Page 27 of Goodbye, Earl (Ladies’ Revenge Club #4)

C laire woke to the chime of the breakfast bell at the bottom of the hill, a dense, brassy sound that summoned the event workers to the stalls before the merrymakers would arrive for the day.

She did not immediately stir, only letting her eyes pop open, like she’d been taken directly from the scene of her dreamscape to the one that lived on Earth.

Strangely, they looked very alike.

Freddy Hightower was asleep on the pillow beside her, curled onto his side with his hand outstretched from under the pillow, still holding hers. His hair was mussed, golden and unstyled, hanging over his brow. His lips were parted. His jaw was soft.

He was, as he had ever been, the most beautiful man who had ever walked this planet.

She felt the ache of it in her chest, the glimmer of faint, cosmic outrage at how he pulled every ray of sunlight in through the window like a spotlight on his perfection.

She wiggled her fingers, only slightly, to regain the sensation of them, and felt the pads of her fingertips brush the gold of his wedding band in the process.

She supposed she never considered that after giving in, she might wake up in total peace and silence. She had expected that the ground would crack open or that stones would start falling from the sky. Something!

Honestly.

And there he was, so utterly at peace in her bed.

She was careful disentangling her hand, silently slipping from the sheets. She truly did not want to disturb him.

If anything, she was a little surprised that, after inviting him to come and sleep beside her, they had actually followed through with the sleeping, and only the sleeping. As though they both weren’t still speckled with flour dust and the taste of sweetened cherries.

She tossed another glance at him as she started toward her vanity, more than a little tempted to throw the lock on the door and climb on top of him. She startled, finding his eyes open this time, painfully blue and clear and watching her.

Apparently, she had not been as silent as she thought. Or as opaque.

He smiled slowly, like he could see right through her mind and into her thoughts. Here was that smug bastard she had always loved so well, gloating at his victory, at his soft throne of linen laurels.

She hated herself for how easily she smiled back.

“I suppose I should sneak out,” he said softly, propping himself up on his pillow and lacing his fingers behind his head, making not a single move toward doing so, “before anyone catches us together.”

She blinked at him and forced herself to give a quick and elegant shrug, just one shoulder, as she turned her back to him. “If you like.”

She could feel his grin, feel the wideness of it, the flash of his even white teeth catching the sunlight at her back, and she hid her own as well as she could, ducking her head as it pulled at the corners of her lips.

She knew exactly which dress she intended to wear today, a wispy pink affair that would mitigate the heat and allow for easy movement. There had been no time to press it last night, arriving as late as they had, but as she pulled it from her valise, she was pleased to see it looked well anyway.

“That is pretty,” Freddy commented, still not moving, “but there will be quite a lot of mud down there, you know.”

“Oh,” she said with a little frown, reaching up to hang it on the door of the wardrobe and considering it. “Oh, you’re probably right after yesterday’s weather. I have never attended before. Oliver was always too small. I wasn’t sure exactly what to bring.”

“I didn’t realize it was your first time,” he said with such sharp teasing that she immediately snapped around to glare at him, which made him laugh.

It made him laugh like he’d wanted that exact reaction and was delighted he’d gotten it.

“Honestly, you can spend most of the day sitting and watching the games. You won’t have to do much if you don’t want to, after we ring in the procession. ”

“We?” she repeated with a little sniff, knowing she was only posturing now. “What do you mean, we?”

“The earl and the countess and their little heir,” he replied, smooth as the butter he’d whipped into pie crust last night. “And Tommy, of course. Local fixture that she is.”

She smirked at him and turned back to the dress, pulling her hair over her shoulder and twisting it into one big coil with an absent tap of her foot. “Maybe I should wear something thicker today.”

“For the mud?” he asked with a raise of his brows. “Or the padding?”

“The padding?”

“For sitting,” he clarified with another grin. “Or armor.”

She raised her brows right back and then spun on her heel to retrieve her comb and fall into the vanity stool.

Her dressing gown was dry now, she noted, feeling it against her back.

“Armor?” she asked, glancing at him in the mirror as he finished his stretching and turned to fling his feet over the side of the bed and onto the floor. “Am I going to need armor, Freddy?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, his voice languishing in that lethal softness as he came to his feet, brushing his hands down his rumpled clothes in a way that made her want to bark at him like a feral fox.

He prowled closer to her, deceptively slow and casual in the low light of the morning, stopping just behind where she sat and draping his fingers over the back of her chair. “Yes, you will. In fact, perhaps you ought to save the padded one until you really need it.”

She was holding her hair at the middle, winding the comb through it, watching him with a wary sort of fascination, their eyes locked through the reflection in the mirror. “When will that be?”

“It is hard to say,” he replied with a wistful little shrug. “However long it takes until you can’t sit comfortably anymore.”

Outside, the bell rang once more, as though to punctuate the threat.

She stared at him, waiting for elaboration. Surely he didn’t mean …

“Because of exhaustion?” she prompted.

He chuckled rather than answering, choosing instead to lick his thumb and lean down next to her, until their cheeks were almost touching. He dragged it along the tip of her chin, where a streak of flour had managed to linger through the night. “Dirty,” he whispered. “Must keep up appearances.”

She almost choked at it, her breath sticking in her throat like a thicket. “You said I was safe in my room,” she reminded him thinly.

“I did say that,” he agreed, rubbing away the flour from between his fingers, pulling away the thin night rail fabric from her shoulder and dropping a warm little kiss there before he stood back up. “But then you invited me in. You knew better than to do that, Claire.”

She managed to make herself swallow, turning to the side at his hand still resting on her bare shoulder and then blinking up at him from where she sat. “For the night,” she reminded him, knowing now that this was just theater, that she didn’t mean a damn word she was saying. “For one night.”

He only smiled again. Only laughed.

And then he turned and left her there, alone with the sunlight and the mirror and the rest of the flour staining her flesh.

Alone with the promise of what was to come.

“Shin-kicking?” Claire repeated in horrified disbelief. “And it’s what it sounds like?”

“Oh, entirely,” Tommy confirmed with a bark of laughter. “Two gents hold one another by the shoulders and just thrash away until one or the other collapses. When I was still the countess, we had to put a man in jail for hiding nails in the toe of his boot.”

“Oh,” said Freddy from ahead of them, turning slightly from where Oliver rode on his shoulders. “In front of the boy, Tommy?”

“Nails!” Oliver repeated, mouth still half full with his breakfast pie. “In his boot!”

“Charming,” Freddy said with a sigh.

“It is, isn’t it?” Tommy replied, clearly unbothered. “Anyway, a lot of them will pad their trousers with hay or otherwise try to skew the odds in their favor. It’s a lot more boring to watch than you might imagine, though, just a bunch of muffled thumping as they grimace at one another.”

“But it is called the Olympicks,” Claire pressed, still a little unwilling to believe it. “Aren’t they going to do the ancient games, javelins and discus and so on?”

“They are not,” Tommy said with an apologetic shrug, “and they won’t be naked either.”

“Tommy!” Freddy said without turning around this time, only making her laugh.

At this point, Dot and Silas caught up to them, working at a bit of a jog from how they’d fallen behind in the first place.

“We overslept,” Dot said with a weak smile of apology as her husband caught his breath beside her.

“Did we?” Silas replied mildly, making Dot blush.

“We were just discussing the games themselves,” Claire told them, glancing between the couple and wondering if they, too, had discovered the allure of an empty kitchen in the night. “Silas, why didn’t you warn us about shin-kicking?”

Silas gave a startled laugh, glancing knowingly at Tommy. “Ah, I should have, shouldn’t I? I find that there’s a bit of glee in watching people react to it all for the first time, to be honest. Did they tell you about the dwile flonking?”

“The what?” Dot repeated, aghast.

“Those are not real words,” Claire replied dismissively, well-trained to know when she was being teased after even a brief marriage with Freddy.

“I’m afraid they are,” Freddy put in, recognizing her tone.

“They stand in a circle,” Silas explained, creating one with an arc of his finger in front of him, “and try to slap each other with rags soaked in beer while they dance.”

“What?!” Dot and Claire both exclaimed in unison.

“The flonker,” Freddy said slowly and helpfully as he passed his kerchief up to Oliver to clean his cherry-stained hands, “tries to dodge the dwile. It’s all very fun and stupid. Sadly, like any good sport, ladies aren’t allowed to play.”

“Sadly indeed,” Tommy said with a bracing little sigh. “We can’t do the Morris dancing either.”

Claire did not ask.