Chapter Twenty-Seven #3
Hearing his name on her lips in the middle of the day pleased but unnerved him, and he could only nod and offer her his arm. “Come and I will show you how I made that deduction.”
***
They rode home in the moonlight.
“What a beautiful sky,” Katie said, trying not to recall her frantic ride down this very path earlier that day.
“Yes. Very beautiful.”
Katie turned at her husband’s odd tone and found him looking at her.
“You aren’t even looking at the sky,” she chided in a foolishly breathless voice.
He merely regarded her with an intense, almost brooding, stare.
“You are making me shy,” she said a moment later.
He turned away. “I apologize for staring.”
“What?” Katie shook her head. “No—you don’t have to apologize. It is true that I feel shy, but I—I like it.”
He turned back to her. “You like it when I stare at you?”
“Yes,” she said, her face hot in the cool night air. “I like it a great deal. I only mentioned it to explain why I was becoming so red and fidgeting like a child.”
“You look silver in the moonlight, not red.”
“I am relieved to hear it,” she said, flustered by his caressing tone. “Tell me, why do you sound so surprised that I would enjoy your eyes on me? Gaining a man’s attention is the entire point of a London Season, after all.”
He turned away, his lips tightening and his jaw firming in a way that usually presaged a cool silence. But this time, he surprised her. “My first wife disliked it when I stared at her. She said it was freakish.”
Katie flinched at the word freakish. “Surely she did not use that word?”
“She used precisely that word.”
“Oh, Gerrit—” Katie stopped, biting her lip.
“Oh, Gerrit?” he repeated. “That sounded like a prelude to something more.”
“It was,” Katie admitted. “But I—I don’t know how to put it in words. Not yet.”
“I will wait patiently until you do.” His stern mouth curved up slightly and he turned to face her. “And enjoy looking at you in the meantime.”
She gave a startled laugh, his compliment and smile all the more intoxicating for how rare they were.
“I am very fond of your laugh, Kathryn.”
“It is nice to have things to laugh about.”
“Why have you not had reason to laugh? I am not the most perceptive of men, but I believe I’ve noticed a—a sadness, for lack of a better word—in your eyes at times.”
Katie’s chest tightened at the dangerous turn in the conversation. Talking about the shadows in her eyes would lead to that wretched summer five years ago. And until she told Gerrit the truth about that—
“You do not need to confide in me, Kathryn. I did not mean to sour the mood.”
“The mood isn’t sour,” she hastened to assure him. “You are right that I am sometimes melancholic. Although far less so these past few weeks.”
Did she imagine the dark stain on his cheeks at her words?
Katie cleared her throat. “As for my oh, Gerrit,” she said, moving the conversation toward safer ground.
“I was lamenting that people often say the most hurtful things to those they are the closest to.” Hy’s face rose up in her mind, but Katie shook it away.
This was about Gerrit, not about her. Besides, Katie deserved what Hy said to her.
Gerrit did not deserve being called a freak.
“Your first wife said something that shaped the way you perceive yourself. If she’d said something pleasant, that would be one thing.
But to say your attention was freakish? That is not only cruel, but also wrong. ”
“I am glad to hear you do not mind my attention, Kathryn.” She was about to correct him—to remind him that she’d said she liked it—but he was not finished. “Because I find it difficult to look at anyone or anything else when you are near.”
“That—that is a lovely thing to say,” Katie said, stunned by how good his words made her feel.
He was watching her again, wearing the look she’d once thought of as critical and arrogant, but which she now knew meant he was thinking deeply about something. How glad she was that she’d never thrown angry words at him about his expression during those early days.
Tell him that. This was what you wanted—to talk—so talk.
“During the early weeks of our marriage, I mistook your resting expression for arrogance and conceit and thought your gaze held only censure,” Katie blurted. “But I now realize your face is sternest when you are pondering something.”
His eyebrows rose. “I am glad you no longer think that. It is true that I take pride in myself, but I hoped it stopped short of arrogance.” His lips twisted slightly. “But perhaps I am wrong.”
“No. No, I don’t think so.”
“Good. Because your opinion is the only one that matters.”
Katie laughed. “Now that just might be a bit arrogant.”
He chuckled and Katie almost fell off her horse. “I like the sound of your laugh.”
Once again, he looked startled. Katie was beginning to think that nobody had ever given Gerrit even the mildest of compliments. At least no lover.
“Thank you,” he said a bit stiffly. “I, too, have not had much in my life to make me laugh.” He paused and gave her one of those heavy-lidded looks that felt like a physical caress. “Until lately.”