His nether regions had long ago decided she was the North Star. They possessed horrid decision-making skills.
John shoved Richard out of the way as he stepped around him. “Yes, well, we were young then. Life was not so formal. But if it pleases you?—”
“It does, I assure you.”
“Then Beatrice it is,” John said. “Richard… will you not turn around and greet our guest?”
No, he’d rather not. But he was trapped. There was always the lake. But wouldn’t Beatrice simply love to see him so shaken he jumped in a lake to escape her?
Not today, Beatrice Bell. She would not win his pride today. He’d already sacrificed enough of it to the bush.
He turned slowly—so, so slowly—attempting to prolong the time between the last moment he’d seen her, lips swollen from his kisses, eyes wide with disbelief, hand swinging through the air to mark his cheek with the sweet violence of her palm, and the inevitable next one, the moment still to come. And to school his features, which felt rather numb and must look somewhere between wildly petrified and terribly indignant. He shifted his mandible side to side to loosen it, and he blinked several times to put his eyes in a more natural width.
But no mere half circle could be delayed as long as he’d like it to be. One more slight turn of his foot, and… there. Done.
And there.Her.
Beatrice Bell, bright-eyed and beautiful. A brazen tilt to her pointy chin, her spine the boldest of straight lines, and her brows thick brown slashes over pale-green eyes. His soul staggered backward, the sight of her a cannonball to the gut. Even now… after all this time… she rearranged his very world. Time had been so kind to her it had mostly stopped. Her chocolate-brown hair was still thick and heavy, without a streak of silver in it. She’d always despised it because it had never quite held a curl. But he’d always…
Push his fingers through it, decimate the pins holding it back, spread it against his bedsheets, wrap it around his fist?—
It didn’t matter.
The need to touch it again would not beat so persistently through his veins if he’d not already touched it once, if he couldn’t remember the heavy silk of it in his hands as he’d kissed her. But he had. And he could.
That also did not matter. Better forgotten.
He swallowed and shoved the cannonball out of his gut. Rearranged the world tohisliking, focused on her eyes. The last time he’d seen her they’d been rich with rage. Now they were flat, as if looking at him inspired not even the most mundane of emotions. He was less than a speck of dirt on her skirts. The speck of dirt would annoy her. He simply was of no consequence. Better that way. He couldn’t abandon his brother for the next fortnight, refused to. But if he were going to survive it, he’d need to nurture the feeling her eyes reflected for him, and he’d need to do his best to spark it in himself.
Two
No matter how much one prepared for disaster, it was never enough. Particularly when the disaster’s name was Mr. Richard Clark. A cow. A cow? He’d rather wed acowthan?—
Conceited arse.
If only he’d aged into his personality. If one acted like rotting cheese, one shouldresemblerotting cheese.
Richard did not.
In the coach on the way to Slopevale, she’d shoved back and locked away ghostly impressions of his hands on her skin, his lips against her own. How long ago had it been since the kiss? Seven years since she’d learned to hate him, but only three years since the kiss.
She should not pretend she did not know.
He’d not changed much in the intervening time. His hands were stuffed in his pockets, a habitual gesture, but that did nothing to diminish his size, his presence. It was as if the shadows hiding him solidified, gathered in flesh and bone about him, gifting him their secret, cool appeal. No easy smile now, his lips a compressed line of irritation. And somehow, from the shadows that seemed so much a part of him, his brown eyes saw through her, into her, disarmed her. There was something in his hair, and when John stepped to the side with an inviting smile, Beatrice saw what—a tiny, purple flower that had seen better days, propped atop his ear and stuck in his dark hair.
What an odd accessory, incongruent with the whole of him. A flower in Richard Clark’s hair was like a ribbon tied round a dragon’s neck.
The light beaming across him revealed more changes—the gray hairs at his temples, the lines that struck out from the corners of his eyes and crinkled when he smiled.
He wasn’t smiling now. No, his brown eyes had clouded with something between humiliation and the desperate need to bolt. Those brown eyes flicked toward the lake as those thick brows pulled toward one another. Was he considering jumping in?
“I can push you if you do not possess the courage, Mr. Clark.”
Now those eyes snapped to her. “Pardon?”
“The lake. You were considering your options for escape, I assume.”
He rolled his shoulders backward. “Not at all.”
