“You don’t find that strange?” he asked.
“That I don’t dream?” She knew what he’d meant, but for some reason she’d needed to state it out loud.
He nodded.
“No.” Her voice came out flat. But certain. Maybe it was strange, but it was also safe.
He didn’t say anything, but his eyes searched hers with penetrating intensity until she had to look away. He was seeing far too much of her. In less than a week this man had uncovered more of her than she’d revealed to anyone in the past eight years. It was unsettling.
It was dangerous.
Reluctantly she pulled herself from his embrace, stepping just far enough away so that he could not reach out for her. She bent to retrieve her pelisse from where it lay on the grass, and without speaking she refastened it around her shoulders. “The girls will be back soon,” she said, even though she knew that they wouldn’t. It would be at least another quarter of an hour before they returned, probably more.
“Let’s take a stroll, then,” he suggested, offering her his arm.
She eyed him suspiciously.
“Not everything I do is with lascivious intent,” he said with a laugh. “I thought I might show you one of my favorite places here at Whipple Hill.” As she placed her hand on his arm he added, “We’re only a quarter mile or so from the lake.”
“Is it stocked?” she asked. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone fishing, but oh, how she had enjoyed it as a child. She and Charlotte had been the bane of their mother, who had wanted them to pursue more feminine activities. Which they had, eventually. But even after Anne had become obsessed with frocks and gowns and keeping tally of every single time an eligible gentleman glanced at an eligible young lady . . .
She’d still loved to go fishing. She’d even been happy to do the gutting and cleaning. And of course the eating. One could not understate the satisfaction to be found in catching one’s own food.
“It should be stocked,” Lord Winstead said. “It always was before I left, and I would not think that my steward would have had cause to change the directive.” Her eyes must have been shining with delight, for he smiled indulgently and asked, “Do you like to fish, then?”
“Oh, very much so,” she said with a wistful sigh. “When I was a child . . .” But she did not finish her sentence. She’d forgotten that she did not speak of her childhood.
But if he was curious—and she was quite certain he must be—he did not show it. As they walked down the gentle slope toward a leafy stand of trees, he said only, “I loved to fish as a child, too. I came all the time with Marcus—Lord Chatteris,” he added, since of course she was not on a first-name basis with the earl.
Anne took in the landscape around her. It was a glorious spring day, and there seemed a hundred different shades of green rippling along the leaves and grass. The world felt terribly new, and deceptively hopeful. “Did Lord Chatteris visit often as a child?” she asked, eager to keep the conversation on benign matters.
“Constantly,” Lord Winstead replied. “Or at least every school holiday. By the time we were thirteen I don’t know that I ever came home without him.” They walked a bit more, then he reached out to pluck a low-hanging leaf. He looked at it, frowned, then finally set it aloft with a little flick of his fingers. It went spiraling through the air, and something about the fluttery motion must have been mesmerizing, because they both stopped walking to watch it make its way back down to the grass.
And then, as if the moment had never happened, Lord Winstead quietly picked up the conversation where it had been left off. “Marcus has no family to speak of. No siblings, and his mother died when he was quite young.”
“What about his father?”
“Oh, he hardly spoke to him,” Lord Winstead replied. But he said it with such nonchalance, as if there was nothing at all peculiar about a father and son who did not speak. It was rather unlike him, Anne thought. Not uncaring, precisely, but . . . Well, she didn’t know what it was, except that it surprised her. And then she was surprised that she knew him well enough to notice such a thing.
Surprised and perhaps a little bit alarmed, because she shouldn’t know him so well. It was not her place, and such a connection could lead only to heartbreak. She knew that, and so should he.
“Were they estranged?” she asked, still curious about Lord Chatteris. She had only met the earl once, and briefly at that, but it seemed they had something in common.