Page 51 of The Runaway Duchess

“Here.” She handed him a flower. “Do you know—if we plant one of these crumbs—” She gestured toward a plate. “We can grow a new crop of ginger biscuits?”

For a moment, he looked puzzled, then comprehension flared.

“Loveday.” He sighed, dropping the flower into his mouth. “She planted that caraway seed in a pot and watered it every day for a month.”

“You can’t pretend you weren’t pleased with yourself,” she said, because he was trying to hide a smile.

“You have to understand, I’m the youngest of five.” He pinched a crumb from the plate. “I was always getting told everything. I never got to do the telling.”

“So you told tales to your younger cousin?” She ate another flower, dry on her tongue and then that sudden tang.

“I taught her all I knew,” he protested. “But my stock of knowledge was small. When I ran out of facts, I had to rely on invention.”

She laughed and the breath rushed back into her chest. She liked laughing with Neal Traymayne. She wouldn’t mind staying in this dusty cobwebbed room with him. If she could keep him here, until the dance ended, until Derwent Druce was fast asleep in the vicarage, until dawn, when Tomas woke to harness the horses and drive them to Bodmin Station, they could continue a little longer as they were, mutually enticed, dreaming the same dream.

It was a dream, not a lie, this idyll as Muriel Pendrake. It was a tale she told because she’d run out of facts, or at any rate, facts that didn’t hurt. It was a last chance, and she wouldn’t feel guilty for taking it.

“I wish I could plant this crumb so it yielded a dozen ginger biscuits.” He threw the crumb back onto the plate, looked at her through his lashes. “But such a feat is beyond even Varnham. Are you still too hungry to dance?”

“I want to dance,” she said, coming around the table. “But not out there. Here.”

He hadn’t expected that, but he was equal to it. He gave a mock bow and reached for her, then cocked his head. “Ah, but Mr. Hichens has arrived. The night will go on in jigs.”

Out in the assembly hall, the hornpipe shrilled along with the fiddle, and the raucous shouts and thumps sifted dust down from the ceiling. Lavinia coughed. This was her proposition, though. She couldn’t back down.

A jig. Bother.

Slowly, she gathered her skirt and lifted it well above her ankles. She kicked up one white satin slipper and turned on the other, skipping in place. That was as far as memory served and space allowed. She looked up at Neal expectantly.

“Not bad.” He folded his arms, amused, tapping the fingers of one hand on his elbow. “But we can’t dance a jig in this clutter.”

Without warning, he leaned forward and gripped her around the hips, raising her clear off the ground. He set her on top of a barrel and stepped back, grinning his satisfaction. The gasp she’d been too startled to emit exploded as a laugh.

“We’re to dance on these barrels, then?” Better not to tell him she’d feared all Cornish festivities led to exactly this.

He sprang up onto the adjacent barrel. His head brushed the ceiling, and he flicked several times at his hair.

“Spider,” he explained, catching her look. “Never mind. I’ll have to stoop a little.” He began to strike his heels and toes on the barrel in time with the music, feet flying back and forth, and side to side, faster and faster, until he stopped with a stamp and grabbed her hands.

“We used to practice on hogsheads of pilchards.” He said, chest heaving. “We’d stink aloud of fish at the end of it, but we worked out dozens of steps, Jenni and Tomas and Loveday and I.”

“I will learn them all,” she vowed. That should take a while.

“We’d leap from hogshead to hogshead,” he said. “If you touched the ground, you lost.”

“I played a game like that.” She held his hands more tightly. “We were only safe on stone or wood, so we had to run between the fountains and the trees.”

“We?” His thumb found her palm and pressed.

“Effie, my friend. She and I.” The tension in her fingers relaxed. “We’d play all day in the garden whenever we could.”

Which was less and less often, until it was never. They’d grown apart, even as their fathers became more entwined. Effie had eloped, without a word. She hadn’t confided in Lavinia. But then, Lavinia had never confided in her, about George. Effie had been abandoned by her husband. Instead of welcoming her home, her father had locked her away in an asylum, or Lavinia’s papa had done it, or they both had. Competing stories circulated.

Fact: she’d remained there even after her father died, until Anthony had found and freed her.

Lavinia remembered every moment of that dreadful morning when Anthony stormed into the breakfast room to confront Papa. She’d listened, aghast, to the accusations before her mother forced her from the room. That morning ended her engagement. Toppled Papa from his pedestal. Life accelerated on its downward spiral.

Small wonder Effie hadn’t flown to her, eager to renew their friendship.