All the way home in the carriage, she had listened, baffled, while her mother gloated. The next day, when the flowers arrived with a note thanking her for dancing with him, she had thought he was mocking her. And now, three months later, after ninety days of being besieged by his deliberate and carefully waged courtship of her, she still had no answer. What did Hest Finbok, one of the most eligible bachelors in Bingtown, see in her?
Alise forced herself to admit she was deliberately dawdling. She tidied away her sketches and notes with a scowl. She had been working with information from three separate scrolls, trying to divine what an Elderling had truly looked like. She knew she would not be able to get back to her work again this afternoon. With a sigh, she went to her mirror, to be sure that no errant smudge of charcoal remained on her face or hands. No. She was fine. She wasted just a moment looking into her own eyes. Gray eyes. Not snapping black eyes, nor yet placid blue nor jade green. Gray as granite, with short lashes, above a short, straight nose and a wide, full-lipped mouth. Her ordinary features she could have tolerated, were they not dotted everywhere with freckles. The freckles were not a gentle sprinkling across her nose like some girls had. No. She was evenly dotted, like a speckled egg, all over her face and on her arms as well. Lemon juice did not fade them and the slightest kiss of the sun turned them darker. She thought of powdering her face to obscure them and then decided against it. She was what she was, and she wasn’t going to deceive the man or herself by dabbing on paint and powder. She patted at her upswept red hair, pushing a few dangling tendrils back from her face, and spent a moment making the lace of her collar lie flat before she left her room to descend the stairs.
Hest was waiting for her in the morning room. Her mother was chatting with him about how promising the roses looked this year. A silver tray set with a pale blue porcelain pot and cups rested on a low table near him. Steam from the pot flavored the air with the delicate scent of mint tea. Alise wrinkled her nose slightly; she did not care for mint tea at all. Then she controlled her face with a pleasant smile, lifted her chin, and swept into the room with a gracious, “Good morning, Hest! How pleasant to have you come calling.”
He rose as she approached, moving with the languid grace of a big cat. The eyes he turned toward her were green, a startling contrast to his well-behaved black hair, which, in defiance of current fashion, he wore pulled back from his face and fastened at the nape of his neck with a simple leather tie. Its sheen reminded her of a crow’s folded wings. He was attired in his dark blue jacket today, but the simple scarf at his throat echoed the green of his eyes. He smiled with white teeth in a wind-weathered face as he bowed to her, and for just that moment, her heart gave a lurch. The man was beautiful, simply beautiful. In the next moment, she recalled herself to the truth. He was far too beautiful a man to be interested in her.
As soon as she had taken a chair, he resumed his own seat. Her mother muttered an excuse that neither one paid any attention to. It was her pattern, to leave them in each other’s company as often as she decently could. Alise smiled to herself. She was certain her mother’s vicarious imaginings of what she and Hest said and did in her absence were far more interesting than the reality of their quiet and rather dull conversations. “May I offer you more tea?” she asked him politely, and when he demurred, she filled her own cup. Mint. Why would her mother have chosen mint when she knew that Alise disdained it? As he raised his own cup to drink from it, she knew. So that her mouth and breath would be fresh, if Hest should decide to steal a kiss.
She inadvertently gave a tiny snort of skepticism. The man had never even tried to take her hand. His courtship had been painfully free of any attempts at romance.
Abruptly, Hest set his cup down on its saucer with a tiny clink. Alise was startled when he met her eyes with something of a challenge in his glance. “Something amuses you. It is me?”
“No! No, of course not. That is, well, of course, you are amusing when you choose to be, but I was not laughing at you. Of course not.” She took a sip of the tea.
“Of course not,” he echoed her, but his tone said that he doubted her words. His voice was rich and deep, so deep that when he spoke softly, it was sometimes hard to understand him. But he wasn’t speaking softly now. “For you’ve never laughed, or truly favored me with a smile. Oh, you bend your mouth when you know you should smile, but it isn’t real. Is it, Alise?”
She had never foreseen this. Was this a quarrel? They’d scarcely ever had a real conversation, so how could they have a quarrel? And, given her complete lack of interest in the man, why should his displeasure with her make her heart beat so fast? She was blushing; she could feel the heat in her cheeks. So silly. What would have been fine and appropriate in a girl of sixteen scarcely was fitting for a woman of twenty-one. She tried to speak plainly in an effort to calm herself but found herself falling over the words. “I’ve always tried to be polite to you—well, I always am polite, to everyone. I am not a giggling girl, to simper and smirk at every jest you make.” She found a sudden curb for her tongue and forced herself to claim the higher ground. “Sir, I do not think you have any grounds to complain of my behavior toward you.”