Chapter Eleven #2
“About the Starlings,” she reminded him, looking very curious about his sudden change in demeanor. “Here you are. I hope you like port. It is accidentally quite aged.”
“Oh, right,” he said, easing again with a little frown. “No, I didn’t. Maybe Harcourt knows. They were friends.”
“Maybe so,” she agreed, holding her glass while staring at his with what appeared to be extremely intense expectation. “Go on, then.”
“I … All right?” he said, lifting it to his lips and giving it a little sip.
She frowned. “No, I mean your ritual with the glass. Proceed.”
“My what?” he said, helplessly as she made a little clicking sound with her tongue.
She set her own glass aside and reached out to push his fingers against the base of the little glass. “Like this,” she said impatiently, her fingers soft and insistent over his. “Then the stem, like you do at dinner.”
“I do what?” he managed, staring down at the glass like he’d never seen one before.
She huffed, leaning back, and watched him for a moment, her eyes flashing with indignation. “You’re not doing it purposefully?”
“Doing what?!” he demanded, throwing the rest of the port into his mouth as a matter of necessity and swallowing it down.
“Testing me!” she burst out, throwing her hands up. “Teaching me the silent language!”
“The … oh!” he said, realization bursting over his skin and muddying the confusion that still lingeried just beneath. “At dinners?”
“At dinners!” she repeated, shrill again.
He couldn’t help but gawk at her for a moment, gloriously furious, glowing with her own frustration. And then he began to laugh again.
Not intentionally.
But he couldn’t help it.
“Elias Selwyn!” she shrieked, outrage glowing on her like a mantle.
It only made him laugh harder, dropping his face into his hands and shaking his head in apology as he tried to get his mirth under control.
“Fine!” she snapped, and he heard her take up her own port and swallow it in a single gulp as he had. “I shan’t learn it, then. That is fine. I never expected to, anyhow.”
“Harriet,” he managed, peeking up at her through his fingers, his ribs aching with how good it felt to release some of the tension that had been bottled up beneath them. “Please.”
She glared at him. “You promised you would help me.”
He drew in a deep breath and pushed it out as a sigh, dropping his hands and rubbing his lips together in an effort to quell the curve of amusement that still lingered there. “I did,” he managed, as apologetically as possible. “And I meant it.”
She huffed, crossing her arms. “You don’t understand,” she said, a marked pout in her tone. “I don’t like not being good at things right away.”
It took every ounce of fortitude in his body not to laugh again. Instead, he only pressed his lips together and gave a somber nod. “Right,” he said. “Can’t imagine what that must be like.”
“You only do it when you are watching me,” she said with a little sigh, shaking her curls. “I thought for certain you were attempting to impart a lesson.”
“Well, now hold on,” he said, raising his brows. “If I only do it when I’m watching you, then it likely is some form of communication, even if unintentional. Do you want to show me again?”
She considered it, her eyes glinting in the low light as she studied his face. “No,” she decided. “I am embarrassed.”
This time, he could not suppress the twisting beginnings of a smile, charmed despite himself though still doing his level best not to laugh and send her off into a snit again. “What were you going to tell me the other day?” he asked. “About tribes in Siberia? I cut you off and I shouldn’t have.”
She wrinkled her brow, as though she did not quite remember.
He did chuckle at that, but only in reaction to his own peevishness.
“I was being a beast, if you recall, about the will,” he reminded her, holding up the flat of his hand and brushing it against the tip of her nose just the way he had in his room that first day, when he’d wanted her to stop talking.
“You wanted to come to some sort of accord about the marriage and you said something about Siberian tribes.”
She blinked, giving a little shiver as he pulled his hand away, her eyes drifting down to look at her empty port glass.
“Oh,” she said, half-whispering. “That. It is nothing, really. Only that there is a tribe that often matches children they consider the most opposite when arranging marriages, because they think that opposing elements of temperament produce the strongest households and the most resilient children. I thought perhaps Willa was thinking along similar lines, with her decree.”
“You think us complete opposites?” he pressed, raising his brows. “I also do not like failing to be good at things right away, you know.”
“You don’t?” she asked, sounding genuinely surprised.
He shook his head, letting another ripple of laughter escape him. “So how do you think it felt,” he pressed, “sitting beside you in Latin lessons? Or beside Malcolm in arithmetic?”
“Well,” she said, frowning. “I also had to sit next to Malcolm in arithmetic.”
He paused, a little flash of surprise passing through him. “Oh,” he said. “I suppose that is true. Did you hate it as much as I did?”
She grimaced, her teeth reflecting the low light. “Of course I did. Especially when it was algebra or logic problems. And he’d take such glee in answering very fast, before I could even wrap my head around the question.”
“He would!” Elias exclaimed, eyes widening. “What a little peacock he was.”
“Was,” said Hattie with a shrug. “Is?”
And they both laughed this time, for a stolen, quiet moment.
“Ah,” she said, shaking her head. “I suppose I did the same thing in language lessons, didn’t I? And the more of us Willa took in, the more unbearable lessons must have been for you, one by one.”
He gave her a wan smile and a shrug. “Must have been,” he echoed. “Who can remember now?”
“But now you are the instructor,” she reminded him, “and I the struggling pupil. You have the answers and I do not. Perhaps you may motivate yourself in teaching me as some sort of revenge, hm? Do I not deserve it?”
He narrowed his eyes. “You do, actually.”
She smiled, lowering her lashes. “So what were you thinking? Watching me at dinner, holding your crystal wineglass?”
He straightened, breathing with intent, and angled himself toward her, their knees brushing on the edge of the mattress.
It immediately distracted him, his eyes falling to the collision of his velvet robe and her tiger-striped silken one.
“I can scarcely recall,” he confessed, though, just now, he had an inkling.
“Oh,” she whispered, raising her eyes back up to meet his, her tongue darting out to moisten her lips. “That is a shame.”
“Forget the wineglass,” he said, a bit throatier than he would have liked, nudging closer to her on the mattress. “What do you think my body is conveying? Right now?”
She was silent for a moment, though Elias was of the mind that she even thought a bit more loudly than was polite.
He dragged his eyes up to meet hers, trailing over all the details of the damned robe in the process, until there was nothing left in his view but the dark shadows and dancing lights around her irises, the color of amber stones in the dark.
She swallowed, her narrow throat flexing, and ran those eyes of hers over his face. “Perhaps I am too close,” she said in barely a whisper, her little, pink tongue darting out to moisten her lips.
“You are not close enough,” he returned without thinking, his hands itching to remove that robe now and be done with it forever.
“Elias,” she said, her tongue rolling over the syllables in that serpentine shape she loved so well, her eyes fixed on his mouth. “If I were any closer, we would be touching.”
“Indeed?” he said. “And is that not part of the silent language as well? Touch?”
“Is it?” she asked, just a breath on the air, so soft, he might have missed it. “I didn’t know.”
“Guess what I’m saying silently,” he persisted, reaching up to touch one of those wayward curls that had worked its way loose just over her ear, wrapping his finger around it. “Go on.”
“You want …” she managed, her breath catching when he touched her hair.
“Yes?” he said, his own gaze traveling over her face now, noting the delicate pulse in her throat, the shallowness of her breath, the color in her cheeks. “What do I want?”
“I don’t …” she said as he leaned closer, his thumb tracing the line of her cheek.
“Yes, you do,” he replied, soft and firm, just the way she’d tried to force his hands to speak to her on that little port glass. “You do.”
He wondered if she would taste the way she smelled. Like a spiced dessert, forbidden and foreign and just a little bit incorrect. He could find out right now, he realized. He could answer an impulse that had hounded him for half of his life.
Or …
He pulled back, dropping his hand away, his heart roaring in his ears, and watched the blink of confusion, the scatter of gooseflesh that arose on her throat and collarbones and crept down to the tantalizing swell of her bosom.
“When you have a guess,” he said softly, pushing himself to stand, “I look forward to hearing it.”
“Elias?” she managed, evidently dumbfounded.
He stifled a false yawn, glancing over her head at the window by her washbasin. “We ought to get some sleep,” he told her, relishing in this rare feeling, in her presence at least, of being good at something right away. Good at something that she was not.
And there was something else.
Something he could not quite name, but it was damned endearing in the locus of her pouting and fretting about the matter.
He grinned at her. “It is getting very late. I think I’ll sleep well tonight.”
And he turned to leave as quickly as he could, before he looked at her for a single moment more, rumpled and flushed and waiting for him on the edge of a warm bed.
He left before he could lose his resolve.