Page 33 of Miss Dramatic
“Hmm?” She took aim, let the weight of the mallet amplify her backswing, and—
“I want to kiss you.”
The mallet connected with a gratifying whack. The ball flew past its intended mark and barreled through the tall privet marking the boundary of the yard. Rose watched her trial shot disappear and desperately hoped—and feared—she’d heard aright.
“Say something,” Gavin muttered.
“Let’s find the blasted thing lest it roll all the way down to the Twid.” She marched off in search of her lost ball.
Gavin, swinging his mallet, followed after.
ChapterEight
I want to kiss you.What sort of opening line was that? A fresh start should be characterized by honesty and decorum. Gavin’s mouth was apparently fixed on the honesty part at the expense of the decorum.
For the benefit of any maids and footmen lingering at the windows, he ambled in Rose’s wake, exuding the nonchalance of a man humoring a lady at her diversions.
Rose disappeared around the end of the privet hedge, her mallet propped on her shoulder.
Her walk gave away nothing. She always moved with a certain confidence, a brisk sense of intention that put Gavin in mind of generals before battle and hostesses before a ball.
She could kiss with the same sense of purpose. “We can pretend I did not just say that.” He came around the end of the hedge and began poking about the greenery. The ball might have hit a root and bounced anywhere.
“I am much less tolerant of pretending than I used to be.” Rose jabbed at the hedge a few yards away. “Do you resent this longing to kiss me, or are you hoping I will resent it for you?”
Poke, jab.Swat.
Gavin spied the ball, sitting innocently in plain sight ten feet behind where Rose was menacing the shrubbery.
“I am hoping that we can be truthful with one another.” He pretended to search for the ball, because the hedge afforded them privacy, and if nothing else, this ridiculous conversation should be private. “I spent half of supper trying not to watch you slip a spoon between your lips and the other half hoping you’d take another bite of your tart.”
“Where in blazes could that ball have got off to?”
Gavin moved along the hedge a few feet in Rose’s direction. “We’ll find it, though it’s no great loss if we don’t. I take it my sentiments are not reciprocated.”
Rose shifted her search by two yards. “What sentiments? Desire is not a sentiment. It’s a… a physical business, like hunger or fatigue. It’s not supposed to mean anything.”
Gavin peered through a thinning in the hedge. The supper gathering was breaking up, the guests wandering into the garden or down to the towpath.
“Did your husband tell you that desire was like scratching an itch? Like sneezing?”
The hedge suffered a particularly energetic jab. “Perhaps for him it was. We’re losing the light, and the footmen will not thank us for adding to their duties in the morning.”
Gavin closed the distance between them. “Rose, for me it’s not like scratching an itch. When I say I want to kiss you, that is a wish of the heart, not simply of the body. I’ve missed you. If we are making a fresh start, you need to know that. I can play the part of Mr. DeWitt, your new acquaintance, but between the two of us, I want there to be honesty.”
She left off abusing the hedge and studied him in the waning light, then brushed his hair back from his brow. A tidying rather than a caress. “There it is.” She dodged around him and fetched the ball. “I gave it a good, hard whack, didn’t I?”
“A veritable drubbing.” As Gavin’s nerves were taking a drubbing.
Rose set her mallet down next to the ball. “I want to kiss you too, Gavin DeWitt. This… this… preoccupation is not consistent with my plans. I had intended to stay good and disappointed in you, to put you in your place at least once a day, and then forget you.”
Put him in his place for refusing her coin? Her words bewildered him, but he’d ponder them later. “I had intended to be civil, dignified, and indifferent,” he said. “I find I cannotbeindifferent to you… Not for all the leading roles on Drury Lane could I be indifferent to you.”
She took his mallet and laid it in the grass. “If we yield to these feelings, it can’t be like before, Gavin.”
“Then you have them, too—the feelings?”
She grimaced. “It’s as if the feelings have me. I didn’t know you as well as I thought I did in Derbyshire, though of course, how could I? I made assumptions. I don’t want to err like that this time. If we choose to enjoy each other’s company now, we do so without expectations or conditions.”
