had ever been so direct, so outrageously intimate. How dare he ask such a thing! And then she almost laughed—if he wasn’t going to play by society rules, then neither was she…she would be what she was, a colonial who did not know how to behave properly.
“Only when they have dishonourable intentions.” She gave him a blithe smile as she spoke and had the satisfaction of seeing surprise flicker across his face.
“Alas, you know me so well already.” He inclined his head to her, his blue eyes sparkling with laughter. “But at least you did not slap my face; I suppose I should be grateful for that.”
“I have never cared for overly trodden paths,” she said as they walked side by side towards the camomile seat.
“Oh, sharp, sharp, Miss Hilton, I am wounded to the quick.” He put a theatrical hand to his breast.
“Not so much as Piers was,” she said sweetly, thinking it would do him no harm to be reminded that she was very capable of defending herself.
“True,” he agreed wryly, and then frowned. “You are limping. Have you hurt yourself?”
“It’s nothing. I broke my leg in a fall almost a year ago and it still aches sometimes,” she answered, as she sat down gratefully upon the springy cushion of herbs.
“Horses can be dangerous beasts, can they not?” he said as he seated himself beside her. “I broke a collarbone once, and that took long enough to mend.”
“Yes.” She let his assumption go. She did not want to have to explain about the accident, or Edward, just now. She was having trouble enough coping with his disconcerting nearness and the knowledge that she was as susceptible as any society miss to Jonathan Lindsay’s very considerable charm.
“So is that why you like to come here often, because you do not care for the overly trodden paths?” he asked a moment later, giving her a sideways glance.
“How did you know I come here often?” She paused in the act of crushing a sprig of the camomile between her fingers, wondering if the herb’s calming properties would have any effect upon her heart, which had begun to race from the moment he had sat down beside her.
“This—” he patted the springy camomile, his fingers a scant half-inch from her thigh “—has no need of weeding, someone has been doing it, and—” he reached into his pocket with his other hand and produced a glove worked with the initials J.H. “—I found this. You, Miss Hilton, have been trespassing for some time. Have you not?”
“Guilty, m’lud.” She released the breath that had caught in her throat as she accepted the proffered glove and his fingers momentarily brushed hers. “It was the one place I could be sure of escaping my guardians and—” she glanced across the pool and upwards to where the tall pines clung to the edge of the cliff above the waterfall “—there is something about it which reminds me of home.”
“Home?” His straight brows lifted as he looked about him, from the sparkling spill of water to the wild untidy tumble of ferns, brambles and once-cultivated shrubs, long since gone wild. “I cannot say this puts me in mind of the grounds of Pettridges Hall.”
“I meant America,” she said, still staring across the pool. “This reminds me of the Kentucky Trail and where we settled in Minnesota. Sometimes, sitting here watching the water and listening to the wind in the trees, I can almost believe I am back there—that if I turn around quickly enough I will see my father hitching up the team or my mother coming out of the cabin to call us in for dinner—” She broke off, wondering why on earth she was confiding such thoughts to him.
“You miss your life there?” There was the faintest note of surprise in his voice. A note she recognised all too well in carefully educated English voices, when she made the mistake of speaking about her past.
“Yes, I do,” she said with a sharp lift of her chin, telling herself that she was a fool to think that he might be different from the rest, that he might just understand. “America has a great deal to recommend it. England does not have a monopoly upon natural beauty, Mr Lindsay.”
“While you are resident in England, that is a subject upon which I shall have to disagree with you,” he said, bending down to pick up the stick that the ever-hopeful spaniel had dropped at his feet.
“Then I suppose it would be churlish to argue—” she said after the slightest intake of breath. “Do you always flirt so outrageously, Mr Lindsay?”
He straightened, threw the stick and then turned to look at her, his eyes sparkling. “Only with women whom I find interesting or desirable.”
“And into which category do I fall, Mr Lindsay?” she asked, surprising herself with the apparent uninterestedness of her tone.
“Both,” he said softly after a moment, his eyes suddenly very dark as his gaze dropped to her mouth, and then lower still to the fullness of her breasts. “Very definitely both.”
His voice had lowered to a velvety depth that made her skin prickle and grow tight, as if his hands had followed his stare, and she found herself staring back at his face, the wide slanting line of his mouth, his long clever fingers as he toyed with a piece of camomile.
Her mouth and throat grew dry as his gaze came back to her eyes and she knew that he meant it and that they had just stepped off the safe ground of lighthearted flirtation into some decidedly dangerous waters—for her, at least.
She swallowed and stared down at the glove in her hands. “Good,” she said, as matter-of-factly as she could manage. “I should hate to be merely desirable.”
He laughed, dissolving the tension that had been almost tangible. “I do not think you could ever be ‘merely’ anything, Miss Hilton.”
“You are doing it again,” she murmured, lifting her gaze to watch the spaniel heave itself out of the pool and shake the water from its coat.
“What?” he said innocently as he studied her detachedly, thinking that he had been right. She was not pretty: her fine nose was too straight, the upswept line of her jaw too clean and sharp, her forehead a fraction too high, her mouth too wide and feline. Oh, no—no insipid, dainty, English rosebud, this—more a lioness, lithe, fierce and very beautiful.
“Flirting,” Janey replied, putting a hand to her face, ostensibly to push back an errant strand of fair hair, but in reality to shield herself from the piercingly blue gaze that was making her feel decidedly uncomfortable.
“And you are not?” he mocked softly.
“No. I have no talent for it,” she said tersely, wishing that she were not quite so aware that, if she moved a matter of an inch, his shoulder would touch hers. “All I asked you—”
“—was whether or not I found you desirable?” He laughed. “If that does not constitute flirting, Miss Hilton, I don’t know what does.”
She shrugged, determined not to fall into another of his verbal traps as she glanced at him with what she hoped passed for indifference. “I was simply curious.”
“I should be happy to satisfy your curiosity whenever you wish.” He grinned at her and quirked a dark eyebrow. “You only have to say the word.”
He was wicked. Quite impossibly wicked, she thought, the corners
