Chapter Eight
Calm. Collected. Serious. Subtle.
Elliot had been repeating the words in his head like a mantra since he and Richard had arrived at the townhouse twenty minutes ago.
Though he had managed to give some passing approximation of participating in the polite conversation offered by Mrs. Littlefield, the obnoxious jangling of his nerves had shown itself in the jogging of his leg and the rhythmic tapping of one forefinger against the arm of the couch upon which he sat.
Calm. Collected. Serious. Subtle.
As Mrs. Littlefield chattered on about the events of the day and the myriad shops they had visited, Elliot caught the sound of footfalls upon the stairs and the low, muted flutter of laughter from Rebecca as she responded to something Kate had murmured, which had regrettably been too soft for him to overhear.
“Ah,” Richard said as he reached for two fresh glasses set upon the sideboard, preparing to fill them with wine. “Unless I am much mistaken, it seems the ladies are ready to join us at last.”
As those footsteps approached, Elliot flexed his fingers to still their anxious fidgeting and set his glass of wine aside as he rose to his feet. Calm. Collected. What was he meant to do with his hands now that he was standing? Serious. Subtle.
Rebecca swept in first with a swirl of violet silk skirts which cascaded about her feet. She eased open the door so that Kate could pass around her, and then—
The mantra that had filled Elliot’s head these last twenty minutes vanished like smoke up a chimney, leaving in its wake only a raw honesty that he could not suppress. “Kate,” he blurted out, his voice abruptly rough and scratchy despite the liberal application of wine. “You look beautiful.”
Of course, she had always looked beautiful to him.
Even at her most bedraggled, even on the most blustery days in Northampton, when the wind dragged her hair from its sensible plait and tossed it about in wild whips.
On the coldest days, when the frigid air cracked her lips and dried her skin.
On the hottest days, when the sun burned her cheeks and produced little beads of sweat that soaked the hair at the nape of her neck.
She had always been beautiful to him, and now—now the whole of the Ton would see it, too. What had before been only for his eyes was laid bare, accentuated with little frills of lace and a neckline that was just one deep breath away from causing a scandal.
The sky blue silk of her gown suited her sun-warmed complexion; a perfect contrast to the dark hair that gleamed sable in the candlelight, and which had been tamed from its perpetual wind-blown frizz into an elegant, polished style.
He’d never had occasion to see her hair styled into anything other than a simple plait, but the arrangement suited the shape of her face, framing her high cheekbones and softening the sharpness of her winged brows.
A lone curl bobbed against her forehead as she paused there in the doorway, arrested by the words.
Her lips rounded into a moue of surprise, frozen on a surprised inhale as if his assertion had stolen the very breath from her lungs.
Shocked or horrified, he could not decide which she might be; an impossibility to determine, given that a whole new Kate had appeared before him.
The veneer of the lady Rebecca had turned her into in the space of an afternoon sat entirely too well upon her, a sharp departure from the frazzled woman he had left at the breakfast table only this morning.
This new reinvention of Kate did the unthinkable—she blushed.
Hot, vivid color seeped into her cheeks with a surprising alacrity.
Had she ever blushed in his presence before?
He’d seen her in all manner of situations which might have merited it, but could not call a specific occasion, a specific blush, to mind.
It was only now, with a simple compliment, that he had found himself graced with one.
Kate recovered herself enough to pitch a faint glare upward and puff at the curl bobbing over her brow, and Elliot found himself relaxing a fraction. Kate, as he had always known her, was still in there after all, beneath the silk and the gilding of lace and pins.
Beneath that wild, rampant blush that still pinked her cheeks.
She was meant to say something, or else he was meant to say something else, something far less witless and impulsive and revealing. But instead they both—stared. Kate stared, winged brows arched high over her wide, dark eyes. Almost as if…as if she were seeing him for the first time.
The silence that had fallen upon the drawing room grew oppressive, stifling.
Rebecca, darling woman that she was, broke it at last with a trill of laughter and a chiding tap upon his shoulder with the tip of her fan.
“Really, now, Elliot,” she said, with a contrived, haughty toss of her perfect golden curls.
“You might have said something to me as well. This is a new gown.”
Elliot managed, through sheer dint of will, to shake himself of the queer stupor that had bound his tongue. “Of course you look lovely, Rebecca,” he said, dragging his gaze away from Kate at last. “You always do.”
She gave a little sniff, tilting her nose in the air as she sashayed across the room to accept the kiss her husband bussed across her cheek as her due. “Too little, and much too late. We ladies go to quite a lot of effort to appear so effortlessly lovely, you know—do we not, Kate?”
Kate lurched from her position frozen in the doorway, as if the address had released her from some spell that had held her there.
“Yes,” she said, that bewildered expression softening into a wry smile.
“I’m surprised there is still a hair left upon my head, in all honesty.
I thought for certain every last strand would be wrenched from it. ”
“Yes, well, you’ve got quite a lot of hair to manage,” Rebecca said breezily as she snatched both glasses of wine from her husband’s hands, and turned round again to offer one to Kate.
Over her shoulder, she cast a sparkling smile to Kate’s mother.
“What do we think, Mama Littlefield? Your Kate has turned out just lovely, hasn’t she? ”
“The neckline is rather low,” Kate blurted out, shifting beneath her mother’s gaze. One hand toyed with the lace wreathing the cap sleeves of her gown. “And the sleeves—”
“Just lovely,” Kate’s mother pronounced as she rose to her feet, her eyes watering behind the lenses of her spectacles as she swept toward Kate to pull her into a fond embrace. “Just—just lovely. If only your father could see you.”
A surprised little laugh trickled up Kate’s throat. “He wouldn’t have approved of the gown,” she murmured, pillowing her cheek upon her mother’s shoulder. “The neckline—”
“Darling,” Mrs. Littlefield said, a hint of amusement in her voice. “Of course your father would have preferred for you to be buttoned up to your throat. Probably all fathers would prefer such necklines for their daughters. Is that not so, Lord Crewe?”
Richard coughed into his fist, studiously avoiding his wife’s gaze. “Little Ava is not yet five,” he said uncomfortably as he settled onto a couch. “There’s years yet before I must consider such things.”
Mrs. Littlefield chuckled, adjusting her spectacles upon the bridge of her nose. “The years go by only too quickly. Best to manage such considerations in advance before you find they have sneaked up upon you and caught you unawares,” she advised.
“Not to worry,” Rebecca said as she perched lightly beside her husband. “Ava is my daughter, too, after all. How could she be in anything other than the height of fashion, no matter how low the necklines have dropped when she makes her debut?”
“No matter how low!” Richard protested, pitching forward in his seat so abruptly that he nearly cast his wine out of his glass. “Any lower, and they’d be flirting with the navel. I simply won’t have it.”
“Oh, come, it’s years too late for you to have become such a prude,” Elliot said as he reclaimed his own seat, and laid one hand upon the arm of the couch.
“You forget I knew you at school.” To Kate he confided, as he patted the open seat beside him in invitation, “Difficult as it might be to believe, Richard once aspired to be a rake.”
Kate blinked, fascinated, her eyes straying to Richard even as her feet carried her absently across the floor toward the space Elliot had indicated. “Was he, really?”
“No.” Elliot grinned. “Oh, he wanted to be. Had grand designs upon the idea, as I recall. Resolved to cut a swath through London, sowing his wild oats.”
Wide-eyed, Kate sat beside him, attention so thoroughly captured he was certain she hadn’t even realized that her thigh was nearly pressed against his own. “What happened?” she asked.
“Rebecca.” Elliot paused to take a sip of his wine, sliding a good-natured, taunting glance at Richard, who had sunk down in his seat with a groan of sound humiliation.
“At our very first society event once we’d left university.
She’d made her come-out only a few weeks prior.
One glance and he was smitten—and they were married by the end of the Season. ”
“No thanks to my father,” Rebecca said. “If he’d had his way, I would have married Elliot.”
Kate choked upon her wine, covering her mouth with her fingertips to stifle the brief coughing fit that followed. “Really?” she gasped. “Elliot?”
“Oh, yes,” Rebecca said, smiling behind her wine glass.
“I had a rather impressive dowry, and Papa was certain that Richard was only a fortune hunter. He is only the second viscount Crewe, you know, and the title did not come with a grand fortune or vast estate. Papa would have preferred the third son of a duke to the relatively recent creation that was Richard’s title for me.
And Elliot was such a shameless flirt that I’m certain he gave Papa the mistaken impression he was angling for me. ”