Patrick took the cup from her. “Thank you.”
“I hope you can actually shoot that thing.” She pointed to the rifle. “I went out on a limb persuading them to let you have your turn at the watch.”
“I can shoot it.”
She smiled. “Not that I think we’ll have any trouble with tigers. For the most part, they stay clear of humans.”
Well, there went Patrick’s chance at glory.
“Shall I sit with you tonight?” Linley asked. “I’d like to, if you don’t mind.”
“I rather hoped you would.”
“You know, Patrick,” she said, picking at a blade of grass. “I’m so glad you came here. Without you, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”
“You’d get on. Time and absence have a way of working things out.”
“Why do you think you are so dispensable to me?” she asked. “Am I replaceable in your heart? Will I be that easy to forget about when you go home?”
“Linley…”
“Sometimes I forget that I am one of dozens of girls who have passed through your life.”
“Five,” he said.
“What?”
“You talk to me about memory, yet you forget entire conversations,” Patrick said. “Remember at the Museum? You asked me how many women I’d been with. I told you five. Not dozens. Only five.”
“Did you love any of them?”
“I cared for all of them,” he said.
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Patrick sat silent for a moment. “No. I did not love them.”
“Do you believe in love?”
“I want to.”
Linley resumed picking at the blade of grass. “I want to, too.”
The last rays of the sun disappeared from the sky. Only the glint of moonlight on waving grass moved across the landscape.
“Do you think your sister loves Hereford?”
Patrick swiveled his head to look at her. “I have no idea. Why?”
“It just seems that no one ever expects to marry for love anymore,” she said. “That romance only belongs in fairy tales and spinster novels.”
“People like Hereford, and Georgiana, and myself don’t have the freedom to marry for our hearts. We must wed for practical reasons. To dream of anything more only leads to heartache and disappointment.”
“So you had no problem marrying your sister off to a man she did not love, and who probably would not love her?”
Patrick frowned. “Georgiana wanted to marry Hereford. It was her idea,” he explained. “She was expected to marry a cousin of ours. It was all but arranged. At the last minute, I told her I would not hold her to the agreement if she did not want to go through with it. So she didn’t. She married Hereford instead.”
“Maybe they were in love, after all,” Linley said, smiling.
“You’re awfully romantic for someone who casually talks of taking lovers—or do you not remember that day in the garden either?”
“I remember.”
“As I told you, I’ve had five lovers and never loved any of them,” he explained. “The emotion of love and the sexual act are two completely separate things. You’d do good to keep that in mind when the time comes and you want to give yourself over to a man.”
“Is that why you got so upset that afternoon?” Linley asked. “Because you thought I’d go to bed with a man believing it would make him love me?”
“No. I was upset because you should not be discussing sex with me. Just as you should not be doing it now. If I were a gentleman at all, I would end this conversation.”
“…So you’re not a gentleman?”
“I am a gentleman.”
“And this conversation is over?”
“Precisely.”
Linley smiled in the dark, certain that he was smiling, too.
***
“Are you asleep?” she asked him.
“No. Why?”
“You got quiet.”
Patrick shifted against the tree trunk he leaned against. “I’m not asleep.”
Linley looked up at the moon, guessing at the time. “In an hour or two, go and wake Reginald. He will come to relieve you.”
“For the rest of the night?”
“Yes.”
“No one told me that,” he said.
“Probably because they wanted you to stay up the entire time.”
Patrick moved the rifle from across his lap and placed it on the grass beside him. “I really hate your friends.”
“Don’t worry,” Linley said, laughing. “They hate you, too.”
“I’m going numb. Would you like to stretch out with me?”
They shifted away from the tree trunk and lay on their backs. The tall grass formed a cocoon around them, leaving only the most beautiful view of the moon above their heads.
Linley rested her head beside Patrick’s. “I want to live up there.”
“Where?”
“On the moon,” she said.
Patrick crossed his hands behind his head, letting Linley use his underarm as a pillow. He watched the clouds move across the sky, thinking it was a perfect night.
“I’d like to kiss you,” he whispered. When Linley did not answer, he thought she might not have heard him. “I would like to kiss you.”
“I know,” she said, her own voice barely above a whisper.