Page 45 of And Then There Was the One
She wondered—in a sort of idle, glancing way, without looking at the question head-on—if that might not be anicething, every once in a while.
“People are easy,” he said, still watching her very carefully, as though searching for cues. “If you’re friendly, if you like them, they’ll like you in return. I’ve never had any trouble with that part of things.”
“What gives you trouble, then?” she asked, and wondered, in some dim corner of her brain, when she had grown so desperately curious about the man before her—a man about whom, upon meeting, she’d thought she already knew all there was to know.
“The part where I try to say anything that people take seriously.” He scrubbed a rueful hand down the side of his face, the gesture rough, impulsive, and considerably less elegant than most motions she’d seen him make thus far in their acquaintance.
“You don’t make it easy for them,” she pointed out.
“You’d have thought my family, at least, might have given me the benefit of the doubt.” Something close to bitterness crept into his voice then, and Georgie, without thinking, reached out and took his hand.
He glanced down, his expression softening at the sightof their interlinked fingers. Georgie, face heating, made as if to withdraw her hand, but he held on tighter, his skin warm against her palm.
“Georgie,” he murmured, reaching out a hand to trace her cheek. Her skin burned in the wake of his touch.
“Don’t do that,” she said, unable to bring herself to pull away, and instantly his hand stilled, then vanished from her cheek, leaving a kiss of cool air in its wake. “No,” she said hastily, even as she watched him open his mouth, presumably to apologize. “I mean—that is—I only meant, don’t… I’m not one of your women in London.”
A frown creased his ordinarily smooth forehead. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not someone to—to be trifled with!” she burst out. “Don’t try to pretend that someone likemeis who you’d usually flirt with. I know—I know that Buncombe-upon-Woolly must seem terribly provincial to you, and I expect you’re bored, and I know there aren’t any glamorous, dissatisfied wives here to flirt with, but—”
“But what?” he asked, his tone suddenly brittle.
“But don’t… toy with me,” she finished, humiliation warming her cheeks. “Just because I’m here, and it’s convenient. I know I’m not the sort of woman you’d actually be interested in—”
“Do you,” he said, a sharp edge evident in his voice.
“Don’t flatter me,” she snapped, suddenly weary of everything about this ridiculous day. Egg—who had been happily sniffing a patch of wildflowers a few feet away—looked at her, emitting an anxious whine from the back of her throat. “I knowyou flirt with everything that moves, but if you could leave me out of it, I’d appreciate it.” The words came out sounding harsher than she’d intended, but she didn’t wish them unsaid. It was better to state it bluntly, so he’d know where they stood. So he understood that she wasn’t prepared to be yet another notch in his bedpost.
“Do you know,” he said now, and there was nothing the slightest bit vague or amiable in his voice, “that you are possibly the most irritating woman I’ve ever met?”
“ThatI would believe,” she said, hands on her hips.
“But youwouldn’tbelieve that I’m not toying with you? That just because I’ve a bit of a—well, a history, shall we say—doesn’t mean that I can’t be genuinely interested in you?” He was still frowning, and he ran a hand through his golden hair, mussing it. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked a bit exasperated. He swallowed, as if suppressing something else he wished to say, and Georgie, against her will, found her eyes drawn to the movement of his Adam’s apple.
“I don’t—perhaps it’s best if we just… don’t,” she said, biting her lip. She found herself suddenly unable to look him in the eyes. She was not a complete novice when it came to romance—there had been one of the village boys that she’d kissed behind the church when she was seventeen, curious to see what all the fuss was about; and, too, Arthur’s cousin, who had spent an entire summer in the village the year she was twenty, with whom she’d engaged in rather more than kissing—but she could never recall anyone making her feel as annoyed, and embarrassed, and entirely discombobulated as Sebastian was making her feel in this particular moment.
She gave a sharp whistle, and Egg looked up quickly in wounded affront. “Egg, that’s enough. Let’s go home.”
She turned on her heel. Sebastian fell into step beside her but mercifully didn’t attempt to say anything else the entire walk back. They parted on the kitchen stairs, and Georgie retreated to the safety of her room for the rest of the evening—but found that even after night fell, sleep was a long time in finding her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When Georgie arrived at the breakfast table the following morning, Sebastian was nowhere in sight. Papa and Abigail were already seated at the table, which gave Georgie pause; Papa usually beat her to breakfast, but Abigail almost never did, and it was only half eight.
“You’re up early,” she said to her sister, sitting down and smiling gratefully at Mrs. Fawcett, who slid a plate containing two poached eggs and a couple of slices of thick, streaky bacon in front of her.
Abigail, who had been staring into her teacup in a listless sort of fashion, glanced up at her. “I’ve started leaving my curtains open at night,” she said, which seemed like a complete non sequitur, until Georgie’s tired, overstimulated mind caught up a moment later.
“So… the sun woke you?” she asked. She reached for herfork. Abigail’s room faced east, and she’d sewn thick, dark curtains for her bedroom windows years earlier, blocking out much of the morning light during the long days of summer.
“Yes,” Abigail said, taking a fortifying sip of tea. Now that Georgie looked at her more closely, she saw that her sisterdidlook rather tired; there were faint purple circles beneath her eyes, marring her otherwise flawless complexion.
“Why don’t you keep your curtains drawn?” Georgie asked, slicing into her egg and using a piece of bacon to mop up some of the runny yolk. “That seems a simple solution.”
Abigail suddenly looked a bit evasive. “I heard… somewhere… that it is good for the body to let natural light awaken it.”
Georgie was instantly on alert, with an elder sister’s keen instincts. “?‘Somewhere,’ is it?”
