Behind the Courtesan - By Bronwyn Stuart Page 0,52
involved.”
“Perhaps,” Blake mused.
He looked as if he would speak again, but Sophia beat him to it. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, gentlemen. There are chores to be done if I’m to dance this evening.”
Over her dead body. She would drag out the chores until the rooster crowed on Sunday if she had to.
Barn dances and public engagements with women and children were not places she wanted to be. Blake and Blakiston fighting over her as though she were a trophy to be had and men staring at her would only add to her discomfort. She would probably trip over her own feet and break her neck. There would be no dancing for her. Not with a tavern owner or a duke.
Chapter Thirteen
“I think I left something on the stove, we had better turn around and check.” Words Sophia had never thought to utter under usual circumstances. Her knees almost knocked together beneath her dull gray gown, she was so frightened.
“You did not leave anything on the stove. You didn’t leave the axe anywhere near the path where someone could fall over it in the dark and for the last time, the piglets will not starve if you are not there.”
Sophia grimaced. She was out of excuses but so far none of them had worked anyway.
In the end, she’d dressed in her plainest gown, tied her hair back in a simple knot, squared her shoulders and stepped from her room.
When she considered how terrified she was on the carriage ride to Blakiston, how she feared a pitchfork-bearing, stone-throwing crowd, this was worse. Far worse. Even though Blake had only just handed her down from the cart, Sophia already felt the eyes of the judgmental, the frowns of the disapproving and the sharp sting of rejection.
She inhaled until she felt it all the way to her stomach and then exhaled slowly.
“You will be fine. You are Sophie Martin. If you remember that, you will be more than fine.” Blake squeezed her hand and towed her toward a barn where music, laughter and light spilled out into the wet night. As much as she didn’t want to go inside, they couldn’t stand there waiting for it to rain. Even the elements worked against her.
“I can’t do this, Blake.”
“Can’t go into a room full of people enjoying themselves? Or can’t be Sophie Martin?”
She bit her bottom lip. She wasn’t Sophie Martin anymore and they both knew it. She was, however, no longer Sophia Martin either. She hovered somewhere in the middle of an e and an a.
Of one fact she was most certain. She wasn’t a frightened mouse. She was a woman who had fled her domineering, greedy father to start her life anew still bleeding and battered from the ordeal. She was a woman who stood on her own two feet and didn’t let anyone or anything concern her. Least of all a silly little barn dance.
Her heart skipped a beat.
It didn’t matter how many times she told herself, she couldn’t quite believe the words.
As Blake pulled her through the wide doorway, Sophie tried to pull back, tried to come up with a plan, another excuse, anything, but by then it was too late.
It seemed every face in the room turned toward her, her breath hitched, her mouth dried and she actually flinched, hiding her face behind Blake’s shoulder.
Before she had a chance to process what happened, why no stone bit her skin, why no nasty whispers reached her ears, she was folded into the embrace of more women than she could count. Men kissed her cheeks, ladies squeezed her hand and a whole village thanked her for being there for Blake when he needed help. Some thanked her for keeping Blake out of the kitchen, some thanked her for cooking delicious meals and others thanked her for a friendly smile over a soup bowl. Even Annie smiled in her direction.
Finally, after being passed around the room, she ended up next to her brother.
“Did you do this?” Sophie asked.
“I had nothing to do with any of it.”
“It must have been Blake then?”
“You still can’t see it can you?”
“See what?” She turned to him, to search his face for that which he hadn’t said, but then Blake brought a very heavily pregnant Violet to join their conversation.
She had to change the subject before she blushed. “Violet, Matthew let you come?”
Matthew groaned, “Not you too.”
“We reached a compromise,” Violet said. “This is the last time I will be allowed to leave the house.