I’d marry Christopher before I married Crispin, and that’s saying something, when Christopher has no interest in girls and is the closest thing I have to a brother.
Crispin pouted. “Aww, Darling…!”
I shook my head. “You’re terrible, St George. Save your dubious charm for someone who appreciates it.”
“Like me,” Florence said brightly. “I’d be happy to marry you, Lord St George.”
I arched my brows. It seemed Florence hadn’t taken herself off down the hallway towards her own flat, the way any decent person would do after being dismissed. She still stood beside the lift, beaming at Crispin.
It would take stronger measures, I supposed.
“That’s right,” I told Crispin, meanly, “she’d be happy to marry you. So be careful what you say. Someone else might think you meant it, and then you’d end up wed to some woman you don’t care about just because you got drunk and careless. If you had said to Miss Schlomsky what you said to me, you’d be on your way to the registrar’s office right now.”
Florence nodded. Crispin looked horrified.
“Come along,” I added, still with that death grip on his lapel. “Goodnight, Florence. Next time, don’t be so quick to attach your mouth to him, please. This is the second time in a month I’ll have to clean lipstick off his face, and I’m getting annoyed with it. If I can’t get it out of his collar, I’ll be sending you the bill.”
I tugged him after me down the hallway in the direction of our—Christopher’s and mine—flat. Crispin, of course, couldn’t resist the last word. “Good night, Miss Schlomsky. You’ll have to forgive Darling, I’m afraid. She can be so possessive sometimes?—”
The sentence was cut off when the flat door shut behind us. That was assuming he’d planned to say anything more, of course. He might not have.
“You’re horrible,” I told him, as I pulled him, stumbling, across the foyer and into the sitting room. “Over there, on the chair. Sit.”
I let go, and watched him make his way across the floor, a bit unsteadily, towards the chair I had indicated. When he reached it, he fell upon it and sprawled, legs akimbo. The grin he gave me was lazy and no doubt intended to be charming. “Evening, Darling.”
“Good evening, St George. Do you prefer to use your own handkerchief on your face, or should I bring you something less expensive than a monogrammed silk square?”
From which Flossie’s crimson lipstick wasn’t likely to ever come out.
“You do it.” He put his head back against the chair and closed his eyes. Like Christopher, he has excessively long, curly eyelashes, and the shadows fanned against his cheeks. I shook my head and walked into my room to dig a less ostentatious handkerchief, one in plain cotton, out of my tallboy.
“Here you are.” I stopped next to him and held it out.
He didn’t open his eyes, just reiterated, “You do it,” and patted the arm of the chair to indicate that I should sit down next to him.
I arched my brows at the presumption. “I’m not wiping your mouth for you, St George. You’re not two years old.”
“You’ve done it before.”
“That was different,” I said.
He shook his head against the back of the chair. “No, it wasn’t. You may have felt differently about it, but it was the same situation.”
It absolutely was not. The last and only time I had wiped lipstick off his mouth had been in public, during a weekend party a month ago, after one of his other conquests had descended on him with glad cries of recognition and the almost palpable need to mark him as her own in front of us all.
On that occasion, yes, I had taken the handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dragged it across his mouth before handing it to him with a rather pointed directive to finish the job himself. We had been surrounded by other people at the time, not been alone in the privacy of Christopher’s and my flat, and he had not been sprawled in an armchair, already three sheets to the wind and determined to continue celebrating his twenty-third birthday in style. This was not a situation in which it would be appropriate for me to come anywhere near St George’s mouth, with a handkerchief or anything else.
“Do it yourself,” I told him again, and dropped the handkerchief on his stomach.
He couldn’t possibly have felt it, as it fell with the lightest of flutters, but he opened his eyes halfway to peer at me. “You’re a hard woman, Darling.”
“And don’t you forget it,” I said. “I’m not wiping Flossie Schlomsky’s lipstick off your mouth, St George. I’ll sacrifice a handkerchief to the cause, but that’s all I’m willing to do. You’re on your own with the rest of it.”
“Oh, very well.” He grabbed the handkerchief, which he passed over his mouth several times. “There. Is that better?”
I narrowed my eyes to see what, if anything, remained of the lipstick, and didn’t think about what I was doing until the lips I examined so intently curled up at the corners, amused.
“Damn you, St George,” I told him, flushing pink.
