Well. He certainly would have gotten on his knees before her. He had a number of full-color engraved illustrations in his mind for what might happen after that.
But Georgianawasin the coach, which required some discretion. She spent the morning scowling so furiously that Lydia eventually looked up from her notes and blinked at her friend. “What on earth is the matter?”
“Nothing at all,” Georgiana said.
“Is it—”
“I am worried about Bacon!” she burst out, all in a rush. “We have never been parted this long before!” And then she glowered at them so fiercely that neither Arthur nor Lydia dared to respond for some minutes.
He’d intended to steal a moment with Lydia alone at their first night’s stoppage. He’d thought to pull her aside before she went into the bedchamber with Georgiana, perhaps, or maybe find a quiet corner of the inn. Only the bloody inn was packed to the rafters—why inhellwas it so busy in late October? The dining room was so noisy that he had to shout to be heard, and the proprietress had only a single room available for sleeping.
He could not think of anything less romantic than a tiny, ale-scented chamber into which he, Lydia, Georgiana, and Huw all piled together in a tessellation of cots and bedrolls.
He didn’t need starlight and orange blossoms, for Christ’ssake. He just needed not to have to bellow at the top of his lungs for her to hear his declaration.
But it was not to be.
He would propose to her on the morrow, he resolved to himself, and ignored the somersault in his belly at the thought. He turned on his side, nudged Huw’s heel slightly farther from his nose, and tried quite fruitlessly to go to sleep.
It seemed to Lydia, as they stopped to dine in Edinburgh the next afternoon, that Arthur had been behaving rather oddly ever since—
Well. Ever since he’d torn open her night rail and brought her to sexual climax against a wall.
Which in itself could perhaps be termed “behaving oddly.”
But she hadaskedhim to do that—perhaps not the night rail shredding, but she certainly wasn’t complaining—and he’d told her he did not regret it. And yet he appeared uneasy, a trifle distracted. Every time she looked up to meet his gaze in the coach, he was already looking at her and scowling quite ferociously. Part of her—the part that was always primed to see disaster around every corner—wondered if he was displeased with her. But he did not leave her side, not in the public rooms they dined in or the inn’s bedchamber. Even today, in the coach, he had seated himself snugly on the bench beside her, his long muscled thigh pressed to her own.
At one point he grabbed her hand and then dropped it again as though it were hot to the touch.
During breakfast, he’d knelt beside her and then popped up so swiftly she’d inquired if he’d misplaced something.
He did not seem to have misplaced anything, except perhapsthe power of speech. He’d glowered silently at her and their companions and the bannocks and honey on the table.
Once they’d arrived in Edinburgh, though, he seemed to have quite lost his head. She was no more than three bites into the apple she’d acquired from a street vendor when he’d grabbed her elbow and dragged her down a narrow alley.
She, to her credit, dropped neither the apple nor her reticule, though she did stumble a bit on the small heel of her striped half boots.
Arthur’s hand—large and solid—held her elbow steadily. He didn’t let her fall.
“Is everything quite all right?” She peered up at him—his whiskers had begun to emerge once more, and his shirt, as usual, was open at the collar. He looked slightly overset and rather edible, in point of fact. Something about the open vee at his neck, the notch at his collarbone, called out to be explored. By her mouth.
“Lydia,” he said, which was not precisely an answer. He nudged her a little deeper into the alley, which opened on the other side to a smaller, busier street of shops and stalls and market-goers.
“Yes?”
He dropped her elbow. He ran his hands through his hair—he had a hole at the seam of his sleeve beneath his arm—and then picked up her hand, apple and all. “Lydia,” he said again, and then hesitated.
“Yes,” she said encouragingly. “That’s correct.”
He blew out an exasperated breath, and as he did, her attention snagged on something in the street at the other end of the alley. She narrowed her eyes, uncertain. Something—something in the bustling road beyond them struck her as out of place.
“I know these last weeks have been unsettling,” he began.
She came up on her tiptoes, just a bit, peering over his shoulder into the crowd. “Unsettling,” she agreed. “Indeed.”
There was a couple in the middle of the street. Something about them had caught her eye, she was certain of it, only she could not say precisely why.
Arthur still held her hand, the apple cupped absurdly between their palms. “I know—that is to say, I believe—Ihope, rather, that you are open to matrimony. To—to an earldom. To anearl, I mean.”
