was one of those who saw past the glowing accounts of victory to the long lists of dead and injured.
‘I dare say you know his strengths and weaknesses better than most, Sir Adam,’ she replied.
The mere mention of his service in the Peninsular reminded her of her first sight of him as a fully adult male, in the prime of his life and power, instead of the annoying brother of her best friend she remembered from that humiliating encounter as a rebellious girl. Captain Sir Adam Langthorne, dark-haired, dark-eyed and breathtakingly handsome, in silver-laced blue coat and all the attendant glory of a cavalry officer’s uniform, had still had the power to disturb her six months later. It ought to be made illegal for any man not blessed with a squint, or a figure akin to the Prince Regent’s portly one, to go abroad so decked out in the presence of susceptible ladies. Now he had sold out of the Queen’s Light Dragoons she would get over the memory, of course—if she contrived to avoid him a little more successfully in future.
Today his russet coat fitted loosely, and his shabby leathers shouldn’t enhance his powerful figure. But neither did anything to disguise the latent strength in his broad shoulders and those long and sleekly muscled legs. Put her brother-in-law in such a ramshackle outfit and he would look like a carter instead of an earl, yet Sir Adam looked just as dangerous as ever.
‘Your brother-in-law has just informed me the war is costing too much and our army should be brought home—to do nothing, presumably,’ he now informed her rather shortly, as if he was still restraining himself from telling his most powerful neighbour and fellow magistrate exactly what he thought of such waverers.
‘Henry has no concept of military strategy or battle tactics, I’m afraid,’ Serena said apologetically. Her brother-in-law probably had no idea how offensive such second-hand ideas were to a man who had seen what price the expeditionary forces were paying for keeping some of Bonaparte’s most battle-hardened generals so unsuccessfully occupied.
‘If he paid more attention to you and regarded his wife’s arrant nonsense a little less, I dare say he might speak a little sense once in a while,’ Adam said ruefully, and there was laughter and something more disturbing back in his fascinating eyes.
They were too complex to be categorised as just brown, she decided dreamily. His pupils were rayed with gold, as if permanently touched with sunlight, and there was a depth of rich colour to the rest that had nothing simple about it—although she really shouldn’t be intimately acquainted with them. Oh dear, now she was cataloguing his assets like a besotted schoolgirl! She looked away swiftly, but heat still surged through her in an embarrassing tide, and made her wish him distinctly less acute, for there was amusement and a little too much understanding of her confused feelings in his eyes now.
Having had six months to consider his graces, and one or two of his faults, she already knew he was tall enough to make her feel less lanky than usual. And she really must stop meeting his eyes in this coming fashion—just because she had met a gentleman who could look down at her without standing on a box! He was quick of thought and action for a tall man too, she remembered dreamily, picturing him exerting iron strength to stop a bolting horse stampeding through Marclecombe village and threatening to crush a child under its deadly hooves…
Reminding herself he was also impatient and domineering, and as irritating and persistent as a burr, she slanted a minatory glare at him, adding ‘managing’ to his list of faults. One benefit of widowhood was her freedom from being managed, she reminded herself sharply. And of course being excused marital duties. Given her late husband’s outspoken disgust with a wife who could not even give him a daughter in four years of marriage, that was a decided advantage.
Guilty that she couldn’t mourn a man who had changed from a light-hearted and carelessly charming fiancé into a spendthrift husband with a foul temper and worse habits, she ordered herself to be more dutiful. It hadn’t been George’s fault she had been too young to tell love from infatuation—although he had killed any lingering enchantment stone dead by the time he had died. She shivered even in the bright sunlight and turned her attention to the present. Even with the conundrum that was Sir Adam Langthorne in it, now was much more pleasant time in her life.
‘I can think of nothing more likely to cause trouble,’ she said, with a shudder at the thought of Henry being silly enough to listen to her views over his wife’s. ‘But pray tell me, is Rachel still busy with her spring cleaning?’ she added brightly, once more intent on finding a neutral topic of conversation.
‘Indeed, my house is not my own. I might wish myself back in Spain and enduring the rigours of campaign if not for certain compensations,’ he replied, with a warmth in his deep voice that shouldn’t make her senses sit up and take notice.
Drat the man! She should have known he could bend any subject to his own ends, and there it was again—that fascinating softening of his acute gaze she was determined to resist. If she once let him get the words out it would be the end to so much, and Rachel Langthorne’s friendship was too precious to lose because her brother refused to be set at a proper distance.
‘I suppose Burgess wishes to consult you about the lambing, Sir Adam?’ she asked, still trying to keep their conversation impersonal, despite his lazily amused gaze telling her he knew exactly what she was about.
‘I expect Burgess is all but finished with that,’ he replied, obligingly for once, ‘and at least he won’t talk me half to death while Mrs Burgess provides you with a list of her ailments and those of her numerous brood.’
‘Bearing twelve children and keeping ten
