Joan couldn’t help herself; she memorized the way outrage translated to Thaddeus’s entire body: his stiffened shoulders, frigid gaze, hand on his rapier . . . the general air of menace that descended into the tent.
Perfect for Hamlet, for a prince outraged by murder.
And for a viscount interrupted in a kiss.
The man opened his mouth, but Thaddeus held up his hand. “I have no interest in your opinion. Do you understand?”
The man’s cheeks had turned a ruddy color. “I’ll have—the parish constable—my tent!”
“I collect that you are outraged.”
Joan could feel herself blushing when she caught the man’s scandalized gaze.
“I shall kiss my wife in any dwelling that I choose,” Thaddeus announced, at his most imperious.
Joan’s blush got hotter as the man’s eyes skated from her head to her feet. Who would have thought that Lord Greywick could lie, let alone lie with such conviction?
“What?” The man gaped at her. “That ain’t—”
“My wife chose not to wear a gown to the dusty environs of a public fair,” Thaddeus stated, with an air that suggested ladies often made that choice. “I trust you aren’t questioning the sartorial preferences of my viscountess.” He withdrew his hand from his pocket, and a guinea caught a ray of sunlight coming in the tent door.
“No, sir,” the man said, his face suddenly wreathed in smiles. “I’d guess that my wife, bless her soul, would have thought it a frolic herself, when we were young.” He accepted the coin and nodded to Joan. “I thought when you came to my tent that you were the prettiest young gentleman as I ever did see, my lady. And I say that as sees everyone who comes to the fair, from across the whole of England. Now I see why you’re so fetching!”
Joan cleared her throat. “I appreciate that. Thank you.”
She walked out of the tent, her mind reeling, knowing that her cheeks were flaming red. What just happened?
Thaddeus had kissed her. He kissed her. A smile trembled around her lips because for once she hadn’t invited the kiss with a temptress’s smile.
She’d spent years practicing her smiles in a glass. Without being overly prideful, she thought she could entice almost any young man in the kingdom who wasn’t promised or in love with another woman to kiss her, if they found themselves away from prying eyes.
And yet she hadn’t even been thinking of kisses. In fact, hadn’t she been scowling at Thaddeus? She thought she had. All the same, he had kissed her. Her smile spread, which made her realize that her lips were swollen, and her fingers were trembling. She’d like to do that again. Kiss him.
She turned around, curious to see if Thaddeus shared her inclination.
He was walking from the tent, his expression bleak and icy, his eyes like chips of blue stone. Her heart sank.
Apparently not.
“That was unforgivable on my part,” he stated tautly, when he reached her side. “I beg your pardon. I have no excuse.”
In other circumstances, she would have made a laughing rejoinder, but nothing came to mind. Instead, she just stared at him, trying to figure out if he was angry with her. He looked as stiff and pompous as she’d ever seen him.
But she thought the expression in his eyes was self-loathing.
“It was only a kiss, for goodness’ sake,” she exclaimed, before she thought better of it. “It isn’t as if I climbed in your bedchamber window, and you failed to push me back out the door!”
If possible, his expression shaded even cooler. “It wasn’t the act of a gentleman,” he explained, with the odious air of one teaching ethical standards to a felon.
She could agree with him . . . or she could provoke him. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, deliberately giving him a dimpling smile. “I’ve found that many a gentleman snatches a kiss upon occasion.”
“Despicable,” he said curtly. “A weakness.”
“One you share, apparently.” It wasn’t possible to make her tone sunnier, but she put in a good-faith effort. It was sad just how much she was enjoying the raw discomfort she saw on his face. “Weakness or not, I’ve been kissed by many gentlemen. I would never judge you by a kiss in a snake tent, of all places! It was nothing. Think no more about it. So what do you think of Leviathan?” she asked over her shoulder, beginning to stroll to the next tent.
There was silence, and then: “Leviathan is a barred grass snake,” Thaddeus stated.
“What? No grass snake is that big,” Joan objected, stopping in her tracks.
“Natrix natrix helvetica. At most, it can grow to twice your arm length.” He cast her one of his condescending looks. “That poor fellow was perched on top of a clay snake fashioned from unconvincing coils.”
Joan was silenced. She had been entirely duped. Of course, she loved make-believe and theater.
“I thought they may have pinned his tail to the clay but he showed no signs of distress. I expect he was tied down,” Thaddeus continued.
She raised an eyebrow. “What would you have done if he were pinned?”
His face was inflexible, his mouth a thin line. “Set him free.”
Of course he would have.
The fact that Joan’s heart thumped to think of Thaddeus saving a grass snake was a further demonstration of the fact she’d lost her mind. At this rate, she’d find herself mad as poor Ophelia, but Thaddeus wouldn’t be writing her any love letters that she could return to him later.
She considered his expression as he strode beside her, glowering at the beaten grass. His cold eyes had made it very clear that the knot of longing she felt in the pit of her stomach was felt by her alone.
She refused to feel humiliated. He had kissed her, not the other way around. She had always declined to be pushed into marriage due to mere kisses—as when she kissed poor Anthony Froude just to irritate Thaddeus.
Whispering matrons thought she should be humiliated that Froude didn’t offer marriage, not knowing that he had done so, three times.
And been rejected each time.
She wasn’t humiliated by their sympathy, and she refused to be humiliated by Thaddeus’s glower.
“The next tent, the rabbit hutch, is my favorite,” she told him, speeding up as they approached it. This time she paid only for herself. Perhaps Thaddeus wouldn’t want to enter, given his response to Leviathan.
“Careful going in, lad,” the man at the door told her. “They’ll be all around your feet.”
Lad!
He didn’t think she was a woman.
“What is this?” Thaddeus asked a moment later, folding himself almost in half to get in the door, then standing up and rubbing the back of his neck.
“Bunnies,” Joan said happily. She crouched down, waiting. Sure enough, an inquisitive brown baby bunny hopped over and sniffed her shoe, so she picked it up and held it in front of her face. “Oh, you are adorable,” she crooned, sitting down. Another baby hopped over and soon she had three funny, sweet balls on her lap.
“Look!” she cried a moment later. One of her bunnies was standing up on his hind legs and rubbing his nose. “Isn’t he sweet?”
True to form, Thaddeus hadn’t picked up a single rabbit, or even bent over, though a baby had perched itself on top of his shining black boot.