sure whether to cheer or weep, and felt vaguely ashamed of herself for using it as a means to deflect a possible proposal and the discomfort and distress it would cost her to refuse him.
‘Very,’ he replied, seriously enough to make her feel much better, so it was a shame she merely felt guilty for reminding a former soldier of what his comrades had so recently endured. ‘Old Nosey’s not that good at sieges, I’m afraid,’ he added, and she had little doubt he was one of those who saw past the glowing accounts of victory to the long lists of dead and injured.
‘I dare say you know his strengths and weaknesses better than most, Sir Adam,’ she replied.
The mere mention of his service in the Peninsular reminded her of her first sight of him as a fully adult male, in the prime of his life and power, instead of the annoying brother of her best friend she remembered from that humiliating encounter as a rebellious girl. Captain Sir Adam Langthorne, dark-haired, dark-eyed and breathtakingly handsome, in silver-laced blue coat and all the attendant glory of a cavalry officer’s uniform, had still had the power to disturb her six months later. It ought to be made illegal for any man not blessed with a squint, or a figure akin to the Prince Regent’s portly one, to go abroad so decked out in the presence of susceptible ladies. Now he had sold out of the Queen’s Light Dragoons she would get over the memory, of course—if she contrived to avoid him a little more successfully in future.
Today his russet coat fitted loosely, and his shabby leathers shouldn’t enhance his powerful figure. But neither did anything to disguise the latent strength in his broad shoulders and those long and sleekly muscled legs. Put her brother-in-law in such a ramshackle outfit and he would look like a carter instead of an earl, yet Sir Adam looked just as dangerous as ever.
‘Your brother-in-law has just informed me the war is costing too much and our army should be brought home—to do nothing, presumably,’ he now informed her rather shortly, as if he was still restraining himself from telling his most powerful neighbour and fellow magistrate exactly what he thought of such waverers.
‘Henry has no concept of military strategy or battle tactics, I’m afraid,’ Serena said apologetically. Her brother-in-law probably had no idea how offensive such second-hand ideas were to a man who had seen what price the expeditionary forces were paying for keeping some of Bonaparte’s most battle-hardened generals so unsuccessfully occupied.
‘If he paid more attention to you and regarded his wife’s arrant nonsense a little less, I dare say he might speak a little sense once in a while,’ Adam said ruefully, and there was laughter and something more disturbing back in his fascinating eyes.
They were too complex to be categorised as just brown, she decided dreamily. His pupils were rayed with gold, as if permanently touched with sunlight, and there was a depth of rich colour to the rest that had nothing simple about it—although she really shouldn’t be intimately acquainted with them. Oh dear, now she was cataloguing his assets like a besotted schoolgirl! She looked away swiftly, but heat still surged through her in an embarrassing tide, and made her wish him distinctly less acute, for there was amusement and a little too much understanding of her confused feelings in his eyes now.
Having had six months to consider his graces, and one or two of his faults, she already knew he was tall enough to make her feel less lanky than usual. And she really must stop meeting his eyes in this coming fashion—just because she had met a gentleman who could look down at her without standing on a box! He was quick of thought and action for a tall man too, she remembered dreamily, picturing him exerting iron strength to stop a bolting horse stampeding through Marclecombe village and threatening to crush a child under its deadly hooves…
Reminding herself he was also impatient and domineering, and as irritating and persistent as a burr, she slanted a minatory glare at him, adding ‘managing’ to his list of faults. One benefit of widowhood was her freedom from being managed, she reminded herself sharply. And of course being excused marital duties. Given her late husband’s outspoken disgust with a wife who could not even give him a daughter in four years of marriage, that was a decided advantage.
Guilty that she couldn’t mourn a man who had changed from a light-hearted and carelessly charming fiancé into a spendthrift husband with a foul temper and worse habits, she ordered herself to be more dutiful. It hadn’t been George’s fault she had been too young to tell love from infatuation—although he had killed any lingering enchantment stone dead by the time he had died. She shivered even in the bright sunlight and turned her attention to the present. Even with the conundrum that was Sir Adam Langthorne in it, now was much more pleasant time in her life.
‘I can think of nothing more likely to cause trouble,’ she said, with a shudder at the thought of Henry being silly enough to listen to her views over his wife’s. ‘But pray tell me, is Rachel still busy with her spring cleaning?’ she added brightly, once more intent on finding a neutral topic of conversation.
‘Indeed, my house is not my own. I might wish myself back in Spain and enduring the rigours of campaign if not for certain compensations,’ he replied, with a warmth in his deep voice that shouldn’t make her senses sit up and take notice.
Drat the man! She should have known he could bend any subject to his own ends, and there it was again—that fascinating softening of his acute gaze she was determined to resist. If she once let him get the words out it would be the end to so much, and Rachel Langthorne’s friendship was too precious to lose because her brother refused to be set at a proper distance.
‘I suppose Burgess wishes to consult you about the lambing, Sir Adam?’ she asked, still trying to keep their conversation impersonal, despite his lazily amused gaze telling her he knew exactly what she was about.
‘I expect Burgess is all but finished with that,’ he replied, obligingly for once, ‘and at least he won’t talk me half to death while Mrs Burgess provides you with a list of her ailments and those of her numerous brood.’
‘Bearing twelve children and keeping ten alive is an achievement in itself,’ Serena told him, as she fought back a smile at this all-too-accurate description of Mrs Burgess’s preoccupations.
‘You’d think she would realise what was causing them by now, wouldn’t you, though?’ he asked with a wicked grin.
‘Well, really, Sir Adam!’
He raised one dark eyebrow and his eyes were alight with laughter. ‘I hope you’re not turning into a prig, Lady Summerton?’
‘Pray confine such comments to the gentlemen in future,’ she said stiffly, trying to remove her hand from the crook of his arm.
He bowed briefly, but placed his other hand over hers. She stilled immediately. ‘I beg your pardon. I thought you were beyond the series of hypocrisies and evasions that commonly make up polite conversation,’ he told her, and she couldn’t tell if he was teasing or deadly serious.
‘Then you thought wrongly.’
‘Perhaps,’ he replied enigmatically, releasing her hand at last—only to clasp it again as he helped her over a stile and onto the footpath that led to Red Bridge Farm.
‘I’m a conventional creature, Sir Adam. Despite any rumours you might have heard to the contrary,’ she made herself say airily, over the thundering of her heartbeat as she leant on his strength as briefly as she could without tripping over.
‘I don’t listen to rumour, my lady. Instead I like to gather facts and make an informed judgement for myself.’
‘If only more of our kind did that,’ she replied impulsively, and risked undoing all the good she had managed to do herself by smiling up at him as if they were more than the mere acquaintances she had assured herself they were.
Luckily he resisted such an obvious opening, and returned her look with a quizzical one of his own. ‘It has often occurred to me that most of the nobility and gentry don’t have nearly enough to do—unlike you, my lady.’
‘I hate being idle,’ she told him earnestly.
She didn’t have it in