The Importance of Being Wanton - Christi Caldwell Page 0,65
therefore, the same to classify whatever wonderful wickedness she’d experienced last evening as— “Ouch!” she squeaked, rubbing at the forearm her sister had just pinched.
“This. This is what I’m talking about,” Isla said flatly as they came to a stop outside the Old Corner Bookshop. She drew Emma by the elbow away from the entrance so that they were framed by the sparkling windowpanes. Isla ran a concern-filled stare over Emma’s face. “You’ve just created something so special, and something so wonderful, and I would hate to see all your efforts for naught because . . . because . . .” Of him.
Emma stiffened.
This time, there could be no doubting those unspoken words. Rather, this time, a name.
“Emma?”
They both looked over.
Owen stood with the door open, and Olivia poised on the threshold, staring back, a question in her eyes for Emma.
“We’ll be along shortly,” she promised, waiting until Olivia and Owen had continued ahead, leaving Emma and her sister alone.
The moment the Watley siblings had disappeared inside, she turned her attention back to Isla.
“You are . . . not wrong,” she conceded, because she respected her sister too much to lie any more than she had. “I am no more distracted now than I’ve been since I ended it with Charles,” Emma said quietly.
Her sister smiled sadly. “That is hardly a ringing endorsement of your focus, nor any real indication that you’ve moved on from him.”
That charge brought Emma’s fists curling. She wanted to lash out at her sister. To call her out for having dared think the thoughts she had.
And yet this was her sister, and sisters oft knew a woman better than the woman knew herself, and this moment proved no exception.
Her gaze snagged on the happy family that had passed them earlier, the handsome gentleman lifting each child up into the carriage, their merry mirth and happy laughter a touching scene of everything Emma had secretly longed for with Charles. Then he caught the pretty brunette by the waist, and—
It was too much. Emma forced her stare away from that intimate exchange, and she found her sister watching her once more.
“I am doing the best I can to put him from my thoughts, but it . . . isn’t as easy as all that. We have been betrothed since we were children. I have seventeen years of thinking my life would be one way with him, and just two months of readjusting to this new norm.” Emma caught her sister’s hands and squeezed lightly. “But just because I am, does not mean I’m incapable of helping to make the Mismatch Society everything I, you, and every other woman wish it to be.”
Isla’s throat moved furiously as fury burnt through the worry that had been there in her sister’s eyes. “I do not doubt you are capable of doing anything, and saving our society, at that. I just don’t want to see you give him any more of yourself than he’s already had. He was never worthy of you.” Those words came as if torn from deep within Isla.
Emotion swarmed Emma, and she fought the sting of tears. “Thank you,” she said past a thick throat.
Her sister went up on tiptoe and kissed her cheek. She hesitated and, by her still-troubled eyes, appeared as if she wished to say more, before finally hurrying inside the bookshop.
Emma stared after her, taking a moment to order her thoughts. Though she believed Isla exaggerated several points she’d made this day, her sister was also correct on any number of other scores. Emma had not been putting proper attention where her attention was due.
As she entered, Emma loosened the lace strings of her bonnet, lowering the article.
She was to be the one organizing the topic of the next Mismatch meeting.
As such, she should have been devoting her full attention to developing the agenda for the first full session she would be organizing and moderating. Emma headed past the enormous collection of gothic novels and romance tales to the philosophical section at the far corner of the shop that she frequented when she came. She wandered down one of the narrower, empty aisles. Absently, she plucked a copy of Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social from the shelf.
Alas, since she’d fled Charles’s house and boarded the hackney home, she’d been unable to think of anything . . . but him. And the passion he’d awakened. And her sister was right. It was past time that she put her efforts where they should—