“For having a few coins in my pocket?” He chuckled. “No. I was the most courteous, virtuous, promising young man any professor had ever seen.”
There was such lovely mischief in his voice. He was courteous, virtuous (as far as she could tell), and infinitely promising. But he was also clever, cunning, and willing to bend the rules.
Why did the Fates tempt her so? Why must he be so marvelously perfect for her and yet so abysmally unattainable?
“Is there anything you can't do?”
“No,” he said, laughing. “But there are things I can't do very well. I'm a terrible cook, for instance. I tried, but my family refused to live on my frugal meals.”
The very idea of it shocked her. Even before he became Lord Tremaine, he'd been cousin to dukes and princes. This man, whose blood was so blue it was probably indigo, had worked before a stove and—success or not—produced at least one entire meal. What next? The Prince of Wales laying down railroad tracks with his own bare hands?
An even more shocking thought occurred to her. “Did you plan to work for a living?”
“I did. But lately I've become hesitant. A title does hamper things, even if it's only a courtesy title—for now. I suppose running an estate is a noble and time-consuming task.” He shrugged, his sleeve brushing the edge of her skirts. “But it's not what I'd have chosen to do.”
“And what would you have chosen?”
“Engineering,” he answered easily. “I study mechanics at the Polytechnique.”
“Your parents said something about physics or economics.”
“My parents are still in denial. They think mechanics sounds too common, too much grease and smoke and soot.”
“But why engineering?” Her father had worked with dozens of engineers. They were an earnest and rather single-minded tribe, seemingly having nothing at all in common with the elegant marquess beside her.
“I like to build things. To work with my hands.”
She shook her head. Hands. The future duke liked manual labor. “Well, don't tell anyone else what you've told me,” she cautioned. “They wouldn't understand at all.”
“I don't. I only told you because you spend as much time with your accountants and solicitors as you do your dressmaker. You are pushing to define a new normality as surely as I am.”
She'd never thought of herself quite that way. She was more an idiosyncratic ignorer of established boundaries than a glutton for the new and the uncharted. But perhaps they were one and the same, each one implying the other.
She looked at him, at his calm, unhurried progress, his gloved hand holding on securely to the horse's tether. His other hand he extended to the lower branches of the Old Willow, brushing their supple tips.
“I—” she began, and did not finish.
The Old Willow. They were going by the Old Willow. Which was at least a furlong away from the hitching post. She couldn't believe it. Yet as she glanced back, the hitching post in the distance was the size of a matchstick.
“Yes?” he prompted her, keeping up their stately pace.
She looked back one more time to make certain her eyes hadn't cheated her. There was no mistake. She'd come some two hundred yards, her nausea having dissipated somewhere along the way, her hands no longer gripping the reins but holding them loosely, almost casually.
Somehow, in animated conversation with him, the impossible had happened. She'd forgotten her fear and her body had relaxed into a comforting, familiar rhythm.
“We've done more than fifty yards, I think,” she murmured.
He looked behind. “So we have.”
“You knew we'd gone past fifty yards long ago, didn't you?”
He didn't answer her directly. “Would you like me to help you dismount?”
Would she? Suddenly she felt dizzy again, not with fear but with the exhilarating absence of it, the way simple robust health felt a blessing and a miracle after a long, painful illness. No, she didn't want to dismount. She wanted to ride, to hurtle along in a mad dash.
He stepped back. “Go ahead,” he said.
So she did. It felt wonderful, the sensation as new as the first shoots of spring, as weightless as walking on water. She gave in to the moment, to the euphoria of once again being young and fearless. The horse, as if sensing her elation, flew.
If she could distill the sensations that flooded her—the headlong rush, the metrical, earthy hoofbeats pounding away beneath her, the dense evergreen woods tearing by at the periphery of her vision, and the cold wind that was utterly powerless before the fire of her exuberance—she would have the essence of joy.