Chapter 2 #2
She had only to say yes, and she could marry a good man.
She would have a family. Then why did she hesitate?
Was affection enough to marry on? Should she not seek someone who would make her heart beat hard, just as had happened with Tentwall?
Something within her warned her that she must not make the mistake of deeming sufficient a calm that did not set her ablaze.
‘Mr. Linfield,’ she said slowly, ‘it would not displease me to be courted by you.’
His face lit up before he could master it.
‘Eveline, I—’ he skipped the formality in his emotion.
‘But I need to know something first,’ she checked him.
‘Whatever you wish.’ He had already recovered his etiquette.
She knew what she had to do. She was about to commit a rash act, but it was more than necessary in order to discover whether she could belong to that future before pledging herself to him.
‘Kiss me,’ she said with assurance.
Edward went motionless.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I am not suggesting you dishonor me beside a gazebo, Mr. Linfield. I am only asking you for a kiss. One brief kiss. I need to know whether…’ She searched for the right words so as not to sound ridiculous.
She sighed. ‘It is necessary to know whether my heart inclines towards you for something more than the friendship that has bound us these past months.’
The blush rose to his cheekbones. To Eveline it seemed charming. Also, a little exasperating.
‘My lady, if anyone were to see us…’
‘No one will see us. ’
‘We cannot know that.’
‘You are being very reasonable.’ She was on the verge of bursting into tears.
She had not foreseen that it would be she who had to press him to obtain what she wanted.
She realized she had gone from one extreme to the other.
The viscount had been too much the rogue, and the man standing beside her too decent.
‘I am trying to be worthy of your trust.’
‘And I am trying to find out whether I wish you to be,’ she insisted in desperation.
At last he understood the reason for her request. Eveline saw it in the way he stopped glancing towards the path and fixed his attention back on her.
He no longer looked like a correct young man measuring every step before a duke’s sister; rather, he had transformed into a man who would fight to convince the woman he liked.
He placed a hand at her waist and leaned towards her, so Eveline closed her eyes in order to concentrate on the kiss.
‘If you do not release her at once and step away from the lady, the next thing you will see is my fist heading for your face.’ The masculine voice exuded an uncontrollable rage.
Mr. Linfield sprang backward at once, and Eveline’s eyelids flew open. Surprisingly, it was not her brother who had come to preserve her reputation.
No. Of course it was not Oliver. It had to be the Earl of Arden. How had Eveline not foreseen it?
Lord Arden stood near them both. Neither she nor Linfield understood how the devil he had come there without either of them hearing his steps. Perhaps he did not walk—perhaps he merely materialized like a ghost to torment her.
Arden, for all his words full of fury, appeared calm, but Eveline knew him too well to be deceived.
His face kept that severity that so irritated her; nevertheless, the line of his jaw was too taut, and his brown eyes were not looking at Edward with disapproval, but with something darker, more dangerous, less befitting a judge and closer to a man who had just found another trespassing on ground he had no right to claim.
She shook her head a couple of times. Arden jealous over a suitor?
Jealous over her? What nonsense! He only wanted to save her or to vex her, depending on who told the story of the interruption.
‘My lord,’ Eveline greeted him, with the utmost naturalness, as though he had not just caught her committing an unpardonable folly, ‘how timely. Will you join our chat?’
Her brother’s best friend’s eyes fixed at that instant on hers. He was already standing before the pair.
‘Out of here, now,’ he said. The lady sighed. She did not want to argue with him. She was utterly humiliated. So Eveline took a step to leave, and he caught her by the wrist without the least dissimulation. ‘Not you—him.’ He tilted his head towards the young fop. ‘Why are you still here, Linfield?’
The man so addressed looked at the place where Arden kept hold of the young lady he had dreamed of marrying, and sighed in resignation. It was clear. That gesture denoted possession.
‘I understand. I beg you to forgive me, please. I did not… I did not know that you…’
‘I will not say it to you again,’ he interrupted.
‘Return to the terrace, Linfield. Smile, take a glass of lemonade, converse with Mrs. Pritchard and speak to her of her daughters or of the weather, and forget this stroll before I decide to recount it to Statony with all the details your imagination deserves. You will also forget Lady Eveline forever, and you will do so at once. Have I been clear?’
The silence that followed those words was brutal.
Edward looked at Eveline. There was a clear apology in her suitor’s eyes, and also a mute question.
She would have liked to tell him to stay, not to let Arden dismiss him just as one would a clumsy footman, but the truth was that the earl had just placed between them a reality difficult to ignore.
If this reached Oliver’s ears, the situation could twist with dreadful ease, and she was not prepared to marry without knowing whether she could love without reserve the man who would become her husband.
And Edward Linfield, unlike Cedric Lancaster, seemed to understand that a woman’s reputation was not a coin a man might gamble with to measure his own daring.
‘My lady,’ Edward said, as he made her a bow, ‘I beg you to forgive me. I deeply regret the confusion.’
And with that, the honest, correct Mr. Linfield departed in great haste.
When Edward’s steps faded towards the terrace, she gave a tug for Arden to release her. The earl did not let go.
‘Have you gone mad?’
Arden looked at her in a way that… The impact of that look was so direct that Eveline lost the first word she had meant to hurl at him, before he answered her.
There was anger in the earl’s gaze, yes.
Disapproval too, of course; Lord Arden seemed to feed on it with admirable regularity; yet beneath it lay something that did not fit the role of moral guardian Oliver seemed to have assigned him.
Something alive, violent, almost—wounded? Jealous? Impossible!
‘You little fool… Do you not understand what you were about to bring upon yourself?’ The earl did not mean to use formality with her. In fact, when he lost his temper with Statony’s sister, he forgot the proprieties entirely.
‘I was about to kiss a gentleman who wishes to court me,’ she defended herself.
‘You were about to compromise your reputation in a secluded corner of the garden with a man you do not know.’
‘What a tragedy. Notify the archbishop, Lord Arden,’ she mocked, though she was not sure how long she could hold out without spilling her tears.
‘Do not mock this.’
‘Of what, exactly? Of my reputation? Of my want of judgment? Of your habit of appearing when no one has asked for your intervention?’
Arden took another step towards her. Eveline forced herself not to retreat. They were very close to each other. He still had not released her, so she could not flee however much she might have wished to.
‘I am tired of your follies. Someone must keep you from turning every impulse into a catastrophe, and I have grown tired of its being me. ’
‘There it is. You were overdue to pass sentence. Will you burn me at the stake at last? Why not shout for my brother to come applaud your intervention and begin chopping the wood on which I shall be consumed?’
‘Linfield, Eveline? Did you truly believe he would make a good husband for you? The poor man really would end up at the stake if I had not arrived to save him from your claws. ’
‘So this time I am a witch and not a rattlesnake, my lord?’ she defended herself. ‘Why can you not behave as though I did not exist? My troubles are not yours; you are neither my father, nor my brother, nor—thank God for it—my husband.’
‘A kiss!’ he thundered. ‘It was not enough for you to grant the blessed saint Linfield two dances at the last village party. No. You had to encourage a kiss from a man you would have tired of in the blink of an eye, and with whom Oliver would not have known what to do after you cast him aside. You are mad, Eveline!’ he roared.
‘Release me at once, Lord Arden,’ she demanded.
‘If you wanted a suitable suitor, you had only to ask your brother to take you to London. I told him he should not leave you in the country because you might trap some poor fool, but no, Statony told me you had changed. I knew you had not, because you always look where you should not!’
‘Arden… you are shouting at me. ’
‘I am shouting at you because someone has to!’ he barked again. ‘A kiss? That is what you wanted of him, is it not? Why him?’
She refused to remain calm any longer. She straightened and prepared to fight him.
‘Yes, devil take it!’ she burst out. ‘I wanted a kiss, because I have a right to find a prince who will kiss me and make me his queen. I will not be the princess to another toad like Tentwall.’ It was her turn to lose her temper.
‘Then I will give you your blessed kiss,’ he declared, and then bent his head.
And Arden kissed her.
He did not do it with the violence Eveline had foreseen after that outburst, nor with the arrogance of a man who meant to punish her for having defied him.
At first his lips merely brushed hers, a brief contact, so unexpectedly light that it left her astonished.
She had been prepared to push him away, to slap him perhaps, for he had no right whatsoever to take that which he had just reproached another man for.
But Nathaniel Greystoke was demanding nothing of her.