A Portrait of Love (The Academy of Love #3) - Minerva Spencer Page 0,98

just so happened to compliment her habit. She cut him a sideways glance and he winked, letting her know he was responsible. The tiny act of sweet, playfulness made her chest expand with love and she looked away, afraid of what her eyes might expose to him.

“Are you ready?” he asked her.

She nodded and he waved away the groom who’d pushed over the mounting block. Instead, he lifted her into the saddle himself.

He ignored her look of concern at such exertion and gave her booted ankle a quick squeeze before turning to the steward, who was already on a handsome gelding named Saturn. Simon himself rode Loki. She couldn’t help wishing he had a less volatile mount, but it was hardly her place to say such a thing.

Honey rode between the two men, Simon including her in their discussion of land, tenant farms, and other estate matters. She enjoyed the desultory pace and sunshine and thought the two men seemed to get on quite well; it was easy to like the tall, earnest steward.

They were cresting a gentle rise when a voice called out. Honey saw there was a little gazebo that overlooked a bend in the stream.

She knew who it would be before the person stepped out of the shadows. Not that she recognized the woman’s voice after all these years, but it just seemed like no part of arriving at her new home could proceed without something coming along to ruin it. First it had been the duke, and now it was Arabella MacLeish.

The other woman floated toward them with a sinuous grace, her smile blinding. “Simon! I just knew it was you.”

Sometimes in life, one exaggerated the grandeur or beauty of a person or event, only to later see said object and discover that one’s imagination had built it up.

This was not one of those occasions.

Countess MacLeish was even more beautiful than Honey remembered.

Simon’s face was so blank that she wondered if he didn’t recognize his former love. But Loki shifted beneath him with a nervousness that came from the man on his back.

“Bella,” he said.

It was not the same joyous exclamation of that long-ago day in London, outside Gunters, but the word still throbbed with some emotion, not that Honey could identify it.

She could not look at either of them, which left Heyworth.

When she turned to the steward, he was looking directly at her, and Honey would have sworn she recognized the same expression she’d been seeing on Simon’s servants: pity.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Simon hadn’t drunk this much since that night at Grunstead. Indeed, he’d not had any spirits at all since that evening—a conscious decision.

But tonight, the alcohol kept sliding down his throat, as if somebody else’s hand were pouring it.

Earlier today, when Honey had come to his room, he’d been annoyed that Heyworth would be at dinner with them—he’d wanted his wife all to himself.

But then they had run into Bella.

Simon snorted and his hand lifted the glass to his mouth without any encouragement from his brain.

She was as beautiful as ever. Not as slender, but lush—the body of a mature woman.

He had no idea why she was back here—he’d never given Wyndham a chance to tell him—but assumed her husband had left her destitute. Had she failed to bear him an heir? Or was it some other catastrophe that had brought her back to her childhood home?

She certainly hadn’t looked like a mother—at least not like any mother that Simon had ever seen. She had looked like a green-eyed siren and he’d gawked at her like a stunned, smitten boy—right there in front of his new wife and a complete stranger.

His wife.

“Hell,” he muttered, topping up his glass from the almost empty bottle, filling it all the way to the rim.

As addled as Bella had made him, it had taken him almost until the end of their brief visit to shake himself from his fugue and see that she was bent on mischief. She’d all but ignored Honoria, fawning over Simon and Heyworth, remind him suddenly of how she’d always behaved when other women were around: dismissively.

He recalled that she’d claimed to be a victim of feminine jealousy. As beautiful as she was, he suspected there was a grain of truth to her assertion. But he thought she worsened the situation by always seeking to be the center of attention.

By the time Simon had gathered his wits and disengaged his party from her, Honey had become as cool and aloof as she’d been before Brighton,