Slightly Dangerous by Mary Balogh Page B

way up the rather steep slope. She strode up ahead of him to the very top of the hill, though they might have skirted around its base, and stood there, spreading her arms to the sides and twirling once about, her face lifted to the sunlight. The breeze, which was more like a wind up there, whipped at her hair and her dress and set the ribbons that tied the latter at the waist streaming outward.
    She looked like a woodland nymph, and yet it seemed to him that her movements and gestures were quite uncontrived and unselfconscious. What might have been coquetry in another woman was sheer exuberant delight in her. He had the strange feeling of having stepped—unwillingly—into an alien world.
    “Who indeed?” he said.
    Mrs. Derrick stopped to regard him.
    “Do
you
prefer the countryside?” she asked.
    “I do,” he said, climbing until he was beside her and turning slowly about in order to see the full panorama of the surrounding countryside.
    “Why do you spend so much time in town, then?” she asked.
    “I am a member of the House of Lords,” he told her. “It is my duty to attend whenever it is in session.”
    He was looking down at the village.
    “The church is pretty, is it not?” she said. “The spire was rebuilt twenty years ago after the old one was blown off in a storm. I can remember both the storm and the rebuilding. This spire is twenty feet higher than the old one.”
    “That is the vicarage next to it?” he asked.
    “Yes,” she said. “We practically grew up there, my two sisters and I, with the old vicar and his wife. They were kind and hospitable people. Their two daughters were our particular friends, and so was their son, Charles, to a lesser degree. He was one boy among five girls, poor lad. We all went to the village school together, girls as well as boys. Fortunately my father, who taught us, was not of the persuasion that girls have nothing but fluff to keep their ears from collapsing in on each other. Louisa and Catherine both married young and now live some distance away. But after the old vicar and his wife died, within two months of each other, Charles, who had been a curate twenty miles from here, was given the living himself and married Hazel—the middle sister of my family.”
    “Your eldest sister is married too?” he asked.
    “Eleanor?” She shook her head. “She announced when she was twelve years old that she intended remaining at home after she grew up to be a comfort to Mama and Papa in their old age. She did fall in love once, but he died at the Battle of Talavera before they married, and after that she would not look at any other man. After our father died she repeated what she had always said as a girl, though now, of course, it is only our mother she needs to comfort. I believe she is happy.”
    Yes, he thought, she really was from a different world—the world of the lower gentry. She had indeed made a brilliant marriage.
    She stretched out one arm and moved a step closer to him so that he would be able to see just what it was she pointed at.
    “There is Hyacinth Cottage,” she said. “It is where we live. I have always thought it picturesque. There was a moment of anxiety after my father died, since the lease was in his name alone. But Bertie—Baron Renable—was kind enough to lease it to Mama and Eleanor for the rest of their lives.”
    “On the assumption,” he said, “that you will not outlive the two of them?”
    She returned her arm to her side. “I was still married to Oscar at the time,” she said. “His death was not predictable, but even if it had been, Bertie would have assumed, I suppose, that I would remain with his family.”
    “But you did not?” he asked her.
    “No.”
    He looked at Hyacinth Cottage in the middle distance. It looked a pretty enough home, with its thatched roof and sizable garden. It looked like one of the larger houses in the village, as befitted the home of a gentleman by birth, even if he had also been the