Page 54 of Never a Duke
“I am curiousas to why people who have never had to solve a problem more pressing than which cravat pin to wear are in charge of everything from the poor laws to treaties to turnpikes. By breeding and experience, such men are not our most thrifty or ingenious thinkers, and yet, we expect them to handle the nation’s exchequer and its most pressing difficulties. If Britain’s government were in the hands of widows, you can bet the children would be fed and a great deal less would have been spent on making war.”
He ought not to have said that. Ought not to have allowed a note of bitterness to creep into his voice. He was alone in the countryside with a woman he was attempting to woo, and spouting sedition never did win a fair maid’s heart.
“Are your small investment projects successful?” Rosalind asked.
“They are. Not wildly successful, but consistently successful. I’ve had a few failures, but the failures aren’t wild either. They are more disappointments than failures.”
“I want to meet your widows.” Rosalind stretched out her legs and leaned back on her hands. “I want to learn how they manage their businesses, and if other ladies could undertake the same degree of enterprise as successfully. London is full of widows, spinsters, wives with husbands off to sea, or women who simply need a decent livelihood. You are solving a real problem, Ned, and we will talk more about your ambitions, because if they matter to you, they matter to me.”
Ned heard the words and hugged them to his heart, but he also watched Rosalind’s lips, watched the breeze tease at curls coming loose from her chignon. He took another sip of cider and passed her the bottle.
“I am usually more than willing to discuss banking and commerce at great length,” he said, “but right now, I am alone on a blanket with a woman who fills my every waking thought. Rosalind, might I kiss you?”
She took a sip of cider, corked the bottle, and set it aside. “I thought you would never ask.”
Then she tackled him.
Chapter Ten
Rosalind pinned Ned to the blanket—or Ned allowed her to pin him—and straddled him. “Will he be all right?”
Ned’s smile was a trifle bewildered. “The horse?”
“Artie. He’s never driven before, has he?”
Ned cupped her nape with a warm palm and urged her down to his chest. “Not that I know of, but the gelding has worked out the fidgets and is a steady sort. Artie is equal to the challenge, and besides, I’m trying to sweeten him up.”
Ned, lying on a blanket beneath her, was more sweetness than Rosalind could bear. She wanted to sketch him and devour him and…what she truly wanted might shock him.
“Why does your tiger need sweetening?”
“We’re having a disagreement, as reasonable gentlemen sometimes do, but enough about that. I want to muss your hair and disarrange your skirts, and Rosalind, if you don’t soon—”
She crouched over him and let the kissing begin. They had time, two whole hours, and thus she made a thorough exploration of Ned’s mouth and laced her fingers with his.
Ned was a good kisser, good at matching her mood, at making a kiss into a conversation.
“You are worried,” he said, when Rosalind paused to catch her breath. “You need not fret, Rosalind. I will stop when you ask me to.”
“I am more worried that you will stop when Idon’task you to.”
He traced her eyebrows with his thumb. “What does that mean?”
Rosalind sorted through the riot of emotions and sensations crowding her mind and found a coherent thought. “You talk to me. You explain about your widows, about why they matter so very much to you. You boost a small boy’s confidence. You buried Her Grace’s dog.”
And thus I must make love with youfollowed logically from those observations. Rosalind let the obvious conclusion go unspoken because she was too busy savoring the slow stroke of Ned’s thumb on her forehead.
“I didn’t want Walden to have to deal with the whole burial task himself,” Ned said. “Wodin was a sizable—”
Rosalind put two fingers against his lips. “You area good man, Ned Wentworth. I had nearly forgotten there were good men. My brothers are shallow, my father is arrogant, and the prancing bachelors…They have no ambitions other than idle self-indulgence. If I marry one of them, then I am to aspire to idle self-indulgence as well. My greatest challenge would be devising a seating arrangement for a formal dinner.”
Ned wrapped his arms around her, and some of Rosalind’s inner tumult quieted. She had needed to be held, simply held, and she hadn’t realized that. Desire simmered too, but desire was not the sum of her longings.
“Are you in danger of marrying a prancing bachelor, my lady?”
“No.” She mashed her nose against Ned’s throat. “Yes. My father…”
Ned stroked her back in slow, easy caresses. “Talk to me.”
