But his legs were long, and his stride determined, she supposed. There was no sight of him up ahead in the west wing corridor. She rounded a bend and slammed straight into someone else.
Her sister, Pru.
They grasped each other’s arms to keep from falling.
“Christabella, what has happened?” her eldest sister asked.
Oh, dear.If there was any of her sisters Christabella would have preferred to run across during her flight after she had nearly been ruined by a duke, Pru was not the one. She was sure she looked as if she had just been properly ravished. Because she had been. Delightfully so.
Not thoroughly enough.
Her cheeks went hot at the last thought.
“Nothing has happened,” she lied at last, blinking. “Pru? What are you doing in this wing? I thought it rather uninhabited.”
It was the reason she had chosen the red salon for her assignation with Coventry, after all.
“Have you just come from an assignation, Miss Christabella Mary Winter?” Pru demanded, invoking her dreaded second name.
Christabella felt her cheeks going hotter still. “No,” she denied quickly.
Too quickly, she knew. Her sister was no fool. She could see through any excuse. Cut right to the heart of a matter. And she was always playing mother hen, taking it upon herself to be the mother they were all lacking.
“You were meeting with someone,” Pru pressed. “Tell me the truth.”
The worst part about lying to her sister was that she was an abysmal liar. Also, she had no doubt she could not hold Pru’s gaze whilst she fibbed. But there was no hope for it. Her mind and body yet reeled after what had just transpired in the red salon with Gill. She needed time to think about what she would do next.
She forced her gaze to a point over her sister’s shoulder. “Of course I was not. I was merely seeking out some solitude. You are the one who practically knocked me off my feet. Where wereyoufleeing to in such haste?”
Indeed, now that she thought upon it, running into Pru in this wing of the house, also hurrying, was odd. She jerked her gaze back to her sister, noting she was flushed, and that tendrils of hair had escaped her coiffure.
“What happened to your hair?” Pru demanded, almost as if she had read Christabella’s mind about herself. “It looks as if a man has been running his fingers through it.”
Her hands flew to her hair, tentatively inspecting the damage Gill had wrought. “Perhaps I lost a hair pin. I was outside in the garden earlier, and it is quite windy.”
A modicum of fibbing had never hurt anyone, after all.
“The wind did not steal a hair pin,” her sister countered grimly, “and from the looks of it, you are missing more than one pin. I would wager at least five are gone, if not more.”
Drat.
She patted her hair. “Perhaps it is from my bonnet, then. It did get caught in my hair when I was removing it.”
“Why do you not tell me the truth?” Her sister’s eyes narrowed. “I am not a fool. I have eyes in my head. Your gown is wrinkled. Why, your skirts look as if they have been crushed.”
Good God. Christabella thought of the manner in which her skirts had been crushed. And just how pleasant that interlude had been. She had known she ought to flee to her chamber to change her gown. And instead, she had gone running after Coventry, only to be caught.
“I fell in the gardens,” she invented.
“Why is your gown not dirty?” Pru asked.
To the devil with persistent sisters who did not believe the lies they were fed.
She thought for a moment of a reason why, and settled upon one quickly.
“Because there is snow in the gardens.” Christabella smiled, pleased with herself.
There.That ought to stifle her sister’s questions. An unusually early winter’s storm had blanketed the land in a dense coating of white. As unlikely as a fall into snow was, particularly since she was currently deep within the heart of Abingdon House, she had seized upon the idea.
