Page 38 of Kiss a Rake and Tell

She stuck her finger into a cucumber sandwich, which Benjamin was careful to pick up and cast aside—into the potted spider plant beside them. “Better a scepter with which to stab myself,” she huffed.

Benjamin dipped his head to cover a laugh. “Charlotte—“

“Yes, yes. This must all be very amusing for you.” She set down her lemonade in a show of power, only to pick it right back up. “Do run along and collect your accolades, invitations, and kisses. The dullard from earlier is still drooling in the corner. Perhaps you might roll her tongue up from the floor and—”

“Would you quiet yourself?” He seized her by the wrist beneath the tablecloth before he could think better of it. “What has gotten into you?”

“I will tell you what,” she began, her bosom rising and falling with her angered pants, “when I came give name to it.”

“Try, for me.”

She dropped her gaze, thinking, before shaking her head. “It is a thing without name.”

“If that were true, you would not feel it.”

“Perhaps I am the first to ever feel as I do. And why not?” She dropped her voice low. “Is our situation not the first of its kind?”

Of all the things he admired about Charlotte, her speaking in riddles was not one of them.Such is why we stray from women of written word.“Well then, let’s go through the possibilities, shall we?” He leaned against the table, settling next to her. Somehow, it made her smile. “You are upset your poem was a triumph, as they say.”

She shook her head.

“You think my delivery of it was terrible.”

Again, she shook her head.

“Is it—that you wished to have been the one to recite the poem yourself?”

His hypothesis gave her pause. For a moment. “Somewhat, but that feeling is higher up.” She touched her neck. “This is… low.”

“In your knees?”

She breathed a laugh. It was something, at least, if not an answer. “Higher.”

“It would be quite ungentlemanly of me to suggest what next has come to mind.”

Charlotte’s eyes widened in mock-horror. “Oh, you wouldn’t understand even if you could.”

No, he probably wouldn’t. With a desolate sigh, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure St Chett was not gearing up for a telling-off. He was not, far from it, if his zealous delight at speaking with someone other than his sister was to judge. And then he saw her again, thedullardas Charlotte had put it, nibbling at a lemon tart by the doors.

“It’s nothing to do with…” He paused, knowing he needed to tread carefully, as tiring as it was. “With darling dullards, is it? With the attention… Huxley has received from fairer breeds of poetry enjoyers?”

Charlotte flashed red—flashed with surprised knowing, too, like a key fitting tightly into a lock. “How dare you imply—“

She tried to step back, and her eyes darted down in time with his own. He had not released her from his hold. Neither of them had noticed. He tore his hand away. As he did, she turned on her heel to leave.

Storming past her blissfully ignorant brother, weaving through the crowds, she took off into the gardens out of the back door of the hall. Like the fool he was, his palm still burning for her touch, her took off after her.

He hadn’t needed to harry himself overlong. She was sat on the lip of a fountain, down a lonely, tiled path off the main stretch, mostly hidden by the tamed overgrowth of the gardens. It was like a little slice of heaven, made all the more divine for Charlotte’s presence.

She was crying, he thought to tell, from the slight tremble of her shoulders. She ran her hand through the clear water of the pool, before splashing it violently away. It cascaded up the dry stone of the ornament’s sculpture—a set of intertwining nymphs. She drew her hand out, water dripping from her smallest finger down the side of her hand and to the sleeve of her dress.

It was all he could do, like a pilgrim, to step forward and wipe it away.

“Here,” he murmured, pulling a kerchief from his coat pocket.

She refused to take it, shaking her hand out and looking away. Benjamin settled beside her, lowering himself slowly as if any move might scare her silly and have her bolt off. She stayed where she was, resentfully, so he lifted the silk, dotted kerchief to her wrist and dried her fingers.

“Enough to cause a scandal...” she muttered.

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