A Matter of Class (13 page)

Reggie felt an alarming rise in the already-warm temperature of the room, and a corresponding tightening in the area of his groin.

To distract himself from lascivious thoughts, he looked down at her hand, which still held the fairy cake. He took it from her and set it on the plate, careful to hold it where there was only cake. And then, with totally brainless lack of forethought or memory of exactly where they were, he lifted her hand to his lips and licked the cream from the edge of her forefinger and sucked it off her thumb.

He felt like a raging furnace.

And cream had never tasted so delicious.

“Oh.” She sounded breathless. And as if she were strangling.

Reggie looked up into her face, and beyond her to a grinning cousin.

He grinned back and took a napkin from the tray to dry her hand and wipe off the remains of the cream.

“A stolen kiss on the balcony at our betrothal ball,” he said. “A little finger-sucking at your family tea.
People might well conclude that I am a red-blooded male, Lady Annabelle.”

“When in reality,” she said, “all you are is a man who does not know how to behave.”

“Do I take it,” he asked her, “that you do not want to finish your cake? I did warn you. Indeed, I do believe our cook ought to be severely reprimanded for serving such unmanageable delights when we have company.”

“Everyone has been remarking upon how delicious they are,” she said, taking up her plate again and biting into the remains of the cake.

The cream oozed again, and again she licked it off her lips—looking steadily and defiantly into his eyes as she did so.

Minx!

“The weather has been a bit unsettled lately,” he said with cheerful politeness. “Will it settle eventually to sunshine or to rain, do you suppose?”

R
eggie had not been home for more than three years. Not to his parents' home, anyway. He had seen them several times in the meanwhile, though. They sometimes came to London when he was there, usually during the spring, when he enjoyed socializing with the friends he had made at school and university and with the sons and daughters of his parents' friends, whom he had known all his life. And they often came to stay with him at Willows End, the home and estate that had been unofficially his since his twenty-first birthday.

He liked being there. He loved the house, an old early-Georgian manor, and the park. And he liked pitching in with the work of the farm, getting his hands dirty with soil, acquiring an all-over sweat, pulling calves from distressed cows, shearing sheep. The farm was even turning a modest profit under his management.

But he was back at home in Wiltshire at last. His mother had been rather poorly last winter. Although she was feeling much better by the time spring came, Reggie's father had felt it unwise to take her to London during the spring or to Willows End during the summer. And so Reggie had come to see
them
in the early autumn, after the harvest was done.

It was one of those weeks in October when one would have sworn it was still summer except that there was a different feel to the air and a different look to the sunlight, and the leaves on the trees were beginning to turn yellow.

It was the middle of the afternoon on the third day of his visit, and he was strolling alone and aimlessly about the park, no particular destination in mind as he feasted his eyes on the landscape surrounding him and enjoyed the warmth. He ought to have come before
now despite the fact that he had seen plenty of his parents in other places. This was where he had belonged all his life. It was where his roots were.

Why had he always made excuses to himself
not
to come? He knew the reason, but his mind skirted about it as it always did. Besides, it was a stupid reason. One simply did not fall in love during the course of a single afternoon when one was twenty-one. In
lust
, yes, certainly. But not in
love
.

It had merely been the attraction of the forbidden.

His aimless steps had brought him, he could see, to that narrow stretch of the river he had always called the bridge. Or
had
his direction been aimless? Had he been making his way here all along? He ought not to cross over to the other side. It would be very embarrassing at his age to be caught and escorted off Oakridge land or, worse, hauled up before a magistrate for trespassing.

He crossed anyway and strolled in the direction of the old oak tree. It was strange that they had always met there. Their meetings had not been numerous, though they had spanned many years. He would guess that the total number of times could almost be tallied on the fingers of his two hands with a few toes thrown in. But it
had always been here. He had been eight the first time, twenty-one the last.

He could scarcely believe the evidence of his own eyes. There she was, sitting on the grass beside the river, her knees drawn up to support an open book, her neck and face and the pages shaded by a straw-colored parasol.

He could not even be sure that it
was
she since the parasol half hid her. But he knew it was. Who else could it be? Besides, there was something within him that
felt
it was she.

She had not heard him. Neither had she seen him. He had approached the river from the opposite direction than usual, and there were not enough autumn leaves on the ground yet to crunch beneath his feet.

He considered turning around and going back the way he had come. There was little to be gained from hailing her. He had seen her occasionally in London during the past three spring Seasons. She had made a hugely successful come-out, being both the daughter of the Earl of Havercroft and at least twice as beautiful as her nearest rival. She could have been married a dozen
or more times during those years without moving out of the titled ranks. The fact that she had not married any of her many suitors was an indication that she knew she could be discriminating, that she knew she could wait until she met someone with whom she really wanted to spend the rest of her life.

In three years the gulf between her and Reggie had widened immeasurably—though it had always been impossibly wide.

He had never tried to come face to face with her. Or to speak with her. Or to attract her attention. Occasionally she had seen him. Their eyes had met, held for a few uncomfortable moments, and then broken contact. Sometimes it was she who looked away first, sometimes he.

He took a few steps forward rather than back and rested one shoulder against the tree.

She turned a page.

“Is it a good book?” he asked.

The parasol fell to the grass behind her. Her head turned sharply in his direction, and she stared at him with wide eyes, her eyebrows arched above them in surprise.

Several seconds went by.

“It is a very silly book, actually,” she said. “Samuel Richardson's
Pamela
. Papa said I was never to read it because there are passages in it that are not suitable for a lady's eyes. So of course I had to sneak it out of the library and read it for myself. But it is tedious and extremely silly. Mr. B—deserves to be hanged from the nearest tree by his thumbs, but I have the horrible suspicion that Pamela is going to be stupid enough to marry him.”

“She is,” he said. “They are going to live happily ever after, as rakes and virtuous females invariably do when they marry.”

“Poppycock!” she said.

“You have not a romantic bone in your body,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “I can remember the time when you flatly refused to be a damsel in distress and allow me to rescue you and gallop off with you on my trusty steed.”

“Was I really such a sensible child?” she asked.

The saucy preliminaries over with, they stared at each other again.

“Anna,” he said at last because he really could not think of anything else to say.

“Reggie.”

She closed her book then and set it down on the grass beside her before getting to her feet and coming toward him. She was wearing a pale blue dress and spencer and a pretty little straw bonnet.

“I had not heard you were at home,” she said, gazing at his face as if to memorize his features. “I saw you at the Wellings's ball in the spring. You danced with Miss Stockwood.”

“You must be twenty-one,” he said. “You are dangerously close to being on the shelf, are you not?”

“Perhaps no one will have me,” she said.

“Or perhaps,” he said, “you will have no one. Are you waiting for someone special?”

“Yes,” she smiled ruefully. “It is hard to find such a man. Have you started a search for a wife yet, Reggie? Are you finding it equally difficult?”

“You have never found anyone you can love?” he asked her.

“N—,” she started to shake her head, and then gazed deeper into his eyes and sighed. “Yes. Once.”

He felt, ridiculously, as though she had just stabbed him with a knife.

“It did not work out?” he asked her.

She shook her head.

“He did not love you in return?”

“Oh, no,” she said, smiling. “No, he did not. He was young and carefree and wanted nothing more from me than a stolen kiss. Men are very different from women. And that is my profound observation for
this
year.”

“Did he
steal
a kiss?” he asked, frowning.

“To be honest,” she said, “I did not put up any fight.”

“You
wanted
him to kiss you?” he asked her. “And you
enjoyed
it? You
loved
him?”

“This old friend of yours can be very foolish, Reggie,” she said, and he felt a deep and quite ridiculous depression.

“Well,” he said in sheer self-defense, allowing a slightly mocking smile to lift one corner of his mouth, “this is a blow to my pride, Anna. I thought your
second
kiss, the one given the day after your eighteenth birthday, was the one you would remember for the rest of your life.”

He had the sensation suddenly that he was falling into her eyes, and he became aware just as suddenly that they were welling with unshed tears.

“Oh, Reggie,” she said so softly that he scarcely heard her.

Oh, dash it all!

“To which kiss are you referring?” he asked her.

“I have only been kissed twice,” she said. “I have never allowed any man to kiss more than the back of my hand since that second time. Foolish, is it not?”

He had always found it characteristic of her to speak frankly of things the average male would not reveal even under torture. She was talking of
him
? She had once loved
him
?

She laughed softly and blinked away her tears.

“Oh, you need not look so frightened, silly,” she said. “You only
kissed
me, Reggie. You did not compromise me. I am not going to demand that you do the decent thing and
marry
me. Come, tell me we are still friends even if we scarcely see each other any longer.”

And she held out her right hand to him.

“You
loved
me?” he asked her, ignoring her hand.

“I was a mere
girl
,” she said, laughing. “Of course I loved you. You were handsome and dashing and
everyone
was in love with you.”

“It is past tense, then,” he said as she returned her hand to her side. “Not present tense?”

“Oh, Reggie,” she said, laughing again. “How silly you are!”

Which did not really answer his question, did it?

“Tell me about your home,” she said. “The one your father gave you for your twenty-first birthday. Do you live there at all? Do you like it? Is it attractive? Oh, I know almost nothing about your life as it is now. Do tell me.”

She was smiling brightly—with eyes that were strangely empty. Or guarded. He did not know quite what was wrong with her eyes, but something was.

“Anna,” he said, “do you know why I hurried away that day after kissing you?”

Her smile faded and he could read her eyes at last. They were bleak.

“Of course I do,” she said. “You had proved your point and were afraid that I would misunderstand and start to talk about
feelings
. Men are such cowards about feelings. But you need not have worried. I knew you felt no tender emotions for me. I did not expect them of you.”

“I went away,” he said, “because the situation was hopeless. Utterly. I was the son of a man who made his fortune as a coal merchant and made no secret of his roots despite his ambition to move up the social ladder. You were the daughter of an earl who was very conscious of his superiority over other, ordinary mortals. And in addition to that matter of class, there was the additional fact that our fathers had rubbed each other the wrong way for almost thirty years, that they hated each other with a passion. And I do not even know why I use the past tense. The present tense would do just as well. If one wishes to be theatrical—even Shakespearian—about our situation, one would have to say we were star-crossed lovers. Or would have been if . . . ” His voice trailed away without completing the thought.

Her eyes were huge again.

“We were not lovers,” she said.

“Did you fall in love with me on that day?” he asked her.

“Oh,” she looked away suddenly as though something very interesting was happening in the river. “No. I fell in love with you when I was twelve and you were
fifteen. You had grown at least a foot since I last saw you, and you had become slender rather than skinny, and your face had turned from boyhood toward manhood and every other girl for miles around agreed that you were gorgeous. We
all
fell in love with you that year, Reggie. But I was the lucky one. You were my friend.”