Just to Have You (Blackwood & Friends #3)

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

Ben: "Where are you going?"

Griff: "Home. My mother wants to wash my hair with vinegar and lard because of the lice infestation going about the village."

Ben, aggrieved: "I wish you had told me this before we spent the entire day lying on the same throw, watching the clouds!"

(B & G conversation about some of the benefits of friendship 10 years prior)

In the day and a half that had passed since the ball, Oliver had found himself immobilised temporarily from whatever task he had set out to accomplish and merely absorbed in a moment of simply observing Amy at whatever task she had been completing more than once.

Yesterday, when his parents and her mother had to leave London for Haventry, he had come about her in one of the damask-patterned sofas in the library that now boasted a jagged hole in its ceiling. He had been attempting to locate his father's prized hunting rifle, which Lionel refused to depart without, and the last occasion with which it had been used, unfortunately, was within the confines of the library. Oliver half suspected his mother had hid the weapon from his father after that day as the servants were considerably unhelpful to boot, which was suspect in itself, and Lionel had outright refused to climb aboard the carriage without the rifle in his possession.

At the insistence of both his parents and her mother, Amy would return to Haventry the following day with Oliver in order to allow her a day more to enjoy the city and acquaint herself further with her newly acquired friends while he attended a legal matter on behalf of them. It stood testament to their years of friendship, and possibly Amy's encroaching years of self-proclaimed spinsterhood, that they were willing to leave her unchaperoned with him, and if things were not as they currently stood between them, Oliver may have trusted them both to act with propriety in any given opportunity that they chanced to find themselves unabatedly alone.

If he hadn't have kissed her, he may have thought it possible.

She had been reposing indolently, in no manner in which a proper lady ought to on a settee, and he had paused on the threshold, grinning to himself at the picture she made. Her legs were thrown over the armrest as she lay on her back, cushioned by the dark curling mop of her tresses, as she held a heavy tome of literature up to her face that she was reading. Her calves swung happily back and forth, swishing the skirts of the cheerfully yellow day frock she was wearing, almost childlike in the innocence and abandonment of the gesture.

Upon noticing him observing her on the threshold, she had started, smiled, and clumsily dropped the book on her forehead.

Presently, while he was perusing the semantics of Nate's testimony and consulting other written references and transcriptions at the escritoire in the parlour room, his attention was once more diverted from the task at hand and he found himself studying her.

She had joined him some time ago with a book to consume some of her time before they departed, and they had continued in companionable silence, until a slight scuffle had diverted his concentration.

Oliver had also been tasked with travelling with Cecil and Millicent, who had earned themselves another conveyance entirely due to their sheer size alone so that Arianna would not be burdened with the task of tending to her husband's gigantic dogs, to Gravewood Manor, therefore the wolfhounds were still in residence with him and Amy.

She had vacated her perch on a chaise longue by the window and was tussling on the carpeted floor with the two hounds. The beasts were notoriously huge and dwarfed her considerably in her disadvantageous position as she kneeled on the carpet, currently rubbing Cecil's belly that he had presented to her while happily thumping his wiry tail on the floor, uncaring that the whiplike motion was causing pandemonium to the tea service neatly placed on the low table behind him. Millicent was leaping about, pawing at Amy's lovely mauve gown incessantly, yipping in appeal for her own turn.