“I shall take that recommendation.”

She hummed quietly as they turned.

“You’re going to make me ask, aren’t you?”

“Only if you want to.”

He caught her gaze and held it. “I do want.”

“Very well, I was feeling flirtatious because—”

“Hold on one moment,” he interrupted, because she deserved it, after making him ask. “It’s time for another spin.”

They executed this one perfectly, which was to say, they didn’t fall down.

“You were saying,” he prompted.

She looked up at him with faux severity. “I should claim to have forgotten my train of thought.”

“But you won’t.”

She made a sorry little face. “Oh, but I think I have forgotten.”

“Sarah.”

“How do you make my name sound like such a threat?”

“It doesn’t really matter if it sounds like a threat,” he said. “It only matters if you think it sounds like a threat.”

Her eyes grew wide, and she burst into laughter. “You win,” she said, and he was quite sure she would have thrown up her hands in defeat if they had not still been depending upon one another to stay upright.

“I think I do,” he murmured.

It was the strangest, most awkward waltz imaginable, and it was the most perfect moment of his life.

Chapter Fourteen

Several nights later, well after dark

in the guest bedchamber shared by

the Ladies Sarah and Harriet Pleinsworth

“Are you going to read all night?”

Sarah’s eyes, which had been speeding along the pages of her novel with a most pleasurable abandon, froze in place upon the word forsythia. “Why,” she said aloud (and with considerable aggravation), “does that question even exist in the realm of human activity? Of course I’m not going to read all night. Has there ever even existed a human being who has read all night?”

This was a question she regretted immediately, because this was Harriet lying in bed next to her, and if there was anyone in the world who would respond by saying, “There probably has been,” it was Harriet.

And she did.

“Well, I’m not going to,” Sarah muttered, even though she’d already said as much. It was important to get the last word in a sisterly argument, even if it did mean repeating oneself.

Harriet turned onto her side, scrunching her pillow under her head. “What are you reading?”

Sarah pushed back a sigh and let her book fall closed around her index finger. This was not an unfamiliar sequence of events. When Sarah could not sleep, she read novels. When Harriet could not sleep, she pestered Sarah.

“Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron.”

“Haven’t you read that before?”

“Yes, but I enjoy rereading it. It’s silly, but I like it.” She reopened the book, planted her eyes back on forsythia, and prepared to move forward.

“Did you see Lord Hugh tonight at supper?”

Sarah stuck her index finger back into the book. “Yes, of course I did. Why?”

“No reason in particular. I thought he looked very handsome.” Harriet had dined with the adults that evening, much to Elizabeth’s and Frances’s chagrin.

The wedding was now but three days away, and Whipple Hill was a flurry of activity. Marcus and Honoria (Lord and Lady Chatteris, Sarah reminded herself) had arrived from Fensmore looking flushed and giggly and deliriously happy. It would have been enough to make Sarah want to gag, except that she had been having a rather fine time herself, laughing and bantering with Lord Hugh.

It was the oddest thing, but his was the first face she thought of when she woke in the morning. She looked for him at breakfast, and she always seemed to find him there, his plate so nearly full as to indicate that he’d arrived mere moments before she had.

Every morning, they lingered. They told themselves it was because they could not partake in the many activities that had been planned for the day (although in truth Sarah’s ankle was much improved, and even if a walk to the village was still out of the question, there was no reason she could not manage bowls on the lawn).

They lingered, and she would pretend to sip at her tea, because if she actually drank as much as one normally might over the hours she sat at the table, she’d be forced to cut the conversation short.

She did not reflect upon the fact that a conversation truncated at the hour mark could not possibly be construed as short.

They lingered, and most people didn’t seem to notice. The other guests came and went, taking their food from the sideboard, drinking their coffee and tea, and leaving. Sometimes Sarah and Hugh were joined in conversation, sometimes not.

And then finally, when it became past obvious that it was time for the servants to clean the breakfast room, Sarah would rise and casually mention where she thought she might take her book for the afternoon.

He would never say that he planned to join her, but he always did.

They had become friends, and if occasionally she caught herself staring at his mouth, thinking that everyone had to have a first kiss, and wouldn’t it be lovely if hers was with him . . . Well, she kept such things to herself.

She was running out of novels, though. The Whipple Hill library was extensive, but it was sadly lacking in books of the kind Sarah liked to read. Miss Butterworth had been haphazardly shelved between The Divine Comedy and The Taming of the Shrew.

She looked back down. Miss Butterworth had not yet met her baron, and Sarah was eager for the plot to get moving.

Forsythia . . . forsythia . . .