Page 51 of Miss Dashing
“What is the benefit of moving DeWitt to the summer cottage?” She could see the inconvenience of assigning Phillip a cottage mate all too easily.
“I do not trust your lady cousins. Portia is trailing after me like a hound after a bitch in season and watching me from windows and stairways. She is a woman bent on mischief. DeWitt, as my chaperone, has foiled her plans already, I’m sure.”
“I am sorry. Portia has grown worse lately, as her mother has been distracted by other matters.”
“DeGrange? He has to be ten years her junior.”
“He’s also the great-nephew of a marquess and quite solvent. What matters age compared to those consideration?”
“When is your birthday?” Phillip asked as they reached the path through the woods.
“The week after next, as it happens. Yours?”
“October, the fourteenth or fifteenth. I’m never sure. I have to look it up each year in the parish registry and count the years to make sure I know my own age.”
Because he’d had nobody with whom to celebrate his natal day. Hecate stopped and hugged him again. “We’ll remark the occasion this year. Give you some memories to anchor the date on your mental calendar.”
He held her loosely, his arms around her shoulders. “And the week after next, perhaps you’ll be in Crosspatch Corners that I might do the same for you.”
The exchange should have been heartwarming, acknowledging a mutual desire for a shared future, but Hecate was also unsettled by it. To admit of that desire without speaking of matrimony was to admit of a vulnerability, a potential loss. A dream dashed.
Phillip had withdrawn both times when they’d made love. Had that been an insurance policy guaranteeing his freedom, or a courteous attempt to guarantee Hecate’s?
Falling in love with Phillip Vincent is not an investment to be assessed in terms of risk and reward.The warning in Hecate’s head was delivered in her mother’s voice. But then, Mama hadn’t been an expert on marital or romantic success.
“I’ll move DeWitt to the summer cottage with you,” Hecate said when they were strolling over the arched bridge. “Like you, I do not trust Portia, though for all I know, she’ll set her cap for Cousin Johnny, if he deigns to join us.”
“The conquering Canadian is to become Portia’s loyal swain? I will comfort myself with the hope that he and Portia become enamored.”
On the side terrace outside the conservatory, Phillip kissed Hecate farewell, a tantalizing reminder of pleasures shared and pleasure still to come.
“Into the house with you,” Hecate said, stepping back. Far to the east, the sky was acquiring a hint of gray. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”
“My darling lady, do not, for the love of spring lambs, come down to breakfast. Have a damned lie-in. Rest. Linger at your bath. Let the world for once spin forth on its own inertia. You have earned a respite.”
“While you will clear ditches and fell trees and work yourself to exhaustion.”
“The estate isn’t beyond salvaging,” Phillip said. “I’ll do what I can while I’m here, but I will also hope you have a spare key to the summer cottage.”
Hecate did not dare touch him again. “I do. Away with you. I will take a tray for breakfast, but rearranging guest quarters will take some managing.”
Phillip kissed her cheek, bowed, and slipped into the house. Hecate sank onto the wrought-iron chair near the balustrade and contemplated the past few hours.
She was changed—in love, hoping for a future with Phillip, confiding her worries and dreams in him—and she was the same. A glorified house steward expected to keep an entire horde of Bromptons from the River Tick and other sources of scandal.
The old Hecate could obliterate the new Hecate all too easily, and the Bromptons would aid in her destruction. Phillip would fight for her, but he could take the battle only so far. Hecate sought her bed on that thought, her mind awhirl even as fatigue dragged at her.
She was drifting into the nearer reaches of slumber, thoughts washing about in a fog of hope, worry, longing, and pride—she had a lover, andsucha lover—when it occurred to her that Phillip was different.
The pleasure they’d shared had been amazing, a revelation in itself, but Hecate also realized that Phillip had never once alluded to her money as anything other than a means for her family to plague her. Not obliquely, not overtly, not in jest.
He did notseeher money as a marital inducement, and that left her naked in a sense, without camouflage or a protective costume, but alsofree.
Wonderfully free.
Wonderfully, terribly free.
The summer cottage was a bit of heaven, at least to Phillip. He could not answer for DeWitt’s impressions, because that good fellow had taken to collecting a fishing pole and disappearing after breakfast, returning only when the dressing bell rang for supper.
