“Do you feel the doctor ought to be sent for tonight?” he asked.
“I’m not so worried that I don’t think it could wait until morning.” She squeezed his hands and even smiled a little, though not quite enough for her dimple to reappear. “Thank you for this. I just knew you’d help me, but I felt guilty asking, seeing as your family burdens you so much with demands on your time and energy.”
“There is a great difference between you asking me if I will help you and my family’s unwavering requirement that I help them.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying I should be more demanding?”
She had the most uncanny ability to bring him right to the brink of laughter. Not many people did.
“Are you not allowed to laugh, Dubhán Seymour?” she asked, much to his surprise. It was almost as if she had read his thoughts. “You assume a look now and then that I can describe only as ‘inclined to laugh but not permitted to.’”
She was sorting him rather easily, wasn’t she? He liked that she seemed so interested in doing so. “I don’t laugh out loud very often. It has never been in my nature to do so.”
“But you aren’t unhappy, are you?” She seemed to genuinely want him to be happy.
“I am not any more unhappy than anyone else.”
With a soft smile, she asked, “Are you happy right now?”
He was with her again, seeing her smile, holding her hands. “Right now, I am decidedly happy.”
Then Eve did something he never thought he’d see from the lively Irishwoman: She blushed. And that blush set his heart racing and his mind back to their final evening in the inn.
He brushed his free hand along her cheek, mesmerized, as always, by her expressive silvery eyes. She slid closer but with the air of one who didn’t realize she’d moved. They were drawn to each other; there was no denying that.
And her lips were as tempting as ever.
But before he could so much as lean closer to her, voices echoed in the corridor. Eve stepped back, her hands dropping free of his.
“This could be difficult to explain,” she whispered.
While theirs wasn’t a truly inappropriate arrangement, provided his inclination to kiss her was not inadvertently revealed, explaining the reason for their private conversation would be difficult without revealing the secrets she’d been sworn to keep.
He motioned her over to the wall the door was on. They stood side by side, their backs pressed against the wall. They wouldn’t be spotted unless someone stepped inside and peeked around the door.
“But musical magic, of all things?” Grandmother’s disparaging tones could not be mistaken. “Surely we could spend our evening in a more sophisticated manner.”
“This gathering is for the young people,” Aunt Penelope replied as calm and even as ever, though Duke knew well the telltale sounds of tension in her voice. “It’s for them to choose the evening’s entertainment.”
“You would relegate your duties as hostess to a child?” Grandmother was likely wrinkling her nose the way she so often did.
“Mrs. Jonquil is not a child. She is perfectly capable—”
“How very like you, Penelope.” That was Father, which meant the discussion in the corridor might soon be a full row.
Duke glanced at Eve, hoping she wasn’t as horrified as he feared she would be. She was concentrating, but for once, he couldn’t read her expression in the least.
“And just what is it you mean by that?” Aunt Penelope asked.
“Finding ways to benefit from the efforts of others,” Father said. “The horses you snatched away from Ballycar, your greediness regarding Fairfield, now this.”
“The horses I brought here were mine,” Aunt Penelope said tightly. “Fairfield was always mine. And this house party is not about you, Liam. Neither is it about you, Mother. Nor myself or Niles.”
“Then, what, pray tell,isit about?” Grandmother asked haughtily.
“For the first time since Colm returned from war, he has a group of friends he is at ease with, who accept himashimself. And he has brought them here, something he hasn’t done since joining the army. And when he is with them, I see less of the hardened soldier and more of my Colm. If these young people want to play musical magic or move all or any other game you two consider beneath you, they will have free rein to do so.”
“Colm is a war hero,” Grandmother said. “He doesn’t need childish—”