Page 50 of The Lady’s Deception

He glanced at Rosamund before answering. “I thought, so long as we’d come this far, we’d all go to London instead.” All. Her heart caught. “Miss Gorse has affairs to which she must tend, and you two must be missing Mama and Papa.”

“And Cami and Erica and Galen. Oh, truly, Paris?” squealed Bell as she jumped up and threw her arms about his neck.

One long-fingered hand covered the back of her head. “Truly.”

“London,” Daphne repeated, a hint of awe in her voice. “Is that where you’ll do it then?”

“Do…what?” A puzzled frown appeared on his brow.

Bell looked up at him and shook her head in a mock scold. “Oh, Paris. Marry Miss Gorse, silly.”

Rosamund watched the color leave his face, while feeling her own rise. They were saved from having to offer any immediate response, however, by the discovery that Eileen’s basket lay empty on its side on the seat of Bell’s abandoned chair.

Precious moments ticked by while they debated where to search for the escaped kitten. “She was just here,” insisted Bell, starting forlornly into the basket, while Daphne tried to claim that none of this would have happened if she had been put in charge. Rosamund glanced toward the windows, her mind as choppy as the gray water.

What on earth had given Daphne that idea that she and Paris were going to marry?

How much time before the passengers from the Industry came ashore?

Leaving Daphne and Bell to bicker not-so-quietly with one another, she hurried about the dining room, searching for a little fluff of white among the forest of legs, both furniture and human. An occasional glimpse of something gave her hope, but it was always only a handkerchief or a napkin that had fallen to the floor or, once, a lady’s fur muff lying on a chair.

At a shout from the kitchen, she jerked upright, nearly striking her head on the corner of a table. Paris, who was closer, went to investigate. Moments later, following a few alarming bangs that sounded like cast iron cookware colliding with the flagstone floor, and a cry of something that might have been pain, Paris emerged, rumpled and with a scratch down one cheek, holding Eileen by the scruff of her neck. Eileen carried within her tightly clamped jaws a lifeless mouse.

The girls, at once proud and horrified, ran toward the two of them. Eileen, evidently fearful that her prize was to be taken from her, growled loudly enough for Rosamund to hear from several yards away.

“I wouldn’t come any closer if I were you,” Paris advised, reaching up with his free hand to gingerly brush the scratch on his cheek, then studying the smear of blood on his fingertips. “She’s quite determined to keep it.”

Determined, indeed. The mouse was fully grown and almost half the kitten’s size, but Eileen had triumphed over it nonetheless. “Good girl,” Bell offered, a trifle tentatively, while Daphne nodded and clutched the empty basket to her chest.

“The cook offered me half a crown to leave her here to catch pests in the kitchen,” Paris said, one dark brow cocked. “I won’t say I wasn’t tempted.” His sisters gasped in alarm.

Amusement and annoyance warring on his face, he jerked his chin toward the exit, the kitten still firmly within his grasp. In the inn yard, he managed—Rosamund was never quite sure how—to snatch the mouse from the kitten’s mouth, dropping Eileen into Daphne’s basket with one hand and flinging the carcass into the ditch with the other. “Sorry, puss,” he answered her hiss of protest, “but no disemboweling rodents in the coach. Come, girls. Up you go.”

The carriage Paris had hired stood before them, and in its traces, four high-stepping chestnuts stamped and pranced, almost as eager to be underway as Rosamund was. At least, until she recalled the quizzing that awaited her from Daphne and Bell. Her only hope was that they might have forgotten in all the commotion over the kitten. And she considered it far more likely that Charles had given up the chase.

Paris helped his sisters in first, then turned to her and held out a hand to assist her. His injured cheek, the same one she had slapped the night before, was pink again. This close, she could see three shallower wounds surrounding the angry scratch down his cheek, one groove for each of Eileen’s unsheathed claws. Poor man.

Steeling herself not to react to his touch, she let him help her into the carriage and found the girls already seated side by side on the backward-facing bench. With a pang of uncertainty, she seated herself opposite the young inquisitors, leaving room beside her for their brother. As soon as he had closed the door behind himself, Daphne released the kitten from her basket prison. The driver chirruped to the horses and the carriage wheels began to roll. As Rosamund watched the tumbling gray water of the Irish Sea recede from view, a little sigh of relief escaped her.

Opposite her, Bell too was looking out the window. The changing scenery did not hold her attention for long, however. Abruptly, she turned away from the glass. “Do the others know?”

“Know what?” her brother asked.

“About the wedding.”

Without looking at Paris, Rosamund squared herself on the bench and said with as much firmness as she could muster, “Whatever can have given you the notion that your brother and I are getting married?” She blamed that ridiculous book of flower poetry for putting the idea in the girl’s head.

Bell was frowning now. She disliked being told she was wrong. “Daphne told me. Woke me from a sound sleep and whispered it in my ear. Didn’t you?” She twisted sharply, seeking confirmation from her sister.

For just a moment, with all eyes upon her, Daphne looked frightened and perhaps a tiny bit chagrined. But her customary boldness soon returned. “The firelight shone through the screen last night,” she explained. “It was better than a magic lantern. I saw you kiss.” Her eyes darted from her brother to Rosamund and back again, taking in their reactions to her accusation. “I even saw you lie down together. And Miss Gorse never came to bed.” Her chin jutted upward in defiance. “I—I know you think I’m still a child. But I’m not a simpleton. I know that means you have to get married.”

* * * *

Paris had risen that morning believing the most difficult thing he would have to do that day would be to ask for help from Eamon Graves. Well, second most difficult, actually. First, he’d had to make himself leave Rosamund, warm and sleepy on the hearth.

He had not considered the particular difficulties to be posed by his sharp-eyed younger sister. If pressed, he would’ve been willing to swear he was incapable of being surprised by his siblings’ antics. But he was certainly surprised now.

Surprised most of all by the strong, sudden impulse to drop to one knee in the middle of the carriage floor and ask Rosamund Gorse to make him the happiest of men.