He’d started shaking his head with her second sentence. She finally seemed to notice, winding down her protests until they trailed away into silence. For a moment they simply stood, staring at each other, alone in this ruined garden. A breeze rattled the thin branches of the bushes and blew a lock of her dark hair across her mouth to catch in the seam of her plush lips. She pushed it behind her ear, her gaze still tangled with his.
He didn’t want her to leave, he knew it suddenly. He talked to Artemis, to Makepeace—and to no one else. There was no one else—save her, now. She’d found his secret, knew he wasn’t just a hulking mute, devoid of brain or soul. And more—she stirred something deep within him, something he’d thought had been beaten out of him in Bedlam.
Carefully he took a step back, hoping she’d understand that he was ceding the ground to her.
“Stop!”
They both started at her voice.
Miss Stump cleared her throat and said in a lower tone, “That is… I mean, if you’d like to stay and continue your work, I… I don’t mind.”
He nodded once and turned.
“Wait!” He heard her call from behind him, but there was no point in trying to explain when actions were simpler.
He jogged back to the tree he’d been trying to take down earlier and picked up his shovel and his satchel before returning.
Miss Stump was bent over her papers again, but he made sure to make enough noise that he wouldn’t startle her.
“Oh,” she said, straightening. “You’ve come back.”
Was that relief in her voice?
His mouth twisted wryly at himself. She was a lauded actress, vivacious, quick, and pretty. Even when he’d been able to speak, most of his feminine company had been bought. He wasn’t a comely man. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Yet she seemed happy that he’d returned, and that simple fact made his chest bloom with joy.
He dropped his satchel and took up the shovel, sticking it into the base of one of the dead bushes, striking at the root mass. The blade only went halfway into the soil, so he jumped with both feet on the shoulders of the blade, driving it the rest of the way down. He could feel as the blade sliced through the roots and he grunted with satisfaction. He’d spent part of the previous night sharpening the shovel to do just that. Gingerly he began prying with the handle—too hard a movement and he’d snap it, or worse, the iron blade itself. He’d already lost two shovels this spring.
“You don’t mind if I continue?” he heard Miss Stump ask. “It’s just that I need to finish writing this soon—very soon.”
He glanced up curiously at that, wondering at the worried line between her brows as she stared down at her manuscript. Makepeace had said she couldn’t get acting work at the moment. Perhaps this was her only means of making money.
He shook his head in reply.
“I’m only in the third act,” she said absently. “My heroine has gambled away all her brother’s money because, well, she’s dressed as her brother.”
She glanced up in time to catch his raised eyebrows.
“It’s a comedy called A Wastrel Reform’d.” She shrugged. “A complicated comedy because right now no one knows who anyone is. There’s twins—a brother and sister—named Wastrel, and the brother has convinced his sister—her Christian name is Cecily—to pretend to be him so that he might seduce Lady Pamela’s maid, and he’s engaged to her—Lady Pamela, not her maid.”
She took a breath and Apollo slowly smiled, because against all odds, he’d understood everything she’d just said.
Miss Stump grinned back. “It’s silly, I know, but that’s what comedy is, really—a lot of silly things happening, one after another.” She glanced down at her play, running her finger down the page. “So Cecily, dressed as Adam—that’s the brother—has lost terribly at a hand of cards to Lord Pimberly. Oh! That’s Fanny—the maid’s—father, and Lady Pamela’s scorned suitor. Although of course no one knows that Pimberly is Fanny’s father, otherwise she wouldn’t be a lady’s maid, now would she?”
Apollo leaned on his shovel and cocked an eyebrow.
“Kidnapped at birth, naturally,” she replied. “But fortunately she has quite a distinctive birthmark. Right here.” She tapped the upper slope of her right breast.
Apollo defied any man not to follow the direction of her finger. She had a lovely breast, gently swelling above the severe square neckline of her dress and modestly covered by a filmy fichu.
“Yes, well.” Her husky voice made him raise his gaze. Her cheeks had pinkened, but that might’ve been the wind. “In any case, I’m writing a scene between Cecily and Lord Pimberly in which Pimberly demands his money and Cecily doesn’t have it. And naturally he’s begun to realize he’s attracted to her at the same time.”
She cleared her throat.
He nodded, messing a bit with his shovel to look as if he were still working. Actually, he was beginning to fear that the blade was stuck in the roots.
Miss Stump glanced at her manuscript and slipped back into what he now knew was Cecily—the sister dressed as her brother. “Do you judge a gentleman by his bits, my lord?”
She turned and placed her fists on her hips again, in the wide-legged stance. “Pardon me, but I said chits.”
Turn. Her hands dropped. “And yet, ’tis still your manly bits we discuss.” She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “No?”
He screwed his mouth to the side and reluctantly shook his head.
“Blast!” she exclaimed under her breath, bending to the paper. She scratched out something and then froze, obviously thinking.
He wasn’t even pretending to work anymore.
She gasped and then hunched over her manuscript, scribbling furiously before straightening, a gleam of triumph in her eye.
She tossed her head as Cecily. “Indeed, and would you know a chit should you see one?”
Now she was a baffled Pimberly. “Naturally.”
“Oh, my lord?” She turned her head and looked over her shoulder through lowered lashes at the imaginary Pimberly, all daring flirtation. “And how is that, may I ask?”
“How?”
“How does a gentleman of your unsurpassed perception differentiate a chit from a bit?”
And she batted her eyelashes.
The juxtaposition between the ribaldry of her words and the innocence of her expression was so silly, so utterly enchanting, that Apollo couldn’t help it: he threw back his head and laughed.