Page 35 of How to Cross a Marquess (The Way to a Lord's Heart 3)

“There’s something unusual about this place,” said Fenella, pointedly changing the subject. “It’s almost as if we’re in a room, cut off from the countryside.” She walked around the circle, trailing her fingers over the whole rank of standing stones. When she’d made the entire circuit, she glanced at him. “Do you feel that? Or do you think I’m being fanciful?”

He didn’t think so. The air felt thicker and warmer here inside the stone circle. His ears buzzed. There were bees in the clover at the foot of the stones, but the sound seemed louder than that. A sweet scent fogged his senses.

Roger gazed through the space between two menhirs. The rolling hills looked too far away, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. He suddenly understood the stories of fairy rings, where one stepped out of the familiar and entered another realm.

“We must hope that years won’t have passed when we leave,” said Fenella, echoing his thoughts.

He turned to look at her, and his memory finally gave him scattered images from their previous visit here. She’d bent over him when he fell from his horse those years ago. He’d seen her haloed by the sun like a descending angel. She’d put gentle fingers to the cut on his head. Despite his rudeness and really bumptious behavior, despite her fears, she’d tended him. Just as she’d brought him the tonic for his stomach when she noticed his pain. Which she’d had no reason to heed. She was kind through and through.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

Abruptly, Roger’s life spread out in his mind, a panorama of fits and starts, achievements and mistakes. At the same time, he was aware of Fenella in incredible detail. He admired the delicate curl of her eyelashes, the beautiful line of her lips, the intelligence in her eyes, and the grace of her carriage. His mind held a history of her image, beginning in childhood and running up to this moment. And it added up to the fact that this was the woman for him. Immaturity and interference had prevented him from knowing this for far too long. “May I court you?” he blurted out.

“Court?” She looked startled.

He felt his cheeks flush. How did a man gain the kind of finesse that his houseguest Macklin, for example, so amply possessed?Courtingwas a silly word. Yet it expressed his desire to deserve her, to win her, after the way he’d behaved.

“No,” Fenella said.

Roger felt as if his heart had dropped to his feet. She didn’t want him. He’d wrecked his life.

“My father would be too smug,” she added. “I can hear him going on and on, and on, about what a waste it was. Years of upheaval for nothing, and now we’re right where he wanted us in the first place. If we’d only listened, only done as he commanded. It would be so vastly irritating.”

Roger dared to feel some relief. Those weren’t heartfelt reasons. She hadn’t said she disliked him. He bent to catch her gaze and searched for an answer in her eyes. They softened under his anxious scrutiny, and she smiled. “What about a clandestine courtship?” he asked. Fenella laughed, and he felt as if he had indeed been reprieved.

“What?” she asked. “Hidden trysts and secret meetings?”

“What else is this?”

“A chance encounter of two neighbors?”

“No.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t chance. I was looking for you.”

“Were you?”

She didn’t seem angry, Roger thought. More…speculative? Was that it? He watched as a series of expressions passed over her beautiful features. He thought he saw doubt, interest, even yearning. But who could be sure?

Then she stepped closer, very close, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him.

It was a soft, sweet, simple kiss. And yet desire shot through him like a lightning bolt. He would have crushed her to him, but she drew back. One step, and then another. “Well,” she said. “That was…umm.”

“Tremendous,” said Roger. He reached out, longing to kiss her again.

But Fenella moved farther away. “Unexpected,” she said.

“How so? You kissed me.”

She acknowledged it with a nod. “Why did I do that?” She looked around at the stone circle. “There’s something about this place.”

“As if the rules don’t apply here.”

She looked surprised. “Yes, something like that.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “They do, however.”

Roger accepted his fate and moved a step back. “Still, I’m glad you did it.” He hoped she would say the same.

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