The Truth About Love by Stephanie Laurens Read Free Book Online Page B

for tonight, or do you want to go with the black?”
    Gerrard considered. “The black.” Leaving Compton to fig out his evening clothes, he turned back into the bedroom and headed for the glass-paned doors that opened onto the balcony.
    The private semicircular balcony ran half the length of the room. Because of the odd shape of the house and the angle of the room next door, no other room was visible, and vice versa; both balcony and room were essentially private, and offered a unique and stunning view over the gardens.
    Gerrard stepped out, entranced.
    Even through the lengthening shadows of approaching dusk, the gardens were magical—fantastical shapes rose out of the twilight, a plethora of fairy-tale landscapes scattered across and down the valley, each opening out from the last, then merging into the next.
    On the horizon, the sea shimmered gold in the last light of the dying sun, then melted through shades of gilt and silver laid over blue to become the iridescent surf breaking on the rocks clogging the inlet’s narrow beach. He let his gaze slowly travel nearer, noting how the gardens became progressively more structured the closer they got to the house. In the ring of areas adjoining the house, he glimpsed a garden of round boulders on one ridge, a formal Italianate garden nearer at hand, statuary in another section and a towering pinetum on the other ridge.
    He could hear the tinkling music of water running over rock. Looking down toward the sound, he saw a terrace below the balcony. The terrace skirted the house on the valley side, giving views and also access to the gardens; he could just make out steps leading down in several places. Toward the middle of the house, a denser, darker patch of thick vegetation ran right up to the terrace, perhaps even extending beneath it.
    That, Gerrard guessed, on a mild surge of satisfaction, had to be the famous Garden of Night.
    Tomorrow, he’d explore. He tried to focus on the prospect, only to find his mind drifting, insistently, back to Jacqueline Tregonning.
    How was he going to gain her trust, gain her confidence enough to learn all he wanted to know?
    Considering the best way to approach a young lady he now knew wasn’t as conventional as he’d blithely assumed, he wandered back into the room, absentmindedly shutting the door on the darkening gardens.
     
    D inner was a curious experience. The food was excellent, the conversation beyond subdued. The hour passed in oddly peaceful quiet, with long stretches of silence, yet strangely without any sense of repression. They spoke as necessary, but there was no compulsion to fill the gaps.
    Gerrard was fascinated. Both he and Barnaby had been watchful, quick to match their hosts’ behavior. Both found the family intriguing, Barnaby because, as a student of crime, he found the vagaries of human nature absorbing, while for Gerrard, Jacqueline’s interaction with her family would inevitably form the cornerstone of his mental picture of her, the basis of the understanding he ultimately brought to her portrait.
    Regardless of the relative silence, the established procedures were followed; when the covers were drawn, the ladies rose and left the gentlemen to pass the port. Mitchel asked Barnaby about the curricle-racing scandal. Lord Tregonning grasped the moment to inquire whether the room he’d been given met with Gerrard’s approval. On being assured it did, his lordship nodded and lapsed once more into comfortable silence.
    Gerrard sat back, comfortable, too, and considered his best way forward with Jacqueline. At the end of a restful twenty minutes, they all rose and quit the dining room. Lord Tregonning left them in the hall, heading for his study. Together with Mitchel and Barnaby, Gerrard strolled back to the drawing room.
    They crossed the threshold to the gentle strains of a sonata. Gerrard looked at the pianoforte set in one corner, but it was Millicent at the keys. Jacqueline was seated at one end of the central