Page 29 of Tempting Fate
“And what do you think about that?” he pressed gently.
Her step faltered a bit, and she brushed it off as if checking her shoe for a flaw. “A statement? Are you implying you want to make one? But we’re not… and you’re…”
“Old?” His lips twisted into a rueful sort of smirk.
“I wasn’t going to say that,” she rushed to placate his feelings. “I mean, you are quite twenty years my elder, but I was more thinking about how a connection might come across as a bit… incestuous, you being my cousin and all.”
“Second cousin,” he corrected. “And I know that’s fallen out of fashion these days, but we needn’t even produce an heir if you’re not inclined. I merely thought that since your father’s title and certain lands passed to me upon his death, so, too, might your delightful self. Furthermore, you mentioned in the past, you’d like to find a way to keep the holdings together.”
“I-I did, but…”
“Oh!” Bainbridge lifted a hand and waved enthusiastically at a group of gentlemen. “Pardon me, dear Felicity, I see a scoundrel with whom I must have a word. I’m going to leave you in the hands of this fellow for no longer than it takes for a kettle to whistle.”
He hurried away over the green expanse of lawn, leaving her beneath the shade of a beech tree by a bench made of iron and oak.
Felicity sank onto it, unfocusing her eyes at her twirling her parasol as she fought a rising bout of nerves.
Bainbridge had spoken so blithely about marriage. As if it were a lark. But— God willing— she’d several decades to live her entire life. Deciding what that future would look like— and with whom she would share it— seemed like too monumental and overwhelming a task to leave in her own hands.
What if she made an enormous mistake? This was the sort of contract only broken by death.
Or worse, divorce.
She had no idea about marriage. Most of the books she read ended by the time the vows were spoken. And when asked, her sisters all claimed to have known the men they married were the loves of their lives. Their choices were absolute and their regrets nonexistent.
Whereas she…she’dreceived twelve proposals by post once she’d entered half mourning. Most of them from men she’d hardly met, and all of them little better than business contracts. Noblemen, politicians, even an impoverished duke, all offered to take over the running of her father’s shipping company.
Indeed, her suitors thought that offering her a generous stipend of her own money was tantamount to courtship.
Bainbridge represented a different course, or so she thought. Someone she knew. Someone she liked.
However, behind his charm lurked something secretive, something that set alarm bells tolling in her head.
Was this fear valid, or something foisted upon her by her already nervous, overwrought disposition?
Blast, but it was bloody awful not to trust oneself.
She felt a presence before she heard the faint rustle in the grass beside the bench. A large body sheltered her from the increasingly chilly breeze as Gareth Severand stood sentinel at her side.
She glanced up at him, so glad to have the help of her spectacles to observe him.
Lord but he was compelling to look at. From every angle, she learned something new. Discovered a scar or mannerism she’d not previously detected. His teeth ground together when he pondered the world, as if chewing on his thoughts to make them more palatable. He’d a vein in his forehead, just beneath his widow’s peak, that would appear when he was tense or irked. His eyes were never still, never fixed; they made ceaseless journeys across his entire vicinity, and she suspected he identified and catalogued any perceived threat, no matter how slight.
From this angle, she could tell he’d nicked himself shaving this morning beneath his jaw.
A vision of the man about his toilette distracted her from her troubled thoughts. His hair was combed back into organized layers tamed with pomade. His jaw clean-shaven, but threatened with a slight dark shadow in the places where the scars didn’t shine.
She pictured him at the mirror, running a blade over his ruined cheeks, his hair in damp disarray and collar open, exposing his chest.
It was easier to picture him sprung from the darkness just as he was. Clean and dark and presentable. Never disheveled or rumpled.
Suddenly, her hand itched to glide through the strands of his tamed hair. To pull it and muss it and play among the glossy strands.
“Are you all right?” He never looked at her once, just stood by her side, scanning the promenading elite as if he expected to find an assassin in their midst.
Starting, she tore her gaze from appreciating him. “I find myself amazed, Mr.— er— Gareth.” They were in public, but no one was paying them any mind. She felt alone enough to dare the intimacy of his first name. If she were honest, she needed the connection. “Does Bainbridge think that was some sort of proposal? To match his tiepin with my dress and dance with me more than once? What does a lady even do with that?”
That muscle ticked in his jaw as he rolled his shoulders in the semblance of a shrug.
