"I'm not your gilded prince with the gilded chairs, Letty," Geoff said simply. "I couldn't be if I tried."
"I wouldn't want you to be." Letty's voice felt rusty.
"I'm not particularly bold or dashing or heroic. I'm happier at my desk than in a black cloak. And I've never entirely mastered all the steps of the quadrille." He looked soberly down at her. "But what I am is yours, if you'll still have me."
It was a gesture more eloquent than a bended knee.
Somehow, Letty realized, he had turned the tables. He had taken all of her imperfections and turned them into his. He had turned his own pride inside out and offered it to her, hilt first, like a knight surrendering his sword, placing the power of refusal in her hands.
Letty was humbled by the very generosity of it. Humbled, and so filled with love that she could scarcely find the breath to express it. She didn't care if he couldn't dance the quadrille; she had no use for black cloaks; and she didn't mind if he preferred books to people so long as there was room among his books for her.
"Gladly," she said, the word choking in her throat. "So gladly."
"Warts and all?"
"Goiters, boils, and carbuncles," Letty assured him eagerly.
"I don't think we need to go quite that far…." She loved the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, the lopsided tilt of his lips, the dark shadow of his hair above his brow. "Warts are quite enough."
"And smelly straw." Letty wrinkled her nose at the odor arising from their feet. "Quite a place for a declaration of love."
Geoff's eyes moved meaningfully to her lips, in a way that made color flare up through Letty's cheeks like a whole fusillade of rockets. "We do seem to make a habit of carriages." His hands slipped around her waist, drawing her closer.
Flushed with happiness, Letty glanced around her at the splintered slats and the bloodied straw. She wouldn't have traded the dilapidated old wagon for any number of gilded reception rooms.
"I don't think you can call this a carriage," countered Letty, tilting her head back up toward Geoff. "It's really more of a cart."
Geoff lifted both his eyebrows. "Does it matter?"
Letty lifted herself up on her tiptoes and latched her arms around his neck. "No," she said honestly. "Not in the slightest."
And that was the last either of them said for quite some time.
When they had time to reflect upon it later, the Viscount and Viscountess Pinchingdale were in perfect agreement that, for certain purposes, one wheeled conveyance was quite as good as another.
Chapter Thirty-one
"Leaving?" I craned my neck in an entirely unsubtle way, but the angle of the door blocked the corridor from view. "But we haven't even had dinner yet."
I'd been counting on Colin being logy with large quantities of food before I made my approach. As a veteran of countless Thanksgiving dinners, I knew exactly how much pumpkin pie I could consume before stupor struck. A neophyte, unused to the soporific properties of turkey and stuffing, should be easy prey.
But not if he was leaving.
Blithely insensitive to atmosphere, Mrs. Harrington gave a little wave. "He had some other do to attend, he said. But Serena will be staying with us, won't you, dear?"
"Pammy was very insistent." Had that been a bit of a barb beneath the quiet cadence of Serena's voice? Probably my imagination. In the meantime, her brother was getting away.
I had to go say something to him. I didn't know if everything had been all in my head from the start; I didn't know if he had ever had the slightest bit of interest in me, or if he had realized that I had been snubbing him (even if only because I thought he was snubbing me). But I did know that if I didn't say something I was going to spend the rest of the evening feeling awful in a way that had nothing to do with Thanksgiving bloat.
It wasn't like I was following him to Ireland, or anything.
"Will you excuse me?" I levered myself off my perch on the side of the couch so abruptly that strands of Serena's hair fluttered with the movement, rising and settling like a flock of pigeons in Trafalgar Square. "Be back in a moment."
Propelling myself toward the door, I barreled out into the hallway. It wasn't a long hallway, just a narrow rectangle that spanned the house from the front door on one end to the garden door on the other. I didn't think Colin had gone out the garden way; o'erleaping garden walls went out of fashion several centuries ago, along with lutes and codpieces. I hadn't heard the front door open and close. Although, I warned myself, it was unlikely I would have over the hum of cocktail-lubricated conversation.
There was only one other place he could be. Crossing my fingers for all I was worth, I ventured into the little spur of hallway between dining room and kitchen, a narrow space that had been commandeered as a cloakroom. Sure enough, there was Colin, pawing through a row of identical coats on a portable aluminum rack, a look of intense concentration on his face. I blessed the blandness of raincoat manufacture. Minus identifying factors like that coffee stain on the sleeve or that slightly hairy mint at the bottom of a pocket, one Burberry looks much like another. I usually identified mine by dint of an elderly movie stub in the left-hand pocket, admitting one to a 9:40 showing of Legally Blonde.
Colin glanced up at the click of my heels against the hard-wood floors. "You're not leaving?" he asked politely.
"No, but I heard that you are." Given where we were standing, it wasn't exactly the world's most brilliant observation.
Colin whipped a Burberry off the rack. I hoped it was actually his. "I have other plans."
"Mrs. Harrington said."
This had all seemed much easier back in the living room. Being faced with a living, breathing man intent on putting on his raincoat made matters much harder. In all the conversations I had with him in my head, he generally stayed put and listened, before responding with eloquent lines like "How right you are."
People are so much more agreeable in one's head.
"Listen," I said, taking a step forward. "I just wanted to say I'm sorry."
Colin blinked, one arm halfway into his raincoat. "What for?"
"About your mother's accident. Why didn't you say anything? I would have left right away."
"At midnight?"
"You must have cabs in Sussex. Hotels, even. I could have gone to a hotel. You really didn't have to stick around because of me. I feel awful."
"Don't." Colin's eyes crinkled at the corners, like a polar ice cap cracking. "I wasn't able to find an earlier flight."
"If you had, I hope you would have kicked me out earlier."
"Without a second thought," Colin reassured me.
"Good." I beamed at him before remembering that beaming probably wasn't appropriate when a parent was in the hospital. "She is doing better?"
"Much. It wasn't anything life-threatening to begin with, but it was someone from hospital calling, not Mum—she was out cold. All I caught was that there'd been a car accident and she was in hospital, unconscious."
"Scary," I said, making a sympathetic face.
"Her husband was away at a conference, and my Italian is purely rudimentary. Enough to ask for grappa, but when it comes to medical terms—" Colin spread his hands in an endearingly boyish gesture of bafflement.
"But they cleared it up once you got there?"
"With a great deal of pointing at the relevant phrases in an Italian-English dictionary. Once we established that she had neither gangrene nor leprosy, it went swimmingly."
"Surely there must have been someone who spoke English?"
"Probably off on coffee break," said Colin dryly. "Or just enjoying watching the English bloke make a prat of himself."
"You never know, they might have just been on strike," I provided. "I gather that's pretty much the norm over there."