“And are we in agreement?”

“Only in that there is probably no answer.”

She nodded.

“Now the two of you look like you’re going to cry,” Violet protested.

Georgiana recovered first. “Philosophy does that to me.”

“I concur,” Edmund said. “My least favorite subject by far.”

“You always did well in it, though,” Nicholas said.

Edmund grinned. “That’s because I can talk my way out of almost anything.”

Everyone rolled their eyes at that. It was the absolute truth.

“I think baby Colin takes after you in that way,” Georgie said.

“He’s four months old,” Edmund said with a laugh. “He can’t even speak.”

“There’s something in the way he looks at me,” Georgie said. “Mark my words. That boy is going to be a charmer.”

“If he doesn’t explode first,” Violet said. “I swear, all that baby does is eat. It is unnatural.”

“What are you talking about now?” Lady Manston asked, clearly exasperated by a seating arrangement that kept leaving her just barely out of earshot.

“Exploding babies,” Georgie said.

Nicholas nearly spit his food across the table.

“Oh.” His mother placed a hand over her heart. “Oh my.”

He started to laugh.

“One baby specifically,” Georgie said, elegantly flipping her wrist with perfect sardonic punctuation. “We would never talk about exploding babies in the general sense.”

Nicholas started to laugh so hard it hurt.

And Georgie … Oh, she was in fine form. She didn’t even crack a smile as she leaned ever so slightly in his direction and murmured, “That would be tasteless.”

His laughter turned silent, the kind that shook the room.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” his mother said.

Which nearly made him fall out of his chair.

“Do you need to excuse yourself,” Georgie said behind her hand. “Because I know when I laugh that hard …”

“I’m fine,” he gasped. In fact, he was better than fine. His ribs were sore, and it felt good.

Georgie turned to answer a question her sister had asked her—presumably something about why Nicholas was acting like a loon. He took the moment to catch his breath and also to think about what had just happened.

He’d forgotten, for a moment, why he was here.

He’d forgotten that his father had summoned him home, all but ordered him to marry a girl he’d known all his life and never shown a whit of romantic interest in.

To be fair, she’d never displayed a whit in his direction, either.

But that hadn’t mattered. Not while he was laughing so hard he probably should have taken Georgie’s advice and excused himself. Now all he could think was—this wasn’t bad at all.

Maybe he could marry her. It might not be love, but if this was what life with Georgie would be like, it was a damn sight better than most people had.

She laughed at something Billie had said, and his gaze dropped to her mouth. She was looking at her sister, but she was still enough in profile that he could see the shape of it, the fullness and curve of her lower lip.

What would it be like to kiss her?

He had not kissed many women. He’d usually chosen to study while his contemporaries caroused, and the one man—Edmund—with whom he might have gotten drunk and made foolish decisions had married young. No sowing of wild oats there.

Then he’d started his medical studies, and if ever there was a hard and fast lesson on why a man should keep himself in check, that was it. He’d told Georgie that there was rarely a shortage of illness, and that was true. He’d seen enough syphilis to curdle his brain.

He’d seen how syphilis curdled other men’s brains.

So no, he did not have a wide range of sexual experience.

But he had thought about it.

He’d imagined all the foolish decisions he could have made, the things he might have done if he’d met the right woman. Usually the women in his fantasies were nameless, maybe even faceless, but sometimes they were real. A finely dressed lady he’d passed on the street. The woman serving ale at a public house.

But never, never Georgiana Bridgerton.

Until now.

Chapter 6

Crake House, later that night

By any standard, Nicholas’s first non-platonic thoughts about Georgiana Bridgerton were disconcerting.

Almost to the point of bewilderment.

She was certainly pretty—he’d never have said otherwise if asked—but he’d also never really looked at her beyond her just being … her.

She was Georgiana Bridgerton, and she had blue eyes like her mother and gingery hair like no one else in her family. And that was the extent of what he’d noticed.

Wait. No. Her teeth were straight. He supposed he’d noticed that. She was of average height. He hadn’t really noticed that, but if someone had asked him how tall she was, he could have made a reasonably decent estimation.

But then they had joked about exploding babies and she’d done that little twist with her hand. His gaze had fixed inexplicably on her wrist.

Her wrist.

He had been laughing, and looking at her, and she’d done that thing … A curve, a flip, a sweeping gesture—whatever it was that women did with tiny movements that spoke volumes and seemed to envelop them in a fine mist of Pretty. It was an innocent enough move, clearly executed with no coy forethought, simply done to punctuate her dry humor.

Simple, innocent.

And if his father had not suggested they marry, Nicholas was sure he’d never have looked at the inside of Georgie’s wrist, much less noticed it.

But then he’d moved his gaze from her wrist to her face.

And he’d thought about kissing her.

Georgie.

Georgie.

He couldn’t kiss Georgie. It would be like kissing his sister.

“Sister? No,” he said to the nighttime air. He was sitting by his open bedchamber window, staring up at stars he could not see.

It was a cloudy night. The air was turbulent.

Georgie was not his sister. Of that he was certain. The rest of it, though …

Thinking about exploding babies felt a whole lot safer than thinking about Georgie’s wrist. Or to be more precise, thinking about laughing about the ludicrousness of exploding babies felt safer than thinking about turning Georgie’s wrist upward and pressing his lips to it.

Could he kiss her? He twisted one of his own hands palm up—or rather, fist up; he wasn’t feeling terribly relaxed—and stared down at the inside of his own wrist.

Yes. Of course he could. But did he want to?

He looked into the night. Could he spend day after day and year after year with her? At her table, in her bed? Nothing in the stillness of the night assured him that this was anything but an impossible question, and yet again he felt the acuteness of time. Not of the seconds ticking but the hours, the days that led to her more permanent ruin.

He could not tarry much longer. His father spoke of Georgie’s ghoulish schedule, of the husband she needed to find if he did not step forward for the position. But Nicholas, too, had a calendar he must keep. Even if he set out for Scotland the very next day, he’d have been away nearly a month. A month of classes, of missed exams. By his estimation, he could stay in Kent only a few days more—maybe a week—before he would fall too hopelessly behind to make up the material.