Page 53 of Better Love Next Time
“Are you going to meet him?” Georgiana asked.
“No.”
“But you didn’t even think about it.”
Kitty folded the letter, certain in her conviction and feeling like a heel all the same. “I did think about it.”
“You read the letter, I asked you, and you immediately replied no. He has written you every day. He applies himself to his studies and he walks to that silly boat every day, no matter the weather. The least you can do is see him.”
The least Julian could have done was let her know he was alive. And he hadn’t. Grief burned her eyes, like the endlesshours she had spent crying, praying, fasting, doing things just so, like chewing every bite of food twenty-one times. Three for the trinity multiplied by the seven days of creation.
“And when he’s not studying,” Georgiana said, “or waiting for you at theFairy, he exercises.”
“Like using his muscles?” The idea intrigued her.
“Part of his classical studies. The Greeks believed a virtuous body a civic duty.”
“Oh,” she said softly, stopping her mind from wondering on Julian’s virtuous body.
“He’s not even looked at a girl. I see how the maidservants eye him. He ignores them. Lady Stockton and her daughter, Barbara, spent three days at Farendon while their coach was mended. He yawned in her face. A very comely face, I’ll add.”
Kitty traced the sign of the cross in her mind. Lady Barbara was more than comely. Her brother Shelley was over the moon for her. And she possessed a fat dowry. Unlike Kitty’s dowry, which Sir Jeffrey’s skimming had dwindled to embarrassing.
Julian will never marry me. He only kissed me. And fondled my breast.
Kitty brushed her arm against the side of her left breast, hot and tingly all over. Why had she not felt the same fire swirling in her belly with Anthony Philips? She hadn’t been bubbling with fury when Anthony had kissed her.
Julian had plotted a seduction, just like he did with widows, and if she hadn’t slapped him, he would have ravished her on her mother’s grave. Barring his complete savagery where her feelings were concerned, she would have let him.
She again made the sign of the cross.
“Thinking on it?” Georgiana said.
“No.”I think about his kisses day and night. And my breast and his hand. His hand callused from working sheet and sail. She should prefer a polished hand but the memory of his touchstirred visions of Julian’s muscles straining, his black hair damp with sea water, sweat trickling down his square jaw. Not on a ship. On her.
Kitty crossed herself again.
“I know a mare in season when I see her,” Georgiana said.
Kitty shot from her chair, her heel catching a strip of lace on her hem. “I am not a mare.”
“No, a girl who has been lovesick over my cousin for years.”
To hide her embarrassment, Kitty grabbed her sewing basket and yanked her hem up between her legs. The repurposed lace had seen better days years ago.
“I’m sure he’ll offer for you,” Georgiana said. “If yousee him.”
“He has no inclination to marry me.”
“Show him your pretty legs and he will.”
“There is nothing pretty about my legs.” Kitty retrieved her scissors and snipped off the lace.
“They aren’t attached to a six-foot frame like mine.”
Kitty peered at Georgiana’s superb riding boots to the fall of her tailored blue breeches. Legs as long as a mile, slender and strong. “You do not give them enough credit.”
“True. They could strangle a man, but why are we discussing legs?”
