life might have been.
The first time she had met Adam Langthorne he had threatened to tan her hide and send her home to her father, with a message informing him that his daughter would never be permitted contact with his sister again.
‘Only my grandfather’s sense of chivalry prevents me from packing you off right now, even if you have to travel all night,’ he had told her, and looked down his nose at her from the superiority of his lanky height and his new commission in His Majesty’s army.
Serena had glared back at him and refused to admit she had anything to apologise for—even if she and Rachel Langthorne had been within a whisker of causing a scandal and had put themselves in deadly peril. To be labelled ungovernable hoydens given to outrageous pranks like dressing up as coachman and postilion and stealing his grandfather’s carriage to go to a mill would have blighted their reputations for life, even though they had only been fourteen at the time, but how she had hated him that day, she recalled with a wry smile. Probably all the more so because she had known he was right. It struck her that if he had published her infamy to the world, George Cambray would never have tainted his great name with such a hoydenish wife. Only think of the danger of passing on such bad blood to the docile and dutiful daughters he had expected her to bear him as the inevitable side effect of breeding his heirs.
Shaking off such unwelcome thoughts, she listened for Sir Adam’s soft footfall on the unpromising surface of the ancient woodland floor and wondered about that first meeting. Even at fourteen to his nineteen had she already been secretly in thrall to the tall ensign of dragoons? If so, she’d stoutly refused to allow the idea room in her silly head—and that would have been one secret she would never have confided in her best friend even if she’d known it herself. So much as a whiff of a match between Serena and her adored elder brother would have turned Rachel into a hardened matchmaker on the spot. In fact, now she came to think about it…Could that explain Sir Adam’s uncanny knack of knowing where Serena was before she’d hardly thought of being there herself?
She shook her head absently and acquitted her friend of such perfidy; Rachel knew everything about her but that one almost unformed secret, and wouldn’t serve Sir Adam such a backhand turn even if she had a suspicion of it. Yet Serena’s stubborn thoughts lingered on what might have been, and she drifted into a fantasy of meeting the by then Lieutenant Langthorne at her come-out ball instead of the rather awesome Earl of Summerton. If only that dashing and dangerous gentleman had presented himself to be danced with, dined with, and even perhaps mildly flirted with, could she have seen a truly nobleman from the outward pattern of one?
Who knew? She had been ungovernably silly in her debutante days, so it would probably have been in the lap of the gods. So goodness alone knew why the wretched man was intent on getting her alone now. Once upon a time she would have assumed he wanted to make her an offer and preened herself on another conquest. Now she dreaded it. And he could hardly find himself a less suitable wife if he combed every assembly room in the British Isles.
‘Good day, Lady Summerton,’ the wretched man greeted her, as if he had no idea she was attempting to hide from him yet again.
Serena jumped at the sound of the deep voice she had been trying not to hear in her dreams, and turned to watch Sir Adam Langthorne effortlessly close the gap between them with a long, easy stride. She told herself it was foreboding that was making her heart beat faster.
‘Oh, dear—I mean…good day, Sir Adam,’ she said, and felt herself blush like a green girl instead of a respectable widow of four and twenty. ‘I felt unaccountably tired for a few moments,’ she explained feebly, trying not to see the hint of laughter and something even more dangerous in his dark gaze as one dark eyebrow rose in polite incredulity at her limp excuse for behaving like a fainting young miss with considerably more hair than sense. ‘It’s unseasonably mild today is it not?’ she heard herself ask with an internal groan, thinking she sounded very much like the vicar’s spinster sister, who was one of the silliest women in England.
‘Last week you were sheltering in that tumbledown barn because you informed me it was too chilly in the open air,’ he responded solemnly, and she wondered if she had been right as a girl to think she would quite like to strangle Rachel’s superior and insufferable brother. Then he grinned at her, and she knew it would have been a grievous waste of both their lives, and a smile trembled on her own lips before she controlled it and looked back at him rather severely.
‘And so it was. Such are the vagaries of the English weather, Sir Adam, in case you have quite forgot them during your sojourn in the Peninsula.’
‘Indeed I have not. This is the only country I ever came across where we have all our seasons in one day, but at least this one is fine and, as I never seem to see anything other than the hem of your pelisse disappearing over the horizon of late, my lady, it must be ranked an especially clement one for me,’ he added with a sardonic smile, and her stupid heart raced all over again.
‘I have been—that is to say, I am very busy,’ she told him solemnly. ‘Very busy indeed,’ she added, and took her late father’s half-hunter watch out of her pocket and inspected it as if every second of her day were precious.
‘Then we mustn’t waste your valuable time,’ he said, taking her gloved hand and raising her to her feet as if she was made of spun glass, then fitting it into the crook of his elbow as if it belonged there. ‘A lady of your advancing years should learn to take life a little more easily,’ he chided wickedly as he led her inexorably back onto the footpath that led away from her brother-in-law’s acreage and onto Sir Adam’s even larger estates.
It felt like venturing onto dangerous ground, but Serena told herself not to be silly for perhaps the thousandth time since she had met him again. It had only taken one look to know the infuriating, arrogant youth who had given her a tongue lashing that had bitten all the deeper for being well deserved, was now an infuriating, arrogant mature and potent gentleman she had endless trouble dismissing as merely her best friend’s brother.
‘And a gentleman of yours should learn better manners,’ she snapped back, before she had time to put a guard on her tongue. Catching a glint of satisfaction in his brown eyes, as temper robbed her of the starchy dignity she was forever striving for in his company, Serena decided she was an idiot to secretly prefer his provocation to the smoothest compliment.
‘I wonder if the objects of your inexhaustible charity know you are a spitfire of the first order,’ he mused, but this time she refused the bait.
‘They are my friends,’ she countered, mildly enough, ‘and as such aware of my faults without you taking the trouble to point them out, Sir Adam.’
‘No doubt,’ he replied amiably, and proceeded to guide her past a particularly persistent puddle.
Infuriating wretch! How dared he be so irritating and look so devastatingly handsome while he did it? Yet she suspected that even if he had been born as plain and homely as a man could rightly be, he would still have commanded the attention of any room he walked into—and why on earth wouldn’t he take the hint and turn his charm and wit and undoubted looks on some other unfortunate woman and stop plaguing her with them?
She had resolved to avoid the man when she noticed how his eyes heated whenever she met them, but he now seemed determined to force a meeting on her. A craven part of her wanted to wrench her hand from the warm contact on his russet coat sleeve and run away before she let herself consider the flesh-and-blood man underneath it, and reawakened some of the wicked fantasies that had been disturbing her dreams since he had come home. If she had ever met a man who inspired such contrary emotions in her she was very certain she would have recalled him, and a seductive voice whispered how very satisfying it might be to be constantly surprised, exasperated and seduced by such a faulty and unforgettable gentleman for the rest of her days.
Utter rubbish, of course, and the sooner her life returned to its usual mundane serenity the better. Until Sir Adam had come home from the wars the unchanging routine at Windham had been so soothingly predictable—and novelty, Serena decided huffily, was vastly overrated.
‘The news from Spain is decidedly mixed, is it not?’ she finally