‘May I ask you a few questions?’ Her tone was softer now, more ladylike as she searched. It better matched the soft shades of her eyes than the scold she’d given him. ‘You can translate the language? You can write it?’
‘Yes. Quite well.’ A hint of defensiveness crept into his tone. Did she think him an entirely ignorant buffoon? His pride stung. For a moment he thought it might be better if she did see his erection. Better that than to think he was illiterate.
‘How did you work with your tutors in the past? Did you read from sheets like the one I had for you this morning?’
‘Yes, we’d read passages out of books.’ He tried to guess where she was going with this. ‘What does that have to do with anything, Miss Welton?’ Now he was feeling defensive on behalf of his instructors. He’d had the best.
‘We won’t be doing that any more. I don’t think it will work for you. If it was going to work, it would have worked by now.’ She tapped her chin thoughtfully with one long finger. ‘I have a hunch, Mr Lashley, that you may suffer from performance anxiety.’
Clearly she had not seen the state of his breeches.
‘Whoa, wait a minute, Miss Welton, I assure you I do not have “performance anxiety”.’ If anything, this morning’s debacle proved just the opposite. He was fully functioning, all right, aroused by a woman he barely knew because she wore a pale-green dress and did gorgeous things with her mouth.
She gave a delicate cough. ‘There are many types of performance anxiety, Mr Lashley. I am not entirely sure what sort of performance anxiety you are referring to, but I am referring to the idea that when you’ve spoken French in the past, you’ve felt as if you were on display or under judgement and it hampered your ability to perform the task.’
Jonathon gave a snort. ‘And you can solve this problem?’ He already feared she couldn’t, through no fault of her own. He wasn’t telling her everything about his apparent disability.
She nodded without hesitation, never suspecting he was holding out on her. ‘Yes, I believe I can. It may require some unorthodox teaching methods.’ Ropes and chairs came to mind unbidden. Perhaps he hadn’t been wrong after all. ‘We won’t be sitting at tables and reading from books.’ Oh, so no ropes and chairs. ‘I believe reading, the presence of visual cues, has been part of the problem. When you read, you see the words, you don’t hear them. You pronounce them as we would in English. While the French may have the same letters in the alphabet as the English, they don’t always have the same sounds. You need to hear the language, not see it. We’ll work from there.’
Jonathon raised a dark brow, in part impressed with her theory, but also doubtful. He really ought to tell her the rest of it. ‘Countless tutors have tried.’ It was unfair to hold back the last piece. It wasn’t that he couldn’t speak French. Only that he couldn’t any more. At one time, he’d been perfectly fluent on all levels; before he’d gone to war, before he’d lost Thomas. Before his life had been put on hold.
‘They haven’t tried my method. Are you willing? We’ll start with simply having you repeat my phrases and then we’ll eventually move on to conversations where you will construct your own responses. We won’t be doing any of this sitting at a table in a stuffy old room. Tomorrow, we’ll walk in the gardens so you might feel more at ease, more natural.’ Ah, the performance anxiety theory again. He had to give her points for trying.
The clock on the mantel chimed. It was one. The lesson was over. ‘Au revoir, Monsieur Lashley. À la prochaine.’
‘Alla pro-shane... Claire.’ Such familiarity was bold of him. His voice hovered over her name, drawing it out as if it were a new discovery. In its way it was precisely that. He couldn’t think of her as Miss Welton any more. Miss Welton belonged to a wallflower of a woman, but this woman, the woman he’d met in the library, had been anything but retiring. This woman had fought for him. Claire Welton was tenacious.
He let his eyes hold hers as if she were a woman he’d met at a ball and found interesting. Something flickered in her eyes and she dropped her gaze first. Apparently tenacity had its limits and while those limits extended to throwing herself in front of doors and saying provocative things like ‘performance anxiety’ and ‘watch my mouth’, it drew the line at returning a man’s extended gaze. It was an interesting dichotomy to be sure. Claire Welton was not all she seemed. She had layers.
He wouldn’t mind peeling them back, not so much like peeling an onion—that just left the onion in a shambles—but like the petals of a rose, where the petals were pulled back not to ruin, but to reveal.
The garden worked well for him, at least. Jonathon was more settled, more focused the next day. Claire noted immediately that the words came more freely for him now that his mind had other things to occupy his attention and he was less aware of being under scrutiny. Claire wished she could say the same for herself. She might have resolved some of his performance anxiety, but she’d not helped her own.
Garden paths weren’t assisting her at all. In her desire to help him relax, she’d overlooked a few potential barriers to her own comfort, namely that the garden held an intimacy the library lacked. There were no dusty books, only the lovely faint scent of her mother’s roses. There were no long tables to enforce distance, instead, they were expected to walk side by side, her hand on his arm out of necessity if not propriety, and they’d been strolling for the better part of an hour.
Be careful what you wish for. She was well aware this was the very thing she’d coveted just a few nights ago in May’s drawing room: to stand beside Jonathon, to place her hand on his arm. She wouldn’t lie. She did revel in the opportunity to be so close to him and for such an extended period of time. But it also made it hard to concentrate on anything not him. Still, she made a fairly good go of it. The garden—le jardin—provided all sorts of conversation starters and vocabulary to practise, from words like l’arbre to sentences like ouvrez la porte.
‘I can imagine what that word looks like on paper.’ Jonathon laughed as they practised the last sentence. ‘Ouvrez. What kind of word is that?’ Today, he was the Jonathon she knew, all laughter and light and easy perfection. Gone was the cold, dangerously exciting man from the library.
‘A French one and don’t imagine it. I think that’s your whole problem. You see the words with English eyes.’ Very attractive eyes, but English none the less.
He smiled, a smile that crinkled those eyes and lit up his face when he looked at her. She felt that smile to her toes. ‘Hopefully, I’ve proved I’m not a complete dolt.’
She heard the search for affirmation in it. How strange to think Jonathon Lashley needed that from her. Everyone adored him. Everyone found him perfect. She returned the smile and gave him the assurance he sought. ‘I never thought you were.’ Far from it, if only he knew. ‘Now that we know we’re going the right direction, it will keep getting better.’
‘Everything depends on it.’ They reached the end of a path, their steps bringing them to the fence on the edge of the property. Jonathon paused as they turned and she sensed the hesitation in him. ‘But you know that, apparently. May I ask how? Yesterday, you mentioned the Vienna posting.’ His dark brows drew together. ‘It’s not something that is widely known, at least not the part where I have to demonstrate oral competence.’
Claire worried her lip. She didn’t have a good explanation for that. She should have been more careful with what she blurted out in the heat of an argument. ‘I did not mean to offend you.’ She’d promised herself she would be good today. She’d been given a second chance—no mopping up spills, no blocking entrances. Nothing unladylike.
‘No,’ he answered quickly. ‘I’m not offended, just surprised that you knew.’
‘The appointment is important to you?’ Claire asked, steering away from directly answering him. She didn’t want to get