“I’m not sure I want to tell you the whole story,” she said grumpily, resisting as he drew her toward a wooden bench beside the path.
“Too bad. If you can listen to me whine about my parents, you can give me chapter and verse on your disastrous marriage.”
“You didn’t whine. And my marriage wasn’t disastrous.”
“Convince me,” he said in a mild tone. He placed his hands on her shoulders, pushing until she sat.
“Why should I?” she said in a sulky voice.
He sat beside her, stretching his powerful legs in front of him. “Because you insisted we get to know one another.” His tone softened. “Tell me, Amy.”
Chapter Seven
Pascal heard Amy sigh as she stared across the grass to the water. After what felt like a long time, she turned to him. “I was eighteen when I married Sir Wilfred Mowbray.”
“And long over your tendre for that popinjay Gervaise Dacre.”
Pascal hoped his gentle teasing would ease her strain. This sharing of confidences was a devilish uncomfortable pastime.
“Oh, that was ancient history by then.”
“Did you love your husband?”
She still stared at the ponds, silvery in the fading light. “I loved his herd of Hereford cattle.”
Pascal gave a low laugh. “Is that why you married him?”
“That’s what I tell people.” She fiddled with the yellow ribbons tying her pretty straw bonnet under her pointed chin. Amy wasn’t a fidgety woman. It was one of the many things he liked about her. But he didn’t need the evidence of her restlessness to see that she hated speaking of her marriage.
Was he cruel to make her continue? Satisfying idle curiosity?
Except he was desperate to understand her, which to his shame, was something he’d rarely said about a lover. Somewhere Amy had changed from a means to an end, however appealing, to someone he cared about.
“But it’s not the whole truth?” He caught her hand and brought it down to rest in her lap.
“No. Not the whole truth,” she said in a hollow tone. To his regret, she slid her hand free.
“Will you tell me?”
Grim humor flattened her lush lips. “I have a horrible feeling I just might.”
“You can trust me, you know.” He meant it.
She leveled a considering gaze on him, hazel eyes somber and piercingly intelligent. After a pause, she sighed again, and her slender shoulders slumped in mute acquiescence. “Growing up, I never had much interest in the things most girls like. Dresses and dances.”
“No boys?”
She stared down into her lap. “Not the ones my age anyway. They seemed so trite and childish. Probably because the men I worked with on the estate had skills and purpose. I’d run Woodley Park since I was sixteen. That suited everyone. Silas could pursue his botanical work, and I could try out my ideas for improving profitability.”
“Most successfully, I gather.” She couldn’t have been much older than sixteen when she published her first article on animal husbandry. Even for the clever Nash family, she was a prodigy.
“Yes, I had some luck.”
She was too modest, but he let it pass. “So what happened?”
“Silas got married.”
“To Caro Beaumont.” Pascal had fond memories of his brief flirtation with the lovely widow, but from the first, Silas Nash had been her choice. “Don’t you like her?”