small moment of elation crumbling to dust, as she tried to imagine what leap of logic Amanda was about to embark upon to explain why Eloise should be banished to the Amazon.
“We’re home,” Amanda said, sounding exceedingly supercilious for an eight-year-old. Or maybe she was supercilious as only an eight-year-old could be. “So you should go home.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Eloise said sharply.
“Yes, it does,” Amanda replied with a smug little nod. “Do unto others as you would like done to you. We haven’t gone to your house, so you shouldn’t come to ours.”
“You’re very clever, did you know that?” Eloise asked.
Amanda looked as if she wanted to nod, but she was clearly too suspicious of Eloise’s compliment to accept it.
Eloise bent down so that they were face-to-face, all three of them. “But I,” she said to them in a very serious—and slightly defiant—voice, “am very clever, too.”
They stared at her with wide eyes, their mouths hanging slack as they regarded this person who was clearly so different from any other adult they’d ever met.
“Do we understand each other?” Eloise asked, straightening her spine and smoothing her hands along her skirts in a deceptively casual manner.
They said nothing, so she decided to answer for them. “Good,” she said. “Now, then, would you like to show me where the dining room is? I’m famished.”
“We have lessons,” Oliver said.
“You do?” Eloise asked, arching her brows. “How interesting. Then you must return to them at once. I imagine you’ve fallen behind after spending so long waiting outside my door.”
“How did you know—” Amanda’s question was cut short by Oliver’s elbow in her ribs.
“I have seven brothers and sisters,” Eloise answered, deciding that Amanda’s question deserved an answer, even if her brother hadn’t allowed her to finish her sentence. “There isn’t much about this sort of warfare that I don’t already know.”
But as the twins scurried down the hall, Eloise was left chewing her lower lip in apprehension. She had a feeling she shouldn’t have ended their encounter with such a challenge. She had practically dared Oliver and Amanda to find a way to evict her from the premises.
And while she was quite certain they wouldn’t succeed—she was a Bridgerton, after all, and made of sterner stuff than those two even knew existed—she had a feeling that they would throw every fiber of their being into the task.
Eloise shuddered. Eels in the bed, hair dipped in ink, jam on chairs. It had all been done to her at one point or another, and she didn’t particularly relish a repeat performance—and certainly not by a pair of children twenty years her junior.
She sighed, wondering what it was she had gotten herself into. She had better find Sir Phillip and get to the task of deciding whether they would suit. Because if she really was leaving in a week or two, never to see any of the Cranes again, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to put herself through the trouble of mice and spiders and salt in the sugar bowl.
Her stomach rumbled. Whether it was the thought of salt or sugar that did it, Eloise didn’t know. But it was definitely time to find something to eat. And better sooner than later, before the twins had a chance to figure out how to poison her food.
Phillip knew that he’d blundered badly. But deuce it, the bloody woman had given him no warning. If she’d only alerted him of her arrival, he could have prepared himself, thought of a few poetic things to say. Did she really think he’d scribbled all those letters without laboring over every word? He’d never sent out the first draft of any of his missives (although he always wrote it on his best paper, each time hoping that this would be the time he’d get it right on the first try).
Hell, if she’d given him warning, he might have even summoned a romantic gesture or two. Flowers would have been nice, and heaven knew, if there was one thing he was good at, it was flowers.
But instead, she’d simply appeared before him as if conjured from a dream, and he’d mucked everything up.
And it hadn’t helped that Miss Eloise Bridgerton was not what he had expected.
She was a twenty-eight-year-old spinster, for heaven’s sake. She was supposed to be unattractive. Horse-faced, even. Instead she was—
Well, he wasn’t exactly certain how one could describe her. Not beautiful, precisely, but still somehow stunning, with thick chestnut hair and eyes of the clearest, crispest