The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2)(21)
Here I thought nothing could inflate my brother’s head more. I swear his chest actually puffs up. I’m no great lover of this mealy beer, but I take a drink just for the drama of it before I reply, “I pray nightly I never again have occasion to see my brother’s bare shoulders.”
“Come on now.” Monty knocks his foot into mine—then peers beneath the table to make sure he’s aimed correctly this time. “If you’re going to be a doctor, you mustn’t be shy about human anatomy.”
“It’s not human anatomy that makes me queasy, it’s your anatomy.”
“My anatomy is excellent,” he replies.
“Yes, it is,” Percy adds, pressing his lips to Monty’s jawline, just below his earlobe.
“Dear God, stop.” I resist the urge to cover my eyes. “You’re still in public, you know.”
Monty drags himself away from Percy and gives me a saccharine smile. “Felicity, my darling, you know we love you dearly and are so very delighted that you’re staying with us for the time being, but it does place some limitations upon the sort of, shall we say, activities that we are accustomed to engaging in both frequently and privately—”
“Stop talking now,” I interrupt, “and go find a back room somewhere and suck each other’s faces off.”
Monty grins, his hands suspiciously out of sight beneath the table. “That’s not what I intend to be sucking.”
“You are the filthiest creature on God’s green earth,” I tell him.
Percy wraps an arm around Monty’s shoulder and pulls him into his chest. Their vast height difference is only slightly less comical when they are seated. “Isn’t it adorable?”
That roguish grin goes wider. “I told you I’m adorable.”
They slink off together, though slink is far too sheepish a word for it, as there’s absolutely nothing sheepish about it. They strut, hand in hand and tripping over each other in delight. Obnoxiously proud to be in love.
Scipio and Georgie return with food—neither of them asking where the gents disappeared to, thank god. I don’t eat much, or talk—Scipio asks a few gentle questions about how I’m doing, but my answers must be brisk and simple enough that he knows I’m not in the mood. By the end of the meal, I’m sitting alone at the edge of the group, picking at the cracked white paint on the tabletop and wishing Monty weren’t so right. It’s mad to go to Stuttgart alone. More than mad—it’s impossible. I have almost no money. Certainly not enough to get to the Continent. And what would I do once I arrived? What does one say to a friend who broke your heart? Hallo, remember me? We were young together and used to collect bugs in jars and broke chicken bones from supper so we could practice setting them, but then you called me a pig in a party dress in front of all your new friends and I said you were shallow and uninteresting. Congratulations on your union; may I talk to your husband about a job? I sink down in my seat without meaning to, one hand sliding into my pocket and fiddling with the edges of my list.
Someone sits down at the table across from me, and I look up, expecting Monty and Percy returned from their backroom romp.
It’s Sim. In spite of the trousers and loose shirt, she’s far more feminine-looking in close proximity. The bones of her face are fine and elegant in the lamplight. She doesn’t say anything, and I’m not sure what it is she wants from me. We stare at each other for a moment, both of us waiting for the other to speak.
“Am I interrupting your sulking?” she says at last.
“I’m not sulking,” I reply, though I very clearly was.
“So your posture is always that terrible?” Her English has the same accent as Ebrahim’s; he was raised speaking Darija in Marrakesh before being kidnapped and sold into slavery in the American colonies. Before I can reply, she presses on, “You want to go to Stuttgart.”
I throw my hands up, a gesture that nearly overturns my mug. “Good, so everyone overheard that.”
“No one overheard it,” she says. “We just heard it. Your brother speaks very loudly.”
“He’s deaf,” I say, then add, “and obnoxious.”
Her face doesn’t change. “I want to take you.”
“Take me where?”
“To the Continent.”
“The Continent?”
“To Stuttgart.” She pauses, then says, “Do you want to repeat that as well?” Her tone snaps with impatience that I can’t keep up, as though she’s proposing something as casual as paying a call together. Though I might have been flummoxed even if her choice of conversation had been more conventional, for her eyes are very dark and very intense and they’ve got me fumbling for an answer. “You want to go there,” she says slowly, tapping a finger on the table between us. “I want to take you.”
“You want to . . . why?”
“You know Johanna Hoffman, and you’re invited to her wedding.”
None of that answers my question. I’m also most definitely not invited to the wedding, but a correction would overturn a complicated grave, so I ask, “I’m sorry, who are you?”
“Oh, do we need to make some preliminaries?” She holds a hand over the table, which I don’t take. “I’m Sim. I work for Scipio.”