Page 42 of In With a Chance

Gwen—well, she had said to call her that, hadn’t she?—blinked. “Yes. Yes, I rather gathered that.”

Ernest tried to smile, even as he wondered whether the Aubusson rug could swallow him up. “It’s a particular book, it’s… Tell me, how are the books in your library organized?”

“It’s my father’s library,” said Gwen quietly.

The conversation they’d had only a few days ago returned to Ernest’s memory.

“I want… I want a home.”

“Some would say you have a home already.”

“Then those people would have failed to recognize that I live in my parents’ home.”

How strange it had been, to hear one’s own thoughts repeated back to you in the mouth of another. Quite startling, in fact, but that had been nothing to the shifting emotions with which Ernest had been overwhelmed as he had watched her laugh at the spilled buttons.

Oh, he could live a thousand lifetimes and never hear anything so beautiful as Miss Gwendoline Chance’s laugh.

“Well, if it is your father’s library, you should know it well enough to guide me,” Ernest said brusquely, forcing aside the affections that rose at such a memory. “Is it by surname, or book title, or genre—”

“I’m afraid it’s by frequency of reading,” Gwen said blandly.

Ernest halted as he reached out to pick up a wayward book that had somehow managed to find itself reshelved upside down. “I beg your pardon?”

“Whenever Papa reads a book, he always puts it back in the bookcase to the left of the door,” Gwen said with a rueful smile, gesturing with a book that had a long title Ernest could not quite make out. “Mrs. Kinley shifts the books along to fill the gaps so the books that he reads often end up on the left of the room, and the books he never touches are on the right.”

Ernest blinked. “Good heavens.”

It was a marvelous idea, even if it had come about somewhat serendipitously. Why had he never done that? Perhaps he would have to start, now that Frasemere Hall was his own.

“So unless you know how often my father is likely to have read that book—”

“I think it was a common read of your mother’s,” Ernest said with an almost apologetic grin.

Gwen laughed. “Oh, well, you’ve got no hope, then. She just sticks them in wherever there’s a gap. Sorry I can’t help you.”

She disappeared back into the armchair, the conversation evidently come to its natural conclusion, but Ernest could not leave it at that.

How could he?

“And what are you reading?” he asked, stepping forward so that the beautiful woman and her book came back into view. “A book on weddings, I’ll be bound!”

He had intended to be hilarious.

Well, not hilarious. Ernest knew himself well enough to know that hilarity was not something that would naturally to him, and so he did not bother to attempt it. Better to try for merely amusing and succeed than great joviality and fail.

But he had outstretched himself in this instance. As he stepped to face Miss Gwendoline Chance, it was to see a burning fury in her eyes and a corresponding red in her cheeks.

“Do you think that is all I am?” she said coldly. “A woman who obsesses over her wedding?”

“No—no,” Ernest said hastily, cursing himself silently. “No, I—”

“Because I rather thought I had made that plain in Rivers’s Haberdashery,” Gwen said fiercely. “I thought you understood.”

“Yes, I do, I’m sorry,” said Ernest, raising his hands in the internationally recognized symbol of surrender and hoping she would come to terms. “I know ladies find these things important. Laura once—”

No.

The name cut through his speech as cleanly as a blade as Ernest forced his thoughts away from the woman he had cared about so much.