Page 15 of Kiss or Dare

The lady in question startled and looked around with wide, brown eyes.

“It’s me, Miss Clarke.”

Lady Abigail rolled her eyes and returned to her book.

“I’ll spoil it,” Lillian said. “Listen to me now or I’ll tell you how it ends.” A too-harsh threat, and one she would not carry out, but how else was she to get the girl’s attention?

Lady Abigail’s head whipped up, her brown curls bobbing, and her cheeks fired with indignation. She jumped to her feet and hugged her book to her chest. “You would not.”

“There are lots of things I would not do.” This was one of them, but better to let Lady Abigail think otherwise.

“What is it you wish to say to me?”

“I wish you would not think of us as enemies. I merely wish to help you.”

“By making esteemed gentlemen say horrid things about me?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Then why bring his attention to me at all?”

Lillian raised her face to the pale blue sky and stitched the words together carefully, one by one. “Because sometimes all it takes is for one person to see you correctly, and then everyone else will, too.”

A long pause from the other side of the hedge. “I do not wish to be seen at all. I prefer anonymity. And books.”

“And hiding behind box hedges.”

“Precisely so.”

“If that is truly your wish,” Lillian said, “then I’ll depart and never speak with you again.”

Silence again. Bother.

“Do you think I’m curiously shaped?” Abigail’s quiet inquiry floated through the branches and dropped like stones into Lillian’s tea.Plonk, plonk, plonk.

Lillian’s heart sank with them. “Not at all.” She punctuated each word with a stamp of her foot.

A snort. “What is it you want me to do? Marry well? A man like Littleton?”

“I do not care who you marry so long as you shine.”

A bark of laughter came from the other side of the shrub. “I am not a glittery type of person.”

Lillian strode around the bush until she faced the girl. “Nonsense!”

“I can’t dance.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? Of course, it does.”

Lillian took a sip of tea. “It only matters if that’s how you decide you wish to shine. I, for one, do not see you shining on a dance floor.”

“Oh? Where then?”

Lillian pretended to consider the question, though she did not have to. She’d seen Lady Abigail shining in her imagination since they’d met the first week of the season. “Perhaps… in a salon, influencing intellectuals.”

The girl’s brown eyes grew distant, as if covering miles of road and years of time. Good. Let her think on that.