He leaned forward to brush her cheek with his lips just as she stepped towards him to do the same. He caught her as she stumbled, his arms tight around her waist, her body pressed firmly to his chest. He looked down into her eyes, and she raised her mouth to his. Their lips brushed for the merest second. Enough for her to close her eyes. Enough for the attraction between them to spark to life and send them jumping awkwardly apart. For the second time in the space of a few days, they walked back together from the lake in silence.
Jack completed what had become his daily circuit of Hyde Park, then decided on impulse to walk through Green Park to St James’s. He found a bench at the opposite end from Horse Guards, and sat back, closing his eyes and enjoying the early-evening sunshine on his face. The change of scene seemed to be having a positive effect on his melancholia. Only three times had he woken in the last two weeks after enduring the nightmare, though a good many of the other nights had been spent awake, his brain churning in an endless circle of questions.
Here in London, Jack could have easily stayed out on the town, but he’d never been a carouser, not even when he was a young colt. Instead, he took the opportunity to catch up on his reading. There was a German mathematician called Gauss who had published several fascinating papers, which Jack was methodically working his way through. Complex stuff, and much of it in Latin, which kept him occupied through the long hours of darkness. He was having to pay extra for candles at his lodgings, and the piles of paper covered in scribbled equations were most likely interpreted by his landlord as evidence he dabbled in the black arts.
A barked order issued from the direction of Horse Guards shattered the silence of the park. Jack smiled wryly to himself. Someone was getting a rollicking. One thing he did not miss, the army’s obsession with spit and polish. His slapdash approach to his own appearance, after all those years of having to appear immaculate, surprised him. He’d had his hair cut here in London, but he had felt no temptation to blow any of the considerable wealth he had amassed over the years on anything other than a couple of pairs of boots and some new breeches. To be bang up to the mark interested him not one jot.
Nor had he felt any urge to blow his cash on wine, women or any other vice for that matter. London, even out of Season, offered many opportunities to do so. He’d attended far too many parties and balls in Wellington’s entourage to find them anything other than a duty call. And women—Jack had always liked women, but for that reason, he’d never been interested in bawdy houses. Not that he condemned them, or judged the men and women who frequented them—a combination of war and absence made such places necessary to an army. But for Jack, the notion of sexual congress with a woman he did not know was repugnant.
Until he met Celeste, in the two years since that fateful day, all thoughts of intimacy were repugnant. His celibacy hadn’t been a conscious decision at first. He had barely noticed the complete absence of desire, because he had at the time been between affairs. It was only later, when the opportunity arose and he—literally—did not. He’d dismissed it on that occasion as exhaustion. It was only now, thinking back, that he could see he’d simply—and without any regrets—taken to avoiding any social occasions where he would be confronted with his apathy.
He sat up on the bench, rubbing his eyes. Away from Trestain Manor, alone in the city, awake during the long night hours, he had had plenty of time to think. He had no name for it, his condition, he doubted that any medical doctor would recognise it, but he could no longer deny its existence. Army life had kept it at bay. The pressure, especially after Napoleon escaped from Elba, to find ever more clever ways to keep one step ahead of the French, had forced him to work ever longer hours, deep into the night, not sleeping so much as passing out from exhaustion. It had been there, catching him unawares in his rare moments of inactivity, but only then.
Finding a new occupation was surely the key to containing his melancholia again. This mystery of Celeste’s was merely a stop-gap, though it was a useful one, if only because it had been the kick up the backside he needed to stop putting up and start getting on with life.
Though it had been Celeste, rather than her unanswered questions, who had done the kicking, Jack thought ruefully. Celeste, with her sharp mind and her determination not to be cowed, as Charlie and Eleanor had been, by Jack’s inexplicable behaviour. She was the reason he’d finally admitted to the problem. She was the reason the admission had led to action. She was the reason he was determined to find a way out of the morass he’d been sinking in.
