Page 19 of The Subtle Craft of Courting Kate

“I don’t think it is,” Kate mused as she watched Elliot’s bland smile turn forced and the merry light in his eyes dim as he slowly began to realize that her assistance would not be quite as forthcoming as he might have hoped. “Is it always like this for him?”

“Well—” Richard hedged. “Yes—and no. He has always been a darling of the Ton. I imagine there are a fair few ladies who have set their caps for him in the past, but he has always managed to let them down gently. This Season has been something of an aberration from the usual. His admirers have gone a bit more—er—” He gave a vague roll of his wrist, as if attempting to scrape a polite word from the ether.

“Feral,” Rebecca supplied, with a disdainful sniff, as she fisted her hands on her hips. “And in my damned drawing room, no less!”

“Now, now,” Richard said, his voice turned placating as he sought to calm his wife’s brief flare of temper. “You must understand. They’re convinced now that he can be caught.”

Because Devon had decreed it so. Kate heaved a sigh as Elliot turned to her once again, eyes as pitiful and beseeching as a puppy’s. “All right,” she said. “I suppose he’s suffered long enough.”

“Merciful of you,” Richard observed mildly. “Good luck, then. I don’t know that I’d risk it, myself. Liable to have a hand snapped clean off your wrist if you venture too close.”

Kate took a bracing sip of wine and threw back her shoulders, preparing herself to march into the fray. The very moment she took that first step toward the cluster of women who had pinned Elliot in place near the doorway, open relief slid across his face.

He had extended a hand toward her even before she had made it halfway across the room, reaching past the shoulders of the ladies who peppered him with questions still. “Ah, Katie,” he said, his hand grappling desperately for hers. “There you are at last.”

To his credit and her amusement, he sounded genuine and sincere. His fingers were warm and strong as they wrapped around hers, drawing her nearer and forcing the gaggle of women who had him surrounded to admit her within their circle. The crowd parted with some reticence and more than a little resentment, Kate thought, and could not believe the jostling of shoulders she had received on her way past to be anything but intentional.

“I was just telling these lovely ladies about you,” he said as he drew her closer still, pitting them like outnumbered allies against an impenetrable wall of enemies.

The words settled strangely in her ears, issued in a kind of low, warm tone she’d never heard from him before. Affection was nothing new; they had been friends for far too long to be absent it, but this—this was something different entirely, something which made her cheeks heat and the fine hairs at the nape of her neck prickle. “Good things, I hope,” she managed to say, hearing the odd, flustered tone of her voice, rife with an abrupt tension she couldn’t quite explain even to herself.

Elliot chuckled, favoring her with that dimpled smile she knew so well. “Naturally,” he said. “It is of utmost importance to me that it is known that I trust your opinion above all others, and could not possibly make such an important decision without your counsel. Your approval is paramount; I would entrust my future happiness to no one else.”

His future happiness. Why did those words cause a strange, sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach? Of course he had been bound to marry eventually. Of course he would choose a lady with the proper breeding, the proper social standing. Bizarrely, she had the sense that he was slipping straight through her fingers even as his hand held tight to hers.

How was it possible to know that something would inevitably happen, and still somehow to find it unexpected? She had known it, and yet it had always seemed a distant thing, far away and long off. So fuzzy and indistinct that it had never threatened the peace of their countryside home.

Now suddenly it loomed. Worse than unexpected, even—unwelcome.

And Elliot was depending upon her to help him choose the woman who would become his wife. To ensure his happiness, because he trusted her opinion above all others.

Much to Kate’s bewilderment, the mere thought of it sent a strange jolt straight to her heart and left her with the disconcerting sensation that something of monumental importance had just swept by straight over her head.

Chapter Nine

By all rights, Kate ought to have been exhausted. The dinner party had gone well past the point that Kate, who was accustomed to country hours, would ever have deemed reasonable. The guests had left in nearly the same slow trickle in which they had arrived, though it had been long past midnight before the first of their numbers had begun to take their leave.

Kate had felt as wilted and limp as a bad bit of lettuce by the time Elliot had shepherded her and Mama out of the house and toward the waiting carriage. And yet, despite the lateness of the hour and the fact that he had been awake even earlier than she had, Elliot had been as bright and chipper as a morning songbird, chattering gaily away, clearly under the impression that the evening had gone exceptionally well.

Kate hadn’t had the energy either to agree or to disagree. She hadn’t had even the energy to feel ill over the rocking of the carriage over the cobblestone streets as it had carried them back home. But as Elliot had left them courteously at the door and entrusted them to the care of Hodges—who had been waiting up for their arrival—Kate had felt the weight of the dinner party settle on her not with the exhaustion she ought to have felt, but with a sizzling sense of disquiet.

A second wind of the mind, if not of the body. Her thoughts had begun to race before she had even bid good night to Mama, before she had even touched a toe to the stairs that would lead her up to the bed chamber which had been given to her.

She had seen Elliot embroiled in all manner of plots and schemes. She’d seen him snotty-nosed, covered in mud, and worse. She’d seen him sick and ailing, seen him broken out in inconvenient spots in his awkward teenage years, and had once even seen him bare-arsed as he and the village boys had gone tearing down to the local stream for a swim during the longest and hottest day of the year.

But she had never seen him play the gentleman.

She supposed, as she settled into her soft feather mattress for the night, it wasn’t truly playing. He’d been born to the role, after all, even if it had never seemed to come between them before.

Or maybe he simply hadn’t let it come between them. She had never truly been a proper playmate for a duke’s son—though his parents had never seemed to mind the friendships their children had cultivated with the local children. She had always known the difference in their classes, but…Elliot had always been just Elliot to her.

Only here now in London did she understand in a way she hadn’t before that to everyone except his closest friends he was Lord Elliot, the youngest son of the previous Duke of Longthorpe and brother to the current. That he enjoyed a sort of prestige and admiration of which she could hardly conceive.

It was Lord Elliot who had taken her hand this evening as he had calmly and confidently declared her the final arbiter of his future. More worrisome still was that Lord Elliot hadn’t felt as much a stranger as she thought he ought to have done. He had been the same Elliot as always, revealed by his cheeky smile and that damned charming dimple—just polished now in a way she had never seen him. A new facet of the same boy—no.

A new facet of the same man he must have been for some time now, only somehow she had missed it. They had both grown up years ago, even if her heart struggled to let go of the boy he had once been. That same heart performed an obnoxious flutter in her chest as she flounced onto her side. What the devil was wrong with her? Had London addled her senses and her wits besides?

You look beautiful.