in the gloom, she read Lord Neville’s dismay at her reaction to his well-meant if inopportune advice. “Genevieve, you’re a woman of unimpeachable virtue. I lay no blame at your door. Any wrongdoing is entirely the gentleman’s fault.”
The apology didn’t mollify. “My lord, none of this is your business.”
Now she’d offended him. “A man of principle must speak when he sees a woman he … respects at risk of making a fool of herself.”
His concern struck her as overweening. After all, he was a colleague of her father’s, not a member of the family. “Lord Neville—”
Luckily for her relationship with her father’s patron, the door opened and Mr. Evans emerged with Sirius at his heels. The parlor faced west, so it was purely a matter of geography that the setting sun lit him like a saint in a painting.
She had no idea what Mr. Evans saw, but he went still and his tall body radiated danger. Sirius stood alert at his master’s thigh.
“Miss Barrett, are you all right?” he asked softly. With his back to the light, she couldn’t read his expression. His voice was steady and he sounded protective. Or he would if she trusted his sincerity. Even so, she battled a traitorous surge of warmth.
Lord Neville lurched around. “You interrupt a private conversation, sir.”
Did she imagine it or did Mr. Evans deliberately relax back into his easygoing self? “I go through to dinner, my lord.”
No love was lost between them. But tonight for the first time she wondered if mutual antipathy might verge on something stronger. Something approaching loathing. She’d always considered Lord Neville a dominating character. But it was the older man who shifted on his feet and turned to stump into the dining room.
“I take it he warned you against me.” Mr. Evans stepped into the hallway, clever enough not to crowd her. Right now she thought she’d clout the next man who tried to intimidate her with his physical size.
Genevieve glared at her rescuer, fleeting gratitude evaporating. “Shouldn’t he?”
She waited for Mr. Evans to claim ignorance of her meaning, but she misjudged him. He leaned close enough for her to see his half smile in the gloom. “Do I make you nervous, Miss Barrett?”
With a flick of her skirts, she turned and headed for the dining room. “Not at all, sir.”
She waited for him to challenge an assertion that they both knew was untrue. He merely gestured her ahead with the smooth dispatch that both attracted and frightened her.
Richard woke with a start. Lying motionless in his monastic bed, he tried to work out what had disturbed him. Everything was silent. Moonlight flooded through his open window. The night was stifling and he slept naked, although his clothes were conveniently to hand across the Windsor chair. His door remained open a crack for air.
Sirius stretched out under the sill, his brindled coat lost in the shadows. His great dark eyes glinted. Something had alerted the dog too.
Richard heard a door squeak down the corridor, then a surreptitious rustle as someone tiptoed toward the stairs. The rumble of the vicar’s snoring next door, audible even through the thick wall, indicated that the old man slumbered. Dorcas slept in the attics. Which meant the nocturnal wanderer was Mrs. Warren. Or most intriguing of all, Genevieve.
Carefully so the bed didn’t creak, Richard sat and reached for breeches and shirt. In this heat, even such light clothing felt constricting. As he tugged his boots on, he heard the snick of the kitchen door. Whoever left was as light-footed as a sylph.
He stood at the window. Below, someone wrapped in a dark cloak slipped through the back garden, plotting a deft path between cabbages and lettuces. The figure was anonymous, but he knew that swift grace to his bones. It didn’t belong to middle-aged Lucy Warren.
No, another quarry roamed the Oxfordshire countryside this quiet night.
He traced Genevieve’s progress toward the stables. If she glanced up, she’d see him. But she remained intent upon her errand, whatever it was. The nearly full moon lit her way.
So where did the enchanting Miss Barrett go?
Did she meet a lover? The thought pierced his gut like a saber. He’d never encountered a female so unaware of herself as a woman. Her unworldliness compounded the challenge, along with her intelligence and determination to dislike him no matter how he tried to charm her. He respected Genevieve’s resistance. Although tonight in the parlor, for one blazing instant, attraction had spiraled unchecked between them. Now he faced the unpleasant possibility that his charm failed because her interest was engaged elsewhere.
Devil take that.
Within moments, he’d followed her from the house. At his side, Sirius padded soundless as a ghost.
Gingerly Richard opened the back gate, then realized he wasted his care. She was no longer in sight. It should be cooler outside, but the air was as still and heavy as a damp blanket. With an impatient gesture, he brushed his hair back from his forehead and bent to whisper in Sirius’s ear. “Find her. Find Genevieve.”
Sirius trotted toward the high brick wall separating the stables from the adjoining Leighton Estate. Feathery tail idly waving, he slipped through the rusty gate that sagged from its hinges. Feeling like he trespassed upon a fairy-tale realm, Richard pushed past the wildflowers tangled around the gate’s base.
Sirius waited on a path leading into the woods. Once his master followed, he loped ahead. Under the trees, progress was more difficult. Richard picked his way forward, keeping an eye on Sirius. Luckily the trail was well trodden, indicating someone—Genevieve?—used it regularly.
It was cooler too. Fresh scents surrounded him. Leaf litter. Green foliage. Sirius’s confident progress indicated that Genevieve was still ahead.
Unless, damn it, Sirius chased a rabbit.
The path ended so abruptly that Richard nearly tumbled into the clearing. Cursing his conspicuous white shirt, he slipped under an oak’s shadow. He sucked in a breath, heart racing. Then another deeper breath as stabbing relief weakened his knees.
She wasn’t meeting a lover. She’d wanted a swim.
As she stroked across the water, each ripple caught the moonlight, turning the pool to silver. No man with an ounce of poetry in his soul could fail to relish this scene.
Richard didn’t know how long he stood, astonished and entranced. Something about her ease indicated she’d done this frequently, probably since she was a girl. She didn’t check nervously for intruders, although surely that was a risk. But who would be about at such an hour? No poacher with his head screwed on right chanced his luck on one of Sedgemoor’s estates.
Without conscious thought, Richard circled the pond, keeping to the dark, seeking to see without being seen. When he stumbled over a bundle under a rowan bush, he smiled with wolfish anticipation.
Reluctantly
