If You Give a Girl a Viscount by Kieran Kramer

night, too.”
    Mona and Cassandra stared at each other and then back at him.
    “He doesn’t look the type,” Cassandra said.
    “No,” Mona added speculatively.
    “I didn’t cry,” the viscount insisted, completely unruffled and still gazing at Daisy adoringly. “I merely moaned. Once. In my sleep. I think it was indigestion.”
    “But you said it woke the neighbors,” Daisy said, looking deep into his eyes. It was so difficult to appear besotted when you were aggravated. “And you told them that was the last straw. You had to come see me. You said something about how love was better than … petting a lamb with brown eyes. Or a pudding.”
    “Funny,” he answered her, his eyes sparking with a message that she read loud and clear as: You. Will. Pay. And it won’t be pretty . “I don’t remember that part.”
    “I do,” Daisy said, feeling nervous as a result of that threatening message of his, which he disguised well beneath his own cloying version of a besotted gaze. “We simply couldn’t stay apart any longer. He came here to win you over, Stepmother, despite his unfinished business.” She sighed. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”
    Oddly enough, a corner of Mona’s mouth went up. “Don’t be. Finally, you’re showing some much-needed wiliness. A trait to be nurtured.”
    And then she laughed—a slow laugh that built into a crescendo that sent Jinx flying from the room, her tail cocked to the ceiling and puffy, like a thistle in full bloom.
    “Very well,” said Mona, seemingly satisfied with the explanations, thank God. “We’ll adjust. But we don’t have room for you in the castle, Viscount. We’re already cramped. You’ll have to sleep elsewhere.”
    “Don’t tell me,” he said with a weary sigh. “The byre?”
    “Right.” Mona wagged a finger at him. “And don’t think you can hide there. If you want to become a member of this family, prepare to be worked to the bone. No man will be allowed to steal my stepdaughter’s virtue without paying heavily for it, if not with gobs of money—which you apparently don’t have at the moment but is my preferred method of restitution—then with arduous labor. In fact, I need you to move this sofa immediately. Closer to the east window.”
    She pointed to the extremely large sofa the viscount himself had lounged upon not a few minutes before.
    “Very well,” he gritted out, and sent Daisy another you-will-pay-and-it-won’t-be-pretty look.
    It’s your fault, she sent back.
    “Shall I tell you the story of my life, new brother?” Perdita yelled in his ear.
    He winced. “I don’t believe now’s the time,” he replied in grim tones, moving small tables and footrests out of the way of the sofa’s path to its new resting place beneath the east window.
    Nevertheless, just as he hoisted one end of the sofa with ease, Perdita began to regale him with a tremendous lie about her amazing ride on the back of a camel that she’d paid a nickel to ride down the Broad-Way when it had come to New York with a traveling circus.
    She really ought to write books, Daisy thought, engrossed in the fantastical tale despite herself. They’d never been to New York or seen a camel .
    But Daisy was even more engrossed in the way Lord Lumley’s form was shown to perfection when he lifted that sofa.
    He was a virile man. Shivers of awareness ran through her from head to toe. She was to pretend to be the viscount’s fiancée? Eventually, Mona, Cassandra, and Perdita would find out she was not.
    She was trapped.
    Trapped .
    But meanwhile, she was looking after her own best interests: hers, Hester’s, and Joe’s.
    Even with that thought to comfort her, she still felt completely hemmed in by the situation, in more ways than one. Behind her was a solid low table beneath which Jinx had returned to splay herself, belly exposed hopefully, for potential scratches.
    To her right, Cassandra glared at her. To her left stood Mona, who clapped her hands