“I can lead a battalion into a charge without hesitation, Matilda, but I’m still learning how to be a gentleman,” he confessed with a wry smile. “Indeed, there’s a reason I chose the military over polite society: I was never very good at the latter.”
She grabbed the bouquet and gazed down at it with wide eyes, fingertips brushing the hawthorn blossoms and the velvety white roses. There were a few sprays of other blooms in there too, but Albion could not even guess what they were. “Pretty” was the only way he could describe them.
“Now, I understand the twigs,” she said, raising her eyes to him. “A tonic for the heart.”
Hiswas thumping wildly. “Indeed.”
“Is there something wrong with yours?” She smiled, and he could not bear it. When her lips curved like that, how was he supposed to look anywhere else?
“That is averygood question,” he replied. “If you brew me a tonic, maybe I won’t have to find out.”
Her eyes pinched, and he suspected he had said the wrong thing. But before he could attempt to remedy the situation, the carriage turned a corner and passed through the gates of Lord Sanditon’s country estate.
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE
“You are not yourself this evening,” Matilda remarked, hobbling a little as Albion helped her outside onto the terrace.
When they were beyond the scope of prying eyes, Albion suddenly swept her up into his arms and carried her down the terrace steps that led into a marble piazza. A fountain spewed in the center, and it was to the stone rim around the fountain pool that he wielded her.
There, he set her down rather roughly. “Matilda, we’ve insisted on honesty.Youtrippedme. I sought to balance myself, and in doing so, I trod on your foot. I have apologized; I can do no more than that.”
“You could speak to me more kindly,” she shot back. “What if I have broken a toe?”
He sank to his knees, startling her. “Shall I check?”
“Get up before someone sees you!” she hissed, peering over his shoulder and up to the terrace. There were ladies and gentlemen milling about, but nobody seemed to have noticed the couple by the fountain.
“No, no, we must ensure that our mutual clumsiness has not broken a dainty toe,” he insisted, reaching for her shoe.
She drew her legs up sharply, hiding them beneath her billowing skirts. “If you attempt to retrieve my shoe now, I shall scream ‘scoundrel’ at the top of my lungs. I might not be well liked, but the gentlemenwillcome running.”
“And then they will see me and run off in search of this scoundrel,” he replied, smiling.
She was relieved to see that smile on his face again, for it had been absent since their arrival at the ball. He had transformed back into the stiff-spined, upright, unsmiling Captain that everyone expected him to be, leaving her to miss the surprisingly playful, endearing Duke she had married. The Duke who had let her insult his twigs and eat his apology gift before she knew how thoughtful they were.
A heart tonic might fix us both,she mused as he rose up and came to sit beside her. Just having him that close made her own heart leap and flutter, like a bird with an escape plan. Indeed, if he had so much as touched her ankle, she would not have known what to do with herself. Melt into the sort of silly, giddy puddle she used to scorn, she supposed.
“Shall we swim tomorrow morning?” she asked. “I intended to join you this morning, but I slept late.”
He trailed a hand in the pool. “I would like that.”
“I promise to submerge myself, this time.”
“Not if you don’t feel ready,” he replied. “I won’t let you go again.”
Her heart jumped right into her throat at that though her brain swiftly swooped in to boot away any foolishness. Clearly, he did not mean what her silly heart thought he meant.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
His back straightened, his hand stilling in the pool. “Yes.”
“Whydidyou choose the military?” She dropped her chin to her chest, staring down at the veins that slithered through the marble beneath her feet. “I had heard that you were wild in your youth, so I suppose, I wondered if you were made to join the military as an exercise in discipline… or something.”
He laughed, snapping her attention back to him.
“Did I say something funny?” she asked, bewildered.
“If you knew my father, you’d find the suggestion hilarious,” he replied, his smile souring a little. “My mother wailed and threatened for a fortnight after I told her what I intended to do. My father said that if I proceeded, I would be no son of his. He had… notions about what dukes should and shouldn’t do, and how their families should behave as a reflection of them. Me joining the military didn’t fit with those ideals.”
