Esme looked down through her leafy camouflage to the stormy visage of the man seated below her.
"Just enjoying the beautiful day," she answered innocently.
In truth,Esme was almost as horrified as Cleav about her present location. She'd watched Cleav hurrying to call on Miss Sophrona, and she just had to follow.
She'd just wanted to observe them, she'd assured herself. Or rather to observe him. The taffy pull had been a definite setback, and Esme knew she needed to regroup. Esme wanted to see this side of his nature, Cleavis the suitor. She wanted to watch and learn and imagine what it was going to be like when he finally came calling on her. She couldn't bear to think the word was really if. And she wanted to see if he was as hesitant in kissing Sophrona as he was in kissing her.
Seeing the maple tree a goodly distance from the house but within hearing of the porch, she'd scrambled. She assumed the couple would pass their afternoon on the Tewksburys' slatted swing. Esme was more than a little chagrined to find them taking their ease directly below her spying perch.
There was no humor in Cleav's grin. "You just happened to be enjoying it while hidden in a tree in Miss Sophrona's yard?"
His question didn't require an answer, but Esme gave a halfhearted one anyway. "I'm not hidden," she insisted with only a slight blush at the fib. "Anyone who looks up in this tree could see me."
Cleav nodded in apparent agreement. "Except that no one with any sense in the world would think to look for young women peeping from trees."
"You did!" she shot back.
"It's because I've come to know you." His explanation was terse, and his eyebrow was raised in disdain.
Esme felt the roses building in her cheeks but could think of no snappy comeback.
"Actually," Cleav continued, "it was your shoes that gave you away." He made a gesture toward her discarded footwear. "Aren't you aware that young women of your age do not go around bare-legged?"
His heated disapproval was clearly based on the distraction the sight of those legs was causing him. As Esme realized this, her embarrassment began to fade and a sly smile came to her lips.
"You can't climb a tree in shoes and stockings," she answered him reasonably. "When a woman's got a choice of modesty or breaking her neck," she told him, shifting casually on the thick tree limb, "then it's bare-legged every time!"
Cleav opened his mouth for a scathing reply, but forgot what he was going to say. Esme threw her right leg over the limb, straddling the thick brown tree branch. Her skirts bunched around her, giving an ample display of her bare legs and a tantalizing glimpse of the edge of the leg of her cotton drawers.
As Cleav's mouth hung open in shock, Esme tested the strength of her new power, casually bending forward and arching her back in what she hoped was a seductive pose.
To Cleav, it looked as if she were trying to wiggle herself closer to the hard, thick wood that she cushioned so intimately between her thighs. He swallowed the lump that formed in his throat.
"I'm not really spying," Esme said. "I'm just interested in how a gentleman courts a lady."
With deliberate casualness Cleav crossed one leg over his knee.
"Well, now that you've found out what you wanted to know," he told her, "why don't you get down from that tree and get out of here before Miss Sophrona gets back."
Esme disliked his terse order. She disliked his eagerness to be alone with Sophrona even more.
Her smile was a tease. "Leave so soon?" she asked with mock astonishment. "Before anything has even happened? Now, that would be foolish."
"Nothing is going to happen," Cleav answered, his words cold and precise.
"Nothing?" Esme sighed loudly in disappointment. "If that's all that gentlemen do, save to graces, I can't imagine why any man would want to be one!"
"What do you mean?"
“I mean the boys on the mountain, the ones that court the twins, are always sparking and trying to steal a kiss."
She leaned forward, lying on her stomach upon the thick, burly limb. She raised her legs to drape leisurely along the rough brown bark.
"It looks to me that gentlemen don't have near so much fun."
Bending her knee saucily, she waved one long bare foot in the air. Her wide-eyed grin was downright impertinent.
"Instead of sparking, you're Bible-talking. Do you truly care about what kind of critter was in the Garden of Eden?"
