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He smiled and inclined his head in a most urbane manner. “You sound as if you know of me.”
“Oh, not at all,” Susan replied, so quickly that the veriest fool could tell she was lying. She smiled—a touch too broadly, in Elizabeth’s opinion—and then quickly changed tack. “Elizabeth, have you done something new with your hair?”
“It’s wet,” Elizabeth ground out.
“I know, but it still looks—”
“It’s wet.”
Susan shut her mouth, then somehow managed to say, “sorry,” without moving her lips.
“Mr. Siddons must be on his way,” Elizabeth said desperately. She jolted forward and grabbed his arm. “I’ll see you to the gate.”
“It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss Hotchkiss,” he said to Susan over his shoulder—he couldn’t have done it any other way, since Elizabeth had hauled him past all three younger Hotchkisses and was presently maneuvering him through the door to the hall. “And you, as well, Lucas!” he called out. “We must go fishing someday!”
Lucas squealed with glee and ran into the hall after them. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Siddons. Thank you!”
Elizabeth had James practically to the front steps when he ground to a halt and said, “There is one more thing I have to do.”
“What more could you possibly have to do?” she demanded. But he’d already wrenched free of her grip and strode back to the kitchen door. When she thought he was out of earshot, she mumbled, “It seems to me we’ve already done everything today.”
He threw a wicked grin over his shoulder. “Not everything.”
She sputtered and spluttered, trying to come up with an appropriately scathing retort, when he completely ruined the moment by melting her heart.
“Oh, Jane,” he called out, leaning against the door-frame.
Elizabeth couldn’t see into the kitchen, but she could picture the scene perfectly as her baby sister lifted her head, her dark blue eyes wide and wondrous.
James blew a kiss into the kitchen. “Goodbye, sweet Jane. I do wish you were a little more grown up.”
Elizabeth let out a beatific sigh and sank into a chair. Her sister would be dreaming on that kiss for the rest of her girlhood.
The speech was overrehearsed, but the sentiment was certainly sincere. Elizabeth knew that she would have to confront James about their scandalous behavior, and she’d played out conversations in her head all night and into the following morning. She was still reciting her words as she tramped her way through the mud—it had rained the previous night—to Danbury House.
This plan—this strange, bizarre, incomprehensible plan which was supposed to deposit her on the altar of marriage—it needed rules. Dictums of behavior, guidelines, that sort of thing. Because if she didn’t have some idea what she was supposed to expect in James Siddons’s company, she was liable to go mad.
For example, her behavior the previous afternoon was clearly the mark of a highly distracted mind. She had flung water all over herself in a fit of panic. Not to mention her wanton reaction to James’s kiss.
She was going to have to assume a certain modicum of control. She refused to be some sort of charity case for his entertainment. She was going to insist upon repaying him for his services, and that was that.
Furthermore, he couldn’t grab her and sweep her into his embrace when she wasn’t expecting it. As silly as it sounded, his kisses were going to have to remain purely academic. It was simply the only way she was going to emerge from this episode with her soul intact.
As for her heart—well, that was probably already a lost cause.
But no matter how many times she tried to rehearse the little speech she’d prepared, it sounded wrong. First too bossy, then too weak. Too strident, and then too cajoling. Where on earth was a woman supposed to look for advice?
Maybe she should take just one more peek into HOW TO MARRY A MARQUIS. If it was rules and edicts she wanted, she’d certainly find them there. Perhaps Mrs. Seeton had included something about how to convince a man that he was wrong without mortally insulting him. Or how to get a man to do what you wanted while making him think it had all been his idea from the very beginning. Elizabeth was certain she’d seen something to that effect in her readings.
And if there wasn’t, there sure as heaven ought to be. Elizabeth couldn’t imagine a more useful skill. It had been one of the few pieces of feminine advice her mother had passed on to her before she died. “Never take the credit,” Claire Hotchkiss had told her. “You’ll accomplish far more if you let him think he is the smartest, bravest, most powerful man in creation.”
And from what Elizabeth had observed, it had worked. Her father had been utterly besotted with her mother. Anthony Hotchkiss hadn’t been able to see anything else—including his children—when his wife walked in the room.
Unfortunately for Elizabeth, however, when her mother had been dispensing advice about what to do with a man, she had never seen fit to explain how to carry out that advice.
Maybe these things were intuitive to some women, but certainly not to Elizabeth. Good heavens, if she had been forced to consult a guidebook just to tell her what to say to a man, she certainly wouldn’t know how to make him believe that her ideas were actually his.
She was still trying to master the most basic lessons of courtship. That seemed an advanced technique indeed.
