Oh, to be able to join her in the downpour without the fear that doing so would send her running back inside. To give the swing a twirl and hear the laughter sure to echo, to catch it again and threaten not to let go until she gave him a kiss. To chase her around the tree when she playfully escaped him. To catch hold of her, pull her close, and taste the rain upon her lips.
Thunder and turf, he had better go put himself to work. He spun toward the door—and collided with two amused, far too knowing gazes from his parents, who regarded him as if he were a child who had just, finally, learned how to add two and two. He groaned and held up his hands. “Don’t look at me like that, prithee.”
Mother grasped Father’s hand. Probably as much to keep him from fussing with the bandage again as because she was really so moved by the love-struck gleam she must have detected in Thad’s eyes. “Come now, Thaddeus. We have been waiting thirty years to look at you like this. Do not deprive us of the joy.”
“Humph.” He folded his arms over his chest. “Eight-and-twenty. And if you intend to lecture me like Arnaud did—”
“Alain does not approve?” Father frowned and slid one of his hands away from Mother’s to smooth down part of the bandage.
“Bennet.”
“Sorry.” He looked nowhere near sorry, though still plenty curious. “What did he say?”
Thad waved it off and strode toward the door. “He does not trust my judgment in love, that is all.”
“Thaddeus.” That particular tone of Mother’s could, he was sure, halt a stampede of wild mustangs. He stopped with one shoulder through the doorway and looked back at her. She sighed and repositioned her gown over her ankle. “The wound is still fresh for him. Those two years we were mourning him, he was living for the thought of coming home. To get here and find his wife deceased and—”
“I know.” All too well.
Mother lifted her brows. “It is understandable that he would preach caution. He does not want to see you hurt.”
Thad said nothing in reply. He merely nodded and ducked into the hall. He saw no point in arguing with his mother.
But sometimes, when talk turned to the topic love, he had to wonder if Arnaud really wished him well. Or if he rather thought Thad deserved to be every bit as miserable as he.
Nineteen
Gwyneth jolted upright in bed, her eyes searching the dark for some clue as to what had awakened her. Not a bad dream. Her heart wasn’t thudding, and no ferocious images snapped at the back of her mind.
A noise. She had heard a noise, and she heard another outside now. Not a suspicious one though—unless it was such to be whistling when the only light from the window was the pearly gray of predawn. She tossed aside the sheet and scurried to the window overlooking the street. Little light was needed to tell her who was striding down the walk with such cheer. She had yet to see any other man in Baltimore as tall as her Thad.
Thad—not her Thad. Heavens. She pressed a hand to her gritty eyes and spun back to her room, lest he look back and catch her watching him. And divine, as he so often did, exactly what she had been thinking.
Bother. Now her heart pounded, and she had no handy nightmare on which to blame it. And certainly no hope of claiming another hour of sleep. That was all right, though. With a lilt to her step, she dressed in her simplest day dress, jabbed a few pins into her hair, and gathered up her art supplies. If she went out to the garden now to set up, she would be ready for the first touch of morning light. She could finish her rendition of the Masquerade and then still be available to lend a hand to Winter later. Her ankle was largely healed these ten days after the accident, but stairs still caused her discomfort, and she walked with a limp yet.
Her shoes in hand so she could slip silently down the hall, she tiptoed past Jack’s room, the elder Lanes’, and down the stairs. Last evening Thad had mused that, as it was mid-July, Captain Arnaud ought to be back any day—an observation he would not have made around Jack had he not been certain of it.
She paused at the back door to slip on her shoes and let herself out into the pleasant morning mist. Warmer than any she had known in England, but still familiar, this fragile veil that hung over the day.
By the time the silver had turned to gold under the rays of the rising sun, Gwyneth had set up her supplies and brought out the nearly finished painting. She had thought it done four days ago, until she realized it had yet to pulse, had yet to breathe. Something was missing.
Someone. She had known right away that she would have to add Thad, though she had hesitated to do so. He had seen the truth of her father so quickly in that one. What would he see in this, if she included him?