“Oh, I think you will find me quite simple,” Hattie said with a bright smile at their slack-jawed reactions to her words. “To get to know, of course. Please excuse me. I look forward to writing you!”
She walked away still grinning, her cheeks hurting from her delight at her own wordplay.
“So they are his siblings?” one fine lady was whispering to another. “He married one of them.”
“No, no, they were the dowager baroness’s wards,” the other said back, clicking her tongue. “Honestly, this is what happens when you never summer in Brighton.”
“But they’re all… Well, they’re quitevocationalfor a baroness’s brood, are they not?” the other woman huffed.
“Starling’s Rest is the domain of thedemimonde, my dear,” her friend replied with a shrug. “Enjoy it while the sun burns hot.”
Demimonde, Hattie thought.
Half world.
Like the kangaroo in the poem.
She giggled to herself and made her way to Rhys’s corner, flicking the back of his ear before he could hear her coming and reveling in his outraged spin of surprise.
“Whatever is left of my dressing gown,” she said before he could speak, “you will deliver to Monica. And she will make something permanent and ostentatious that will live in a visible corner of the Rest and haunt you and my badly behaved husband until you too are being feted into the afterlife under this pavilion. Do you understand me, Rhys?”
He blinked, his eyes burning emerald green in the sun. “You know,” he said with a few blinks of his heavily lashed and kohled eyes, “for once, I actually do.”
“I will have that box, too,” she decided. “As penance.”
“Not my box!” he cried, hands flying protectively out to shield said box and his half dozen stolen beakers from her greedy gaze.
Hattie only laughed and turned back to see if her husband had completed his royal duties. She wandered back to the podium to inspect the keepsake cards he had laid out, each from a different and strange corner of the world.
There were seven of them, she realized with amusement.
He ought to have brought eight.
Eight was far more correct.
She wanted to stay and read them all, to turn them over in her hands, but she was not the only curious onlooker, and given that the art cards would return to their bedroom with them tonight, she knew she needed to make way for the others, while they still had the chance.
Libba’s troupe had moved to begin setting up the props for their play snippet in the center of the pavilion while canapes appeared on trays from the household staff, dotted throughout the crowd.
That meant interactive displays were next.
It was all so familiar that it was hard to really accept that it had been a decade since the last time they’d done this.
“I got you a biscuit,” Elias’s voice said, appearing at her elbow with a hazelnut confection in his hand and a smile on his face. “Last one.”
She turned, reaching up to brush some of the wayward strands of his dark hair back into place. “Those are my favorites,” she told him.
“Yes, I remember,” he replied smugly. “What do they taste like to you?”
“Hm,” she said, taking the offering and biting into it. She chewed slowly, her eyes sliding to the side as she considered it. “They taste like contentment.”
He twinkled at her, swiping a bit of the hazelnut paste with his finger and dropping it onto his tongue. “What?” he said at her little gasp of outrage. “I want to taste contentment.”
She narrowed her eyes but did not argue, her heart fluttering pleasantly in her chest at this cheek. “What did the prince say?”
“Oh, the usual things,” Elias said with a shrug. “Condolences and congratulations and so on. It was a lot of words and not a lot of meaning.”
“How is that possible?” Hattie demanded, frowning. “I can never get a single syllable out without meaning something, you know.”
