Page 44 of Earl for the Summer
“You do look a bit different though,” Marigold Bridewell opined as she looked at Julian and then Cassian. “It’s a wonder no one noticed.”
“Someone did,” Cassian said, then turned a glance toward the lady at his elbow, whose jasmine scent booth soothed him and drove him slightly mad.
She shot him a self-satisfied look. “Yes,” she whispered, “someone did.”
CHAPTER 10
Daphne was too anxious to sleep or even try. So she slipped from her guest bedchamber and headed out into the night air, needing to breathe, needing to escape the awkwardness of being under the same roof as Cassian Rourke after a strained dinner with the Rourke twins and her family.
Cassian had watched her, and she couldn’t resist sneaking glimpses of him too. But his brother had been the one to truly hold court. He was as amiable as she recalled from those early days of the Season. And though Griffin had initially seemed quite irked by the brothers’ deception, by dessert, it seemed as if Lord Windham had won him over again.
She’d hoped she and Cassian might have found a moment to speak after dinner, but he’d been drawn away to the billiards room with his brother and Griffin, while her sisters all gathered in the drawing room.
Once back in her chamber, she’d even entertained the foolish hope that he might come to her room. That moment in the library had been as charged as every other encounter between them, and it made her imagine he might have regretted how things ended in London.
He felt what she did. She knew it. And despite the farce he’d participated in for his brother, she’d always known—even when she was furious with him—that he was nothing like that other man who’d deceived her.
When Cassian told her all that had passed between them had been real, she hadn’t just believed him, she’d known it in her heart. She’d felt it in those moments, even when it caused her to be racked with guilt over what she thought was a betrayal of Selina.
Yet her feelings persisted, real and rooted, even if inconvenient.
None of this felt like the simple infatuation with Moreland.
Cassian Rourke stirred something much deeper. More than mere attraction. She didn’t even truly understand it, but she didn’t want to walk away from it either. Most of all, she didn’t wanthimto walk away before they’d barely begun to express their feelings. And certainly not over a misguided notion that she was some perfect creature deserving of a paragon.
She wasn’t perfect, and she certainly couldn’t love a man who was. Good grief, it sounded terrifyingly boring.
Now, striding out into the gardens, all she wanted was to speak to Cassian—to touch him, to kiss him, to get him to tell her why he was so determined that he was not good enough for her.
What she found instead was a sad state of affairs.
For a Palladian-style county house like Hillcrest Manor, its gardens failed to match its grandeur. Though there were signs that it once had. An ornate conservatory that appeared to have been abandoned stood a short distance from the manor house, and the beds of the main garden were arranged in a geometric regularity that indicated some designer had taken care with their layout. Yet many of the rows now stood fallow. Only a simple, neatly clipped hedge maze and smaller boxwood hedges thatgave the garden its shape seemed to be maintained by Hillcrest’s gardener.
Though there were no lanterns lit in the garden, the moon was high and bright in a cloudless sky and she easily made her way along the garden’s rows.
A fountain with Aphrodite atop a shell at its center stood at the far edge of the garden path. It looked as if it might have once spouted water, but now it was simply a still pool with water collected in its large basin beneath the statute.
Daphne perched at the edge and looked up at the sky, wishing she’d taken time to study astronomy so she might know which constellations she gazed upon. Hyacinth would know. She was fascinated with the phases of the moon and how they affected the sea and its tides.
“I had a feeling I’d find you out here.”
At Cassian’s voice, warmth rushed into Daphne’s chest.
“Am I that predictable?” She looked over at him, and her breath tangled in her throat.
He’d shed his coat, waistcoat, and neckcloth and wore only his black evening trousers and the suit’s white shirt, now unbuttoned at the throat.
She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off that shadowed spot at the base of his throat.
“You must be disappointed,” he said as he approached, then tipped a glance over his shoulder at the all-but-barren garden.
“It is rather sad. Does your brother not favor a flourishing garden?”
He joined her on the fountain’s edge, settling within arm’s reach. “He doesn’t. I think it reminds him too much of our mother. She’s the one who made it a thing of beauty.”
“Did she choose this fountain?”
He looked up at the voluptuous marble goddess above them. “My grandmother did. She arranged for the design of all of this.”
