Page 56 of To Swoon and to Spar
“I don’t suppose you were ever going to tell me this?” she demanded once she had recovered.
“I was,” he insisted. “I already let Crowe and Mrs. Ash know, so they could plan accordingly. I was going to inform you eventually—I just—” Here, he broke off, because he could not explain, precisely, why he’d delayed telling Jane, other than the fact that it felt dangerously like revealing something abouthimself,and what he felt for her, that he didn’t yet fully understand.
She shook her head and said, half frustrated, half amused, “Why will you never be as insufferable as I expect you to be?”
“How is it thatyou’rethe one annoyed right now?” he asked, finding himself perilously close to laughter, of all things. “In the nearly three months I’ve been in Cornwall, I’ve had to endure a hostile wife, a suspicious staff, and ahouse that appears to be haunted!What do you have to complain about?”
“Perhaps the fact that you think the middle of the freezing sea is a reasonable location to have an argument,” she shot back as he paddled close enough that her face occupied his entire field of vision. Her eyes looked bluer out here, beneath the wide blue sky and surrounded by the sea.
“I wouldn’t have dragged you out here in the first place if you hadn’t decided to impersonate a ghost!”
The words were out before he’d quite decided to utter them, and they landed heavily, like stones sinking into the water. A moment of silence stretched taut between them, their eyes locked in an unblinkingstare, and then, without warning, a large wave surged behind Penvale and shoved them both beneath the surface.
It was powerful enough to spin Penvale around, momentarily disorienting him; he cracked his eyes open, the salt water making them sting, and another wave crashed into him, dragging him until he felt sand beneath his knees. He emerged with a deep gasp, turning his head first to the left, then the right, looking for Jane. He felt something brush his leg, reached down, and closed his hand around sodden fabric, bringing Jane coughing to the surface.
One final smaller wave pushed them fully onto the shore, and Penvale collapsed onto his knees on the sand, one arm tight around Jane’s waist, the surf crashing around them. Next to him, Jane flopped onto her back, trying to catch her breath; her chemise had gone sheer in the water, and his gaze caught on her breasts and lingered there. A moment later, a seashell flew half-heartedly past his ear.
“You could at least pretend not to be leering,” she said, still a bit breathless, and his eyes flew up to hers, surprised; she smiled at him a bit tentatively, and it felt like a peace offering.
“I’d have to be a monk not to be leering at you right now, Jane,” he said, without the teasing note he’d intended, and her smile widened.
She took a deep breath; he virtuously kept his gaze fixed on her face as she did so, for which he thought he likely deserved a sainthood. “Should we… discuss it? The haunting, I mean?” she asked.
All at once, he felt tired—after an afternoon spent outdoors; after a bloody irritating bout of ghost-hunting; after an unexpected swim, and an unexpected dunking, and an unexpected argument.
He reached out and slowly cupped her cheek.
Her skin was cool against his hand, and her eyes were wide.
“Shall we call a truce?” he asked softly.
She swallowed. Nodded. And turned her head and placed a kiss, whisper-soft and fleeting, in his palm.
“So long as you’ll allow me to take a bath,” she said, and there was a smile in her voice and her eyes.
“Fair enough,” he said, and immediately, she was scrambling to her feet, cursing when a particularly stiff breeze hit her, reaching down to scoop up her dress and clumsily struggle back into it.
Penvale rose to his feet more slowly and closed his hand around his palm where the feeling of her lips lingered.
Jane glanced over his shoulder at him as she pulled her wet hair free from her dress. “Thank you,” she said simply. “For the house party.”
He attempted a casual grin, though he wasn’t certain he carried it off; nothing about this conversation had felt very casual. “It was nothing.”
Not inviting a few friends to visitwasnothing to him, not compared to Jane, and her happiness, and her comfort. He suspected that she could have asked him to cancel the entire damned house party and he’d have done so happily, and this thought felt so surprising and profound to him that he stood rooted to the spot for a moment, mindless of the cool wind causing gooseflesh to break out on his damp skin.
“Race you to the house!” Jane called, her teeth chattering again, and she was off, leaving Penvale to fumble for his breeches.
As he followed her, he recalled his conversation with his friends on the night before his wedding, his blithe assurance that marriage would change nothing about his life, about him.
Now, chasing his mercurial, maddening wife up the cliff path, the wind at his back, he experienced a fierce rush of joy at the sight of her tangled hair and the sound of her breathless laugh carrying on the wind, and he knew without a doubt that he had been very, very wrong.
Chapter Nineteen
Somehow, it was nearing theend of April, and their houseguests were due to arrive in little more than a week. And Jane…
Jane was nervous. But she was determined not to let her nerves show—not when Penvale had tried so hard to make her comfortable.
Per her agreement with Penvale—if it could be called that—Jane had retired her ghostly performances at night, and Penvale had made no more mention that he knew her to be the culprit. Mrs. Ash had been perplexed when Jane had informed her that the haunting was to come to an immediate halt, and that said halt was to last for the duration of the house party, but Jane had informed her vaguely that she needed time to assess whether their aims were on course, and the housekeeper had accepted this.
