Hadrian Read Free Page A

breakfast, and you’re welcome to as many pigeons as Harold can stow on his yacht.”
    They had been doing so well with the platitudes and small talk. Hadrian made a doomed attempt to regain that false, friendly footing. “Be like what?”
    “We will try for cordiality and succeed swimmingly until something slips out amiss, and then all will be awkwardness until somebody tosses out another social nicety. While I cannot expect you to forget, I’m so very—”
    She broke off and patted Caesar’s neck.
    “So very what, Lady Avis?”
    She kept her back to him and leaned her forehead against Caesar’s shaggy mane. “I used to be plain Avis to you, or even Avie, and now I’m this Lady Avis creature, whom I hardly know, and don’t think I’d enjoy. I’ll hush now and thank you for your escort.”
    She reached around him to retrieve her flute case from where he’d tied it to his saddle, but he reached it first, keeping possession.
    Hadrian had left the clergy, and thus the only status remaining status to him was that of gentleman. A gentleman would admit that his past with Lady Avis included far more than the scandal she’d endured.
    “When a neighbor extends a hungry fellow an invitation to share a meal, that fellow does not expect the invitation to be retracted.” He winged his arm at her and kept his smile genial.
    Her expression went from puzzled to briefly mutinous, but she took his arm.
    “Your gardens are impressive for so early in the season,” Hadrian said as they approached the grounds behind Blessings. “You must tell me about them.”
    She accepted that challenge, pausing in her recitation only long enough for Hadrian to hand Caesar off to a groom. Then she fell silent, apparently content to stroll with him up to the stately expanse of the Blessings residence proper. The family seat was a huge old place, befitting a wealthy earldom, and yet to Hadrian, it had never seemed cold or lifeless, particularly not when the grounds were bursting with daffodils, tulips and all manner of flowering trees.
    “Blessings looks to be thriving. Your landscaping is sumptuous.”
    “Winter is so long and cold here, I’m usually desperate for color and beauty by spring, and each year, I grow a little more ambitious.”
    These beautiful gardens were her passion, then, so he kept to that topic. “Those beds look similar to some we have at Landover. Did you do ours as well as your own?”
    “I gave Harold my designs, because he complimented the patterns. Harold is the only man I know who isn’t too proud to admire a pretty flower.” She went on, describing what species went well together and why, while Hadrian was still trying to puzzle out their little exchange at the foot of the hill. He hadn’t precisely been avoiding Blessings, but he had been reluctant to see Avis.
    A bond still stretched between them, intimate, precious, and intensely private, but not altogether comfortable for either of them. Or maybe, he thought as she chattered on, there had been a bond, obliterated now, worn away by time, maturation, and the experiences that made up their separate lives.
    “What is your favorite flower?” Hadrian asked, because he wasn’t quite ready to closet himself with her over kedgeree and toast.
    “I love them all,” Avis said easily. “From the first crocus to the last chrysanthemum, and everything in between. What about you?”
    “I like purple flowers. Purple and blue. Irises, pansies, bluebells, violets and so on. We can’t quite replicate that palette of blues, lavenders, and purples God has given to the flowers, and I never tire of admiring it.”
    She plucked a pansy of a soft periwinkle shade and tucked it into the pin securing his cravat. “I wonder: Would the flowers appeal to us as strongly if the blooms never faded?”
    Hadrian let her natter on and occasionally stop to pull off a spent bloom. The morning air was warming up, and wandering around her garden allowed him time to adjust.
    This Avis