Page 42 of Not Just Any Earl
“That I’ve kissed you once before.” He urged her closer, so close he was cradling her against the firm, muscular wall of his chest. “This isn’t our first kiss, is it, sweetheart?”
Emmeline tried to look away, ashamed of the secrets she’d kept, the lies she’d told.
Ashamed of her cowardice.
But Johnathan wouldn’t allow it. He kept her face tipped up to his with a nudge of his fingertips as he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bit of violet silk. “This belongs to you, doesn’t it?”
“My ribbon.” Emmeline cast him a shy look from under her lashes. “I thought it was lost forever.”
“I’ve kept this ribbon in my pocket since that night in Lady Fosberry’s library. When I saw you at Floris with that bit of linen with the same lingering scent, I thought the Lady in Lavender must be either you or your sister. I, ah…haven’t conducted myself as a gentleman ought to, but you must believe me, Emmeline, when I say I not only believed you were the lady I’d kissed, but wished it with all my heart.”
Emmeline gazed down at the ribbon between his fingers for a long time before raising her eyes once again to his face, losing herself in blue eyes the color of cornflowers.
His dear, handsome face.
Weeks ago, Lady Fosberry had told her he was just the gentleman to surprise them all, and he had surprised her. He hadn’t behaved in a way she could possibly have predicted, but that wasn’t what truly stunned Emmeline.
It was that she hadn’t.
Her last fleeting thought before his lips took hers again was how strange it was that she—shy, dull Emmeline, a spinster in the making in her dusty pinafores, the bluestocking with her nose forever pressed between the pages of a book…
That she, of all people, would prove to be the most unpredictable of them all.
Chapter
Eleven
“Will this do for the theater?” Juliet turned away from the looking glass to face Emmeline, the skirts of her opera gown drifting around her ankles.
Emmeline looked up, and a smile of pure pleasure curved her lips. Not one lady in a dozen could do justice to evening primrose, but the rich yellow hue brought out Juliet’s dark, dramatic beauty. “You look lovely. That color is perfect for you.”
“I suppose it will do.” Juliet straightened the neckline of her gown, a smile lighting up her own face as she caught Emmeline’s reflection in the glass. “My, how pretty you look tonight, Emmeline!”
“Do I?” Emmeline glanced down at herself, surprised, and smoothed her damp palms down her rose-colored silk skirt.
“Of course. You always do. The lace on that gown is exquisite, and you’ve such a tiny waist.” Juliet tugged on her gloves, her gaze meeting Emmeline’s in the glass. “I daresay Lord Melrose won’t be able to take his eyes off you.”
Emmeline had been fussing with her skirts, but at this her eyes flew to Juliet’s. She opened her mouth to insist Lord Melrose had never spared her a glance, but this and a dozen other denials didn’t make it past her lips.
Because they were lies, and Emmeline was, at last, finished with lies.
Particularly the lies she’d told herself.
She’d been wrong about love from the start. How she’d ever imagined she could be right about it was a mystery, given she’d never experienced it, but while inexperience was forgivable, it wasn’t as easy to excuse her arrogance in thinking it was her place to orchestrate matches as if she were arranging roses in tidy, predictable rows.
Lady Fosberry had warned Phee that people were nothing like numbers, and as it happened, they were nothing like roses, either.
The truth was, things had been careening wildly out of control since that night in Lady Fosberry’s library, like a runaway horse that flew in whatever direction it liked, without any regard for the people in its path, or the rider on its back.
For all Emmeline’s knowledge of botany, all her scientific theories and her plans and machinations, the only thing she’d ever been able to do was hold on and hope for the best. It was all any of them could do.
“I am fond of this color,” Juliet was saying as she inspected her reflection.
Emmeline cocked her head as she studied Juliet in the glass, recalling the expression on her sister’s face when she’d been arguing with Lord Cross about Shakespeare’s tragedies.
There’d been something there, something Emmeline had never seen before, but her vivacious, spirited sister with the somber, unsmiling Lord Cross? In a thousand years she never would have put the two of them together, but then she’d proven herself to be hopelessly inept when it came to matters of the heart. “I think…I think Lord Cross admires you, Juliet.”
Juliet let out a tinkling laugh. “Lord Cross is far too irascible to admire anyone.”
