The knock sounded again. Lillian tossed aside the boldly written pages she was looking at, hopped off the bed and padded on bare feet across the cold wooden floor to the door. She opened it just enough to see Gwen. Sadly not the marquis. She wouldn’t be ravished tonight. Or even kissed.
“I saw your light on. Do you mind if I come in?”
“Of course not,” she said, stepping back so her sister could come inside. “What are you doing up at this time of night?”
“I couldn’t sleep so I was on my way below stairs for milk, water, or maybe just a bite of bread.” She looked past Lillian to the sheets of vellum lying on the bed. “What are you doing?”
Gwen walked over to the slipper chair where she always sat when she came into Lillian’s room. Grabbing the stool from her dressing table, Lillian moved it closer to the chair and plopped on top of it.
“I’m fuming, thanks to the Lord Wythebury,” she groused.
“Whatever for?”
“I’m going over lessons I must teach to Fallon and Heron tomorrow.” She sighed and stared at her beautiful sister whose blue eyes and blonde hair were close to the color of her own. “You should see all the arithmetic problems Heron has to add and subtract, the words Fallon has to learn how to spell. Heavens be! He’s only five! Not to mention that no child should have to work this hard this close to Christmas. The marquis must be an ogre of the highest order.”
Gwen gave her a skeptical smile.
“Don’t give me that expression,” Lillian complained as she stomped over to the bed, picked up the pages, and thrust them at Gwen. Her sister took them and laid them on the table beside her without ever letting her gaze land on the top sheet.
Her dismissal didn’t stop Lillian. “The amount of work the marquis gives those two boys to do in a single day is unreasonable.”
“But you’ll get it done and you’ll have time to go outside with them as well, right?”
“Yes, of course. I will see to it that we do both or die trying,” she said determinedly.
“That’s the attitude to have, but I can see you’re upset by this.”
“Byhim. I’m so glad Louisa allowed us to enjoy our childhood and didn’t give us so many study lessons to do that we languished under the weight of them.”
“Don’t be so hard on the Lord Wythebury,” Gwen said, rubbing her slightly swollen stomach. “You know that boys are required to learn more than girls. Their responsibilities are much greater and more demanding as adults than ours. And remember, our older sister had four of us to worry about after our brother died and we had no governess. The marquis has only two wards. If Louisa had given all of us several pages of lessons a day, she wouldn’t have had time to check them all.”
Lillian brushed her long plaited hair to the back of her shoulders. “I know, but you should have sided with me in this and not the marquis.”
“I’m not siding with anyone,” Gwen argued good-naturedly. “I was only telling the truth of how things are. But tell me, aside from his heavy-handed lessons, what do you think about him?”
“He’s rigid, much too serious, and probably the most handsome man on earth.”
Gwen laughed.
“You laugh, but it’s true,” Lillian said. “And I’m not finished yet. Lord Wythebury doesn’t seem to have a carefree bone in his body, and he doesn’t seem to enjoy any kind of adventure. He doesn’t want masters Heron and Fallon playing outside when it’s cold. He thinks they’ll get sick. They’ll get sick if they don’t get out of the house and get fresh air. Needless to say, we’re complete opposites in our thinking.”
And for reasons she didn’t understand, and tried to suppress, she’d wanted Lord Wythebury to see her as a woman. She wanted him to cuddle her in his strong arms and hold her as if she were the most precious thing in the world to him while his cool moist lips moved over hers.
“Oh,” Gwen said, adjusting the way she was sitting. “That’s too bad. I was hoping there might be a spark of something between—well, was there nothing to like about him other than he’s handsome?”
“I suppose I could find a few more things to recommend him, if I tried. He doesn’t seem to have an explosive temper, so that is good. ”
Gwen frowned. “How would you know that?”
“Maybe because I hit him three times with snow balls and he never once yelled at me or even looked at me in a mean or angry fashion.”
Gwen rose up straight in the chair. “Three times!”
“I know, I know it was a dreadful thing for me to do. You don’t have to scold me. I’ve reprimanded myself more than once.”
“Dreadful? Scold you? I think it was an amazing thing for you to do. Did he get you with a couple volleys too?”
“No.”
