Because the woman waited until drinks were poured and cakes were served before she looked at Clio and Hector with an eager smile.
“So,” she said. “There have been whispers, but Idemandto know the true story. How did the two of you really meet?”
Hector blinked at Helen, regarding her the way one might look at a stick that had moved and revealed itself to be a poisonous snake. Clio, who really should have expected this, just laughed.
“Well,” she said, taking advantage of her husband’s shock, “I was minding my own business in a toy shop—I’ve gifts for the children, by the by—when Hector appeared out of nowhere and started being most abominably rude.”
Xander narrowed his eyes, like he wasn’t certain if he should object to this, but Helen swatted his knee without even looking at him.
“And then he came along and smashed my carriage with those great arms of his—” Xander, finally understanding that this was a joke, relaxed. “—just for theexpresspurpose of causing a scandal.”
She didn’t know what it was that made her feel free enough to tease like this, let alone with an audience. Maybe it was the country air. It was supposed to work wonders.
Clio turned to her husband and fluttered her lashes at him.
“Isn’t that right, dear?” she simpered.
Hector picked up his teacup, took a sip, and placed it exactly back down on the saucer.
“That,” he said, “is the biggest pack of lies I’ve heard in my life.”
“See what I mean about the rudeness?” Clio asked her cousins.
Helen looked liable to expire from delight.
“Here’s what really happened,” Hector said. “I was minding my own business in the toy shop when this princess came in and started harassing me for daring to be in her regal presence.”
He gave Clio a censorious look, but there was good humor dancing in his eyes.
“Darling,” she said in an exaggeratedly aristocratic purr. “How many times must I tell you? I’m notquitea princess. Just a duke’s daughter. And now—” She fluffed her hair, “—a duchess, of course.”
He ignored this.
“Then she goes outside and doesn’t you know that her self-importance is too heavy for the horses and topples the carriage right over,” he continued, sketching a large shape around her head, apparently to illustrate the enormity of her self-regard.“She starts shrieking so loudly that half the street goes deaf, and when I courageously rescue her, she’s so grateful that she can’t stop clinging to me like I’m the last man on earth.” He shook his head. “Intemperate, it was. Very scandalous.”
Clio could feel that the smile on her face was—well,intemperatewas a good word for it, actually. She was revealing too much. She couldn’t bring herself to regret it, not when Hector was smiling back at her in that same way.
Xander cleared his throat, breaking the spell.
“That’s all well and good,” he said. “But I do believe Helen’s request was for the real story.”
Helen rolled her eyes fondly at her husband, the gesture of a woman who knew herself to be loved without reservation. Clio pushed down a pang of jealousy.
“Thatwasthe real story,” she said, and the words rang true to Clio, even if they clearly baffled poor Xander. Helen turned to the two of them, a maternal sort of smile on her face.
“The two of you are very lucky,” she said. Clio’s heart stuttered in her chest. Nobody had spoken to them that way; everyone had acted rather as though she and Hector were two idiots who had gotten what was coming to them. Some people acted as thoughCliowas lucky, but only insofar as they seemed to feel that Hector should have abandoned her to her shame.
But Helen clearly intended something different.
“You had a rocky start,” she allowed. She didn’t even seem to notice that she inched closer to her husband as she said it. “But that can lead to something marvelous; take it from me. And it is clear that the two of you are well suited.”
Hector shifted at her side, and Clio worried that this clear parallel between them and the Lightholders—a famous love match—would be pushing things too far.
“No,” she said, “it’s not?—”
He interrupted her.
“Clio was my only choice,” he said firmly, looking at her family without the slightest flinch. “For me, she was theonlychoice.”
