‘Exactly,’ she said with an approving smile. ‘You don’t strew your conversation with fatuous, insincere compliments, either, about the lustrous sheen of my hair, or the sparkle in my eyes, without once taking your own gaze higher than my...’ She made a gesture to the front of her coat.
What had she made, then, of the compliments he had paid her? How had she felt when he’d told her she looked magnificent in that gown which had been practically falling off her shoulders?
And hadn’t he told her she had lovely hair and eyes himself? In Bullock’s Museum? ‘Would you prefer it if I didn’t pay you any more compliments, then? I would not wish to make you...uncomfortable.’
She gave him a strange look, then turned her head to regard the shop windows that edged the street through which they were driving.
After a short pause during which he held his breath, she turned back to him. ‘You would not make me uncomfortable, Edmund. Because I know you would never say anything you did not mean.’
‘Never,’ he vowed on a rush of exhaled breath.
She smiled at him. In a way that made his heart turn over, as well as making him long to crush her to his chest and kiss her in such a way that she would know exactly how dashing he could be.
‘Because,’ she continued, ‘we are...friends again, aren’t we?’
‘Friends,’ he echoed.
‘Yes. I...I missed that. This. Very much when we...weren’t. Having someone to talk to.’
‘Talk to.’ Well, that neatly summed up exactly what was wrong between them. While she was thinking of their marriage in terms of having a friend to talk to, he was longing to get his hands on her bare flesh. To sink into that bare flesh. Over and over and over.
‘Yes. The only times that I haven’t been utterly miserable, since I came to London, were the times I spent with you.’
‘But we hardly had a polite word to say to one another.’
‘I know.’ She grinned up at him. ‘You cannot imagine how wonderful it was to just...let go of all the etiquette and be myself.’
‘Hmmm.’ Well, that was something.
‘And you always manage to make me see the funny side of things.’
So now he not only had ink running through his veins, but he was also some sort of clown?
Georgie certainly knew how to cut a man down to size.
‘At least you appear to be reconciled to the notion of marrying me,’ he said.
‘Ye...es...’
‘What is it?’ He turned to study her pensive face, ignoring the lady who was hailing him from a landau bowling along in the opposite direction. Because if Georgie had any doubts, now was the time to quash them. ‘Come now, Georgie, this was the whole point of bringing you out for a drive. So that we could talk to each other. We never had time, did we, before your stepmother burst in upon us, to settle things.’
‘Well, no, and I’m sure you didn’t want to settle things that way, did you? I mean, you had to tell her you were in the process of proposing. It was the only thing to say, wasn’t it? But, um...’
He seized her hand. At last, she’d given him the opening he needed to explain what he’d been planning. ‘Georgie, you cannot imagine I came up to your room with any other motive except to propose?’
‘What? But—’
‘Your stepmother did not coerce me into making a proposal. I simply decided—’ He drew in a short, sharp breath. She’d just made it clear, yet again, what she wanted from marriage. He couldn’t scare her by telling her that her vision of marriage sounded to him like a form of torture. That he didn’t want to be just her friend, he wanted to be her lover.
‘I decided I had to make amends,’ he temporised. ‘For the way I let you down, when you needed me to get you out of having to endure a Season at all. It didn’t take me long to see that your suitors were all making you wretched. That you would be even more miserable if you had to marry any one of them. And I couldn’t bear watching you suffer a moment longer.’
‘So, you decided to...mount a rescue?’
‘Exactly so.’ She still looked confused, so he hastened to explain, ‘I had meant to tell you, at some stage, that should you not find a suitable husband by the end of the Season, that I would agree to enter into the kind of marriage you proposed to me. That day. Your stepmother’s intervention has just brought that, um, event forward.’ He patted her hand.
‘But—’
‘I promised I would always be your friend. And what sort of a friend would I be if I were to stand back and watch you embark on a life of misery?’
‘I...I d-don’t know,’ she said, looking stunned.
‘By then, as well, I had pretty much worked out what happened when I was sent away to St Mary’s. I could see that you were still the same person, basically, as you had always been. Loyal and loving. You could not have broken your word to a lonely boy, sent so far away from home.’
‘No. I didn’t,’ she said indignantly. ‘And I don’t think Stepmama realised just how dreadful it must have been for you. She explained it to me, the other night. The Countess stressed, you see, that she had to turn me into a proper lady. And gave her a whole list of errors into which I’d fallen. She dropped the fact that I should learn that it wasn’t appropriate for a girl to write secretly to a gentleman into the list.’
‘But...my tutor...’
‘Oh, I’m sure he prevented our letters reaching each other at first. Stepmama was a second line of defence. If you had ever managed to smuggle a letter past your guard dog, then she would have intercepted it at the other end.’
‘She is nothing if not efficient.’
‘Which brings me to something I really wanted to ask you about.’
‘What is it?’
‘Your mother’s reaction to the discovery that she has not been able to keep us apart, after all. She must be furious to learn that all her plans came to nothing in the end. Is she? Very angry?’ Georgie shook her head, making the feathers on her bonnet bob wildly. ‘Of course she’s angry. She must be livid.’
‘Not as angry as you might suppose. At least, not by the time I finished with her.’
‘Oh, Edmund,’ she said, her face lighting up. ‘What did you do? What did you say?’
It did something to soothe his wounded sensitivity that she looked up at him with complete trust that he had, in fact, done something.
‘I simply pointed out to her that I was finally doing what she had been urging me to do ever since I came down from Oxford. She has not ceased to remind me of my duty to ensure the continuance of the line. She wastes no opportunity to thrust some eligible female or other under my nose.’
‘Yes, I can understand that she wishes you to marry somebody. But not me. I mean, else why would she go to all that trouble to separate us?’
‘Ah,’ he said, removing his spectacles and reaching for a handkerchief as he considered how best to word the next part of his confession. ‘It turns out,’ he said, polishing his lenses with painstaking care, ‘that her worries on that score were more in the nature of us creating a scandal due to our, or at least your, extreme youth. She did not, in short, want the family name tarnished by an illegitimate child, conceived when you would have been far too young for anyone to credit you knew what you were doing.’
‘What? She really thought that you could...’
He could see her waving her arms about. Fortunately, without his spectacles, he