“What happened?” she asked.
He was shaking his head as he rose to his feet. “It came from the drawing room.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded, and her first thought was relief, although she had no idea why. Her second thought went in quite the opposite direction. If she’d heard the crash, then other people in the house would have heard it, too. And if this other person happened to be upstairs, as her mother was, she might come running down to investigate. And if she did that, she might enter the wrong room.
Finding her daughter in a state of considerable dishabille.
But in truth her mother would probably head first to the drawing room. The door would be open, and it was the first room one came across at the bottom of the stairs. But if she did that, she would find three gentlemen, a hulking bodyguard, the butler, three housemaids…
And no Olivia.
She jumped to her feet, immediately awash in panic. “My hair!”
“-is remarkably intact,” he finished for her.
She looked at him with patent disbelief.
“No, really,” he said, looking somewhat astonished himself. “It’s really almost”-he moved his hands near his head as if to indicate…something-“the same.”
She hurried over to the mirror over the fireplace and stood on her tiptoes. “Oh my goodness,” she said. Sally had outdone herself. Barely a lock was out of place, and she could have sworn that Harry had pulled the whole mass of it down.
Olivia pulled two hairpins out, repositioned and fastened them, then stood back to inspect her reflection. Aside from her flushed cheeks, she looked entirely respectable. And really, any number of things could have caused that. Plague, even, although she probably needed to start coming up with a new excuse.
She looked over at Harry. “Do I look presentable?”
He nodded. But then he said, “Sebastian will know.”
Her mouth opened in shock. “What? How?”
Harry gave a one shouldered shrug. There was something elementally male about the gesture, as if to say-a woman might answer your question in exhaustive detail, but this will do for me.
“How will he know?” Olivia repeated.
He gave her another one of those looks. “He just will. But don’t worry, he won’t say anything.”
Olivia looked down at herself. “Do you think the prince will know?”
“What does it matter if the prince knows?” Harry returned, a little snappishly.
“I have my-” She had been about to say that she had her reputation to consider. “Are you jealous?”
He looked at her as if she was slightly deranged. “Of course I’m jealous.”
Her legs started to feel rather liquid, and she sighed. “Really?”
He shook his head, clearly impatient with her sudden dreaminess. “Tell everyone I’ve gone home.”
She blinked, unsure of what he was talking about.
“You don’t want everyone to know what we’ve been doing in here, do you?”
“Er, no.” Said perhaps a little haltingly, since it wasn’t as if she was ashamed. Because she wasn’t. But she did wish for her activities to remain private.
He walked over to the window. “Tell them you saw me off ten minutes ago. You can say that I had matters to attend to at home.”
“You’re going out the window?”
He already had one leg over the sill. “Do you have any better ideas?”
She might, if he gave her a few moments to think about it. “There’s a drop,” she pointed out. “It’s-”
“Don’t forget to shut the window after me.” And he was gone, hopping right out of sight. Olivia rushed over and peered out. Actually, there hadn’t been much of a drop at all. Certainly no more than Priscilla Butterworth had had to deal with when she’d hung out the ground-floor window, and heaven knew Olivia had mocked her for her silliness.
She started to ask Harry if he was all right, but he was already making his way up and over the wall that separated their properties, clearly uninjured by the drop.
And besides, Olivia didn’t have time for any more conversation. She could hear someone coming down the stairs, so she hurried out, just in time to reach the front of the hall at the same time as her mother.
“Did someone scream?” Lady Rudland asked. “What is going on?”
“I have no idea,” Olivia replied. “I was in the washroom. There is a bit of a performance-”
“A performance?”
“In the drawing room.”
“What on earth are you talking about? And why”-her mother reached out and plucked something from her hair-“is there a feather in your hair?”
“I cannot explain,” Olivia said, taking the feather in her hands for later disposal. It must have popped out through the upholstery on one of the pillows. They were all stuffed with feathers, although Olivia had always thought that the quills were removed first.
She was saved from further comment by Huntley, who had come into the hall, looking terribly embarrassed. “My lady,” he said, bowing toward Olivia’s mother. “There has been an accident.”
Olivia scooted around Huntley, hurrying into the drawing room. Sebastian was on the floor, his arm twisted at an unnatural angle. Behind him a vase appeared to have tipped over, leaving shattered glass, cut flowers, and water all over the floor.
“Oh my heavens!” she exclaimed. “What happened?”
“I think he broke his arm,” Edward Valentine told her.
“Where’s Harry?” Sebastian gasped. His teeth were grit together, and he was sweating from the pain.