was very good luck. Apparently, the sleeping quarters were not salubrious, though I can’t remember the hospital at all.”
“Your lack of memory suggests they gave you opium,” Betsy said. “If you fall into a stupor again, no one should bother with a hospital. Your man can tether you to a tree in the shade and ply you with sausages.”
She’d managed to shock him into a better mood. “It’s a good thing I decided not to marry you, isn’t it?” he said musingly. “Tether me to a tree like an unruly puppy?”
“I’ll just remind you,” she said loftily, “that marriage to me would only follow my decision to accept your hand.”
“I was saving you the trouble of making a decision by telling you about Bedlam.”
“Oh, that.” She waved her hand. Was she overdoing it? No, she didn’t think she was. When Jeremy first came to Lindow, a few months ago, he was drawn and white. Now his eyes were shadowed but his skin was healthy, thanks to spending most of the day in the stables.
“Yes, that.”
“You shouldn’t think of a stint in Bedlam as putting you out of the sweepstakes for marriage. I say that in the spirit of friendship, mind you, not as one who would want to string your proposal onto my daisy chain.”
Silence.
Then: “I’m sorry I was so brutal.”
“So you said.”
“I was a shite to say any of it.”
“You weren’t incorrect,” Betsy said, throwing him a bone.
“I like you as you are, as you truly are. You’re not very sweet, thank God. No, don’t glare at me. That’s a good thing. Sweet people skim along the surface of life. For example, you tell them you’ve been in Bedlam, and they cluck like hens.”
“Whom have you told?” Betsy asked.
“You.”
“Not your father?”
“No.”
“You can’t tell me that Parth clucked, when he found you in the asylum. Parth would never cluck.”
“After I woke up, he threw me in a carriage and blackmailed me into coming to Lindow so he could chase that woman of his.”
“You see? He didn’t leave you alone, but he didn’t fuss over you.”
“Your aunt pried it out of me.”
“Aunt Knowe is not a clucker either.”
“She fusses, though.” He reached out his hand.
Betsy looked at it thoughtfully. A man like Jeremy never asked for help. People had to intrude on his life, pouring tea down his throat and tossing him into carriages. Blackmailing him from pure love.
Yet here he was, holding out his hand.
She took her hand out of the cozy warmth of her eiderdown and reached toward him. His palm and fingers were callused from working with horses.
All she was doing was comforting him, the way any kind person would do. And she was kind, no matter what he said, and “kind” was almost the same as “sweet.”
After staring into the fire and parsing the two words, she felt a prickling awareness and discovered that he was staring at her.
“Is there a smut on my nose?” she asked.
“I give you fair warning: I’m about to be brutally honest.”
“I’ve had enough of your type of honesty for one day,” she said, pulling away her hand. “Why don’t you go back out in the snow instead?”
“I’ve never desired a woman the way I desire you. It’s like being in the teeth of a damned inferno.”
Betsy found herself smiling. “That’s frightfully improper, and a mixed metaphor as well.”
“You sound very pleased.”
“Oh, I am. I like to win, and if you remember, Lady Tallow made a play for your attentions, if not affections.”
“Are you tempted to marry me and take me off the market?”
Betsy snorted. “You just announced that you refuse to propose. And frankly, you’re not such a prize that I’d go out of my way. Lying about in the billiard room, pretending to be drunk and sliding under tables from pure boredom, saying fantastically unkind truths due to a whiff of jealousy. Throwing tea around the breakfast room. Now there’s a man I want to spend my life with!”
He laughed. “You’re not including Bedlam in the list?”
“Bedlam? No. It’s the daily encounters that make marriage intolerable, from what I’ve seen. You’re unlikely to go insensible again, but if you did, I’d stow you in that nice sanitarium where Diana’s murderous mother lives.”
“So she could shoot me again, thereby making you a merry widow?”
She grinned at him. “Exactly. There are women who are cut out to be widows, you know. I wouldn’t have to worry about—” She stopped.
“About what?”
“My reputation,” she answered. “Widows are expected to be lascivious and make their