Free Elisabeth Fairchild by A Game of Patience Page B

like to yearn for a gentleman’s good opinion, to feel a clumsy fool in his presence, all thumbs or left feet.” Her lips went dry, her mouth all cotton. She cleared her throat. In this small way, if in no other, she might reveal herself to Pip. “I know what it is like to think about a gentleman every day, wondering if he ever thinks of me. To imagine his smile, his kiss, sweet words.”
    Richard moved, gravel shifting. She glanced in his direction.
    “Is this love?”
    Pip turned his face to the lights behind them. He was smiling. His eyes, his teeth, caught the light. “Sounds like love to me,” he said.
    She smiled back at him, wondering if he had any notion she spoke of him.
    Richard’s voice exploded from the darkness. “I disagree. You speak of desire. Not love.”
    “Oh?” Pip’s response was caustic. “What then is love, Dickey-lad?”
    Richard took his time in answering, but when he spoke, the words seemed to well up from the heart of him, moving in their intensity. “Love follows desire. If one is lucky.”
    Patience looked away, shaken. Was that all she had ever felt? Desire? Without love? Richard sounded as if he understood deeply what she had yet to fathom.
    “Are you sure you do not mean lust, Dickey-boy?” Pip was ever skeptical.
    “No. You mistake love and passion. There is a difference.” Such certainty in Richard’s tone. His black-masked, black-cloaked figure had become one with the darkness, so that the words seemed to float, disembodied, in a void.
    Pip bowed toward the speaking darkness, in the Turkish fashion, grinning now. She could hear it in his voice, saw the glint of his teeth. “Tell us, then, o wise one. What is this difference?”
    “Passion is overwhelming,” the shadow within the shadows said.
    Patience could not imagine Richard overwhelmed by anything, and yet the darkness had swallowed him whole.
    “It crashes over one,” he said. “Blinds one. Consumes one. Instills jealousy, defensiveness, a clutching possessiveness. It can be blissful and destructive in the same moment.”
    “And love?” Patience was most interested in his diatribe, even if Pip yawned with feigned indifference, and called to them, “Come on, you two. Enough of the maudlin. Time to eat.”
    Darkness loosed its grip on Richard. Starlight found his nose, the flat of his forehead. It fingered his hair as he stepped forward. Stars were trapped in the eyes he fixed on her, a steady gleam behind the mask. He ignored Pip entirely.
    “Love is patient, kind, respectful, even dispassionate,” he said with equal dispassion. “It is a warmth of feeling, not an onslaught. It creates, and heals, and binds without clinging.” So calmly he spoke, his voice low and even, and yet there was that unexpected glimmer in his eyes.
    He reached for her hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm, never pausing in his diatribe. “One is filled with a strong sense of knowing love is worth waiting for, fighting for, perhaps even dying for.”
    Pip snorted his disdain.
    Richard went on, unfazed by his friend’s contempt, starlight and lamplight reaching for him now with greedy hands, caressing him with their combined glow, a mingling of silver and gold. “One cannot imagine living a lifetime without true love, while passion, which burns so very brightly, may be snuffed as quickly as a candle in the wind.”
    They met his outburst with a moment’s contemplative silence.
    Then Pip blurted, his heels spurting gravel as he turned to walk away, “Goodness, Dickey-boy! Preach us a sermon.”
    Patience ignored this ill-mannered outburst. She had never heard Richard address another topic with such intensity and conviction. It was as if the darkness had taken away the Richard she knew and given them back an intriguing stranger. The black sleeve beneath her gloved hand, the brush of his domino upon her own, seemed suddenly more interesting than usual.
    Pip sighed and set off without them. “Come along,” he coaxed