Always Proper, Suddenly Scandalous (Scandalous Seasons #3)(37)

“It is fine.” She did not pick her head up from tending his person. “It does not mean more to me than your injury.”

His heart tugged at those words. The lace had been a gift she carried with her always, a reminder of her home and family, and, Abigail had forever stained it with his blood.

“There.” She tied the fabric about his hand. A smile played across her lips. “You look lovely in lace, my lord.”

People didn’t tease him. They hadn’t in very many years. “Geoffrey,” he corrected.

She blinked, and looked back up at him.

“I imagine when a young lady has come to the rescue of a gentleman then it is only appropriate she should refer to him by his Christian name,” he said, turning her words back to her. “It is my birthday.”

She blinked several times.

Geoffrey felt the sting of embarrassment at his hastily spoken words. He suspected he wanted to share that bit of information with someone considering no one, not even his own mother remembered that on this day, thirty years past, he’d entered into the world. “Forgive me. I don’t know why I…”

“Well, Happy Birthday, Geoffrey. Now, you must certainly keep the scrap of lace from Lizzie.”

“Lizzie?”

“My sister,” she clarified.

Geoffrey struggled to swallow past a swell of emotion. She would give up the fragile reminder from home, for him.

How little he knew about this woman, and yet, he felt a connection to her that defied logic and terrified him all as one.

“You have a sister?”

Abigail nodded. “And three brothers. It is a full household.”

“If it is anything like my household over the years with my sister Sophie, then I imagine there is a good deal of excitement there.” How many days of his life had he spent lamenting that very fact? What a stodgy bastard he’d been.

“Oh, certainly. We were always coming into all kinds of trouble, much to Mama’s chagrin.” Her gaze took on a faraway, wistfulness.

“You must miss them.”

A gentle breeze freed a strand of hair from her neat chignon. She tucked it back behind her ear. “Every day.”

And if she did not make a match, then she would surely return to her home. The breath left him on a swift exhale as, for the first time, he considered that reality. This was not Abigail’s home. Inevitably she’d either wed an English gentleman or board a ship back to America. A vise-like pressure tightened about his heart at both prospects.

He wanted Abigail to say more of her family, but she remained uncharacteristically silent. Geoffrey opened his mouth to ask her further questions, but something in the look she gave him begged him to let those questions die.

“Are you close with your sister, Geoffrey?”

Her question gave him pause. He’d been sternly disapproving of his sister these past years. With her tendency to land herself into scrape after scrape, she had represented chaos in his world. It hadn’t been until she’d wed that he’d come to appreciate how Sophie had filled his household with some modicum of happiness, and how much darker it had become after she’d left. “I suppose more now, than in the past. Sophie possesses a bold spirit. I…I believe you’d get along famously.”

Geoffrey shook his head, dislodging an image of Abigail as his wife; she and Sophie, fast-friends.

“I owe you an apology,” he said.

She angled her head. The sudden movement displaced one of those midnight tresses, and Geoffrey caught it between his fingers, and studied it.

He continued before she could speak. “I kissed you last evening.”

Abigail trailed the tip of her tongue along the seam of her lips and he followed that innocently seductive movement. God help him for being an utter bastard. For even now, with an apology upon his lips, alongside the Serpentine, he longed to take her into his arms yet again, and lay her down and make love to more than just her mouth.

“You needn’t apologize.”

With his uninjured hand, he claimed her fingers in his. “I do. My actions were unpardonable. You are an innocent. And a lady. God help me, I do not know what you’ve done to me, Abigail. I resolved to wed your cousin and honor my familial obligations to the Redbrooke line. And yet, in this short time, you’ve thoroughly bewitched me.”

***

You’ve bewitched me.

Something wicked dwelled inside her. Something wrong and wicked and vile. The kind of wicked that got ladies sent away to abbey’s and shut away from Polite Society but she reveled in his words…

Abigail hugged her arms to herself. The memory of Geoffrey’s lips upon her skin and on her lips still burned hotter than the July sun. It had the power to melt her inside and out, liquefying every single coherent thought.

Something stirred to life inside her breast. Her eyes ran a path over the angular planes of Geoffrey’s chiseled face, his aquiline nose, the serious set to his mouth drawn by the harsh beauty of a man who so valued honor.

Her throat worked up and down, as she acknowledged the truth—a man such as him would never, could never find her an acceptable match.

Filled with a desperate need to put distance between them, Abigail took a step away from him. She wandered to the side of the lake and stared out as the morning sun peeked over the horizon. “Do you know why I like to come here?” She cast a glance back at him and smiled. “No, you wouldn’t know that. I come here because it is quiet and I manage to forget that I’m an ocean away from home.” And here, I’m free of censure.