Laurence dipped his head. “Yes, Your Grace.”
With that, he left, and Albion expelled a rough breath of relief. It was harder than he had expected having a valet. Indeed, the relief and the exertion took him to his own writing desk to craft a letter to Ben, whom he realized he missed a great deal.
You’d have snapped me out of my confusion, tormented me mercilessly, and set me on the right course in an instant.Still, Laurence seemed to know what he was doing in regard to how a gentleman should apologize to a lady, and Albion sensed he might need that sort of help a lot more in the years of marriage to come.
Happy years,he hoped, for the most part.
* * *
“Thank goodness you brought treats for us! Why are you only revealing your secret supply now?” Matilda cried, throwing open the lid of the candied fruits. “I am half-starved, we have been traveling for an age, and the last thing I want is to be called a pig at this ball because I have descended too eagerly on the offerings.”
Albion pursed his lips. “You aren’t half-starved, Matilda.”
“I am! I barely ate a thing all day.” She chose a candied strawberry and popped it into her mouth, her eyes closing in satisfaction as she crunched through the hard sugar shell.
He tilted his stiff neck from side to side.Thiswas why he hated riding in carriages: there was no way to maintain one’s posture, and his bones were suffering for it.
“Don’t use that word,” he instructed, more curtly than he had intended.
Matilda’s eyes opened. She looked at him curiously, chewing the fruit—or, rather, the apology gift that she had woefully misunderstood. And all she had said about the bouquet of flowers was,“Why are there twigs and roses in the carriage? Did it smell too much of horse in here?”
In fairness, he supposed he should havegivenher the flowers outright, but he doubted himself at the last minute and put them in the carriage to surprise her with them. Now, he was content to let them remain a random, out-of-place adornment, never explaining where they had come from or why.
“What word?” she challenged, selecting a quarter of a candied apricot next.
“Starved. It’s not a word you’ll ever have to worry about, so don’t use it.” He hastened to add a careful, “Please.”
She swallowed the apricot. “Of course. That was insensitive of me.”
“Thank you.” He glanced out of the window, wincing at every crack of the sugary shells. He knew he should just tell her they were a gift to say sorry, but it seemed too late now.
“I suppose you really have seen things that I could not even begin to imagine,” she said. “I have read about war, but I am not foolish enough to think it is the same thing. Nevertheless, I understand that where there is war, famine often follows. Starvation, sickness, loss—all of things that I wish could be eradicated from the world.”
He turned, casting her a smile. “If we ever do find a necromancer and a means to reverse time, perhaps we shall.”
“It is fascinating, is it not?” she asked.
“What?”
“The notion of going back to a point in time and doing things differently,” she explained, speaking between mouthfuls. “I have often wondered if it would even be possible. Say therewasa way to reverse time, would you truly be able to change anything, or would it turn out the same way no matter what you tried?”
He blinked at her. “You think about that often?”
“Oh, constantly.” She grinned. “I might write a book about it, one day.”
He saw his opportunity. “Speaking of books, how is yours faring?”
“Well, I decided to remove that entire chapter that I mentioned to you in my sleep,” she replied, surprising him. “I do not want anyone to know the content before it is complete, so it had to go. A pity, really, for you made a very compelling argument about the purpose of a kiss. Or maybe it is ironic that it has been removed, for Iwasoverthinking it somewhat.”
He cleared his dry throat, fighting the urge to glance at her lips. “I’ve been meaning to apologize for my conduct by the staircase. I didn’t mean to make you feel embarrassed. You know I’m interested in your work, whatever the content might be.”
“Embarrassed? Me?” She scoffed, but her cheeks reddened in the low light of the carriage. “I can count on one hand the number of times I have been embarrassed, and that was not one of them. You gave me something to consider, that is all.”
Which part?There were assuredly a few things that he could have said more easily with a kiss than with his words, but he could not dwell on that. He did not want to make another mistake.
Instead, he decided to take the edge off her embarrassment by turning it on himself. “Those candied fruits and the twigs were supposed to be part of my apology. Can you tell I’ve never given gifts to a beautiful lady before?”
She swallowed so hard she nearly choked. “Why did you not say?” she spluttered. “I would never have spurned your twigs if you had said they were for me! I adore them, I just did not understand why they were in the carriage!”
