Her hand was warm in his. She hadn’t let go. Neither had he.
“Fine,” she said. “One afternoon. But if a single piece of silver shows tarnish upon my return, this experiment is over.”
He led her from the morning room before she could change her mind, through the corridors and out toward the stables, where the afternoon waited.
The groom saddled two horses without question, though his eyebrows performed a journey of their own when Alastair requested the mare rather than the sidesaddle. Penelope stood rigid beside him, arms folded, looking exactly like a woman who’d agreed to her own execution and was determined to face it with dignity.
Then they were riding.
Not the careful, measured trot she’d maintained on the way to the assembly—but an actual ride, fast enough that thewind pulled strands from her ruthless updo, fast enough that her careful composure couldn’t hold against the sheer physical exhilaration of speed. He kept pace beside her across the open parkland, watching from the corner of his eye.
She held the reins with more skill than he’d expected. Her seat was natural, confident—someone had taught her well, long before propriety had convinced her to slow down. They crested the hill above the south meadow and he pulled up, letting his horse blow, and she drew alongside him, breathless.
Her cheeks were flushed. Her hair was a disaster. And she was trying—visibly, valiantly, and completely unsuccessfully—not to smile.
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
“Are you bored?”
Her mouth pressed into a line. The smile leaked through the edges of it anyway—a helpless, involuntary thing that transformed her entire face. She looked, for the first time since he’d known her, like a woman who’d forgotten to be careful.
The sight hit him somewhere beneath the breastbone with the force of a closed fist.
“I refuse to answer on the grounds that you’ll never let it go,” she said.
“I will never let it go regardless. You might as well confess.”
She looked out across the valley—green and gold in the afternoon light, the estate spread below them like something from a painting—and he watched the tension drain from her shoulders, watched her spine soften, watched herbreathe.
“It’s beautiful here,” she said quietly. Not to him, exactly. More as though the admission had escaped before she could lock it down.
“It is,” he agreed.
He was not looking at the valley.
That evening, long after she’d retreated to her chambers and the house had gone quiet, Alastair sat alone in his study with a brandy he didn’t want and the memory of her smile lodged beneath his ribs like a splinter he couldn’t reach.
It meant nothing,he told himself.A ride. An afternoon. Nothing has changed.
But when he closed his eyes, all he saw was Penelope on the hilltop—hair undone, cheeks flushed, smiling without permission—and the careful lie crumbled before it had even finished forming.
CHAPTER 19
“You look windswept.”
Hyacinth’s observation greeted Penelope the moment she stepped through the front door, cheeks still burning from the ride. Her friend sat in the entrance hall with a cup of tea balanced on her knee and the expression of a woman who had been waiting for precisely this opportunity.
“I went riding.” Penelope reached up to assess the damage. Her hair had declared independence somewhere between the south meadow and the hilltop. Pins were missing. Entire sections hung loose against her neck. She looked, she suspected, as though she’d been dragged through a hedgerow.
“Riding.” Hyacinth’s gaze drifted past her to the window, through which Alastair’s retreating figure was still visible, crossing the gravel toward the stables. “Alone?”
“With the Duke. On estate business.”
“Estate business.” The repetition was merciless. “Is that what we’re calling it? How fascinating. Tell me, does this estate business typically leave you grinning like a woman who’s just discovered champagne exists?”
“I am not grinning.”