Page 42 of Stealing the Rake's Heart
“Wait.”
He glanced back, an expression of hope flitting across his face. Abigail drew in a breath.
“Do you think I’m a dull wallflower, Lord Donovan?”
His eyebrows raised. “What a question. Do you consider yourself dull?”
“I do not, but then, I’m used to feeling inferior around my sister. She’s very pretty, you know. Pretty and interesting.”
“I see. Well, for what it is worth, Miss Atwater, I do not think you’re dull. Reserved, perhaps, and for some people that means you are a wallflower, but never dull.”
She smiled weakly at that. “Thank you, Lord Donovan.”
He nodded wordlessly, and then carried on down the hill. Abigail watched him go. Lady Diana’s figure had already disappeared. No doubt the awful woman would try something else to get back at Abigail.
“It’s a compliment, really,” she said aloud. “A woman like that thinking that I am a rival.”
Lucy eyed her. “You don’t do yourself credit, Miss Atwater.”
Abigail shrugged, and turned to follow her path.
There was a little winding paved road which led out of the maze. Abruptly, Abigail found herself in a very different sort of garden.
The roses were almost wild, higher than her head, a tangle of stems and leaves and long, brown thorns. And blooms of course, blooms of all colours and sizes. The air was full of the scent of them, thick and sweet. Abigail paused at the entrance to the rose garden, breathing in deeply. It was like another maze, but notably wilder and more complex than the manicured hedges behind them.
“Careful we don’t get lost in here, Miss Atwater,” Lucy remarked, eyeing the roses with dislike. “I don’t fancy pushing my way through rosebushes to get out again.”
“We’ll be fine, I’m sure,” Abigail said, and walked forward.
The path twisted and turned, forking and diverging and circling back on itself, and frankly she found it far more interesting than the so-called maze behind them. In places, the bushes towered a foot or so higher than she was, or more. The bushes seemed to be arranged more or less by colour – yellow roses along one stretch, then red, then pink, then white, and back again.
“I love wild flowers but those roses seem wild and I adore them, don’t you?”
“I prefer a nice bunch of wildflowers myself, Miss,” Lucy remarked heavily. “Although these are a nicer lot than the usual hothouse flowers ladies often get.”
Abigail stopped by a particularly perfect-looking bush. The roses growing from it were red. Although a red rose may be cliched, there is certainly something to be appreciated about these particular blooms.
Perfect, velvety petals curled out from a tight bud at the centre, impossibly soft and smelling so sweet that Abigail simplyhadto stop and smell it. It bowed forward at eye height, the red so vivid it made a person look twice.
Abigail reached out tentatively, drawing a fingertip across the petals. Leaning forward, she breathed in the perfume.
So soft.
“Flowers like this make me wish I could paint,” she remarked idly. “But I never capture the colour, or even the…”
Before she could finish the sentence, Lord Alexander Willenshire came hurrying around the corner at a half-run, knocking into Abigail with his full momentum and sending her tumbling backwards with a strangled, undignified squawk of alarm, arms wind-milling in a most unladylike manner.
Chapter Twelve
Alexander was not expecting anybody in the rose gardens. People tended to find them a little too wild, not as manicured and perfect as a proper estate should keep its flowers. Besides, there was the hill to tackle, anyway.
He carried the flowers he’d selected for his apology bouquet to his mother in a basket on his arm. She loved roses. When he was younger, Alexander had always believed that their father had planted the huge, half-wild, Willenshire roses up on the hill for his wife.
He was wrong about that, of course. The roses had been there for generations, and had they not been “traditional”, it was likely that the old Duke would have had them uprooted altogether and replaced by a folly on top of the hill.
I slept in,Alexander chastised himself. He’d planned to have the bouquet ready before breakfast, but now he’d have to settle for getting it ready before luncheon.
She’ll forgive me,he thought with a pang.Far more easily than I should be forgiven, though.
