Page 20 of Better Love Next Time
Leaping from his seat, his hands strained like claws. “A snake!”
Kitty screamed.
“A big, powerful snake. Run, run away, pink fairy, before it makes children with you!”
“Julian!”
“Here it comes!” He clutched her neck, eliciting more screams.
She shoved his chest. He released her, sending her plummeting flat on her bottom. Great roars of laughter erupted from his chest, on and on. She matched his merriment with giggles.
“Silly pink fool,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes. “You’re nothing but a child. But I am pleased to see you. Who else can I laugh at in this gloomy place?”
He laughedather. Notwithher. The desire to rake his face seized her hands. Scrambling to her feet, she bunched her fists. She still didn’t reach his shoulders, and she had tried so hard to grow, eating everything on her plate and seconds. She was still skinny and short.
She couldn’t look him eye-to-eye, but he did look down his nose at her.
“I don’t know about Eton,” she said, “the awful place that makes you treat me so badly.”
He rolled his eyes.
“I waited an entire year for Julian to return to me. If you would please bring back the beautiful boy I love, I’d be forever grateful. Please tell him I’ll be at Notfelle, playing with Georgie, when he returns.”
She wiped her tears and left him to his horridness.
“My cousin’s a right bastard,” Georgiana announced.
Kitty’s champagne dropped to the medallioned Turkey carpet. Actually, it was cold weak tea in a crystal flute.
Georgiana gripped her flute at the stem, imperiling her mother’s keepsake—one of the few Kitty’s father hadn’t sold. “Black-eyed, skinny sod,” she said.
“He has grown quite strong,” Kitty chanced.
“Strong as the stench of bear shite.”
“And tall,” Kitty said. “Taller than you now.”
Georgiana growled at the reminder. “To think, all the times I lent him my best riding boots.” She had at least ten pair with names for each, like her horses.
At the window, Georgiana’s gaze threatened to set fire to the overgrown bush on the other side of the latticed panes. “I hope his tongue falls out.”
“How does a tongue fall out?”
Georgiana whipped around. “Someone cuts it out.”
“Oh.”
“He called me a child. Achild. When I am nearly as tall as him and race my horses faster than Newmarket jockeys.Andtake taller hedges.”
“What about the Notfelle hedge?” Her friend hadn’t yet cleared the monster: six feet high and four feet wide, preceded by a precipitous drop and a brook. No one had ever conquered it before the age of thirteen. Kitty’s father, Sir Jeffrey Babbington, claimed no female ever had.
Julian had cleared it in?—
“Thirteen years, twenty-two days,” Georgiana grumbled. “Well, I’ll show that Etonian rotter.”
At the force of her friend’s assertion, Kitty plopped backward on a settee, a puff of dust rising around her pink-striped cotton skirts. She bit her lip. “Why do you think he’s returned so hateful?”
“Because he’s four and ten, my father says.”
