The duchess turned then, lifting her aristocratic brows, waiting.
The sheer arrogance of her pose made Alexandra so angry that her voice shook. "Kindly tell your invisible grandson that the wedding is off, or, if he chooses to materialize, you may send him to me and I'll tell him so." Afraid she would burst into tears, which she knew the old woman would only mock, she ran from the room, along the balcony and down the staircase.
"What," asked the butler as he opened the front door for her, "shall I tell his grace—should he inquire as to your whereabouts?"
Pausing in her headlong flight, Alexandra looked Ramsey right in the eye and mimicked, "Tell him I'm 'otherwise occupied.' "
An hour later, as she wandered through the rose garden, her hysteria had cooled to a steely determination. Irritably, she bent and plucked a lovely pink rose and raised it to her nose, inhaling its scent, then she began absently snapping the petals off, one by one, her thoughts in a turmoil. Pink rose petals floated down about her skirts, joining those of the red roses, the white, and the yellow which she had also unconsciously shredded.
"Based on the message you left for me with Ramsey," said a deep, unperturbed voice behind her, "I gather you're displeased about something?"
Alexandra whirled in surprise, her relief at finally being able to speak to him eclipsed by the growing panic she'd been trying unsuccessfully to stifle for days. "I'm displeased about everything."
His amused glance slid to the rose petals strewn about her skirts. "Including the roses, evidently," he observed, feeling slightly guilty for ignoring her these last several days.
Alexandra followed the direction of his gaze, flushed with embarrassment, and said with a mixture of distress and frustration, "The roses are beautiful, but—"
"—But you were bored with the way they looked when they had their petals on, is that it?"
Realizing that she was being drawn into a discussion about flowers when her entire life was in chaos, Alexandra drew herself up and said with quiet, implacable firmness, "Your grace, I am not going to marry you."
He shoved his hands into his pockets and regarded her with mild curiosity. "Really? Why not?"
Trying to think of the best way to explain, Alexandra ran a shaky hand through her dark curls and Jordan's gaze lifted, watching the unconscious grace of her gesture—really studying her for the first time. Sunlight glinted in her hair, gilding it with a golden sheen, and turned her magnificent eyes a luminous, turquoise green. The yellow of her gown flattered her creamy complexion and the peach tint glowing at her cheeks.
"Would you please," Alexandra said in a long-suffering voice, "stop looking at me in that peculiar, appraising way, as if you're trying to dissect my features and discover all my flaws?"
"Was I doing that?" Jordan asked absently, noting for the first time her high cheekbones and the soft fullness of her lips. As he gazed at that arresting, delicately carved face with its winged brows and long, sooty eyelashes, he couldn't imagine how he'd ever mistaken her for a lad.
"You're playing Pygmalion with my life, and I don't like it."
"I'm what?" Jordan demanded, his attention abruptly diverted from her fascinating face.
"In mythology, Pygmalion was—"
"I'm familiar with the myth, I'm merely surprised that a female would be familiar with the classics."
"You must have a very limited experience with my sex," Alexandra said, surprised. "My grandfather said most women are every bit as intelligent as men."
She saw his eyes take on the sudden gleam of suppressed laughter and assumed, mistakenly, that he was amused by her assessment of female intelligence rather than her remark about his inexperience with women. "Please stop treating me as if I haven't a wit in my head! Everyone in your house does that—even your servants are haughty and behave oddly to me."
"I'll instruct the butler to put wool in his ears and pretend to be deaf," Jordan teased, "and I'll order the footmen to wear blinders. Will that make you feel more at home?"
"Will you kindly take me seriously!"
Jordan sobered instantly at her imperious tone. "I'm going to marry you," he said coolly. "That's serious enough."
Now that she had decided not to marry him, and had told him so, the sharp pain of her decision was lessened a little by the discovery that she no longer felt intimidated and uncomfortable with him. "Do you realize," she said with a winsome smile as she tilted her head to the side, "that you become positively grim when you say the word 'marry'?" When he said nothing, Alexandra laid her hand on his sleeve, as if he was her friend, and gazed into his unfathomable grey eyes, seeing the cynicism lurking in their depths. "I don't mean to pry, your grace, but are you happy with life—with your life, I mean?"
He looked irritated by her question, but he answered it. "Not particularly."
"There you see! We would never suit. You're disenchanted with life, but I'm not." The quiet inner joy, the courage and indomitable spirit Jordan had sensed in her the night they met, was in her voice now as she lifted her face to the blue sky, her entire being radiant with optimism, innocence, and hope. "I love life, even when bad things happen to me. I can't stop loving it."
Transfixed, Jordan stared at her as she stood against a backdrop of vibrant roses and distant green hills—a pagan maiden addressing the heavens in a sweet, soft voice: "Every season of the year comes with a promise that something wonderful is going to happen to me someday. I've had that feeling ever since my grandfather died. It's as if he's telling me to wait for it. In winter, the promise comes with the smell of snow in the air. In summer, I hear it in the boom of thunder and the lightning that streaks across the sky in blue flashes. Most of all, I feel it now, in springtime, when everything is green and black—"
Her voice trailed off and Jordan repeated blankly, "Black?"
"Yes, black—you know, like tree trunks when they're wet, and freshly tilled fields that smell like—" She inhaled, trying to recall the exact scent.
"Dirt," Jordan provided unromantically.
She dropped her gaze from the heavens and looked at him. "You think me foolish," she sighed. Stiffening her spine and ignoring the sharp stab of longing she felt for him, she said with calm dignity, "We cannot possibly wed."
Jordan's dark eyebrows drew together over incredulous grey eyes. "You've decided that, merely because I don't happen to think wet dirt smells like perfume?"