Page 20 of The Subtle Craft of Courting Kate

Her cheeks heated anew, and a queer little shiver slipped down her spine. Empty flattery, she thought as she pressed her hot face into the cool softness of the pillow beneath her head. The sort of polite nonsense a man of good breeding was meant to say. Besides, hadn’t Madame Dubois assured her that she was quite plain?

But she hadn’t felt like empty flattery. For those few moments that he had stared at her, with his mouth slightly agape and his hands flexing at his sides, she hadn’t felt plain. For those few moments she had felt…something. Some nebulous and strange, rather like she had discovered a new and unknown aspect of herself. Something wholly unexplored and novel and unexpected.

Heart racing. Cheeks flushing. Blood pounding. Palms sweating. Like she’d acquired a sudden fever; like she’d run a mile or more in the space of only a few minutes.

With a heartfelt sigh, Kate rolled to her back and pushed herself upright once more. The sleep she had desperately wanted was not soon to be forthcoming after all. But unless she missed her guess, there would likely be a library somewhere in this townhouse. Perhaps it would not be quite as well-stocked as was Longthorpe Manor, but she was bound to find one or two of the duchess’ favored romances tucked away somewhere upon its shelves.

∞∞∞

“Good morning,” Elliot said as he strolled into the dining room, snatching up a piping hot pastry from the plate Mrs. Norris had just set upon the table and neatly dodging the swipe she aimed at his hand in retribution. “Or is it?” he asked, leveling an assessing glance at Kate, who was slumped over her cup of tea as if the very concept of good posture were offensive in nature. “Good God, Katie. You look like death warmed over.”

“I feel like death warmed over,” she groused, hunching her shoulders and slanting a glare at him through tousled bangs. “I didn’t sleep a wink.”

“That’s not true,” Mrs. Littlefield chided, lifting her chin. To Elliot, she said, “I woke early and found her sleeping in the library.”

“The library?” Elliot echoed, his brows raising toward his hairline.

“Dead to the world in an armchair, book still open on her lap, snoring like—”

“Mama,” Kate grumbled. “I couldn’t fall asleep last evening,” she explained, her voice rife with surly petulance. “I thought perhaps I could quiet my mind with a book.”

Quiet her mind? Of what? “And did it work?” Elliot inquired as he plopped unceremoniously into the chair beside her.

“Yes and no.” Another little hunch of her shoulders as she lifted her tea cup to her lips, and her eyes flitted away from his. “I managed an hour or two of sleep, I suppose, but I have got a dreadful crick in my neck.” With one hand she cupped the nape of her neck, canting her head away from him to massage at her aching muscles.

Elliot drew his gaze away from her fingers before he could be caught staring, and redirected his attention to the pastry still in his hands. Still gently steaming, drizzled with honey, and sprinkled with the absolute perfect proportion of walnuts. Delicious. “Well,” he said as he chewed, though Mrs. Norris sent him a chiding glance for his absolute disregard for good manners, “an hour or two will have to do. We’re going riding today, in advance of Lady Havisham’s garden party this afternoon.”

Kate’s head jerked toward him so fast that she winced as her sore muscles strained and pulled. “Riding?”

“In the park.”

“In the park?” Her brows scrunched together in confusion.

“Hyde Park, to be specific. It’s one of the innumerable places in London where one goes to see and be seen.” He accepted with a nod of acknowledgment the tea cup that Mrs. Littlefield passed across the table to him. “It won’t be the fashionable hour, per se, but there’s bound to be a few familiar faces about. Likely even some you’ll recognize from evening last.”

“Probably,” Kate said sourly, “the ones who were intelligent enough to leave at a decent hour and have therefore gotten plenty of sleep.”

Elliot disguised a laugh with a cough, and offered blandly when Kate sent him a suspicious glare, “Beg pardon. Walnut got stuck in my throat.” He cleared it in a vain effort to lend legitimacy to lie and added, “You’ll have to accustom yourself to it, I’m afraid. We keep mad hours in London. But a ride in the park ought to do you some good. The air is fresher there than it is elsewhere in London, and you’re a much better horsewoman than you are a traveler.”

Kate heaved a beleaguered sigh. “I am so wretchedly tired,” she said dryly, “that there is every possibility that I will fall straight off the horse in a dead faint.”

“Even better,” Elliot said. “I’ll catch you, of course, and as chivalry is a much-desired quality in a man, I can only think it will increase my marriage prospects. So do contrive to faint before witnesses, won’t you?” He clapped her on the shoulder as he polished off the last of his pastry and rose from the table once more. “That’s my girl. I’ll secure the horses and return in an hour.”

Kate’s shoulders slumped anew at the reminder of her duty, which Elliot hoped had become just the tiniest bit undesirable. The faintest of grimaces tugged at the corners of her mouth. “You have got so many admirers already,” she said, and there was a trace of something uncertain and ambiguous lingering with her voice. Wryly, she offered, “If you are to acquire still more, I might well have to find some sort of notebook to keep them all straight.”

“Not to worry,” he said, and left the words lingering in the air for just a second or two longer than necessary as he drained the last of his tea and set the cup back down upon the table. “I’ll buy one for you before I return with the horses.”

And when her shoulders sank again—just a little—he let himself hope that it wasn’t only her exhaustion that weighed them down.

∞∞∞

“It’s…rather tame,” Kate said as her horse maintained a sedate, plodding pace alongside Elliot’s. A little inclination of her head indicated his own horse; a spirited gelding that appeared to resent the placid stroll when he plainly wished to be given his head to run. “Your horse wants to gallop,” she said.

“He’s Devon’s horse, actually,” Elliot said, giving the horse a gentle pat to the side of the neck. “He’s a good lad, most of the time. But I’m afraid he’ll have to content himself with nothing more strenuous than a trot. The park is far too crowded to manage anything else.”

Kate wasn’t certain what she expected of Hyde Park. Possibly something resembling the rolling hills of her home, where one could look out from the top and see the village below to one side and miles of open land to the other. A place where a person could give a horse its head and ride on with the wind at one’s back at an exhilarating pace, as she and Elliot had done on innumerable occasions in the countryside.

Instead she found there was little difference between Hyde Park and the Crewes’ dinner party, except that horses had also been invited here. People milled about the edges of the Serpentine, stopping to greet those they knew and perhaps offering a nod here and there to those with whom they were not yet personally acquainted. There was a pageantry to it, she supposed, but it seemed infinitely more constrained than that to which she was accustomed, and not nearly as fun.