Chapter Seventeen #2
But the room was toasty warm, and her velvety dressing gown was soft and sleek.
She poured herself a fresh cup of tea and settled back into the chair, wincing as a pin jabbed her in the back of the head.
Blast. She’d not thought past changing from her gown, hadn’t bothered to pull the pins from her hair.
Her fingers snarled in the mess of her curls she made as she rooted about for the hairpins, pulling them free one by one and laying them upon the table beside the tea tray.
That damned curl drifted before her eyes, staunchly resisting all attempts to puff it back.
Why was it that no lady in London had the sense to arrange her hair in a simple plait?
It was unfathomable. Kate reserved a single hairpin to wrench back that unruly curl that plagued her, secured it with a ruthless jab of the pin into the untidy mess of loosed curls, and let the book fall open upon her lap at last.
There was something so lovely about reading, about watching a story unfold in one’s mind’s eye. How, with the judicious arrangement of words upon a page, one could be transported to somewhere else entirely; changed into a visitor in a stranger’s life, peering in from the margins of the pages.
Temporarily, at least. It took only a few minutes before reality began to seep in at the edges, coloring the fiction in shades of her own experience. Page by page, the fair-haired hero began to resemble Elliot in her imagination.
The tea ceased to soothe; the book ceased to transport her. She closed the cover, pursing her lips against the strained sigh that threatened, and set the book aside upon the table. Another book, then; a different one. A different author, even.
Her feet slapped the floor in determined steps as she plodded once more to the bookshelf and perused the shelf with a sense of trepidation.
At random, she selected a half-dozen new books, amassing a tidy little stack of them her arms. Surely they couldn’t all turn into Elliot, she thought as she retreated once more to the chair and settled into it. Surely.
∞∞∞
“Lord Elliot,” Hodges said as he opened the door, clasping his banyan robe closed at the throat. “It’s well past midnight.”
“I’m aware, Hodges,” Elliot said as he slipped in through the crack. “You needn’t have bothered to let me in; I have got a key.” One that Devon had probably long since forgotten about, given that Elliot had had his bachelor’s lodgings going on six years, now.
“But at this hour!” The crisp, condemning syllables were meant to shame him straight out the door again, no doubt.
“Oh, come,” Elliot said, offering his cheekiest grin. “I’ve had Kate back past two in the morning three days this week already. It’s still early by comparison,” Elliot said. “Is she still awake?”
Hodges offered a grouchy harrumph, his bushy brows descending into a scolding frown. “I believe she is,” he said. “I brought tea to her in the library perhaps an hour ago. I was just on my way to see if she’d like a fresh pot before I turn in for the night.”
“I’ll do it,” Elliot volunteered cheerfully. “She requested a book of me this evening; I only came to drop it off.”
“A book! At such a time of the evening!”
“When else has she got the time to read?” Elliot asked. “I have kept her rather busy of late, you know.”
A surly grunt of assent, which Elliot took to mean he still had not yet been forgiven for roping Hodges into his little scheme. “Give it here, then,” Hodges said, extending his hand. “I’ll see that she gets it.”
“No!” Elliot yelped, slapping one hand protectively over the pocket in which the book rested.
Somehow he managed a fraction of a sheepish smile.
“That is…I’d really prefer to lay it into her hands myself, if you don’t mind.
” Good God. Even if the volume he’d chosen—after nearly a half-hour of consideration—was on the tamer end of the plethora of lewd literature he knew to exist, he still wasn’t altogether certain it did not violate several obscenity laws…
and quite possibly those involving the contortions of physical anatomy, besides.
If Hodges so much as glanced within it, he’d—
Probably string Elliot up by his thumbs, inform upon him to Devon, and fall victim to apoplexy. In that order.
Hodges drew himself up to his full height, which was still several inches beneath Elliot’s, rendering the posturing less effective than he likely would have preferred. “Lord Elliot, it is entirely inappropriate—”
“Five minutes, Hodges,” Elliot pleaded. “It’s a favor for Kate, after all. You wouldn’t want me to disappoint her, now, would you?”
That frown deepened into a glower as Hodges let a few seconds pass in tense silence. “Five minutes,” Hodges allowed finally with a taciturn edge to his voice as he tugged at the lapel of his dressing gown.
Blessed relief. Elliot felt his chest shudder with it as his breath sighed out. “You’re a good man, Hodges,” he said as he made for the stairs, the bounce in his step taking him up two at a time. “I’ll give you an answer as to the tea on my way out.”
Darkness descended as he reached the upper floor. To the right as he arrived upon the landing, a faint light glowed through an open door somewhere down the hall. The library, he assumed, given that no other room was likely to be occupied at such an hour.
Elliot proceeded down the hallway and poked his head in the open doorway. “Kate?”
No response. The library was not large—perhaps a quarter of the size of the one at Longthorpe Manor.
She ought to have heard him. Had she gone off to bed already?
No; there was still a lamp lit upon a low table.
Surely she would have thought to extinguish it rather than to leave it burning unattended.
“Katie?” he called again as he stepped into the room.
A hint of movement to the right drew his eye.
There, in the small sitting area arranged in a corner—a cluster of silky sable curls tumbled haphazardly over the arm of an overstuffed chair.
There was a low rustle of fabric, as of someone shifting restlessly, and then…
a soft snore. Light and rhythmic, hardly more than a hum.
Elliot eased closer, rounding the back of the chair.
It had practically swallowed her up within it, but for her bare feet, which dangled above the floor.
She had nodded off in the middle of a book, her hands resting upon the pages open before her.
Her head lolled to the side, cradled against the back of the chair as a mass of curls tumbled over her shoulder and down over the high arm of the chair.
A single hairpin—which looked as though it had been intended to secure that dangling curl away from her face—instead weighed it down against her cheek, hopelessly tangled in the shining lock it had been meant to constrain.
Piled high upon the table beside her were a number of books; the romances she favored.
A dozen at least. Surely she’d not thought to get through all of them in a single evening?
Or had they simply not met with her approval?
The book open on her lap and half-obscured beneath her hands, however, appeared to be some wretched overblown Gothic horror novel.
Curious that the romances had all been discarded.
Perhaps something about them had hit a little too close to home to make them comfortable reading on this particular evening.
Her face was softened in sleep, those expressive brows smooth and without even the slightest crinkle set between them.
Her chest rose in deep, even breaths, breasts swelling beneath the rich velvet of her dressing gown.
Probably this had been amongst the things that Rebecca had taken her to be fitted for—and it had been a good choice.
The sumptuous deep blue fabric suited Kate’s complexion, made her skin glow with sunny warmth against it.
There was a nightgown beneath it, surely, but the only evidence of it was a tiny scrap of lace near the hem, near her bared ankle.