Honor and Desire (Gold Sky #3) - Rebel Carter Page 0,24
but there was no mistaking the larger than normal romance section. Her mother had a soft spot for the genre, and she had imparted it zealously to her daughters, all of whom made no secret of their love of reading.
It was Seylah’s favorite room in the house. Her earliest memories were in this room, on her Papa’s knee, as he read to her in front of the fireplace, or sitting with her mother while she read aloud from her newest purchase to Seylah and her sisters.
It was a good room, a homey room, and she naturally gravitated there when her work day was done. It was no surprise that Delilah should find her here, but what was surprising was the news the other woman brought with her upon her arrival.
“Everyone?”
Delilah nodded. “The entire town from the sound of it.”
“The entire town?!”
“They were positively in a frenzy over the news that you have a courtship,” her sister went on, crossing the room to a stack of well-worn books. She picked one up and held it up to her sister. “What do you think of gothic romances? I find that I am devouring them as of late.”
“How on earth—” Seylah pinched the bridge of her nose, “a frenzy? How?”
Delilah bit her lip and put the book down in the stack. “Of that I have no knowledge. I heard about it in the mercantile, and by then it was well known around town, so it’s hard to say where the news spread from.”
Seylah groaned, slumping in her chair and landing face first into the book she had been reading. A lovely, dreamy novel about a woman’s journey through Europe. She quite wished she was in a foreign land. Anything was preferable to the entirety of Gold Sky making up a reality in which she was being courted.
“This meddlesome town, it’ll be the end of me, I swear it,” she moaned from her place, lips and face pressed to the desk in front of her.
“You sound like papa,” Delilah informed her.
“And he’s not wrong. The whole lot of them are meddlesome and eavesdropping, and entirely too dramatic for their own good and...and...well, I don’t know what, but they are it,” Seylah said, voice muffled by the pages at her lips.
“And they love you and support you at every turn. Accept you as you are no matter what,” Delilah finished for her. “Respect you too, there isn’t another place where you could bring a room of unruly men to heel like Gold Sky. They see you as an authority in town,” Del tapped her chest where an imaginary deputy badge would be pinned, “ badge or no badge you are respected here.”
Seylah sighed heavily and pushed herself up from the books. “Yes, of course,” she smiled at her sister’s words, because they were just as much true as her own frustrated observation. “They are entirely too good and too damnable to be anything else, but what they are.”
“And we love them for it,” Delilah said, holding a finger up to make her point.
“Yes, we do.” Seylah shut her book with a snap of her hand. There would be no reading now, or concentrating on plotlines, no matter how lovely or endearing they were. The people of Gold Sky had effectively stolen her attention, and when she turned to Delilah, she saw that her sister was smiling broadly.
“What is it?” Seylah asked.
“I saw the man in question. A mister Elliot Myers.”
Seylah nodded. “That is he.”
“He’s a banker.”
“He is, and it is not a courtship, it is simply a Sunday picnic at the church. I told August as much.”
“August was not pleased by the flurry of interest your new suitor caused in town, but I feel that the competition is quite good for him. He’s had his time with you, and now could do with a bit of urgency,” Delilah said as blithely as if she were commenting on the weather or the quality of cake offered that day at breakfast.
Cake, not her opinions on August and his need for, what was it? Urgency? Urgency for what? Seylah had no idea, but she had enough sanity to ask her sister.
“For what? Care to explain that bit on urgency once more for me?”
Delilah sat in the overstuffed armchair by the window and gave her sister a considering look. “Oh, sweet Seylah, you are the older of us but sometimes I wonder if you are willfully blind or just that naive.”