Page 21 of Peril in Piccadilly
His eyes flashed. “Of course I feel that way! You’re my best friend, and he wants to marry you and take you to Germany with him!”
“Yes,” I said, “but you never said anything.”
He threw his hands up. “What was I going to say? ‘No, don’t marry this man you seem to like, whose proposal you accepted, because I don’t want to lose my best friend?’ What kind of friend would I be if I did that?”
“Someone who cares that I stay,” I said. “And I didn’t, you know.”
“Didn’t what?”
“I didn’t accept his proposal.” I thought back to that moment in the Marsden Manor foyer, and added, “What I actually said, was, ‘Thank you, but…’ But then someone squealed, and everyone started cheering, and at that point I couldn’t really say no. But I never actually said yes, either.”
“Laetitia,” Christopher said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Laetitia was the one who squealed. Crispin squeezed her hand hard enough for that stupidly ostentatious Sutherland diamond ring to make a bruise.”
“Good grief,” I said, “why?”
Christopher rolled his eyes, hard enough that they seemed to be in danger of vanishing into the back of his skull. “I’m just going to say it, Pippa. I promised I wouldn’t, so I haven’t, but this is getting painful.”
“What is getting painful?” Other than Laetitia’s bruised finger, although there had been no bruise on it this morning, and also no Sutherland engagement ring, so that point was now moot, in more ways than one.
His eyes narrowed. “Your obliviousness, you daft cow.”
I sniffed, offended, and he added, “He fancies you. Has done for years.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again when nothing came out.
“He took one look at you on the train platform in Salisbury when we came home from Eton that last time,” Christopher continued when I didn’t speak. “You were all grown up, in heels and bobbed hair and lipstick, and he made a sound like a dying duck. When I looked at him, he told me he’d kill me if I said anything at all about it, so I didn’t.”
I shook my head, finally finding my voice. “That’s mad, Christopher. He might have been surprised that I wasn’t the same snotty-nosed girl in pigtails that I’d been the last time he saw me—” Over Christmas holidays, that would have been, almost six years ago now, “—but he certainly wasn’t struck by…” I wrinkled my nose, “—by fancy.”
“Shows what you know,” Christopher said. “This level of thickheadedness isn’t an attractive trait, Pippa. Everyone else knows. How could you not have noticed?”
How could I not have…?
“Because there wasn’t anythingtonotice!”
My voice was shrill, and I made a concerted effort to calm down and sound less like something only dogs could hear. “Have you lost your mind, Christopher?”
“No,” Christopher said.
“You must have done! This is your cousin you are talking about, correct? Just to clarify? Not some other chap you may have been sharing your train compartment with on the last ride home from school?”
He gave me a look, one that said clearly that I was pushing him too far, and I raised my hands in pacification. “You can’t blame me for wanting to be certain, Christopher. Not when you’re standing there telling me that the then-Honorable Crispin Astley, current Viscount St George, future Duke of Sutherland—that’s him, correct? Same chap?—that he… that he… fancies me!”
My voice rose incredulously on the last part, and Christopher winced but persisted. “Not just fancies you, Pippa. But yes, the same chap. The one who’s in love with you.”
The ground did a little shimmy, and I did my best to ignore the unsteadiness under my feet. But truly… love, and not just fancy? “How can that be, pray tell, with the way he has always spoken to me?”
“Ugh,” Christopher said with feeling. He reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose as if I were giving him a headache. “I really don’t want to do this, you know. Not only did I promise him I wouldn’t do—and no, that time on the train wasn’t the only time it came up; we’ve actually discussed it more than once, so I’m not simply imagining things?—”
Well, that took care of that objection, and before I could voice it, too.
“If he’s in love with me,” I said, and my face twisted involuntarily as the words came out, “why would he propose to Laetitia?”
Christopher stared at me. “Because you told him to, didn’t you? Slapped him down and told him he might as well marry Laetitia because he didn’t deserve any better. What did you think he would do?”
