Seven Minutes in Heaven(31)
If he kissed her, she would quiver like a rabbit caught in a vegetable patch. Not that he appeared to have any intention of kissing her.
The man was asking for help and she was staring at his mouth. Shameful!
“I shall ask them to prepare a hamper that I can bring back home with me,” he said, taking her arm.
“You mustn’t accept ices,” she told him. “They’ll never last. Gunter’s always promises that properly packed, their ices won’t melt, but they do.”
His eyes crinkled at the corners in a devastatingly attractive way.
“You see? You are a veritable fount of good advice. I’ll bring Otis and Lizzie to London one day, and we can take them for ices,” he said.
We?
He turned her around the way she’d come before she could think of a response. “My carriage is just there.”
Sure enough, a carriage awaited in the street, so luxurious that one might expect a royal duke to clamber out of it, full of gallantry and brandy. “Miss Lloyd-Fantil mentioned that your vehicle is remarkable,” she said, trying to fill the air so that the silence between them didn’t seem quite so potent.
“It was made to order for the Duke of Clarence,” he said, confirming her impression that it was meant for a prince. “It’s a bit grandiose for me, to tell the truth. But when Otis and Lizzie turned up, I needed something larger than a high-perch phaeton, and this was the only suitable carriage I could buy in a hurry.”
“Merely a practical decision?”
“I am convinced that Otis would have tried to drive my phaeton the moment he found time. Taking bets on his prowess, no doubt.”
“You’ve had to turn your whole life upside down, haven’t you? You gave up your profession and your carriage. It’s admirable,” Eugenia said, meaning it.
He shrugged as if it had been no hardship. He probably always put the people in his life above everything else; he was that sort of man.
A groom in smart livery stepped forward as they approached. A small mounting box was already positioned at the door. In truth, Eugenia was tall enough to climb into even a high-perch phaeton without assistance.
Nevertheless, Ward held out his hand. She looked down at the box just as her boot was about to descend on the painted image of . . . She gave a startled gurgle of laughter, dropped his hand, and put her foot back on the ground. “Is that a chamber pot?”
“Unfortunately,” Ward said solemnly, “there’s no mistaking it, is there? Given the . . .”
“Stream of piss,” Eugenia supplied, having just worked out what she was looking at. “What admirable realism.”
He grinned at her. “We mustn’t speak of manure, but piss is acceptable?”
Eugenia could feel color flooding her cheeks.
“I won’t tell anyone,” he said with a twinkle in his eyes. “It is my firm conviction that those of us who needn’t mind those rules shouldn’t. And as for realism, I beg to differ. I gather that is a representation of the Duke of Clarence’s private part,” Ward said, pointing to one corner of the box. “Surely you agree that it is an optimistic—if not grossly inaccurate—rendering of the royal privates.”
Eugenia smiled. This whole conversation—with its brash, irreverent attitude toward polite convention—reminded her of her girlhood.
Her father would love the absurdity of this mounting block.
“The organ in question does appear to be approximately the same size as the chamber pot,” she said, stepping directly on the painting on her way into the carriage.
“More than optimistic,” Ward said dryly. “Catastrophic.”
Eugenia waited until he was seated opposite and the groom had closed the door before she asked the obvious question. “What on earth is the justification for the rampant vulgarity of that mounting box, Mr. Reeve?”
“Rampant?” he repeated, with a bark of laughter.
Her cheeks heated. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“And am I truly still Mr. Reeve?”
She raised her chin. “Of course.”
“I think of you as Eugenia—which, by the way, suits you.”
“The chamber pot?” she insisted, trying to ignore the heat flaring in her cheeks.
“Caricatures have poked fun at the royal duke’s inamorata, the lovely Dorothea Jordan, owing to her surname.”
Eugenia’s brows drew together.
“‘Jordan’ is an inelegant name for a chamber pot,” he explained.
“Of course.” She thought about that for a moment. “Why would the duke wish to remind Mrs. Jordan of such unpleasant remarks every time she climbed into her coach?”