Della looked up from her notes to find her sister standing in the doorway, craning her skinny neck as if to spy the pages from there.
“Itwasgoing perfectly well, until you interrupted me midsentence. I thought I asked you to leave me alone for the next hour.”
“Ihaveleft you alone for an hour.” Annabelle looked as though she’d eaten a lemon, so unpleasant was this order. “Lord Ashton should be here any minute. Aren’t you going to fix your hair before he arrives? You can hardly convince him to commit bigamy with you if you look shabby.”
“Will youpleasestop teasing me?” Della glanced up at the clock. “And it’s been nowhere near an hour. It’s only half eleven. I still have plenty of time.”
She intended to finish a proper opening chapter today to show Lord Ashton when he arrived, and she still had heaps to do before she reached her goal. She’d meant to start writing first thing after breakfast, but then she’d noticed how messy her desk was and judged it best to organize her papers first. She’d been halfway throughthattask when the butler had announced Miss Chatterjee had come to call on her, and she couldn’t very well turn her out after she’d just promised her friend a proper visit. As it happened, Reva had plenty of suggestions as to which shops Della should include in her book, so it practically counted as working.
Afterthat, Annabelle had insisted on playing her new accordion at the loudest possible volume until Della had chased her out of doors and exacted a promise not to return for an hour upon pain of dismemberment. She’d finally sat down to concentrate, and for a few blissful minutes the words had been pouring onto the page as fast as her hand could write them until her sister came right back in to bother her, little demon that she was.
“It’s not half eleven.” Annabelle walked over to the clock that stood on Della’s mantel and picked it up to inspect it. “The clock in the hall reads past noon. When was the last time you wound this up?”
“You’re joking!” Della tore the clock from Annabelle’s grasp and held it to her ear. Sure enough, there was nary a tick to be heard. She’d forgotten to wind it before bed last night. “I haven’t finished anything I intended, and Lord Ashton will be here any second!”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“Out! Out! I have to change. Could you fetch Fanny for me? Quickly, if you please.”
But before anyone could send for Della’s maid, they heard a knock from downstairs and the heavy tread of their butler moving to answer it.
“Too late.” Annabelle didn’t even try to look sympathetic. “I suppose if Lord Ashton’s heart is pure, he’ll love you no matter what you look like. Unless he’s comparing you to his ladies of pleasure. They must always be done up well.”
“Enough!” Della snatched a crumpled page from her desk (there were quite a lot of them to spare, the casualties of her changeable ideas), and hurled it at her sister. Annabelle batted it away easily, laughing.
There was no time for this. Lord Ashton was already downstairs, and she still had ink-stained fingers. Della hurried to the basin to wash her hands and assess her appearance in the mirror. Her hair had been freshly arranged before her morning call, but she’d been winding one curl around her finger as she worked (a horrid habit) and it now hung looser than all the others.Wouldhe think her shabby? No, it would be worse if she kept him waiting to try to fix it. He was here for her book, not to admire her hair. She shouldn’t even care about such things.
Della came back to the desk, stuffed the pages she wanted under one arm and grabbed her sister with the other. “Come down and greet our guest, won’t you? Unless you’d rather leave us some privacy, for once.”
There was no need for a chaperone, really. She was six-and-twenty, not sixteen. And no one would know that Annabelle had left them alone unless she told.
But her sister adopted a solemn tone as she replied, “And risk a scandal? You know how seriously I take propriety.”
“You seem to takemypropriety far more seriously than your own,” Della muttered, recollecting a half dozen of Annabelle’s misadventures. “Never mind, let’s just go.”
She could already hear their butler’s footfalls on the stairs, coming to announce Lord Ashton’s arrival.
They found the viscount waiting in the drawing room, in the same chair he’d occupied last week. He rose to greet the ladies when they entered, but came straight to business the moment they were seated again.
“How is the book coming along?”
“I’m off to a good start.”
Lord Ashton was as crisp and put-together as always—not a hair out of place—though Della recognized his toffee-colored morning coat as the same one he’d be wearing that first day she’d met him in the café on Regent Street. And she thought the cuff links might be the same too. A family crest in plain gold. As he reached for the tea the maid brought in, she could barely make out the stag.
Odd. Most of the wealthy men she knew didn’t repeat their wardrobe between calls. But then, perhaps he didn’t rate their meetings highly enough to keep track of such things. Or perhaps when one was a viscount, one was permitted such eccentricities as standing by an old favorite.
“Do you have an outline for us to go over today?”
Oh dear. She’d had the outline ready last week, but half her papers were out of order from her race downstairs and she had no idea where it had got to.
“I do, if you’ll just give me a moment…”
Beside her, Anabelle radiated smugness. The grandfather clock chose that moment to chime the half hour. No one had forgotten to windthisone, it seemed.
Why, oh why, hadn’t any of the maids seen to the one in her room and saved her from this upset? Oh, that’s right. She’d asked them not to tidy her things because she could never find her papers afterward.Maybe she should amend her instructions to include an exception for clocks.
“Aha!” Della held up the page triumphantly. Although it looked less impressive in the light of day than it had when she’d written it at two in the morning in a fit of inspiration. The margins were smudged where she’d scribbled too quickly, and she’d already changed her mind about half of it.
