Page 20 of The Awakening of Ivy Leavold
Molly walked over. “Girls, this isn’t way to treat our new acquaintance.” She took my hands and pulled me to my feet. “I promise we aren’t normally this cheerless about new friends. We will have so much fun during our visit, and I think you will have fun with us. Can I tell you a secret?”
I wanted to shake my head. I wanted to pull my hands away and run out of this room and out of this house. But something about Molly was magnetic. Cutting and mendacious, but magnetic.
I nodded.
She put her mouth against my ear, her breath hot on my skin. “I don’t think it’s fair for Julian to keep you all to himself and then not play with you, like a trinket in a glass case. Perhaps you and I can change his mind?” And then she nipped at my earlobe, taking it in her teeth and flicking her tongue over the sensitive skin there. As soon as it started, it finished, and she was moving back across the room, throwing me a daring glance over her shoulder.
I put my hand to my ear, not sure how I felt about her proposition or her unexpected touch.
The door to the parlor opened and the men entered, led by Silas, who seemed to be the leader of the party. His pale skin made his dark brown hair and blue eyes stark, mesmerizing, but his engaging laugh and easy smile kept his beauty human and approachable. All eyes followed him as he walked in and gracefully folded himself into a seat, already smiling and joking as he sat.
“You finished your conversation early,” Molly noted to Mr. Markham.
“I didn’t want to leave poor Miss Leavold too long in the viper’s nest,” he said. His tone was light, but there was a warning in his words.
“Oh, we’ve been behaving ourselves, Jules.”
“Mary O’Flaherty behaving herself. Shall I alert the newspapers?”
Without waiting to see her reaction, Mr. Markham turned and walked to the back of the parlor, back to me. As he approached, my vantage point from the stool gave me an entirely different view of his body, namely of how tightly his trousers clung to his muscled thighs and how this highlighted an even more interesting part of his body. He’d removed his dinner jacket, and so now I could see that lean waist and how it led up to that chest and those strong arms that had so effortlessly carried me to my room a few nights ago.
He sat next to me. “Are you comfortable? Entertained?” he asked.
“Of course she is,” Silas laughed. “She’s with us. And we will show her such entertainment that she’ll be spoiled for amusement with anyone else.”
“Charades,” Molly announced. “We shall play charades.”
Silas leapt to his feet. “I claim Miss Leavold for my team.”
Mr. Markham’s posture stiffened. “And I assume I’m on your team as well?”
“Don’t be a fool, Julian, where’s the fun in that? No, you and Molly must be together, as you always are.”
There was a possessiveness in Mr. Markham’s touch when he helped me stand so I could walk across the room, but he didn’t argue. And it wasn’t a hardship on my part—as nervous as I felt around these people and at the prospect of playing a game I’d only played once or twice before—Silas’s infectious energy was impossible to be immune to. When I reached him, he took my hand, kissed it and swept into a bow. “My lady.” He tugged me very close and leaned in conspiratorially. “We must defeat Julian’s team. He always wins and it’s really quite unfair to the rest of us.”
This made me smile.
“She smiled!” Silas exclaimed. “And here we all thought that happy faculty had been stripped from her.” His eyes stayed on my face. “And now that I have seen it, I have decided that my life’s work is to make you smile as often as possible, for a smile as luminous as that can only be the handiwork of God himself, and are we not all called to do the Lord’s work?”
His words were in jest, but his thumb rubbed across the back of my hand as he said them, and there was an intensity in his gaze that made heat spread across my cheeks and down my stomach.
“Silas,” Ned said. “You’ll frighten the girl off before we even start.”
“We can’t have that now, can we?” My hand was squeezed once more, then dropped.
Even from across the room, I could feel Mr. Markham’s eyes burning into my back.
Mercifully, the game began before Silas could flirt with me anymore. Various scenarios and words were written onto pieces of paper and then tousled together in a large bowl. Silas volunteered himself as the first from our team to play. He read the paper, a smile twitching on his lips, and then slid it into his pocket. I let the others shout out their guesses as he began to walk unsteadily around, shoulders hunched and face scowled, as if on a ship in rough weather. Then he mimed a bird flying above, then a gun, then the bird’s death.
I opened my mouth, then closed it as the others kept calling out guesses around me. Silas saw me and nodded encouragingly.
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner¸” I said.
Silas pulled out the slip of paper for the other team to verify and then bowed, winking at me as he slid back into his seat. One tally mark for us.
I watched Mr. Markham as his team whispered about who should go first—Molly, it was decided—and then I watched as she gave him a playful squeeze on his thigh as she stood. His face remained still, giving no acknowledgement of her touch, but envy flared through me, hot and quick. I looked down at my hands as she drew her slip of paper, trying to regulate the sudden wash of resentment I felt towards Molly.
Up in front, Molly made no reaction as she read her challenge, only gave the others a slight nod to show that she was ready to begin. Her eyes fluttered closed and her breathing picked up, speeding into quick pants and sudden, sharp intakes of air, as if her breathing was interrupted by some other sensation that only she could feel. Her head lolled back and her hand reached up to fan her face.
