Chapter Eighteen #2
Kate managed to wrench her lips into a weak facsimile of a smile.
Which would be worse, she wondered—to lose him to distance, or to have him nearby in perpetuity, but always in the company of another?
So close to that happy home that he would share with his wife, with their children.
Somehow, despite that wretched ache in the vicinity of her heart, she dredged up a soft, bland, “That sounds lovely.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” he mused, but his gaze had drawn off into the distance, as if he could see it through the milling of the crowd.
Already built, already his. A future that could not help but to come to fruition.
“I was thinking…a bit west of the village. That hill near the pond where we used to swim as children.”
She knew the one. Her fingers, cold even beneath her gloves, tightened their clasp.
A walk of perhaps fifteen minutes from the village across the lush green fields, where she drove her sheep out to pasture.
The sunsets in the summer were extraordinary.
And at the advent of nightfall, when the world had stilled to a hush, the sky that stretched out over the valley below looked like a sea of stars.
Would they ever watch the sun set upon that hill again? Or would his wife take the place there upon the hill beside him that had once belonged to her?
In that long moment of silence that had fallen between them, Kate swallowed through the lump in her throat. “Elliot, I—”
“How are you finding the book I lent to you?”
Heat flooded Kate’s face in a dizzying rush.
“I—I haven’t read it,” she said, averting her gaze to her lap.
A week, now, since she had woken that morning with her hand wrapped around its spine beneath her pillow, with only the vaguest memory of how it had gotten there.
More dream than memory, really. The foggiest recollection of warm fingers brushing her hair away from her face.
The sensation of floating rather than walking back to her room.
The strong, steady heartbeat beneath her cheek.
A whispered, Sweet dreams, Katie that had followed her down through that silky veil between sleeping and waking.
“I don’t think that’s quite true,” he said, his tone faintly teasing. “You’re blushing like you’ve read more than you’d care to admit.”
Kate made an irritated little sound in her throat, neither acknowledgement nor denial. It was just that she hadn’t had any real concept of precisely how lascivious such things could be. How descriptive. How provocative. How…anatomically unlikely.
“I hope you had the good sense to hide it well,” he remarked casually. “Because if your mother were to find you in possession of it, she would certainly make her objections plain, and I will have to deny providing it to you.”
“Of course I have hidden it!” she declared with an agitated flutter of her hands. “And—and it isn’t the sort of thing one ought to be speaking of at the theatre anyway.”
“No one can hear us above this din, so who is going to know?” he asked lightly. “Although if you keep blushing like that, everyone who has got a pair of opera glasses convenient may suspect that our conversation has wandered toward the somewhat less than perfectly appropriate.”
Perversely, the thought only made her face burn hotter.
What the devil had happened to her? She had never been given much to blushing before—before now.
Before London. “Then perhaps you ought not to have led the conversation in such a direction.” And they certainly were being observed.
Kate drew a swift, cleansing breath in through her nose and pasted a bland smile to her face in deference to the audience who, even if they could not hear them, could certainly see them.
“I was curious,” he said. “I spent a good deal of time choosing one, you know. I thought that one was suitably tame—”
“Tame!” Kate gasped.
“Oh, so you have read it, then.” He cast that cheeky grin at her once more, and that odd lump in her throat dissolved beneath a familiar, helpless laugh. The same sort he somehow always managed to provoke in her, as effortlessly as breathing.
“I—perhaps I skimmed a few pages,” Kate admitted, stalwartly resisting the urge to hide her face in her hands.
“I knew it,” he crowed. “You little liar!”
“It’s a mystery that I have somehow restrained myself from strangling you before now,” she said as she scrubbed the reluctant smile from her face, still mortified beyond measure.
Elliot chuckled. “The theatre would not be the best of places to start,” he said. “Too public. People would talk. No, you’ve got to have privacy for a good strangling.” His shoulder touched hers in that playful nudge to which she had long become accustomed. “I do love to make you laugh, Katie.”
Kate ducked her head and fiddled with the strings of her reticule as the words produced a terrible little ache in her heart. She knew that. She had always known that. She only wished—
She only wished he loved more than that.
∞∞∞
Rebecca had been wrong. It had taken until the second interlude for the crowd to descend upon them.
Possibly, Kate speculated, no one present had wanted to appear overeager in their pursuit of Elliot—but the natural consequence had been that their box had seen visitor after visitor practically from the moment the curtains had been drawn until the moment they opened once more.
Richard and Rebecca had gone off visiting again, but they had had a steward deliver a fresh bottle of champagne, and with a few glasses downed furtively whenever there was a moment where no eyes rested upon her, Kate had managed to bury the annoyance of so many interruptions beneath a pleasantly fuzzy state of tipsiness.
Miss Applegate and her brother had indeed put in an appearance, though Elliot had swiftly taken Lord Shaw to one side under the pretext of having some sort of private conversation which ladies were not meant to overhear, and which had left Kate unbearably nervous.
And also in the company of Miss Applegate. She was even lovelier up close, every chestnut curl perfectly in place. The pins in her hair were fashioned from diamonds after all, and they glittered like stars set within the dark gleaming locks.
“It is lovely to see you again, Miss Littlefield,” Miss Applegate asked, her voice soft and low, as she lifted her glass to her lips and took a sip of champagne, every movement precise and elegant.
A hesitant smile flashed across her lips, there and gone again in an instant.
“I have got that right, haven’t I—it is Miss Katherine Littlefield?
I confess, I have got a terrible memory for names. ”
If a similar comment had been made by a few of the other ladies whom she had met, Kate might have assumed it had been a subtle put-down meant to inform her of her place.
To convey to her that she was nobody important, certainly no one whose name was worth remembering.
But from Miss Applegate, she had only the sense that it was… honest.
Because the woman was so bloody nice. And because she was so damned nice, one couldn’t help but to like her. Even when one would dearly have liked not to do so.
“It is,” she said. “But I prefer Kate. The only person who calls me Katherine is my mother, and that only when she is extremely displeased with me.”
Miss Applegate gave a lovely tinkling trill of a laugh.
“Kate, then,” she said, with that delightful smile which revealed such even white teeth.
“It suits you. Please, you must call me Amelia.” She lifted her glass, canting it in the direction of her brother and Elliot there in the far corner of the box.
“What do you suppose they’re discussing? ”
“Oh, I—I couldn’t possibly hazard a guess,” Kate said.
But it did look rather serious. Elliot’s brows were drawn, his cheeks hollowed.
Not quite angry, if she had to guess, at least not yet.
But irritated at the very least. Her stomach pitched with unease.
She lifted one hand to brush that dangling curl away from her eyes, but her wrist swung her reticule in the doing of it, and it smacked against Miss Applegate’s shoulder, nearly causing the poor woman to drop the glass in her hand.
Flustered and embarrassed, Kate babbled, “Oh, I’m so dreadfully sorry—”
“No harm done,” Miss Applegate said, with a light laugh. “I was only a little surprised. It’s quite heavy for a reticule. Is that where you keep your notebook?”
Kate’s mouth dropped open. “How—”
“I saw you last week,” Miss Applegate said, with a teasing little wrinkle of her nose, “scribbling away in it at—I believe it was the Mercers’ dinner party?
After dinner, in the drawing room. I was dying of curiosity, of course.
I would have asked about it, but you looked so very dedicated to the task that I was loath to interrupt you.
” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.
“Have you got a secret career as a novelist or a columnist? I swear upon my life, I can keep a secret.”
“No! No; nothing—nothing like that,” Kate said. “They’re just…my personal notes.”
“Notes?” The tiniest crease of confusion settled between the delicate arch of Miss Applegate’s brows. And then, as she followed Kate’s gaze across the box to where Elliot and Lord Shaw stood, still engaged in animated—if hushed—conversation, she said, “Ah. I see.”
She really didn’t. She couldn’t. Could she?
“I don’t mind telling you,” Miss Applegate said, “because it oughtn’t to be a secret from an interested party, but the gossip going about is that Lord Elliot has decided to marry and he has enlisted your help in finding a wife. Is there in fact some truth in that?”
“Well—that is to say—” Kate shifted her shoulders uncomfortably. “It is only that we have known one another for such a very long time, and—and he is my dearest friend.”