Really, the emotion had a great deal to recommend it.
“Good evening,” she said, a silly grin on her face.
“Good evening to you.”
“Have you been waiting long?”
“Just a moment or two. You’re quite fantastically prompt.”
“I don’t believe in keeping people waiting,” she said. She leaned forward, and almost had enough courage to lick her lips. “Unless they deserve punishment.”
That seemed to intrigue him. He edged farther out his window, too, until they were both hanging just a little bit too far out. He looked as if he were going to speak, but then some devil must have overtaken him, because he burst out laughing.
And then she did, too.
And they were both just…giggling, really, until they had tears in their eyes.
“Oh my,” Olivia gasped. “Do you think that perhaps…sometime…we ought to have some sort of proper meeting?”
He wiped his eyes. “Proper?”
“Like at a dance.”
“We’ve already danced,” he told her.
“Only once, and you didn’t like me then.”
“You didn’t like me, either,” he reminded her.
“You didn’t like me more.”
He thought about that, then nodded. “That’s true.”
Olivia winced. “I was rather horrid, wasn’t I?”
“Well, yes,” he admitted, rather quickly, too.
“You’re not supposed to agree with me.”
He grinned. “It’s good that you can be horrid when necessary. It’s a useful skill.”
She leaned on her elbow, settling her chin onto her hand. “Funny, my brothers never seemed to think so.”
“Brothers are like that.”
“Were you?”
“Me? Never. I encouraged it, actually. The more horridly my sister behaved, the more opportunity there was to watch her get in a great deal of trouble.”
“You’re very crafty,” she murmured.
He answered with a shrug.
“I’m still curious,” she said, refusing to allow a change of topic. “How is it useful to know how to be horrid?”
“That is a very good question,” he said solemnly.
“You haven’t an answer, have you?”
“I have not,” he admitted.
“I could be an actress,” she suggested.
“And lose your respectability?”
“A spy, then.”
“Even worse,” he said, with great firmness.
“You don’t think I could be a spy?” She was being an utter flirt, but she was having far too much fun to hold back. “Surely England could have used someone like me. I should have had the war tidied up in no time.”
“Of that I have no doubt,” he said, and strangely enough, he sounded as if he might have meant it.
But something made her pull back. She was being too playful, about a topic that wanted no humor. “I should not joke about such things,” she said.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Sometimes one has to.”
She wondered what he had seen, what he had done. He’d been in the army for many years. It could not all have been regiment parades and girls swooning over uniforms. He would have fought. Marched. Killed.
It was almost impossible to imagine. He rode superbly, and after this afternoon, she had firsthand knowledge of his strength and power, but still, she somehow saw him as more cerebral than athletic. Perhaps it was all those afternoons she’d seen him bent over papers at his desk, his quill moving swiftly across the page.
“What do you do in there?” she asked.
“What?”
She motioned toward him. “In your office. You spend a great deal of time at your desk.”
He hesitated, then said, “This and that. Translations, mostly.”
“Translations?” Her mouth opened with surprise. “Really?”
He shifted position, looking, for the first time that evening, a little bit uncomfortable. “I told you I spoke French.”
“I had no idea you did so so well.”
He shrugged modestly. “I was on the Continent for many years.”
Translations. Good heavens, he was even more clever than she’d thought. She hoped she could keep up. She thought she could; she liked to think she was a great deal more intelligent than most people considered her. It was because she didn’t feign interest in every topic that crossed her path. And she didn’t bother to pursue topics or activities at which she had no aptitude.
It was how any sensible person would behave.
In her opinion.
“Is it very different,” she asked, “translating?”
He cocked his head to the side.
“As opposed to just speaking,” she clarified. “I can’t manage anything but English, so I really wouldn’t know.”
“It’s quite different,” he confirmed. “I don’t really know how to explain it. One is…unconscious. The other almost mathematical.”
“Mathematical?”
He almost looked sheepish. “I told you I didn’t know how to explain it.”
“No,” she said thoughtfully, “I think it might make sense. You have to fit together pieces of a puzzle.”
“It’s a bit like that.”
“I like puzzles.” She paused for a moment, then added, “Oh, but I hate maths.”
“It’s the same thing,” he told her.
“No. It’s not.”
“If you can say that you must have had very poor teachers.”
“That goes without saying. I ran off five governesses, if you recall.”
He smiled at her, slow and warm, and she tingled inside. If someone had told her just this morning that talk of maths and puzzles would make her shiver with delight, she’d have laughed her head right off. But now, looking at him, all she wanted was to reach out, to float across the space between them, and settle into his arms.
This was madness.
And bliss.
“I should let you go,” he said.
“Where?” She sighed.
He chuckled. “Wherever you need to go.”
To you, she wanted to say. Instead she placed her hand on her window, getting ready to pull it shut. “Shall we meet at the same time tomorrow evening?”
He bowed, and her breath caught. There was something so graceful about his movements, almost as if he were a medieval courtier, and she, his princess in a tower.
“It would be my honor,” he said.
That night, when Olivia crawled into bed, she was still smiling.
Yes, love had a great deal to recommend it.
A week later, Harry was sitting at his desk, staring at a blank piece of paper.
Not that he had any intention of writing anything down. But he tended to do his best thinking at his desk, with a piece of paper laid squarely in the middle of his blotter. And so, after he’d lain in his bed, making a remarkably thorough study of his ceiling as he tried in vain to figure out the best way to propose marriage to Olivia, he’d moved here, hoping for inspiration.
It was not striking.
“Harry?”
He looked up, grateful for the interruption. It was Edward, standing in the doorway.
“You’d asked me to remind you when it was time to begin getting ready,” Edward said.