Chapter Eleven
In the morning, Elspeth’s head rang like an empty coal scuttle—all ashy and clanking.
“Too much champagne, darling?” Aunt Augusta asked not unkindly as she passed her a cup of blessedly hot morning chocolate.
“Do you think so?” Elspeth whispered, for anything louder hurt her brain something fierce.
“Oh, I know so, darling. Drink up your chocolate and have something to eat. And if that doesn’t make you feel better, take a headache powder. For your Mr. Cathcart will be here sooner rather than later, if I’m any judge. And I am.” She smiled over her teacup. “So prepare yourself for another onslaught of charm.”
“Is that what it was last night—just charm?”
“Charm and a good deal more, my darling.” Aunt Augusta turned her head at the sound of the knocker being applied with far too much force. “Now there he is. Take that toast, it will do you the world of good.”
She breezed out of the room again, and in the time it took Elspeth to chomp down a jam covered slice of toast, reappeared with Hamish Cathcart in tow.
“Elspeth,” he greeted her with his characteristic enthusiasm, and a roguish lack of consciousness. Just as if he hadn’t been kissing her silly the last time they spoke.
As if she wasn’t at that very moment reliving the moment—she could feel her cheeks heat red.
“And here is my man of business, Mr. Smythe, on your heels. Exactly on time, as always. Good morning Mr. Smythe. We’ll sit here, whilst we go over these contracts.” She indicated the arm chairs nearer to the hearth with one hand, while she held out her empty palm for Hamish to fill with his contracts. “The young people may take the table, to work on their own papers.”
“Indeed, my lady.” He bowed in obeisance, and then Hamish Cathcart turned the full force of that smiling regard upon Elspeth. “Good morning, Elspeth.” His voice was low and laced with familiarity.
The warmth of his enthusiasm dispelled her headache faster than any powder. As did the sure span of his hand against the small of her back as he helped her to her seat. As did the way her drew his chair up close so his knees bumped against hers beneath the table.
“Good morning, Hamish,” she answered, not caring that she sounded quite out of breath.
His smile climbed up to crinkle the corner of his eyes before he attempted to get to the business at hand. He set down a thick, typeset manuscript. “I suppose we ought to get to work.”
“I suppose we had better,” she answered, schooling her own smile into something that would not excite Aunt Augusta’s interest. But a glance showed that lady quite rapt in her dry discussion of contracts with Mr. Smythe.
“Well then.” Hamish cleared his throat as if he were realigning his thinking to more businesslike matters. “I thought it easiest to give you an old proof to work from.” He shifted the stack of paper in front of her. “After the masterful job you made of the found manuscript, I’ve no doubt you can make something romantically sweet and yearning out of all this carnal desire.”
“Michty me.” And just like that, any good sense that had survived both the champagne and the headache fled, to be replaced by an exquisite awareness of Hamish Cathcart as a man—a man who, no doubt, had his own carnal desires. Desires she had only ever imagined.
He laughed, as if her oath was meant to be amusing. “Our job—and by our, I mean your job—is to transform young Fanny’s sexual awakening and adventures into something more sweepingly romantic. For such things exist more easily in a book, I’ll warrant, than they do in true life.”
Elspeth hardly knew where to look, much less what to say. Not even a month in Aunt Augusta’s cosmopolitan household could prepare her for such a speech. His practical cynicism entirely damped her native—and she now recognized, naïve—optimism. ‘Carnal desire’ had been bad enough, but ‘sexual awakening’ was so far beyond her experience, that she could only sit there, steaming like a Christmas pudding in her own embarrassment.
But he seemed not to notice. “When was the last time you read your father’s book?” he asked.
She had nothing in her—no euphemism, no worldliness—but the truth.. “Never,” she whispered over the heat parching her throat. “I was never allowed.”
“Never allowed?” Hamish sat back in surprise, and glanced at her aunt where she conferred by the hearth. “I would have thought Lady Ivers more a woman of the world than to forbid you books.”
“Nay, not Lady Ivers.” Elspeth swallowed her mortification like one of Aunt Molly’s bitter nostrums—best gotten down quickly. It was past time for the whole of the truth. “It was not she, but my other kin, my mother’s family, with whom I’ve lived all my life—I came to Edinburgh but lately from a village to the southwest.” She gestured vaguely in the direction of the Borders. “They, those relations, thought…little of my father’s book. And less of my father.”
The frown etched itself into a single line pleating his brow lifted. “The country cloak,” he said as if that answered for everything. “It did occur to me to wonder why I had ne’er met you before.” He shook his head, as if realigning his thinking, and then looked at her again—peered, really—in that minutely assessing way that made heat scorch up the back of her neck and spread under her skin. “At first glance I did take you entirely for a country girl.”
Elspeth had to clear her throat to find her voice, though it was still little more than a whisper. “The plain fact of the matter, Mr. Cathcart, is that I am almost entirely a country girl.” For the past month had taught her a great deal, it could not change who she was deep down—nothing but a naïve dreamer. “And I know little of…awakenings.”
“Ye gods.” There was a long, awful moment of blistering silence while he sat up straight, and considered her anew, as if she were some unexpectedly thorny plant in a vegetable garden. “Then how did you re-write the first book?”
“As I told you last night—” At least she thought she had told him last night—the champagne made it hard to remember. “My theory was to go at it bit by bit, like pruning a rose bush—very carefully and with very sharp shears.”
“But how did you come up with the new bits?” He lowered his own voice to a conspiratorial murmur. “All that sweeping romance?”
She had to wet her lips to get them to talk. “I just imagined it, I suppose.”
“You just imagined it?” he repeated, as if he did not believe her. As if he could not contemplate such a thing. “Don’t tell me you imagined it was hedgehogs?”
She looked up at him, but saw no disdain in his eyes, only gentle teasing. “I’ll have you know the hedgehogs are hopeless romantics, believing someone will love them despite all those prickly spines. But it is the badgers who love with the most unrequited ardor. Quite deeply steadfast, the badgers.”
“Oh, Elspeth.” He took her hand between his, and drew it safely beneath the table. “So it was all flights of fancy? All theory? You’ve never—?”
His question was so sympathetic, she spared no thought for prevarication. “No,” she said simply. There was nothing else she could say.
“And may I ask”—his voice went so low and quiet she had to lean toward him to hear—“if I may be so bold, whether last night was perchance your first kiss?”
Elspeth felt her face flame so hot she might have cooked horse chestnuts on her cheeks. Her voice was the barest shred of admission. “It was.”
“Ye gods.” He passed a hand over his eyes as if the thought pained him. “Then you must forgive me. What a bungle I made of the job.”
Elspeth’s mortification returned in a rush that drained her cheeks of heat. “Kissing me was a job, was it?”
“Nay,” he answered on a swift, self-mocking laugh, reaching for her hand again. “Not at all. Not if done right. And I was an ass for not getting it right. For assuming—” He rubbed his jaw with his free hand as if he might scrub his assumptions right out of his head. “I apologize. But I don’t regret it. I enjoyed kissing you too much for regret.”
“Oh. Good.” His declaration warmed her more than she supposed it ought. But there was the truth of it—she didn’t regret kissing him either. “Thank you.”
His smile spread slowly across his face. “You are being very sweet and very polite, but I think you must have been astonished at my forwardness—or perhaps not, since you had already found me forward when we met.”
“Aye, I suppose I had.” She could feel her own smile return along with her equanimity—if he could laugh at himself, so could she.
“Well, it’s the truth,” he admitted. “I am forward.” He bent his head closer to impart his confidence. “And I would be more forward still, were it not for that lady sitting not ten feet from us.”
Elspeth cast a quick glance at Aunt Augusta in close conversation with her Mr. Smythe, and it seemed Hamish Cathcart came closer still, for his words seemed to whisper in her ear.
“If she were not there, I’d offer right here and now to give you a proper introduction to kissing. Lessons even.”
This was not flirting but charm—this extraordinary ability to amuse and entice and banish her fears all at the same time.
“Lessons in kissing?” She looked up at him. “Do you think I need them?”
He shook his head, and clasped her hand in reassurance. “Nay. But that is neither here nor there, dear Elspeth. The question is whether you think you might like a lesson in kissing? And if you might like to give me a second chance at that first kiss?”
And there was her bad blood heating to make her heart sing like a morning lark at his offer. “I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the first kiss.”
He closed his eyes, even as he smiled. “You’re going to kill me, Elspeth Otis, sitting there so sweetly. Saying such sweetly provocative things.”
“You are teasing me, Mr. Cathcart.” She grew surer of it even as she spoke. “This”—she pointed to the stacked proof pages of her father’s book—“is provocative—I am merely provincial. But I think I may be learning something of awakenings after all.”
He sat back as if the wind had been knocked right out of him. “Hamish,” he finally said. “Do please call me Hamish if you’re having an…awakening.”.
“Hamish, then.”
“Ye gods, Elspeth.” That roguish smile began to reclaim its pride of place on his face. “Do you know, I think I have approached this all wrong.”
“Aye?” She looked at the neatly stacked proof pages in the expectation that he would suggest a new approach.
“Not about the book—about you.”
“Me?” She had been everything candid, she hoped.
And so was he. “Prepare yourself, Miss Elspeth Otis, to be wooed.”
This time, the smile on her face matched the warm feeling within.
She should like nothing better.