“Yes. I think it is.” Caroline tucked her notebook and pencil into a small bag and swept out of the room. After bidding her maid a good day, she made her way toward her nearest source of information.
“Good morning.” Caroline burst into the morning room where Mrs. Rutherford and both younger sisters sat drinking tea and breaking their fast. Caroline didn’t make a plate for herself until after she’d kissed her mother’s cheek.
“Mother says you danced most of the night away,” Caroline’s youngest sister, Josephine, looked thrilled as she made the announcement. Their parents had brought five children into this world. Two sons and three daughters.
And Josephine was the most beautiful.
But she also knew it.
“I did. For once, I was not a wallflower.” Caroline turned from the buffet and carried her plate to the table where she then took her usual spot.
“Yes! Yes! If you marry this season, and Melanie marries next year, I can have my come-out while I’m still young and beautiful.” Josephine’s confidence knew no bounds.
Caroline frowned in mock offense. “What am I then, an old hag?”
“Mother also says you disappeared during the supper dance.” Melanie interrupted, sounding far more serious. “With Baron Dankworth.”
Melanie knew what Josephine was too young to understand—their reputations were all tied to one another’s.
Their mother glanced up from the newspaper and frowned at her two younger daughters. “Mother,” she said, “Can speak for herself.”
She then turned to Caroline. “But I am curious, Caroline, as to where you went off to? Alone? You know better than that.”
Caroline hated the fact that her mother was right. But sitting across from both her sisters, Josephine so very eager to enter society and Melanie so very quiet and serious, Caroline knew she couldn’t allow them to ever make the same mistake she had.
“I was to dance with Baron Dankworth,” Caroline began. Maxwell had told her she’d not done anything wrong. But she had! “He suggested we go outside onto the terrace instead. When he suggested a walk in the garden, I agreed.”
“Oh, Caroline…” Concern flooded her mother’s expression. “You didn’t…”
Caroline shook her head. She would warn her sisters without telling them the sordid details.
“I didn’t. But he thought I would. He said I should have known that ’walking‘ meant… not really walking. As luck would have it, thankfully, Lord Helton also decided to take some air. His appearance prevented Lord Dankworth from… taking advantage.” Caroline met her mother’s stare. “I should have found you. I won’t make that mistake again.”
The shocked looks on her sisters’ faces proved she’d made her point.
“But. You are unharmed?”
“I am fine. As I said, Lord Helton came along at the perfect moment.”
But then, Caroline had allowed Maxwell to take the same liberties Dankworth tried to steal.
That had been… unforgettable in a far better way. Her heart raced as she recalled how thick his hair felt beneath her hands, how hard his chest felt pressed against hers.
Caroline forced her thoughts to cold baths, the hypocrisy of the ton, to anything but the memory of Maxwell’s kiss. Because she knew her mother. And her mother, unfortunately, had read her mind on more than one occasion. If Caroline allowed herself to dwell on that kiss, she’d be beet red.
Lizards.
Spiders.
She took a long sip of tea. “Anything interesting in the paper this morning?” she asked.
Following a short but rather stunned silence, her mother gestured toward an ironed copy of the Gazette. “Mistakes throughout.”
Caroline sighed, disappointed but not surprised. “I wanted to be there. I would have been there, but…” Nobody missed the Chaswick ball. Certainly not the Gazette’s society writer. “Did you, by chance, hear anything er, newsworthy, last night?”
Her mother’s brows shot up. “I suppose you were too busy dancing to converse with the other debutantes?”
“They are so young…” Caroline winced. “But yes. I can always ask Goldie…” In fact, Goldie and Reed’s was to be her first visit after breakfast.
