Lilias had absolutely known she’d be able to breach the walls Nash had erected around himself. Well, maybe she had not knownfor certain, she relented as she stood shivering beside him on the bank near the water. She did not really know him yet, after all. But she wanted to. She’d practically been fixated on him since meeting him in the woods four nights prior.
She blamed the obsession on two things. First was her love of Gothic romance novels. Nash was mysterious, just like a Gothic hero, and absurdly handsome, and she could admit to herself that she’d fantasized once or twice or a thousand times about being the heroine in a book with a gentleman who looked like Nash.
Second, and she’d only confessed this to Owen in a weak moment and sworn him to secrecy after she’d appallingly blabbed her secret, shedidhave a need to try to fix broken animals and people. The compulsion had been with her a long time, ever since her father had started drinking after he’d gambled a great deal of his money away. If her memory served her, she’d been nine at the time. She’d tried to help him by asking for nothing, for trying to make things last, but she’d not been able to fix his problems in the end. He drank himself to death, or at least that’s what she’d heard the doctor say from her eavesdropping position crouched at the other side of her parents’ closed bedchamber door.
“Why do you wear a kilt? Are you Scottish?” she asked as they stood on the riverbank.
“I’m half-Scot on my mother’s side, and I wear it to annoy my mother. She thinks her family wild barbarians.”
Lilias had done things to annoy her mother in an attempt simply to get her attention after her father had died, but it had not been successful. Her mother was too sad to be annoyed. “Does it work?” she asked.
“Not so far. She hasn’t said a word. It’s as if she doesn’t even notice.”
“I’m sorry,” Lilias said, her chest squeezing for him. Her mother seemed to at least notice when Lilias was doing something irritating; she just didn’t care.
Nash didn’t respond. One of his boots clopped against the dirt, followed immediately by the other. Her awareness of him, the broad chest that strained against his white shirt, and the long bare legs she could see because he was wearing a kilt gave her a thrill that was entirely new to her. She’d read about such reactions women had to men. Her novels were filled with such things, but she supposed she had not truly believed that such tremendous emotion was real.
But heavens! It was like an ocean in her chest when Nash chucked off his overcoat and dropped it to the grass. Owen mimicked Nash, and the roiling waters inside her settled. Poor Owen looked like a pup compared to Nash, but she’d never let on so as not to hurt Owen’s feelings. Friends did not do such things to each other. They bolstered each other up; they did not tear each other down.
She stole one last glance at Nash while he had his attention on the water. He had a fine noble nose, strong lips, a square jaw, and chiseled cheekbones. He leaned suddenly toward the water. What was he doing? She glanced to where she thought he was looking. He must have been trying to decide the best place to show Owen how to swim. Moonlight shimmered off the river, and it seemed to glitter off Nash’s skin as he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and revealed powerful forearms. She wished he’d strip his shirt off, but she knew it was too much to wish for. She also knew sheshouldn’twish for such a thing, but the knowledge didn’t stop the yearning.
Her awareness of him felt electric, the way the air before a storm sometimes felt as if it could prick you. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t spoken more than a sentence since appearing in the garden and telling her in a gruff voice to lead the way. All he had done was greet Owen and tell him that he looked to be the sort of man who would easily pick up swimming. Then he’d patted each of her hounds on the head and told them they were good boys. Those two things confirmed her instinct that Nash wanted friends, despite his words to the contrary, whether he realized it or not.
With all these thoughts in her head, she bent down to remove her slippers, but before she could do so, Nash’s voice washed over her from above. “What are you doing?”
It seemed obvious to her, but in her experience—admittedly only with her father—a man’s powers of observation often needed spectacles. So she brought herself upright and pointed down at her feet. “Taking off my shoes so I can teach Owen to swim.”
“Do you have parents?” Nash’s tone was incredulous.
Before she could answer the question, he launched another at her. “Do you have a chaperone?”
She opened her mouth to respond, but another question came at her like a bullet. “How the devil did you get out of your house unnoticed? You’d be ruined if anyone caught you with us.” He shoved a hand through his wavy hair. “One of us would have to wed you.” His left hand took the place of his right to tangle through his thick, dark hair. She wanted to touch that hair, but thankfully, she refrained. He glanced to Owen. “Had you thought of that?”
Owen answered with a shake of his head as Lilias stood there in mute fascination. Nash scoffed. “Of course not. Are you prepared to wed this girl?” He pointed at her, and she found she still could not speak. Owen apparently did not have the same affliction. He opened his mouth to respond, but Nash cut him off just as he had done to Lilias. “I don’t know how I ended up out here. I—”
“I do believe the woman in my house is my mother,” she interrupted, certain he was about to leave them and she desperately did not want him to go. “She claims to be, anyway. And if she’s not, well, then—” Lilias set her hands on her hips as she imagined one of the heroines in her books would do when giving someone a set down. “That would be shocking. It would inspire loads of questions. Such as, what did she do with my mother?” Lilias tapped a finger against her chin, another Gothic heroine move. “Hmm… I do look like her, so I think it’s safe to say that sheismy mother, and we can conclude that I do have a parent,” she finished cheekily.
Nash’s lips parted in obvious astonishment, and she did not bother to repress her smug smile. Finally, it was she who was rendering him speechless. She offered a quick prayer of thanks to God for her elephant-like memory and then said in a scolding voice, “My father died this past year.” She notched up her eyebrows to let Nash know that now was the appropriate time for him to feel remorse for his unthinking question.
Instead, he turned to Owen and asked, “Is she always like this?”
Owen nodded, his mop of blond hair falling across his right eye.
She would have been incensed by Nash’s question, which implied there was something wrong with her, except his tone held unmistakable admiration. She grinned. Finally, someone who had an appreciation for people who refused to conform! She allowed herself one moment to savor this before she launched back into the task of volleying answers at him just as quickly as he’d shot questions at her.
“Ididhave a chaperone, Miss Portsmith, but I only had her for a short while. My papa didn’t believe in chaperones. He had a free spirit stuck in an earl’s stuffy life.”
When Nash laughed, she grinned and kept going. “Mama drove Miss Portsmith away with unreasonable demands—Miss Portsmith’s words, not mine—but I must confess, I was not sad to see her depart. I didn’t particularly like having someone watch my every move and want to accompany me everywhere, but I do think my sister, Nora, could use a chaperone. She’s only nine, and she’s quite a handful already.” She took a breath, certain Nash would tell her to be quiet or some such thing, but a smile teased his lips. He appeared to be following her every word. Another tingling thrill went through her. “I get out of my home down a convenient tree.” She pointed to the trousers she’d borrowed from the stable master’s son, Lucas, so she could climb down the tree at her bedchamber window and teach Owen to swim with ease.
“Thus the trousers,” Nash said, seemingly amused. He pressed his lips together in a knowing smirk.
She returned the look. “Yes. I’m rather a good climber. My father encouraged me, to my mother’s dismay, when I was younger. I don’t suppose he ever considered I might use the ability to leave the house at night when I was not supposed to. Or maybe he did.” She shrugged, pushing back the sadness of her father’s loss, which was always at the edges of her happiness. “I can go about rather freely since my father passed, my chaperone fled, and my mother—”
She stopped herself from confessing that her mother took laudanum nearly daily and locked herself in her room for most of the days and nights. Even Lilias had boundaries of propriety she would not cross, and one did not confess such scandalous secrets. Well, at least not until one knew someone better.
He arched lovely, dark, expectant eyebrows at her.
“And my mother’s preoccupation since my father’s death,” she added lamely.
