Page 46 of Miss Dramatic
Rose preceded him, and Gavin waited a moment to join her.Steady on, you. No rushing fences or shying at imaginary rabbits.
“This is cozy,” Rose said, hanging her cloak and hat on a peg on the back of the door. “Who left the lantern?”
“I did, and I packed the hamper. This afternoon was half day at the Hall, so I had some room to maneuver in the kitchen and pantries. You are sworn to secrecy.”
“Dane maneuvered in the kitchen and pantries at will.”
While Rose had likely respected the privacy of her staff. “Did he try to maneuver with the women in his employ?”
“I assume so, but they were all local women and more than capable of putting him in his place. I don’t want to talk about him, to be honest.”
“I don’t want to talk about how precisely an orchard should be harvested, but it’s a topic I’m well advised to cover at least once thoroughly. Were you trying to play Dane false in memory with me up in Derbyshire?”
Rose settled on the bench at the back of the structure, facing the river. “Oh, probably, or that’s how I started out. Getting back on the horse, hoping for a better ride. Also…”
Gavin took the place beside her. “Also feeling frisky? Ready to exercise the womanly humors?”
“There aren’t any such things as womanly humors.”
He nudged her, shoulder to shoulder. “In your case, I beg to differ. You can be ferocious, Rose Roberts. I adore that about you.” Ferocious in bed, despite all the bland pleasantries she could manufacture by the hour over a formal supper.
Despite the subdued fashions, the demure coiffures, the lack of flashy jewels. Rose Roberts in the flesh was a one-woman tempest of passion.
“If I was ferocious on certain occasions, I was provoked.” She nudged him back. “I love that sound, rain upon water. I never heard it in London. There, it was rain on cobbles, rain on tin roofs, rain on mud. Never rain on leaves and rivers and the good earth.”
He looped an arm around her shoulders. “I don’t mind London, in small doses. Drury Lane alone excuses much else about the capital.”
“The shops,” Rose said. “I went a bit mad in the perfumeries with sachets and soaps. Madder. Widowhood delivers a blow to the nerves.”
Marriage had dealt her nerves plenty of blows before that, in Gavin’s estimation. “Tell me the worst thing, the worst blow.”
Rose kissed his knuckles. “This is not a gazebo, it’s a confessional.”
“I’ll go first, then, and you can be inspired by my example.” He sorted through his inventory of heartaches, a modest list, but weighty enough if he allowed it to be.
“The worst thing about coming home was knowing I would never again be plain Master Gavin. I’d gone off and seen the world without permission, and that was a betrayal of not only my family, but of the whole village. I’m banished now, to manners and propriety. Everybody is still friendly, still fond of me, but I occupy a different place, and I’m lonely here in a different way.”
“You were lonely before?”
“Terribly. No brothers, no cousins—half of Crosspatch is related to the other half—no real friends because I was neither village boy nor gentry born and bred. Phillip was kind to me, but he’s solitary by nature, or he was until Miss Brompton got him by the ear.”
“She has him by the heart.”
And a few other parts. “In any case, I retreated to literature in the grand English tradition, and that led to plays. By the time I was finally turned loose for a few terms at public school, I had pretty much memorized all of Shakespeare, and university was just an excuse to expand my repertoire.”
“And you trotted out your quotes like the obnoxious sprig you were?”
“My sisters took to mimicking me, and I learned from their examples. Pause here, look at the audience there, pace a little faster with the second couplet, then slow down. Drysdale often rehearses in front of a mirror. I had no need of a mirror with my sisters to mock me.”
The memories were painful now, when he hadn’t allowed them to be before. Nobody had meant any harm, but harm had been done. Home had become ever so slightly hostile to tender masculine pride, and that had set a process in motion that ended with leaving Crosspatch altogether.
Retreating still further into literature and plays.
“Dane mocked me,” Rose said, shifting to lay her head against Gavin’s thigh. “Minced about fretting in a falsetto about pin money and quince jellies and wheat fields flattened by hail. His favorite sobriquet for me was Miss Dramatic.”
“You should have flattened him.” Gavin trailed his fingers through her silky hair and along the sweet curve of her jaw. She enjoyed having her ears stroked, like a hound, and he made so bold as to indulge her. She sighed, and another weight lifted—this time from his heart.
“The drink did that,” she said. “Flattened him. You asked for the worst memory… Have you ever tried to impress a lady with your lovemaking when you were drunk?”
