The Courtship Read Online Free

unpowdered hair.
    “My lord.” She started to rise, only to see Percival Windham’s teeth flash in the shadows.
    “Oh, must you?” He approached her bench, gaze trained on the cup in her hand. “Might I join you? I fear the farther reaches of the garden are full of predators stalking large game.”
    He sounded tired and not the least flirtatious. Esther pulled her skirts aside when what she ought to be doing was returning to the stuffy, mildewed confines of her garret.
    She took a sip of her posset and waited.
    “How do you do it, Miss Himmelfarb?”
    “My lord?”
    He sighed and stretched long legs out before him, crossing his feet at the ankles and leaning back against the wall behind them. Moonlight caught the silver of his shoe buckles and the gold of the ring on his left little finger.
    “How do you endure these infernal gatherings? They are exhausting of a man’s fortitude if not his energy. If one more young lady presses a feminine part of her anatomy against my person, I am going to start howling like a wolf and wearing my wig backward.”
    His lordship sounded so put upon, Esther found it difficult not to smile. “May I ask you a question, your lordship?”
    “Lord Percy, if you must stand on ceremony—or sit upon it, as the case may be.”
    “Do you take snuff?”
    He peered over at her in the moonlight. “I do not. It’s a deucedly filthy habit. Nor do I use smoking tobacco. I’m convinced my father’s frequent agues of the lungs are related to his fondness for the pipe. If you were to ask to borrow my snuffbox, you’d find it holds lemon drops.”
    He reached over and plucked Esther’s cup from her grasp, raising it up. “May I?”
    What was she to say to that? “You may.”
    He helped himself to a sip of her posset, and the idea of it, of this handsome lordling drinking so casually from her cup, was peculiar indeed.
    “Are you flirting with me, my lord?”
    He set the cup down between them, his lips quirking. “If you have to ask, Miss Himmelfarb, then I’m making a poor job of it, aren’t I?”
    He hadn’t said no. “May I ask you another question?”
    His lordship closed his eyes and leaned his head back. “I’d rather it be a flirtatious sort of question now that you raise the subject. You’re very pretty, you know, and I’ve lately concluded the entire purpose of this gathering is to develop one’s stamina as a flirt. Like field maneuvers, I suppose.” He cracked open one eye. “I apologize if I’m being rude. That’s a truth potion you’ve slipped me.”
    He settled back against the wall, shifting broad shoulders as if to get more comfortable. With his eyes closed, Percival Windham by moonlight was…
    Handsome. Still, yet, more… deucedly handsome, to use his word. Lord Percival was the spare, but he had “duke” stamped all over him. The height, the self-possession, the charm…
    “So you’re not averse to another question, my lord?”
    “If we’re to be drinking companions, Miss Himmelfarb, then the ‘my lording’ has to cease. Mind you, I am not flirting with you.”
    He was humoring her, though. Or something. “Do you frequently bathe in company?”
    A beat of silence went by, while Esther wondered if perhaps that posset wasn’t truth potion after all.
    “Miss Himmelfarb, this version of not-flirting holds a man’s interest. Whyever would you ask?”
    He sounded amused and genuinely intrigued.
    “I am appeasing my curiosity. Young ladies gossip almost as much as young men do.”
    “They couldn’t possibly. To answer your question, it might have escaped your notice, but my dimensions are such that I rather take up the available space in most tubs. I am not in the habit of entertaining callers when I’m at my bath, despite what our hostess appears to have told half the women in the realm. You never did answer my question.”
    Esther cast back over their short, odd conversation. “How do I endure house parties?”
    “Without committing hanging