Page 61 of A Deal with the Broken Duke
“There doesn’t seem to be very much around the grounds for us to stroll,” Matilda commented, taking the arm that he’d offered to her.
“True enough.” Harry chuckled. He offered his other arm to Juliet, and she accepted it. “But I suppose we’d better make the best of it all the same.”
“What do you think makes someone want to have a garden party when they barely have a garden at all?” Matilda wondered.
“Matilda,” Juliet chastised. “Be kinder.”
Matilda was wonderful, of course, and Juliet was always glad to have her along, but she was going to have to learn a few more social graces before she made her own debut in a few years. If Matilda spoke to people that way when she was trying to find suitors of her own, she would frighten them off.
But Harry laughed. “She does make a good point,” he told Juliet. “I’ve wondered the very same thing, as it happens. But we can’t all have large manors with plenty of space for the sort of parties we’d like to have.”
“If I were the Earl of Hertshire, I would have simply invited fewer people,” Matilda argued.
“Oh, I’m not sure that all these people were issued personal invitations,” Harry said “Sometimes people hear secondhand about parties, you know, and they just invite themselves over. Were you personally invited, Matilda?”
Matilda blushed and giggled. “No,” she admitted. “I came along with Juliet.”
“Well, there you have it. That’s how events come to be this crowded, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so.”
They circled the grounds once. Though Juliet was on Harry’s arm, she couldn’t help noticing that he felt a little cool and distant. Perhaps she was imagining it, she thought. Perhaps she’d been dwelling so much on what had happened between the two of them the last time they’d seen one another that anything would have felt disappointing by comparison.
For a moment, she actually entertained the thrilling idea of pretending to stumble so that he would be forced to catch her again. Just the thought of it set her heart racing. She longed to do it, even though she knew she couldn’t. She didn’t want to make him think of her as someone who could never keep her feet under her. But the idea of feeling his strong arms around her once more, of feeling his body pressed against hers was almost enough to make her forget herself.
They completed their tour of the grounds. Matilda let go of Harry’s arm. “I think I’ll go and say hello to some people,” she stated. “You two continue your stroll.”
“No, we’ll come with you,” Harry said.
Juliet bit her lip. The truth was that she didn’t want to go along with her sister at all. She had a feeling that Matilda was trying to give her some time alone with Harry, and she wanted to take her up on it.
“Do you need us to come?” Juliet asked.
“Not a bit,” Matilda assured her easily. “I see Lady Vivian over there, and I just want to say hello to her. Really, it would be dull for the two of you to accompany me. I insist you stay here. Take another turn around the grounds.”
And she hurried away before either Harry or Juliet could protest further.
Juliet felt deeply conflicted. She shouldn’t be glad about this—being left alone with Harry—because she shouldn’t want to be left to her feelings for him. Now that it was just the two of them, all she could seem to think about was whether or not he would touch her again, and if he did, what that would be like.
She should find an excuse to leave him on his own. But there wasn’t one.
She just wanted to be with him.
She looked up at him, ready to throw caution to the wind and admit her feeling for him.
However, he suddenly dropped her arm.
Juliet couldn’t have been more stunned if he had slapped her.
He took a step back, not a big step as if he was trying to leave her side, but big enough to put a bit of distance between them.
“Is something wrong?”
She was flushed, humiliated as if he had directly insulted her. It was obvious that something was wrong. Something had to be wrong. Why else was he putting up a wall between the two of them?
“No,” Harry said. “Why do you ask?”
“You seem… upset.” She couldn’t bring herself to say that he was being distant. There was still a part of her that wanted to pretend this wasn’t happening.
