Someone to Care (Westcott #4)(13)

“You need not say it,” Miss Kingsley said after the vicar’s wife, with gracious smiles and nods for everyone, had declared the fete open. “I heard. And the singing was lovely. They were doing their best.”

“If ever I did something to please you,” he said, “and you told me afterward that I had done my best, I would crawl into the nearest deep hole and sulk for the next fourteen years or so, Miss Kingsley.”

The wind had whipped some color into her cheeks. Even so, he had a strong suspicion that she was blushing. She had thought he was making some risqué remark, then, had she? He had not been, as it happened, but he was perfectly willing to take credit for it. Her eyes were as blue as he remembered them. They had always been one of her finest features—a real blue, not one of the varying shades of gray that often pass for blue.

“I see a booth over there that is positively spilling over with jewels,” he said. “Allow me to escort you.” He offered his arm.

She looked at it before taking it, as though she suspected some sort of trap. He must have touched her before. Of course he had. He had danced with her on more than one occasion. But the touch of her hand on his arm now felt unfamiliar. Light. Neither leaning nor clinging. But it brought her shoulder close to his arm, and her dress brushed against his Hessian boots. It brought the faintly fragrant scent of her to his nostrils. Not too floral, not too spicy. Just right. Perfect for her.

He was glad he had sent André away.

“Absolutely,” she said. “The church congregation must be rescued from being rained upon. Besides, I am partial to sparkling jewels. Let us see if there are any diamonds among them. Large diamonds.”

The former Lady Riverdale being lighthearted? Actually joking? This was intriguing. He raised his eyebrows but made no comment.

There were diamonds and emeralds and rubies and sapphires. There were topazes and garnets. There were silver and gold. And there were pearls. All of them large and sparkling—even the pearls—and perfectly shaped. All of them unutterably vulgar and not even convincing fakes. He decked her out in some of the more ostentatious of them and paid three times what the two flustered ladies who ran the booth asked of him. She glittered and sparkled at ears, bosom, wrists, and fingers—and admired the effect and preened herself under the admiration of the two ladies and the small crowd that had gathered about at a respectful distance to watch. There was a smattering of admiring applause. She thanked him and told him she would have considered the sapphire bracelet too if only she had one more wrist.

“An ankle?” he suggested, looking down toward the hem of her dress.

“Ah, no,” she said. “One would not wish to look overdressed.”

She had set aside at least some of her legendary dignity, it seemed, in favor of something approaching gaiety, and he was enslaved. She did not immediately snatch off the jewelry as soon as they were out of sight of the booth and hide it away in the darkest depths of her reticule. Rather, she kept fingering it and admiring it.

They had their portraits sketched in charcoal by a bearded, wild-haired artist who made Marcel look like a cadaverous devil minus his pitchfork and Miss Kingsley like a moon-faced ghost with a pearl necklace. They bought two iced cakes after the baking had been judged and they had been awarded third prize. They were as hard as granite.

“But very pretty with their twirled icing, you must admit,” she said when he grimaced.

“I might,” he said, “if I did not feel as though every tooth in my head had just snapped in two.”

“But not by the icing,” she said.

“But not by the icing.”

“Well, then . . .”

They watched the wood-sawing contest, in which a group of brawny, sweating young men with shirtsleeves rolled well above the elbow showed off their muscles and their prowess for a gaggle of giggling village maidens—and for the two of them, the visitors, the outsiders. They examined—at least she did—the needlework stall after the judging had been completed, and she bought him a man’s coarse cotton handkerchief, across one corner of which a large L had been embroidered in the midst of curlicues and stemless, leafless blossoms. The handkerchief had not placed among the winners—one fact that impelled her to buy it, he suspected, the other being that the L could stand for Lamarr. She seemed not to know about his marquess’s title.

He bought her a crocheted drawstring bag in a hideous shade of pink—also not a winner—in which to keep all the jeweled finery now bedecking her person.

“I will treasure it all,” she assured him, and he wondered idly if she really would. He considered how long he would keep the handkerchief. He suspected that he would keep it, though he would never use it and thus display it to the shocked eyes of the ton.

They watched and listened to the fiddle contest. He refrained from tapping his foot or clapping his hands in time to the music, as most of the spectators did, but she did not so refrain, he noticed. She appeared to be genuinely enjoying herself. As, strangely enough, was he.

They watched a singing contest for little girls and one boy soprano, who had somehow escaped the dreadful fate of being a member of the church choir, before moving on to watch the archery contest and then to have their fortunes told. He was to expect long life and prosperity and happiness. No surprise there. Did fortune-tellers ever predict anything different? He did not know what she was to expect. She did not tell him.