The Lady Always Wins(8)

“They’re cutting your tulips,” he said. “Why are they bloo—I mean, why are they cutting your tulips?”

Ginny sighed. She didn’t want to have this conversation. “Because Mr. Redright is paying me twenty pounds for them.”

“But—”

“Maybe twenty pounds is nothing to a man with diamond cuff links, but it’s a great deal to me at the moment.”

He scowled. “God, Ginny, I—”

“Don’t worry about me.” She patted his hand. “I’m just showing my foolhardy Barrett blood after all these years.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I hate it when you talk that way about yourself. I hated it when my parents did it. I hated it when anyone else did it. So you weren’t as well-off as my people. What does that matter?”

He had always been hotheaded and ill-mannered. Her other friends had never been able to understand why she enjoyed his company. But the other side of his total disregard for etiquette had been an utter indifference to the disparity in their stations.

True, he’d never treated her like a lady. He’d treated her like an equal instead, and that had seemed far more precious.

“Simon,” she said slowly, “I was—I am—a Barrett.”

“So?”

“So, we’re not just polite folk who quietly run a little out-of-pocket from time to time. Barretts are the most foolish of any fools who have ever had pretensions to gentility. Just look around us.” She spun, indicating the acres of tulips. “Where do you think these came from?”

“I have no idea. I really don’t care. I thought they grew because your aunt liked them.”

Ginny let out a shuddering laugh. “Two acres of tulips? No. They’ve been here for centuries. Old Farwell Barrett was a modest tradesman who thought to make his fortune on one simple gamble. So he sold his fine home, and a good bit of land beside. He sunk the entirety of his funds into an investment that—he was sure—could not lose: tulip bulbs. Which, at the time, were selling for an ungodly sum of money, the price going up on a daily basis.” She laughed again, and wished she could feel the humor. “Six weeks later, everyone realized how ridiculous it was to go mad over tulips, and the price plummeted. In a fit of pique, he planted every one of those bulbs here. And that is why the cottage is called Barrett’s Folly.”

“Hm,” he said, sounding unconvinced.

“Marrying you would have been the sort of thing that a mad Barrett would do. Trading on hope and delusions. If I had married you, your parents would have been right about me. I’d have been a foolish, impecunious schemer, just like my forebears. I told you I wouldn’t marry a poor man.”

He leaned forward and touched one finger to her chin. “And what do you think of me now, then?”

“You’re every bit as bad as you were before.”

“Yes, but…”

“If I had somehow missed your fashionable hat and your cunning cuff links, I would have noticed your pronouncement yesterday. Also, I do read the newspapers, and from time to time they make comments about wealthy, eligible bachelors. Come, Simon. You did not use to be so gauche as to wear jewels simply to impress a woman.”

He colored faintly, but leaned in. “Maybe it’s because nothing else about me ever impressed you enough.”

Even after seven years, Ginny recognized that this was one of those things that Simon said, hoping to be contradicted. So she simply furrowed her brow. “True.”

His eyes narrowed and he started toward her. “Why, you little baggage. I ought to—”

She shook one finger at him. “You’ve only got two days, Simon. You can’t afford to waste a single hour remonstrating with me.”

He didn’t stop. Instead, he took her arms and pulled her close. “And what did you think I was threatening to do?” Her belly fluttered. He reached up and set his thumb against her lips. “I know all too well I can’t argue with you. You’d never admit it when I won.”

“That’s not true.”

“All I can say is that you are not a mad Barrett. You are the most—”

“I am mad,” Ginny told him. “I am just like them. Oh, God, Simon. These last weeks… I’m selling my tulips, that’s how close things have come.”

His arm settled around her and he pulled her close. “Shh,” he said. “Shh. It will all come out right.”

“I know that,” Ginny said, her voice muffled by his chest. “I know that now. But for a while there, before you came… You have no idea how much I risked. It was close. I thought I might have to sell Barrett’s Folly, too.”

It was the height of foolishness to let him hold her. To let the warmth of his arms come around her and to draw strength from him. But then, for all the pain that he’d caused her once, he’d also been her best friend. Her only true confidant. There had been a time when his embrace would have healed any wound. They’d had games and they’d had Simon’s brash arrogance. But she’d loved him most for this—for this certainty that everything would come out right, so long as he was near. She’d missed him.

He gently stepped away from her. “We haven’t come to the oak yet,” he said. “I’m on a schedule. I’m not supposed to kiss you until we reach the oak.”