Shit.
“Hattie! Malcolm!” Libba cried. “Come! I have to show you your places!”
Hattie smiled and stood, using his shoulder to help herself to her feet and giving him a little squeeze before she sashayed off to receive her orders, leaving that odd spiced sweetness lingering in the air in her wake.
“Shit,” he said aloud, just to the pig.
The pig seemed to nod in agreement, glancing over its pink shoulder to watch Hattie as well and then looking back at Elias with an expression of pure sympathy.
“Do you want a dog bed?” Elias asked her. “Or do you prefer to sleep at the foot of my bed instead?”
He stood, looking about for Errol, and strode toward him, pleased to a degree that ought to have alarmed him when the pig turned and trotted after him in concert.
“I’m keeping this pig,” he said to Errol. “She’s mine now.”
Errol chuckled. “All right. But she still has to perform at the showcase.”
“So must we all.” Elias sighed and turned to watch his bride-to-be as she glittered in the sun, shaking the hands of a motley assemblage of actors and vagabonds, clearly finding many among them who spoke tongues other than English. “So must we all.”
“You’ll have questions, I assume?” Errol pressed, following Elias’s eyeline to Hattie with a knowing raise of his tawny brows. “About the pig, I mean.”
“The pig,” he said, still watching Hattie. “Right. Many. Her preferences and so on?”
“I’m happy to answer any question you have,” Errol told him, giving him a clap on the shoulder. “Feel free to ask.”
“I’ll do that,” Elias replied, “if any good questions ever occur to me.”
And, he thought privately, if he couldn’t get up the courage to ask the lady directly.
Chapter Sixteen
By the thirdrehearsal, the Starling brood had begun to draw a crowd of curious onlookers. It was typical, at least so far as Hattie remembered, from back when they’d performed under the Grand Pavilion with Willa at their head, and not worth fussing over, as the same people would likely turn out to see the full performance on showcase day.
Still, Rhys seemed to take issue with it.
Or with one onlooker in particular.
Hattie wouldn’t have noticed her there at all if he hadn’t spun so suddenly, lighting up like a taper at Michaelmas, his curls quivering with outrage. “No!” he had sung, pointing a damning finger into the crowd, aimed at a coif of stylish, golden-blonde hair in their midst, until the others parted to reveal Persephone Boswell. “This is a closed rehearsal! Begone!”
“‘Closed’?” she repeated, drawing nearer with a smirk on her lips. “You’ve no walls. How can it be closed?”
“‘Walls’?” Rhys repeated, leaping off his pedestal and knocking over several of his props in the process as he prowled toward her. “You know what has walls?”
“No,” she said, raising her pale brows. “What?”
He grimaced, coming up short. “Our… erm… house?”
“Oh, devastating,” Ruby murmured.
“My goodness,” Libba said quickly, stepping to Rhys’s side with a hand to his shoulder. “Lovely to see you again, Seph.”
“Miss Elizabeth!” Persephone said, turning her attention to Libba with a blinding smile. “How do?”
“It’s ‘Liberty’ now, actually,” Libba replied with a grin. “Come, let’s talk… elsewhere.”
Which won a groan of disappointment from the rest of the tourists amassed outside Rhys’s pavilion.
“Oh, go grouse by the shore!” he snapped at them, until they began to reluctantly disperse. “Ingrates.”
