Free A Country Wooing by Joan Smith Page B

she said.
    “And debt. But it isn’t hopeless, you know. I’ll come around soon. We must be patient a little longer.” He looked at her with an impatient expression—intent, questioning.
    Anne felt as surely as she was sitting in his gold saloon that he was talking about marriage. It was a perfectly presumptuous thing to read into his innocent words, but when he reached out and patted her hand, she knew it was that and nothing else that he meant. His fingers ran over the opal ring she wore. She always wore it now. When he smiled softly, she knew exactly what was in his mind: I hope you will have a lovelier one, one day, to wear on the other finger. The atmosphere was so heavy she sought to lighten it.
    “Thinking of taking my gift back and pawning it?” she asked.
    “Not even close. Will you stay to lunch?”
    “I don’t want to leave Mama alone. I’ll be going now.”
    He accompanied her to the stable. As he helped her onto Lady’s back, he looked along all the empty stalls in the useless addition Charles had built and scowled.
    “I’m driving over to Sawburne with Robin tomorrow,” he said before she left. “We’ll get an early start and be back by afternoon. I’ll call around three or four, if that’s all right.”
    “I’ll give Mama the order and tell her to be home, with tea ready.”
    “It’s you I’m coming to see, Duck,” he said with an intimate, meaningful smile.
    Anne’s spirits soared as she cantered home through the flower-dappled meadow. She knew her mother wanted this match with Alex, and as a sort of daydream, she had often considered it. It would be a marvelous social coup, and of course extremely convenient. In these considerings, the only objection had been Alex himself. Cold, aloof Alex. How had she misread him so completely? Had she been so blinded by the dashing, reckless Charles that she’d never bothered to look—or had he changed?
    From the moment he had bumped into her in the doorway of Rosedale and grabbed her in his arms to be welcomed home, he had seemed to view her as a lover. Almost as though he had come home and come to Rosedale with no other view than marrying her.
     

Chapter Seven
     
    Anne’s head was bent over her sewing as she sat in the saloon the next afternoon, awaiting the arrival of Alex and Robin. She hadn’t paid much heed to fashion in the year and a half since Charles’s death, but with Alex home, there would be a few small do’s, and such gowns as she possessed were under revision for possible updating. The yellow silk on her lap was being enlivened with white lace and green ribbons. She wasn’t sure whether it was an improvement or the opposite, but at least it was a change.
    Her mind flew to that rapidly thinning bolt of creamy crepe in Mumbleton’s drapery shop. She mentally balanced her dwindling allowance against absolutely necessary new gloves, a birthday present for Mama, a proper repair to her blue patent slippers (for the tacks piercing her toe rendered them nearly unwearable), and the white crepe. She had been deeply distressed to learn the crepe cost three guineas a yard.
    A daring straight gown was what she had in mind, and the pattern called for three yards. She had never paid such a sum as nine guineas for material in her life; it was a monstrous extravagance. With a little rearranging and careful cutting and omission of the shawl, two yards would do it. A little frown puckered her brow as she considered this important matter. Intent on the solution, she was unaware of company. Alex and Robin had stabled the curricle and come in the back door.
    “If you hate sewing as much as that Roman frown indicates, why do you do it?” Robin asked.
    She looked up to see two handsome young men smiling at her. Both were decked out in fawn trousers and Hessians—city clothes, instead of their customary buckskins and top boots. Robin was undeniably the more handsome, but it was at Alex that she looked longer. A spontaneous smile of surprise lit