Chapter Nine
By all rights, Kate ought to have been exhausted.
The dinner party had gone well past the point that Kate, who was accustomed to country hours, would ever have deemed reasonable.
The guests had left in nearly the same slow trickle in which they had arrived, though it had been long past midnight before the first of their numbers had begun to take their leave.
Kate had felt as wilted and limp as a bad bit of lettuce by the time Elliot had shepherded her and Mama out of the house and toward the waiting carriage.
And yet, despite the lateness of the hour and the fact that he had been awake even earlier than she had, Elliot had been as bright and chipper as a morning songbird, chattering gaily away, clearly under the impression that the evening had gone exceptionally well.
Kate hadn’t had the energy either to agree or to disagree.
She hadn’t had even the energy to feel ill over the rocking of the carriage over the cobblestone streets as it had carried them back home.
But as Elliot had left them courteously at the door and entrusted them to the care of Hodges—who had been waiting up for their arrival—Kate had felt the weight of the dinner party settle on her not with the exhaustion she ought to have felt, but with a sizzling sense of disquiet.
A second wind of the mind, if not of the body. Her thoughts had begun to race before she had even bid good night to Mama, before she had even touched a toe to the stairs that would lead her up to the bed chamber which had been given to her.
She had seen Elliot embroiled in all manner of plots and schemes.
She’d seen him snotty-nosed, covered in mud, and worse.
She’d seen him sick and ailing, seen him broken out in inconvenient spots in his awkward teenage years, and had once even seen him bare-arsed as he and the village boys had gone tearing down to the local stream for a swim during the longest and hottest day of the year.
But she had never seen him play the gentleman.
She supposed, as she settled into her soft feather mattress for the night, it wasn’t truly playing. He’d been born to the role, after all, even if it had never seemed to come between them before.
Or maybe he simply hadn’t let it come between them.
She had never truly been a proper playmate for a duke’s son—though his parents had never seemed to mind the friendships their children had cultivated with the local children.
She had always known the difference in their classes, but…
Elliot had always been just Elliot to her.
Only here now in London did she understand in a way she hadn’t before that to everyone except his closest friends he was Lord Elliot, the youngest son of the previous Duke of Longthorpe and brother to the current. That he enjoyed a sort of prestige and admiration of which she could hardly conceive.
It was Lord Elliot who had taken her hand this evening as he had calmly and confidently declared her the final arbiter of his future.
More worrisome still was that Lord Elliot hadn’t felt as much a stranger as she thought he ought to have done.
He had been the same Elliot as always, revealed by his cheeky smile and that damned charming dimple—just polished now in a way she had never seen him. A new facet of the same boy—no.
A new facet of the same man he must have been for some time now, only somehow she had missed it.
They had both grown up years ago, even if her heart struggled to let go of the boy he had once been.
That same heart performed an obnoxious flutter in her chest as she flounced onto her side.
What the devil was wrong with her? Had London addled her senses and her wits besides?
You look beautiful.
Her cheeks heated anew, and a queer little shiver slipped down her spine.
Empty flattery, she thought as she pressed her hot face into the cool softness of the pillow beneath her head.
The sort of polite nonsense a man of good breeding was meant to say.
Besides, hadn’t Madame Dubois assured her that she was quite plain?
But she hadn’t felt like empty flattery.
For those few moments that he had stared at her, with his mouth slightly agape and his hands flexing at his sides, she hadn’t felt plain.
For those few moments she had felt…something.
Some nebulous and strange, rather like she had discovered a new and unknown aspect of herself.
Something wholly unexplored and novel and unexpected.
Heart racing. Cheeks flushing. Blood pounding. Palms sweating. Like she’d acquired a sudden fever; like she’d run a mile or more in the space of only a few minutes.
With a heartfelt sigh, Kate rolled to her back and pushed herself upright once more.
The sleep she had desperately wanted was not soon to be forthcoming after all.
But unless she missed her guess, there would likely be a library somewhere in this townhouse.
Perhaps it would not be quite as well-stocked as was Longthorpe Manor, but she was bound to find one or two of the duchess’ favored romances tucked away somewhere upon its shelves.
∞∞∞
“Good morning,” Elliot said as he strolled into the dining room, snatching up a piping hot pastry from the plate Mrs. Norris had just set upon the table and neatly dodging the swipe she aimed at his hand in retribution.
“Or is it?” he asked, leveling an assessing glance at Kate, who was slumped over her cup of tea as if the very concept of good posture were offensive in nature.
“Good God, Katie. You look like death warmed over.”
“I feel like death warmed over,” she groused, hunching her shoulders and slanting a glare at him through tousled bangs. “I didn’t sleep a wink.”
“That’s not true,” Mrs. Littlefield chided, lifting her chin. To Elliot, she said, “I woke early and found her sleeping in the library.”
“The library?” Elliot echoed, his brows raising toward his hairline.
“Dead to the world in an armchair, book still open on her lap, snoring like—”
“Mama,” Kate grumbled. “I couldn’t fall asleep last evening,” she explained, her voice rife with surly petulance. “I thought perhaps I could quiet my mind with a book.”
Quiet her mind? Of what? “And did it work?” Elliot inquired as he plopped unceremoniously into the chair beside her.
“Yes and no.” Another little hunch of her shoulders as she lifted her tea cup to her lips, and her eyes flitted away from his.
“I managed an hour or two of sleep, I suppose, but I have got a dreadful crick in my neck.” With one hand she cupped the nape of her neck, canting her head away from him to massage at her aching muscles.
Elliot drew his gaze away from her fingers before he could be caught staring, and redirected his attention to the pastry still in his hands.
Still gently steaming, drizzled with honey, and sprinkled with the absolute perfect proportion of walnuts.
Delicious. “Well,” he said as he chewed, though Mrs. Norris sent him a chiding glance for his absolute disregard for good manners, “an hour or two will have to do. We’re going riding today, in advance of Lady Havisham’s garden party this afternoon. ”
Kate’s head jerked toward him so fast that she winced as her sore muscles strained and pulled. “Riding?”
“In the park.”
“In the park?” Her brows scrunched together in confusion.
“Hyde Park, to be specific. It’s one of the innumerable places in London where one goes to see and be seen.
” He accepted with a nod of acknowledgment the tea cup that Mrs. Littlefield passed across the table to him.
“It won’t be the fashionable hour, per se, but there’s bound to be a few familiar faces about.
Likely even some you’ll recognize from evening last.”
“Probably,” Kate said sourly, “the ones who were intelligent enough to leave at a decent hour and have therefore gotten plenty of sleep.”
Elliot disguised a laugh with a cough, and offered blandly when Kate sent him a suspicious glare, “Beg pardon. Walnut got stuck in my throat.” He cleared it in a vain effort to lend legitimacy to lie and added, “You’ll have to accustom yourself to it, I’m afraid.
We keep mad hours in London. But a ride in the park ought to do you some good.
The air is fresher there than it is elsewhere in London, and you’re a much better horsewoman than you are a traveler. ”
Kate heaved a beleaguered sigh. “I am so wretchedly tired,” she said dryly, “that there is every possibility that I will fall straight off the horse in a dead faint.”
“Even better,” Elliot said. “I’ll catch you, of course, and as chivalry is a much-desired quality in a man, I can only think it will increase my marriage prospects.
So do contrive to faint before witnesses, won’t you?
” He clapped her on the shoulder as he polished off the last of his pastry and rose from the table once more.
“That’s my girl. I’ll secure the horses and return in an hour. ”
Kate’s shoulders slumped anew at the reminder of her duty, which Elliot hoped had become just the tiniest bit undesirable.
The faintest of grimaces tugged at the corners of her mouth.
“You have got so many admirers already,” she said, and there was a trace of something uncertain and ambiguous lingering with her voice.
Wryly, she offered, “If you are to acquire still more, I might well have to find some sort of notebook to keep them all straight.”
“Not to worry,” he said, and left the words lingering in the air for just a second or two longer than necessary as he drained the last of his tea and set the cup back down upon the table. “I’ll buy one for you before I return with the horses.”
And when her shoulders sank again—just a little—he let himself hope that it wasn’t only her exhaustion that weighed them down.
∞∞∞