Chapter 15
Richard hewed as carefully as possible to the agreement they had made, determined not to press his luck too far.
“Are you not to visit your lady?” asked Gerhard at breakfast, a fortnight after the dinner party.
Richard turned a page of the newspaper he was browsing. “It is barely eight in the morning, Gerhard. Many people are still abed at this hour.”
His friend grumbled. “That has not stopped you from walking to her at dawn, other days.”
He turned another page and reached for his coffee cup.
He had indeed gone walking soon after dawn the other morning and found himself eventually at Evangeline’s.
He would have been content to gaze at her windows from afar, but she was out riding, as it happened, and crossed his path.
They’d ended up back at her house for breakfast in the garden, and conversation, and then a walk, and then .
. . He’d gone home in time for dinner, to Gerhard’s immense amusement.
“Ring for more coffee, since you are unoccupied at the moment.”
Gerhard rang and asked for more coffee. “So,” he went on, folding his arms. “What does she see in you?”
“You must ask her,” said Richard from behind his newspaper.
“Is she to dine with us again?”
“Eventually, I hope. Or rather, I hope she shall dine with me. You, I have little use for at dinner.”
Gerhard laughed. “But we are old friends! Who else would put up with your moods and ill humors? If not for me, you would be sitting here alone, since you do not intend to go to her.”
“I have no objection to solitude. You are free to leave at any moment.”
“No objection to solitude,” said Gerhard thoughtfully, “yet you set out to make her acquaintance almost as soon as you took residence here. I suspect you took this house because she lived nearby. You held a dinner party—one of the events you claim to despise with a potent passion—merely for an excuse to invite her and gaze happily in her direction all evening. I sense a plot.”
Richard put down the newspaper and looked at his friend. “Would you be dismayed if I were to agree to all that? Would it alarm you if I fell for a woman?”
“Alarm! No,” retorted Gerhard. “Is this love?”
Instantly Richard remembered the bathhouse, the conservatory, the first night they had met. No, none of those times had been love, because he did not know her. It had definitely been something else: namely intense, all-encompassing lust.
He had experienced lust before; he had never been a monk.
But something about Evangeline was different.
He couldn’t say exactly what, but there was a deeper attraction that pulled at him when he heard her voice, her laugh, her soft sigh of contentment.
And even though he had used the word “love” rather rashly, it kept leaping to his lips, like the confession of a sin he couldn’t keep himself from committing over and over again.
“Are you questioning my intentions?” he asked mildly.
Gerhard raised his brows with interest. “Should I?”
“I did not know you cared so deeply about my romantic adventures.”
Still smiling, Gerhard looked at him for a long moment. “I am correct, I think.”
“I suppose it might happen, now and then,” replied Richard. “Regarding what?”
“You did take this house because of her. Mrs. Murray says you met her years ago, but you never said a word to me.”
Richard lifted one shoulder. “I never knew it would fascinate you so.”
“So you have known this woman, somehow, and now you are in love with her.” Gerhard tilted his head. “How do you know?”
“I was not the one to use the word love,” Richard pointed out. “That was you.”
“And you did not scoff and push it away, as you normally do when I suggest something ridiculous,” Gerhard observed. “That hints to me that, even if you do not believe it is love now, it soon will be.”
“And you do not wish me ever to fall in love?” Richard asked, smiling.
His friend shook his head. “I wonder at your haste, so unusual for you. What have you done to win this woman? How deeply do you know her heart? I only ask in concern.”
Richard sighed. “Clemency has put you to this, hasn’t she?”
The other man leveled a finger at him. “No. She has not. She is as puzzled as I am by the speed of this attachment, but she worships you. She wants you to be happy. She, perhaps, thinks that if you marry an Englishwoman, you will stay. No. I ask because I do not want you to make a grave mistake.”
He grinned. Of course Clemency was behind it.
Gerhard, ever protective of her, was worried Richard’s affair would end badly and send him haring off to China or Brazil for several years, which would upset his sister dreadfully.
“So speaks the man who followed me into the desert of Egypt and stood by my side in a monsoon. We have both risked many grave mistakes, in the most literal sense, and yet here we both are today.”
But Gerhard didn’t smile. Uncharacteristically somber, he wagged one finger.
“You are treating her, this woman, as an adventure, a challenge to conquer, a trial to be won. Women are not like that. You do yourself, and her, an injustice to think so. And when you risk love as well, you could cause both of you great suffering.”
It was uncomfortably close to what Evangeline had said: This is too pleasurable to sully with talk of love.
Richard frowned. He had never been in love himself, but Gerhard had been dying of it for years, Clemency had loved and lost, and Evangeline thought it a fool’s game. Perhaps they knew better than he did.
“I am not a fool,” he said abruptly. “She is not a mysterious foreign land, tempting me to explore simply because she is unknown. There is something more, Gerhard, something I cannot even put into words, that pulls me toward her. No, I dare not call it love—that would be folly, on such slim acquaintance. But . . . I believe it is very possible that I will love her in the future.”
Gerhard sat back in his chair, still looking unpersuaded but no longer frowning. “Then you intend to pursue her.”
“I intend to become acquainted,” he corrected, “as closely as she wishes to be.”
“And you will work tirelessly to do that.”
“I hardly view courting a beautiful woman as work,” he said testily, and shoved back his chair.
“But it will be,” called his friend after him as he stalked from the room. “It must be, or it will not last. You cannot expect to keep anything you do not earn.”
Nonsense, thought Richard in ire. Earning and working did not come into matters of the heart. Gerhard didn’t understand, and that was no doubt why he still had never bared his heart to Clemency—or to any other lady, though Richard knew that he also had not been a saint when it came to women.
All he meant to do was spend time with Evangeline, and not only in bed.
He wanted to spend time with her. He did feel a strange certainty he would enjoy it, and he did sense that she was also drawn to him.
Surely if both their wishes converged, falling in love would happen as easily as plunging over a waterfall.
And if it did not . . .
In the hall, he hesitated. He’d meant to proceed moderately, keeping his word to call upon her and talk to her until he knew her. He’d done so twice, but both times they ended up making love, despite his protestations that he wanted more.
But he didn’t want it to fizzle out once they had sated their obvious desire for each other.
He did not want to stand here in several months and realize he knew little of Evangeline except what pleased her in bed.
Even if theirs was not to be a love affair for the ages, he still wanted it to be full and rewarding, an affair between equals, as she had said.
He went into his study and found another of his travel notebooks. She listened to his stories with the most bewitching attention and interest. Then he put on his hat and coat and headed out to call on her. To earn her trust and affection.
To know her.