“Ah.” And then he wasn’t quite sure what to say—a circumstance that happened very rarely in his life. He wanted to ask her what she’d been talking about with Mrs. Fitzwilliam, but for the life of him, he wasn’t exactly sure how to phrase the question. Have you been taking lessons in seduction from a courtesan? didn’t seem quite the thing. He noticed that Mrs. Fitzwilliam and her children seemed to have left the park. They were no longer in sight.
“Why did you not wait for me at breakfast?” she asked into the silence.
They had begun to stroll about the pond, Jasper leading his horse. “I don’t know exactly. I thought after last night . . .”
What? That she would want some time alone? No, that wasn’t quite true. Perhaps he was the one who needed the solitude. And what did that say about him?
“Did I disgust you?” she asked.
And he was so startled that he halted and looked at her. Why ever would she think he was disgusted by her? To even ask revealed a tender spot in her soul. “No. No, my heart. You could never disgust me if you tried for a thousand years.”
Her eyebrows were slightly knit as she searched his face. She seemed to be watching to see if he lied.
He bent toward her and murmured, “You intrigue me, you tempt me, you inflame me, but disgust? Never, sweet wife, never.”
She caught her breath, and when she spoke, her voice was low. “It wasn’t what you expected, though.”
He thought of her assured and controlled as she’d taken his cock into her hand last night. The feel of her cool fingers, the sight of her intent face, had nearly made him spill right then and there.
“No,” he said, just a little hoarsely. “Not what I expected. Melisande—”
A shot blasted from across the park. Jasper instinctively pulled Melisande into his arms. Mouse began barking hysterically. They could hear shouting and the high whinnying of a horse, but whatever was happening was hidden by a copse of trees.
“What is it?” Melisande asked.
“I don’t know,” Jasper muttered.
A hatless gentleman on a big black horse galloped into view, coming from the sounds of the commotion.
Jasper put Melisande behind him. “Oy! You there! What’s happened?”
The man yanked on his horse, pulling it into a half rear. [o ap>< “I’m after a doctor. I haven’t the time.”
“Is someone shot?”
“A murder attempt,” the man cried as he spurred his horse. “Someone’s tried to kill Lord Hasselthorpe!”
“BUT WHY WOULD someone shoot at Lord Hasselthorpe?” Melisande asked later that night. Vale had bundled her into the carriage and ordered her home before going to the scene of the assassination attempt. He’d been away until after dinner, and this was the first she’d been able to question him.
“I don’t know,” he answered. He had come to her rooms, but now he paced as if he’d been caged. “Perhaps it was some kind of accident. An idiot practice shooting without a proper straw target to catch the bullet.”
“In Hyde Park?”
“I don’t know!” Vale’s voice was overloud, and he looked at her in apology. “Forgive me, my lady wife. But if it was an assassin, he was a damn bad shot. Hasselthorpe was merely winged on the arm. He should make a full recovery. I saw plenty of similar wounds in the war, and they were hardly worth noting as long as infection didn’t set in.”
“I’m glad the hurt is so slight, then,” Melisande said. She sat on one of the low armchairs before the fire—the one they’d made love in the night before, in fact—and watched him. “You hardly ever talk about the war.”
“Don’t I?” he replied vaguely. He was standing by her dresser, poking his finger in a bowl of hairpins. He wore a red and black banyan over his breeches and shirt. “Not much to tell, really.”
“No? You were in the army for six years, though, weren’t you?”
“Seven years,” he muttered. He moved to her wardrobe, which he flung open and peered at as if he’d find the hidden secrets of the cosmos amongst her gowns.
“Why did you join?”
He turned and stared at her blindly for a moment.
Then he blinked and laughed. “I joined the army to learn how to be a man. Or at least that was my father’s purpose. He thought me too lazy, too effete. And since there wasn’t any use for me at home”—he shrugged carelessly—“why not buy a commission for me?”