Free Miss Goodhue Lives for a Night by Kate Noble Page A

would be coming to call, not because he was saddled with helping her, but because he was honored to escort her that evening. And when they danced—and they would dance—it would be as if the room stopped, but the music continued on, playing a different tune, just for them.
    Oh, what a life that would be.
    And maybe, just for one night, Cecilia could let herself live it.

7
    I t was utterly unfair the amount of time women took to get ready, Theo decided. If one said something was occurring at a certain time, a woman’s ears heard it as that time plus fifteen to thirty minutes extra. There was no reason for him to determine this—Theo had no sisters, and his mother always prized punctuality. But in his current mood, Theo was more than happy to put the seven minutes he had been kept waiting in Lord Ashby’s study squarely on the shoulders of an entire gender.
    â€œHave a drink, Hudson,” Lord Ashby said, lounging by the fire. After the blustery morning and the breaking sun of the afternoon, the spring evening had turned chilly and crisp. He wouldn’t be surprised if the ground became crunchy with frost during the night. Of course, he wouldn’t be at liberty to investigate the state of the ground if he died from self-immolation brought on by the friction created via his pacing on the study’s fine carpet.
    â€œDammit, man, you’re going to burn a hole in the rug,” Lord Ashby said, proving Theo’s point. “What has you so nervous? It’s just a ball, for god’s sake.”
    â€œYes, of course,” Theo mumbled. For all intents and purposes, it was just a ball. But it had been an awfully long time since he’d been to any ball—let alone a ball with Miss Cecilia Goodhue. “I had a very long afternoon, looking for this cousin.”
    â€œYes, Miss Goodhue said the officers had referred you to some boarding houses,” Lord Ashby said as he moved to the sideboard. He poured out a glass of brandy from a tumbler, and pressed it into Theo’s hand. It had the intended effect—Theo stopped pacing. “None of them pan out for you?”
    â€œNone,” he replied tersely. The afternoon had been a fool’s errand. He had driven from boarding house to boarding house, in seedier and seedier parts of town. At each place he spoke with the proprietor, and asked them if an officer—possibly of the cavalry—was boarding there, with a woman. But without names to give (considering the circumspection she had shown with Colonel Birmingham, Theo thought Cecilia would have preferred if the name Eleanor stayed out of it), there was no help to be given.
    He tried to describe them. He thought the man would certainly be a younger officer. And he knew Eleanor’s age and coloring, so he tried to describe her.
    â€œShe’s smallish. Dark hair, dark eyes,” he would say, and see the proprietors shake their heads. “She’s . . . she’s an innocent. You can see it in her face,” he would continue. “Wide-eyed, and hopeful, and . . .”
    And then he realized he wasn’t describing Eleanor, a person he had never met. In his mind, he saw Cecilia—his Cee—as she once had been.
    If their day together had taught him anything, it was that she wasn’t that girl anymore. No, the person she was now . . . was better.
    He hid a smile with a swallow of brandy.
    The way she turned weepy eyes to Colonel Birmingham, knowing exactly what he needed to hear. While at the time, it reminded him starkly of her talents at deception, in retrospect he was struck by how alarmingly bad she was at it. Any other man would have seen right through her ruse. And she was doing exactly what she had to, to find her cousin. There was no wrong in that.
    And then she had called him out in the carriage. Told him that she was the one taking care of everything, and he was simply along for the ride.
    By God, he’d