A Night Like This (Smythe-Smith Quartet #2)(45)

Not to mention that it was a topic in which she seemed to have great interest.
“My mother’s eyes are also blue,” he said, “but a darker shade. Not as dark as yours—” He turned his head, looking at her quite intently. “But I have to say, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen eyes quite like yours. They almost look violet.” His head tilted the tiniest bit to the side. “But they don’t. They’re still blue.”
Anne smiled and looked away. She’d always been proud of her eyes. It was the one vanity she still allowed herself. “From far away they look brown,” she said.
“All the more reason to cherish the time one spends in close proximity,” he murmured.
Her breath caught and she stole a glance at him, but he was no longer looking at her. Instead he was motioning ahead with his free arm, saying, “Can you see the lake? Just through those trees.”
Anne craned her neck just enough to catch a silvery glint peeking between the tree trunks.
“In the winter you can see it quite well, but once the leaves come out, it’s obscured.”
“It’s beautiful,” Anne said sincerely. Even now, unable to see most of the water, it was idyllic. “Does it get warm enough to swim in?”
“Not on purpose, but every member of my family has managed to be submerged at one point or another.”
Anne felt a laugh tickle her lips. “Oh, dear.”
“Some of us more than once,” Lord Winstead said sheepishly.
She looked over at him, and he looked so adorably boyish that she quite simply lost her breath. What would her life have been if she had met him instead of George Chervil when she was sixteen? Or if not him (since she could never have married an earl, even as Annelise Shawcross), then someone just like him. Someone named Daniel Smythe, or Daniel Smith. But he would have been Daniel. Her Daniel.
He would have been heir to a baronetcy, or heir to nothing at all, just a common country squire with a snug and comfortable home, ten acres of land, and a pack of lazy hounds.
And she would have loved it. Every last mundane moment.
Had she really once craved excitement? At sixteen she’d thought she wanted to come to London and go to the theater, and the opera, and every party for which she was issued an invitation. A dashing young matron—that’s what she had told Charlotte she wanted to be.
But that had been the folly of youth. Surely, even if she had married a man who would whisk her off to the capital and immerse her in the glittering life of the ton . . . Surely she would have tired of it all and wanted to return to Northumberland, where the clocks seemed to tick more slowly, and the air turned gray with fog instead of soot.
All the things she had learned, she had learned too late.
“Shall we go fishing this week?” he asked as they came to the shore of the lake.
“Oh, I should love that above all things.” The words rushed from her lips in a happy flurry. “We’ll have to bring the girls, of course.”
“Of course,” he murmured, the perfect gentleman.
For some time they stood in silence. Anne could have remained there all day, staring out at the still, smooth water. Every now and then a fish would pop to the surface and break through, sending tiny ripples out like rings on a bull’s-eye.
“If I were a boy,” Daniel said, as transfixed by the water as she, “I would have to throw a rock. I would have to.”
Daniel. When had she started to think of him as such?
“If I were a girl,” she said, “I would have to take off my shoes and stockings.”
He nodded, and then with a funny half smile, he admitted, “I would have probably pushed you in.”
She kept her eyes on the water. “Oh, I would have taken you with me.”
He chuckled, and then fell back into silence, happy just to watch the water, and the fish, and bits of dandelion fluff that stuck to the surface near the shore.
“This has been a perfect day,” Anne said quietly.
“Almost,” Daniel whispered, and then she was in his arms again. He kissed her, but it was different this time. Less urgent. Less fiery. The touch of their lips was achingly soft, and maybe it didn’t make her feel crazed, like she wanted to press herself against him and take him within her. Maybe instead he made her feel weightless, as if she could take his hand and float away, just so long as he never stopped kissing her. Her entire body tingled, and she stood on her tiptoes, almost waiting for the moment she left the ground.
And then he broke the kiss, pulling back just far enough to rest his forehead against hers. “There,” he said, cradling her face in his hands. “Now it’s a perfect day.”

Chapter Twelve


Almost precisely one day later, Daniel was sitting in Whipple Hill’s wood-paneled library, wondering how it had come to pass that this day was so utterly less perfect than the one before.
After he had kissed Miss Wynter down by the lake, they had hiked back up to the clearing where poor Lord Finstead had been courting his beautiful but dim-witted princess, arriving only moments before Harriet, Elizabeth, and Frances did, accompanied by two footmen with picnic hampers. After a hearty meal, they had read from The Strange, Sad Tragedy of Lord Finstead for several more hours, until Daniel had begged for mercy, claiming that his sides hurt from so much laughter.
Even Harriet, who kept trying to remind them that her masterwork was not a comedy, took no offense.
Back to the house they’d gone, only to discover that Daniel’s mother and sister had arrived. And while everyone was greeting everyone else as if they had not seen each other just two days earlier, Miss Wynter slipped away and retired to her room.