He had shaved. She would not have imagined a simple change in grooming habits could effect such a powerful transformation, but there it was, in the insultingly beautiful and virile flesh. His jaw, which had been camouflaged by his whiskers, was sharp and strong. His lips were beautifully, elegantly molded, and his cheekbones seemed higher and sharper now that the hollows of his cheeks were clear.
He looked like a statue. He looked like anangel.
Dear God, this was not going to work. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. This man was a stranger, and she was going to make a hash of things, and she could not hear anything over the roaring of her pulse.
She was going to humiliate herself, and even worse—farworse—she was going to humiliate him. Damn it, she wanted to be worthy of him. She wanted, curse her foolish heart, to be a proper Lady Strathrannoch. Despite herself, she wanted him to see her that way, and yet she could not possibly pull it off.
She knew herself. She knew what she was and was not.
Arthur looked up and saw her. He came to his feet and then was at her side, and Lydia almost could not find it in herself to be embarrassed that he’d seen her encroaching panic, because he’d come to rescue her.
“Good morn to you, Lady de Younge,” he said, and then he caught Lydia about the waist and drew her up to him. “And a good morn to you, my bonny wife.”
Her head was spinning—or else the room had begun to revolve.
He leaned low and murmured into her ear, his voice a deep rumble that she felt all the way through her body. “Do you like kippers?”
She turned her head toward him, which brought her face into sudden, shocking proximity with his sharp, clean-shaven jaw. And his lips. She was in very close proximity to those. “I—what?”
“Kippers,” he murmured again. “Come with me and let me show you how we make them here in the Lowlands.”
She let him lead her like a doll over to the sideboard, whereupon there were, indeed, two large platters filled with breakfast meats and fishes.
“I have no opinion on kippers,” she managed to get out.
“Forget the kippers.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He nudged her around so that she faced the sideboard, andthen he arranged himself behind her. One of his hands came to rest on her shoulder; the other went to the handle of the serving fork, neatly bracketing her between his long, thickly muscled arms.
He was, she realized, almost hugging her.
He lowered his head to whisper into her ear. “What can I do? I know that you’d prefer to avoid this sort of thing. Shall we say you’re ill? Or would that only make it worse later on?”
Oh. He had—oh. He had not wanted to speak of kippers.
It was a small kindness—this shielding her from view, allowing her a moment to catch her breath—but it was a small kindness that meant a great deal. He had not tried to do whatever he imagined best, or swept her out of the room, or attempted to solve her difficulties for her. He hadasked.
“Give me a moment,” she said. Her voice was shaking, but she knew he would not mind, and that mattered more to her than she wanted to admit. “Talk to me about—about kippers. Or whatever you like. And when we go back and sit down, try not to act as though there’s something dreadfully wrong with me.”
“’Twill be no hardship,” he said. And then he did as he was bade.
By the time they returned to the table, Lydia had her wits about her enough to prepare herself for the introductions. She nodded, smiled, murmured a “How do you do?” while Arthur sat by her side, occasionally brushing his pinky finger against her own.
Once he nudged her slippered foot with his beneath the table, sending a frisson through her that was not quite the comforting sensation she’d imagined he’d intended.
No, the sensation that moved like a tendril of smoke through her body was something altogether more heated than comfort.
She tried not to think about fingers and limbs and the way hishand had gripped her thigh in the stairwell at Haddon Grange. Instead, she listened to the talk around the table, made her face smile pleasantly, and did not, in the end, need to speak after all.
Lord and Lady de Younge, who appeared to be in their sixties, were a decade or two older than their guests, all of whom were French émigrés who had come to England at the end of the eighteenth century.
Mr. and Mrs. Thibodeaux were the younger pair, both warm and smiling. Didier—as he’d introduced himself with a wink and grin—was a portly fellow of perhaps forty-five, whose bald head and thick spectacles did not mask the twinkle in his eye. Claudine, his buxom wife, was the less talkative of the pair—her English seemed not quite sufficient to keep up with the flow of conversation around the table. But she made lighthearted remarks to her husband in French, and generally appeared quite merry, if somewhat at sea.
The Marquis and Marquise de Valiquette—Lydia wondered if the marquisat in France was still intact after the nation’s decades of strife—were a good ten years older. The marquise had a pinched expression, as though she’d smelled something unpleasant, and her remarks grew rather more acidulous whenever her glance fell on the cheerful Thibodeaux. Her husband—no first names were offered withthiscouple—looked upon his wife with a rather dour expression.
Lydia wondered how on earth the warm and welcoming de Younges had ended up hosting the Valiquettes. Perhaps the marquis and marquise had simply invited themselves prior to the Revolution, and the de Younges had not yet been able to work out how to make them go back.
