To Woo a Widow (The Heart of a Duke #10)(19)

Philippa stretched her legs out so that her heels nearly brushed the still water and turned her face up to the morning sun.

Possible notice from a passerby be damned, Miles claimed a spot beside her on the white blanket.

“It is beautiful, is it not?” There was a wistful quality to her question as she stared at the sun’s rays shining from the glass-like surface of the lake.

He caressed her heart-shaped face with his gaze. “Most beautiful,” he said quietly.

“I hate London,” she said, not taking her eyes from the water. “When I am here, I can almost believe for a moment that I’m in the country.”

How alike they were in that regard. “It is stifling,” he said softly. “All the rigid expectations.”

She shot her gaze to his. Surprise flared in their depths. “And the constant stares and absence of laughter,” she added. Philippa picked up the leather book beside her and absently fanned the pages. “How odd,” she whispered, more to herself.

He edged closer and the fragrant scent of lavender that clung to her skin wafted about his senses, heady and intoxicating. “What?” he urged, his tone hoarsened with a desire to know her secrets and the taste of her lips.

Philippa angled her head up. With their lips a mere handbreadth apart, their breaths mingled. “I never suspected a gentleman would know those same constraints.”

Miles concentrated on his even breathing and her words to keep from claiming her lips under his. “There are expectations for all members of the peerage, then, isn’t there?” he asked. A light breeze tugged at her chignon and a midnight strand tumbled over her brow. He captured that strand between his fingers luxuriating in the satiny softness of that tress. “Noblemen marry ladies handpicked by their families.”

She closed her eyes a moment. “Those proper, emotionless marriages meant to secure greater wealth and even greater prestige.”

Miles froze, her lock still between his thumb and forefinger. Is that what her marriage had been?

Color rushed the lady’s cheeks and she hastily pulled back. He let his hand fall to his side and cast a glance about. Alas, with the benefit of the small copse, they remained sheltered from possible observers. She cleared her throat and attended the book in her lap, drawing his gaze downward.

“Mrs. Wollstonecraft,” he said with some surprise.

Suspicion darkened the lady’s gaze. “Do you know of her?”

He offered a half-grin. “I am not unfamiliar with the Enlightened thinkers, my lady.” Questions raged all the more about the young widow who, in their handful of exchanges and her readings of the controversial philosopher, had revealed so much. From her disdain of embroidering to her precise read on noble marriages.

The lady followed his stare, and then drew that volume almost protectively to her chest. “I only just…discovered her.”

Miles stretched out his legs before him and that slight shift brought their thighs touching. The heat of Philippa’s skin penetrated the fabric of her skirts and his breeches and scorched him. He swallowed a groan of desire. “And what are your thoughts, madam?”

She startled, her lips parting on a small moue. Did her surprise come in his knowing of the distinguished, yet controversial, philosopher? Or the question he put to her?

Not for the first time, he wondered at the man she’d been married to. One who spoke so coldly to a child about her lessons, what manner of husband would he have been?

“I quite like her,” the lady said softly. She flipped through the pages of the book, landing on the front end of the tome. “Here,” she insisted and spun the book around.

Miles accepted it and followed her finger to the passage. He quickly skimmed the writing. With each word read, a greater window inside the mysterious Lady Winston opened.

“…Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man…”

“It was the needlepoint,” she whispered, bringing his focus from the page to her. “After you left, after you asked me about it, I thought of it. Truly.” She gave her head a shake. “I thought of it when I’ve never truly considered it before. I followed in my mother’s example—proper, obedient—and what did that gain m—?” Philippa bit her lip and looked out on the smooth surface of the lake, once more. A pink pelican glided to a stop on the water and dipped his head, searching under the depths.

What did that gain me?

Those unspoken words twisted his insides into knots. He forced himself to set the book aside. In Lady Philippa, the world saw a sad widow. But in listening to her, in hearing the words she did not say, Philippa spoke more than Mrs. Wollstonecraft. Miles and Philippa traveled down an intimate path of discourse that defied all those expectations they’d earlier spoken of. “What did that gain you, Philippa?” he asked quietly. And he didn’t give a jot about those expectations.

Philippa again brought her knees close. She wrapped her arms loosely about them. A small, humorless smile formed on her full lips. “Not happiness,” she said with a wryness that knotted his belly. He despised a world in which she should have known a hint of a misery. Preferred it when he’d taken her for a broken-hearted widow and not this wounded by life woman. “You asked what makes me happy and do you know what that is?” She posed an inquiry to him.