Page 46 of Ladies in Hating
“No,” Georgiana said firmly. “No. I dreamt them. I am certain of it. Besides, it…” She trailed off, her fingers doing something nervous and busy with the purple buttons at her throat.
“What?”
Georgiana picked Bacon up from the floor and addressed her remarks to his upright ear. “It did not sound like Graves. It sounded like you.”
Oh God. The woman made it impossible not to thaw toward her. Cat tried not to let her mouth curl up, and failed.
She followed Georgiana down to the kitchen—no Mort, no Graves, and no breakfast besides—and then watched in frank astonishment as Georgiana swept her rich amethyst skirts to the side, knelt down, and quickly and efficiently built a fire in the hearth.
“I was wondering if there was any leftover bread,” Georgiana said as she rose and turned back to Cat. “From the loaf you—” She broke off, peering into Cat’s face, which must have reflected her consternation. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Cat managed.
Georgiana looked doubtfully down at her skirts and swiped at some invisible ash. “Oh. All right. I—”
“No,” Cat said, “wait. Where the devil did you learn how to do that?”
Somewhere inside herself, she groaned slightly and cursed her unruly mouth, which persisted in saying things she meant to keep inside.
Georgiana glanced back down at the hearth. “Light a fire, do you mean?”
“Yes. When I knew you—back at Woodcote Hall—you wouldn’t have…” Cat trailed off, because Georgiana’s already pale complexion had gone paler. Her shoulders drew back, her posture going upright and perfect.
“I have not lived there since I was eighteen,” Georgiana said stiffly. “I have learned a great deal in the intervening seven years.”
Cat felt her lips part.
Georgiana had not lived at Woodcote Hall since she was eighteen?
“How is that possible?” Cat demanded, her words forming themselves at precisely the same speed as the questions in her mind. “You had only just started publishing your novels at eighteen, had you not? How could you have managed it? Andwhy?”
Georgiana’s face was expressionless—almost masking her emotions, except for the way her skin had leached of color. “I had three pen names, those first few years. And still it was—lean, at first. For me and my mother.”
Cat felt herself blinking rapidly and could not seem to stop. “But why would you choose to leave Woodcote when you—”
“Some things,” Georgiana said flatly, “are worse than poverty.”
Cat’s brain finally grappled her mouth into submission, and she absorbed Georgiana’s statement silently. Her breath had caught somewhere in her chest.
She remembered Alistair Cleeve. She remembered his neglect, his heedless cruelties. Once she had seen him throw Lady Alverthorpe’s gloves into the fire because she had bought them without asking—a quick abrupt act of dominance that had sucked the air from the room. He had not even been ashamed for the servants to see.
Cat and her family had been cast out of Woodcote Hall. Georgiana and her mother had chosen to leave.
And perhaps they had not been so very different after all.
Cat bit her lip, her eyes roaming Georgiana’s angular face.
She kept on not being what Cat had thought her to be. She was not the painfully reserved, almost silent girl that Cat remembered from their adolescence at Woodcote. But she was not quite the sneering aristocrat that Cat had taken her for when they’d met as adults, either. Perhaps she’d never been.
Georgiana knew how to start a fire with her bare hands. She launched herself after her dog, even when it was not in her best interest.
She had left her home when she was eighteen and made her way in the world by her work and her wits, and Cat could not pretend that she didn’t admire Georgiana. Not anymore.
“How did you choose the Desrosiers pen name?” Cat asked finally. “Over the others?”
Her remark had been meant to break the tension between them, and by the hint of gratitude on Georgiana’s face, the tiny softening of her shoulders, it worked. “They sold the best,” she said. “The romances.”
It was not hard, then, to turn the conversation to books, to the progress of their research at Renwick House. In the absence of Graves, Cat fetched the bread she’d baked the day before and cut thick slices with a black knife enameled in a pattern of thorns. They toasted it over Georgiana’s fire, and Cat congratulated herself on only once noticing the way Georgiana’s forefinger slid along the rim of her mouth.
