Remember Love (Ravenswood #1)(65)

“But your mother will not be here, Gwyn,” her father reminded her. “This is her regular afternoon with her lace-making group.”

“But Idris will be here in the event that fire-breathing dragons should decide to come calling,” she said. “Besides, I never mind being here alone for a while, Dad. Alone with the servants, that is.”

“Well, this is a disappointment,” Aled said, sounding as though he meant it. And for a moment Gwyneth was tempted to change her mind. But he could just as easily change his mind, could he not, and spend the afternoon with her? It would be a good opportunity for some time alone together. The choir, after all, was her father’s, not his, and this afternoon’s practice was just a regular weekly event.

Those facts obviously did not occur to him.

She waved them all on their way after luncheon and turned to go back inside. Should she write those letters she had been meaning for a few days to get to? Or should she go for a walk or even a ride? The gift of an unexpectedly free afternoon was not to be wasted. Idris met her at the door.

“Did you know Devlin is coming this afternoon?” he asked.

Oh.

“No, I did not,” she said.

“When I was leaving Ravenswood yesterday,” he explained, “I reminded him of what he had just said about calling on everyone who had attended the tea within the next few weeks. Why not come to me first? I suggested, since we were once friends and I would be home alone this afternoon. He said he would.”

“You were once friends,” she said. “Was there a quarrel, then, Idris?”

“Not really,” he said. “Just some sharp words when he was leaving and then a long silence. I wrote a couple of times, specifically to Dev, but it was Ben who answered both times. That is not the way you treat your friends, but why bear grudges? He is back home and seems like a different man from the one I used to know. I am curious to discover if we are still friends. But at the very least he is a neighbor and will be for the rest of both our lives, I daresay. We must be civil to each other.”

“I will not get in your way,” she told him. “I will go into the parlor and write my letters.”

“I thought perhaps you had stayed home deliberately,” he said. “I will not ask if you ever got over him, Gwyn. I am sure you did not. But it was a long time ago and I know you have been trying to fall for someone else. Is Aled the one?”

She shrugged. “I like him.”

He shook his head. “If I thought Eluned had ever done that and said that when asked about me, I would probably go out and shoot myself,” he said.

They both laughed. “Eluned has never hidden her feelings for you,” she said, “nor you your feelings for her.”

She decided to stay home and write her letters. Not because Devlin was coming—she was going to sequester herself in the parlor with the door shut—but because . . . Well, because the letters needed to be written and she had procrastinated long enough. And . . . because Devlin was coming. She hated admitting it, but not doing so would not make it any the less true, would it?

She sat at the escritoire in the parlor. There was a view through the window out over the terrace to the lawn and flower garden beyond, enclosed on three sides by bushes and a few taller trees. All of it attracted bees and butterflies. And birds, which came in large numbers to eat from the feeder and drink from the stone bowl beside it. Sometimes, indeed, it was difficult to concentrate upon one’s writing, so much of nature was there to see. And hear, with bees buzzing and birds chirping and insects whirring. Perhaps in front of the window had not been the wisest place to put the desk. But today Gwyneth bent her head over her letter as soon as she had mended a pen and dipped it into the ink. Today she was going to concentrate and not look up, no matter what the distraction.

She was one paragraph into a letter to one of the friends she had made during her Season in London when she looked up. How could she not when she heard horses’ hooves and then men’s voices? Idris had stepped out of the house, and Devlin was telling him that he would take his horse to the stables and come right back. Gwyneth leaned sideways so she would not be seen. His arrival—to call upon Idris—should really be a matter of indifference to her, she told herself in some annoyance. It was just like old times, in fact. She had seen him twice—in the village, when she had strolled and talked with him for fifteen minutes or so, and yesterday at Ravenswood. They had shared a youthful flaring of romance and passion for one single day years ago—she had been eighteen, still little more than a child, for goodness’ sake—and then it had ended. Abruptly and totally. As Idris himself had observed a short while ago, there had been a six-year silence. Not that she had tried writing to him herself, as her brother had apparently done.

She could not possibly still be pining for him. It would be too utterly pathetic.

She heard his boot heels on the gravel of the terrace a few minutes later and looked up again. He walked with firm, purposeful strides, very straight backed, his expression stern beneath the brim of his tall hat. Like a military officer. Or a man who was not really looking forward to the coming encounter with his former friend. What had it cost him to come home? Or was home quite the wrong word for what Ravenswood and his family now meant to him?

She shook her head and returned her attention to her letter.

She finished it, all three pages of it, in a heroic act of determined concentration. Perhaps she ought to have gone to the choir practice with Aled. Would he think she was not really interested in him? Would he be right? She let the ink dry naturally as she cleaned her pen and quelled the sudden panic she felt. Not again. Please, not again. She was twenty-four, perilously close to being left on the shelf. She knew a number of women who would be over the moon with happiness if they had won the notice of a man like Aled Morgan. And she liked him. She would even say she loved him if that were a word that did not frighten her to death.