Her escritoire had been given to her by Rutledge in their second year of marriage. He’d insisted Cav come with him to pick it out. Rutledge had tried to choose some big, awful oak thing. Cav had steered him differently. He’d won.
And hearing her coo over that desk had kept him satisfied for six months afterward.
He blinked as she re-entered the room. “I only brought yours so I won’t mix up the stack,” she explained as she held out the folded sheet of heavy paper.
She had hand-drawn three French hens in the corner of the nameplate, pecking at unseen corn. Beautiful little sketches, and he was certain everyone at the table would be enchanted by them because she was a wonderful artist. In a different time, with a different life, perhaps she could have even been a professional.
But it wasn’t the hens that made him keep staring. He and Emily had exchanged hundreds of letters over the years. Writing was the way of Society, after all, even if they were in the same city. But no one else in his acquaintance wrote his name like she did. The swirl of the C in Cavendish felt like a caress. It didn’t make him proud, but he absolutely planned to take this nameplate once supper had ended. He’d add it to the chest of letters she’d written and drawings she’d made for him, and all the other keepsakes that marked their friendship over the years.
“Is it that awful?” she asked, both teasing and nervousness in her tone as she asked the question. “You’re just staring at it.”
He let himself meet her eyes. “It’s beautiful. I love the way the one little hen is tilting her head, looking right at the person at the table.”
She blushed. “Thank you. I only did that with yours. I thought you might like to make eye contact with a bird. That’s what…you men sometimes call women birds, don’t you?”
He chuckled. “Sometimes, yes. Well, then I see who you’ve matched me with for your grand experiment.” He held up the card next to his face. “Do we suit?”
She giggled and snatched the card away. “You and your great love will have to get to know each other tonight. Until then, I will sequester her from your rakish charms.”
“I will find a way, Lady Rutledge,” he teased. “You shall not keep us apart.”
Her gaze remained on his face for a moment, and to his surprise, something in the room shifted. He knew how to recognize it. Aside from the fact he’d been desperately in love with a woman he couldn’t have for almost a decade, in every other way he was a true rake. He took lovers, he danced with ladies…all in a desperate attempt to find one who would make him forget the one before him…but no one had to know that small fact.
Still, with his experience, he understood when a woman was attracted to him. He recognized the tells of how her gaze might slip to his lips or her pupils might dilate or she might lean in a little toward him.
Emily swallowed hard, her gaze slipped to his lips, her pupils dilated and she leaned toward him a fraction. His stomach flipped. Was he seeing this because he so badly wanted to see it? Or was it real?
“So supper and nameplates,” he choked out, trying to keep the conversation light so he wouldn’t frighten her away from whatever was happening between them. “Is that all?”
She shook her head slightly, as if she were trying to shake off the same thing he’d felt spark between them. She stepped away. The spell was broken.
“Well, no,” she said, and her mouth twitched with a smile. “There is one other thing. Would you like to see?”
“You look positively wicked, my lady,” he said. “So yes.”
She laughed as she motioned him to follow her and he did. They wound through the halls and down and out a back entrance that led directly into the garden. He stopped and stared, because a dozen footmen were bringing small covered cages to arrange beneath the guestrooms above.
“Emily, you aren’t—”
She glanced over her shoulder with a smile and nodded. “Come on then!”
He followed her out into the garden and she grinned as she lifted a hand and then dropped it dramatically. The footmen uncovered and opened the cages, and the birds exited. They began to squawk and call and cock-a-doodle-doo, filling the air with screeching. At the windows above, faces began to appear. The other