Page 66 of To Swoon and to Spar
“?‘Yet’ being the operative word,” Jane muttered.
“—and everyone is having a splendid time.” He paused, mock-thoughtful. “Perhaps you have grown so accustomed to living in a haunted house that you can’t recall what it feels like when things are proceeding normally and everyone is enjoying themselves?”
Jane smacked him on the shoulder. “Penvale,” she said a touch uncertainly, “about the ghost—”
And what she would have said next—if she could have managed toput all of her complicated feelings for him into words, if she could have somehow explained that the prospect of living in this house without him in it, the thing she once thought she’d wanted above all else, was suddenly wildly unappealing to her—she’d never know. Because at that very moment, they were interrupted by a faint pounding on Penvale’s bedroom door, audible even through the open doorway in the dressing room.
“Penvale!” came Diana’s voice. “Are you ready? I want to thrash Jeremy at cricket!”
Penvale grinned down at Jane. “Shall we?”
As it turned out, Penvale reflected, Jane’s fears might not have been entirely unfounded.
“For God’s sake,” she muttered, stalking back toward him after another unsuccessful round at bat.
“At least you didn’t manage to hit yourself that time,” he said encouragingly, earning a glare. He thought he was beginning to appreciate her scowls to a degree that was possibly perverse.
“I give up,” she said, flopping down next to him on one of the blankets that had been laid out on the grass. Their even numbers had led to two teams of five, with West, Violet, and Diana on their team. Penvale glanced up in time to see Sophie bowling with a look of intense concentration, and West so distracted at bat that he seemed in very real danger of getting hit in the face by the ball.
“West!” Diana yelled from where she stood a few feet away, her arms crossed over her chest. “Focus! We need you to make up for the fact that Jane’s utterly hopeless.”
“I can’t even work myself up to being offended,” Jane said, lying down and flinging an arm across her face to shield her eyes from the sun.
“Jane!” Diana barked. “You should be practicing!”
Penvale shot his sister an exasperated look, but before he could tell her to shove off, Jane raised herself onto an elbow and fixed Diana with a hostile glare. “It’s a friendly game of cricket. It doesn’t matter whether I’m any good or not.”
“Winning always matters,” Diana said in superior tones.
“Of course she thinks that,” Jane muttered, and Penvale burst out laughing, earning himself a share of Jane’s glare as well. She punched him in the arm.
At that moment, there was a sympathetic groan from all the other gentlemen present, and Penvale turned in time to see West doubled over, his face white, Sophie evidently having hit him with the cricket ball in a rather delicate location. Sophie, for her part, had her hands clapped to her mouth with what Penvale initially mistook for horror but which, a moment later, was revealed to be hysterical laughter.
Diana threw her hands in the air in exasperation as the game broke up.
“I never would have thought Sophie had such an arm on her,” Emily said, accepting Belfry’s hand as she lowered herself to the ground; a few feet away, Diana and Jeremy were arguing loudly about whether Jeremy’s team could claim victory based on their lead when the game came to a halt.
“To be fair, I don’t think West really had his mind on the game,” Belfry said, crouching beside Emily.
“No,” Emily said, very cheerful. “I don’t think he did, either.”
“Penvale did not exaggerate how much his friends liked to meddle,” Jane said.
Emily laughed, while Belfry looked mildly offended. “Don’t lump me in with the rest of them,” he said.
“Too late,” Emily said, poking him affectionately in the side, and he gave her a smile that Penvale had only ever seen him direct at his wife—one that he never would have guessed Belfry possessed in his inventory of facial expressions.
At this point, the rest of the party rejoined them. West had apparently recovered sufficiently to walk once more, with Sophie hovering next to him offering a litany of apologies that would have been a bit more convincing had she not continued to break into fits of giggles. Violet and Audley trailed behind them, while Jeremy and Diana appeared to have resolved their argument without bloodshed, which Penvale always found to be a relief.
Mrs. Robin, the cook, had prepared an array of food for their picnic—sandwiches, cold meats, cheeses, an entire cake, a few bottles of wine—and they fell upon this now, and Penvale allowed himself to bask in the pleasure of being surrounded by his friends in the spring sunshine outside Trethwick Abbey with Jane by his side. It felt… right, somehow, everything about the scene, and all at once he had the oddest thought:Thiswas what he’d truly wanted when he wished to buy the house. The feeling right now in his chest, the smile tugging at the corners of his lips unbidden, for no real reason other than that it was warm and there was good food and good wine and good company, and a single curl of Jane’s dark hair was clinging to the nape of her neck and he couldn’t bring himself to tear his gaze away—
This feeling that had only a little to do with the house itself and an awful lot to do with everything else.
He was so distracted by his own thoughts that he didn’t catchwhatever had just been said; he became aware that something was amiss only when Jane went very, very still next to him. She had a piece of cake in hand, raised slightly as if she were about to lift it to her mouth, and this was what made Penvale initially take notice; Jane was often still, but never when there was food to be consumed. It was one of the countless small things he’d come to know about her.
That he’d come to… like about her.
That word—“like”—suddenly didn’t feel quite strong enough.
