Marguerite Kaye - The Truth Behind Their Practical Marriage

When it ended, she gazed at him, dazed. Aidan’s eyes were heavy, gazing at her in the same stunned way. There was a hint of auburn in his beard at the corner of his mouth she hadn’t noticed before. She touched it, wonderingly, and he pressed his mouth to her open palm, and she caught her breath again, and it hung in the balance for a few seconds, the possibility of a second kiss, which she would have offered freely, before he smiled lopsidedly at her, setting her free from the circle of his arms.

And then they walked on, not quite as before, but in accord, because there was nothing to be said, passing a pyramid-shaped building which proved to be an ice house, and on, until the trees gave way to a piazza dominated by a fountain, surprisingly deserted. They sat on a bench in the shade, close enough for their bodies to touch, though they kept their gaze on the tinkling fountain. The park was silent, even the birds made drowsy and muted by the heat.

‘I didn’t think I was that sort of person,’ Estelle said dreamily. ‘The kind who kisses at the drop of a hat.’

Aidan gave a huff of laughter. ‘The drop of a handkerchief, to be more precise. Ironically, until I met you, I thought I was no longer that sort of person. It just goes to show how resilient nature is.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing.’ He reached for her hand. ‘You do know, Estelle, that if we were in England—or Ireland—it would be quite wrong for me to kiss you.’

‘I kissed you back.’

‘You know perfectly well what I mean. You may be well travelled, but you’re an innocent.’

‘Not so innocent that I can’t recognise that you have behaved like the honourable man I know you are, Aidan. Other men would have leapt at the offer of a second kiss, and probably pressed for a great deal more, whether it was offered or not. Not,’ she added hastily, seeing his horrified expression, ‘that I have been subjected to that, but there have been times when it could have become an issue, had I been a little less vigilant.’ She sighed, fiddling with the strings of her bonnet. ‘So please stop apologising. We agreed, didn’t we, that we would make our own rules?’

‘We did.’

Later, alone in her pension, realising she’d turned a page in her book without taking in a single word of what she’d read, Estelle cast her history of the Medicis aside. Today had been a revelation. Who would have thought that kissing could be so utterly delightful? Or more specifically, who would have thought that she could find kissing so utterly delightful? She had always found the idea of it frightening, a stormy expression of the unsavoury cocktail of hate and love which her parents felt for each other. And her actual experience, until she had kissed Aidan, had been distasteful. But kissing Aidan!

Jumping out of bed, she threw open the window to gaze out on to the piazza below. Kissing Aidan was like nothing she had ever imagined. For the first time, she understood how Phoebe’s passion for the arrogant but charismatic Frenchman could have flared. When she discovered that her twin had taken Solignac as a lover, she had been shocked to the core—not, as Phoebe assumed, because she had behaved scandalously, but because she claimed to be passionately in love. This, Estelle had always assumed, was the one emotion all three sisters were quite immune to, and happily so, given the appalling example of their parents’ tempestuous and ultimately miserable marriage. But Phoebe, thank goodness, had been cured of her passion for that French enfant terrible , and now that she’d got him well and truly out of her system, she had made a very sensible marriage much like Aunt Kate’s, which allowed her to concentrate on her true passion, for her restaurant.

Aidan, unlike the despised Solignac, was a man of honour. A man who would never take advantage of her. A man she could trust not to overstep the mark, even if she wished him to. It was likely that, this wild, insistent desire to taste more of Aidan’s kisses was a passing fancy, a fleeting passion of a very different nature than the one that had infected and driven her parents. Something to be relished, in fact, while it lasted. A little hiatus from the real world, and a much-needed break from worrying about the future.

Was she in thrall to Aidan, as Phoebe had been to her Frenchman? No, but she was enraptured, enchanted, fascinated and—oh, for heaven’s sake, attracted! They were kindred spirits who had both been alone too much, but they were also ships that must inevitably pass in the night.

Estelle threw herself back on her bed. For the next little while, she could enjoy Aidan’s company and his kisses for what they were. An interlude—an extremely pleasant one of say—a week—no, two weeks, before she left Florence for the next stop on her itinerary. Satisfied, she blew out her candle and lay back on the pillows, pressing her mouth to the back of her hand to relive today’s kisses, and to imagine tomorrow’s. If that was not being too greedy.

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