Beside her, he straightened to his full height. He pushed a hand through disarrayed dark hair. “They don’t, really. He simply wishes to draw them. He says if a German can do it, every Englishman ought to be able to.” He looked her up and down. “I think you’re crushing his latest attempt.”
“They’re pages. They’re already flat.” She shrugged. Might he be thinking about what she was crushing them with? “Can you draw one?”
He gave her a suspiciously bland look. “If I could draw a perfect heptadecagon with only a compass and a straightedge, I wouldn’t breathe a word of it in your father’s library.”
Liza smiled. Aside from being handsome, Lord Thomas was easy to talk to, and because they’d known each other for so long, she was permitted to speak as she chose. He never made her feel like a blathering idiot.
Well, only once, the night they’d kissed. She’d definitely been a blathering idiot that night, over three years ago, on his birthday. Though it ate away at her that he could kiss her and not remember it, she also counted herself lucky he’d been so intoxicated he didn’t. Otherwise, she would surely have lost his friendship.
A ponderous tread sounded in the hall. She hopped down. Her father was not as tolerant of her sitting atop his papers as was Lord Thomas.
The door opened to reveal her father’s broad frame. His face, flushed from the long walk down the hall to the library, broke into a jovial smile. “Liza, dear, there you are. Did you help Thomas?” He maneuvered into the room, toward the table. “You did, I see. Thank you. Never met a more disorganized mathematician. That’s a good girl. Go read on the couch. We men have ellipses to discuss.”
“Yes, Papa.” She gave him a kiss on the cheek, then headed toward the window seat and her pirates. Pirates, she knew, were like astronomers. They used the stars every night to navigate their adventures.
Liza suppressed a giggle. For the life of her, she couldn’t picture her father or Lord Thomas doing anything so spontaneous as having an adventure. She took the book, settled into the chair and folded her legs under her in an unladylike fashion. With a contented smile, she began to read to the soothing backdrop of her father’s and Lord Thomas’s voices.
