Page 36 of How to Cross a Marquess (The Way to a Lord's Heart 3)

But Fenella appeared lost in thought. “I didn’t know it would be so—”

“Wonderful?”

She gave him a sidelong look.

“Mustn’t get ahead of myself,” Roger said, then bit his lip in chagrin. He hadn’t meant to say that aloud. He quickly suppressed a desire to leap and laugh in triumph. “Perhaps we could try it again some time?”

“Possibly,” said Fenella. “Clandestinely.”

The small smile that played about her lips made Roger’s pulse pound. “Absolutely. Have you a trusted maid who can carry my forbidden letters to you?”

“What?” She burst out laughing. “No, of course I don’t. Do you want all the servants gossiping about us?”

“Then how shall we arrange our trysts?”

“We see each other often.”

A few glances at church or a dinner party, Roger thought. It wasn’t nearly enough. He said so. Then he remembered. “The old oak.”

“The hollow tree where your gang left messages for each other?”

“You knew about that?” Roger asked.

“All the neighborhood children did. We read them, too.”

Roger felt ridiculously chagrined. His troop of friends had thought the hidey-hole in the old tree’s trunk was a deep secret. Now he found his boyish schemes had been common knowledge. But that was years ago. He had no reason to feel betrayed. “We could meet there,” he said. “At the oak.”

The idea seemed to amuse her. “All right.” She turned away. “I must go back. My father gets restive if I’m away too long.” She stepped out of the stone circle. “No roll of thunder,” she commented. “I haven’t suddenly aged a hundred years or my clothes fallen into dust.”

“Pity,” said Roger.

For an instant he hoped that the word hadn’t actually left his lips. That he’d only, fleetingly, seen that dizzying picture in his mind. But then they both flushed, the bane of redheads. He’d spoken.

Fenella walked away. But she gave him a speaking glance over her shoulder. “And by the way, I was never anything like a sheep,” she declared.

“No. You were some far more elusive animal, always slipping out of sight at the edge of perception. Not there if one turned to look.”

She stared at him. Roger was as surprised as she by the phrases that had come from his mouth. Very nearly eloquent, he thought. How had that happened?

They returned to the horses, cropping grass outside the circle. Roger reached out to help her into the saddle. “I could stand on that rock,” she said, pointing to a low boulder.

“So near a fairy circle? Never.”

She laughed and let him lift her. Roger kept his hands on her waist for one warm moment, and then went to mount up.

They rode back the way they’d come, much more slowly. Shafts of sun broke through the clouds, illuminating swaths of heath before closing up again.

“Why are you taking care of your father?” Roger asked after a while. “I seem to remember that he always treated your sisters better.”

“I’m the spinster daughter,” Fenella answered as if this was obvious. “We’re meant to nurse aging parents, aren’t we?” She made a wry face. “And mind our errant nephews.”

“Spinster,” he snorted. He couldn’t imagine any woman less suited to the word.

“Greta and Nora have families and households to manage,” she said. “I don’t mind helping out. And should the situation grow impossible—if Papa decided he wished me away, for instance—I can go back to Grandmamma. She’d welcome me.”

Recognizing how much hedidn’twant that, Roger dropped the subject.

They rode on, sometimes silent, sometimes talking, until the tower of Chatton Castle appeared on the horizon. Soon they would have to separate if they really meant to keep their ride private. Fenella was about to say as much when two figures popped out of the long grass at the side of the path. It was John and Tom. So much for clandestine, she thought as they rode closer.

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