Helpful? His wits must be addled, but he found himself asking, anyway. “How is a kiss helpful?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Try.” His tone came out harsh, but he didn’t care one wit. The woman was beyond baffling.
She looked at the ceiling, as if it could help her figure out her own thoughts. “I think the best way to describe it is like a tangled mess of twine.”
Bloody twine? He just frowned, his patience wearing away.
“Yes, that’s it. My thoughts form a tangled mess of twine in my head, and when you kiss me, or I kiss you, the twine shoots skyward and disappears. Then when you stop, it comes back down in a neat line in my mind, and I can speak upon one idea at a time.”
As much as he wanted to growl, he refrained because her analogy actually made sense in an odd way, though why he would expect it to be a normal way, he didn’t know. He stepped back further, behind a small table as much to avoid the temptation of her now rather plump lips and rosy cheeks as to contemplate what to do with this new revelation.
When he didn’t reply, she clasped her hands together. “Is that not a usual reaction to a kiss?”
Her question had his body heating again as it remembered how much he enjoyed the sensation of kissing her. Though irritated by his own response to her, his pride was somewhat soothed by the description of her reaction to him. That his kiss caused her to lose her many ideas was telling. “Yes, it is common to lose all thought during a kiss.” But what to make of the rest of it?
“Then I simply must kiss you more often.”
Even as he stiffened, she frowned. “But that is highly improper.” Her hazel gaze found his, and he could clearly see the sadness in her eyes as tears gathered there. “Then there is no hope for me. I must ramble my life away or be silent. If I can just be silent long enough to attract a husband before…” She turned away, not finishing her sentence.
Before what? Before her fourth season? Before she graduated from the school? Before she made a fool of herself in public? Before—It hit him hard as he suddenly understood her fear, her reaction to his mother’s accusation in the garden, to him being in the library alone when she’d come in.
He was a fairly observant fellow and had not missed her mother slipping into the garden at the last ball, or her noticeable absence when supposedly chaperoning her daughter. It always seemed the Mabrys came to her rescue. It was obvious she needed to marry before her mother caused a scandal and made all chances of marriage disappear. Unfortunately, she was correct. Men would assume she would be similar, yet he alone knew the innocence of her first kiss.
The same protective feeling he felt for his sister rose up into his chest. He also was obligated to make things right, as her innocence would be questioned the first time another man kissed her. Even at the thought of their kiss, his bodyreacted again. Devil it. “I may have a solution.” Even as he said the words, he was well aware it was nothing more than an experiment, but if it worked, they both would be pleased with the outcome.
She sniffed but didn’t face him. “What kind of solution?”
Reaching into his pocket, he took out a handkerchief and forced himself to walk to her and offer it.
She accepted and wiped her eyes, then crumpled it in her hand and turned to face him.
He returned to his place behind the table, not wanting to allow for any appearance of impropriety. He glanced to the open doors and found Lady Sommerset sketching. She held a wooden board no larger than her hand with a sheet of paper on it and used a small pencil. She was a terrible chaperone.
Turning back to Lady Dorothea, he found her lips quirking. “Lady Sommerset is always prepared to capture the beauty of the moment. It makes her happy.”
Her remark reminded him of what she’d said in the garden about being happy. She was right—he was happy when he won a bet. From now on, he would be more observant of his own instances of happiness. But at the moment, he wished to make her happy. “After much research,” which had yielded him nothing but had instigated his own ideas, “I have a way to help you stay in a conversation without losing your compatriots—and without kissing me.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Truly?”
He would not lie, as he could not be sure. “If you can keep any response to three sentences at the most, it will curb your thoughts and eliminate more robust, hmm, squiggly lines.”
“It will?” The excitement in her face made him uncomfortable. “How?”
“The reason this can work, and I saycanbecause only you can do it, is because it forces you to focus on two items atonce. You will focus on not only what you wish to say, but also on how many sentences, thereby forcing you to choose the best statements to make a point. Both parameters will help you limit your replies.”
“That does make sense. It would keep the twine to three strings at most. How tangled could they possibly get?” She grinned and held up three fingers.
He understood that she had just responded in three sentences. Pleased by her effort, he nodded approvingly. “Well done.”
Her smile faltered. “And if I go over the allotted three? What should I do? There need to be ramifications, don’t you think?”
The thought of that did not please him at all. “Is that what they do at Belinda’s school?”
She waved his words away, looking toward the terrace doors once more. “Of course not. But this is far more important than the Pythagorean theorem or Copernican principle. This is about my future.”
“What do you propose?”
