Someone to Love (Westcott #1)(27)
Seven
Five minutes later, having donned her cloak, bonnet, and gloves—the same ones as yesterday—Lady Anastasia Westcott stood on the pavement outside Westcott House. No doubt this was her best outfit, Avery thought, her only best one. It would be interesting to see her everyday clothes—or perhaps not.
She had looked in need of rescuing. Not that he would have rushed into the breach if there were not something about her that piqued his interest. Perhaps it was the way she had not taken fright yesterday when she set foot inside Archer House and encountered . . . him. He knew he intimidated most people. Or perhaps it was the quiet, dignified little speech she had delivered in the rose salon after Brumford had finished with all his disclosures. Or perhaps it was the answer she had given a short while ago when the dowager countess described her as looking like a lowly governess.
He offered his arm and was left with it cocked in midair when she did not take it. He raised his eyebrows.
“I do not need any assistance, thank you,” she said.
Well.
“I suppose,” he said, lowering his arm, “orphan boys are not taught to offer an arm to orphan girls when they walk together on the street, and orphan girls are not taught to accept male gallantries when they are offered. It is not part of your school curriculum?”
“Of course not,” she said in all seriousness. “How absurd.”
“I suspect you are about to encounter a whole world of absurdity,” he said, “unless after the first or second time you lose heart or nerve or temper and scurry back to your schoolroom.”
“If I return to Bath,” she said, “it will be because I have chosen to do so after careful, rational consideration.”
“In the meanwhile,” he said, “your grandmother and aunts and uncles—uncle, singular—and cousins will work ceaselessly, day and night, to wipe clean the slate that has been your life for the past twenty-five years and transform you into their image of what Lady Anastasia Westcott ought to be. They will do it because of course it is more desirable for you to be a lady than an orphan and rich rather than destitute and elegant rather than dowdy—and because you are a Westcott and one of them.”
“I was not destitute,” she said.
“I will not take much of a hand in the education of Lady Anastasia Westcott,” he told her, “partly because my connection to the Westcott family is purely an honorary one and mainly because it would be a crashing bore and I avoid boredom as I would the plague.”
“I am surprised, then,” she said, “that you came to Westcott House today. I am even more surprised that you invited me to walk with you instead of escaping alone.”
“Ah,” he said softly, “but I suspect you are not boring, Anna. And yes, I did invite you to walk, did I not? I did not invite you to stand thus with me on the pavement outside your house, snapping at me and calling me absurd and very probably being peered down upon by a number of your relatives. Allow me to contribute my mite to your education, then, even against all my better instincts. When a gentleman walks with a lady, Anna, he offers his arm for her support and expects her to take it. If she does not, he is first humiliated beyond bearing—he might even consider going home and shooting himself—and then shocked by the realization that perhaps she is not a lady after all. Either way, actually, he may end up shooting himself.”
“Are you always so absurd?” she asked him.
He regarded her for a few silent moments while he curled one hand about the handle of his quizzing glass. If he raised it, she would probably laugh with incredulous scorn. He cocked his elbow again instead.
“This is really quite an easy lesson,” he said. “It will not stretch your intellect to the breaking point. Give me your hand. No, the right.”
He took it in his right hand, drew it through his arm, and set her hand, palm down, on the cuff of his coat. If it were possible for her arm to stretch out of its socket, she would have remained standing where she was, he was sure, a safe distance away. But it was not, and she was compelled to come a few steps closer. Every muscle in her arm and hand stiffened.
Something was absurd, but he kept the observation to himself.
“We now proceed to walk,” he said. “It is the gentleman’s job to match his pace and his step to the lady’s. Men do not have all the power in this world, you see, despite what women often believe.”
Her muscles remained stiff for a while and she looked more than ever like someone’s governess or even someone’s maid dressed in her Sunday best. She would not be mistaken for either today, however. Not when she was seen on his arm. News in London traveled faster than wildfire or the wind. It traveled by the servant underground and the gossip circuit aboveground, and the Westcott story was sensational indeed.
Avery was an admirer of women and a connoisseur of all things feminine. He admired beauty and elegance and charm in ladies and flirted with them and even bedded a few of them when appropriate. He admired beauty and voluptuous curves and sensuality and sexual skills in women of a different class and flirted with them and entertained and bedded them as he desired—though with some discrimination. He liked women enormously. Becoming acquainted with them, escorting them about, flattering them, bedding them were among life’s more enjoyable experiences. He could not recall, however, admiring many women for qualities of character. It amused him to discover that there were such qualities about Lady Anastasia Westcott.