This Wicked Gift by Courtney Milan Page B

underneath hers, but he did not pull away. Apparently,
“don’t” was William Q. White for “keep touching me.” Lavinia pressed her hand
against the heat of his knuckles.
    “Tell me,” he said presently, “the other
evening when you told the young Mr. Spencer that you had a plan, why did you
not tell him immediately he could not be held accountable?”
    It took Lavinia a few seconds to remember
what he was talking about—the moment when James had first presented her with
his idiocy.
    “Why would I have told him? I would have
taken care of it. He didn’t need to know any details. It was simply a matter of
deciding upon an approach.”
    “You would have done everything yourself? Without assistance?”
    Since her mother had died this year past,
Lavinia had assisted everyone else. She had assisted in the library, until her
father’s illness destroyed all pretense that she was a
mere assistant. She had assisted with housekeeping; she had assisted her
younger brother in his lessons, and bailed him out of the sort of scrapes that
younger brothers occasionally got into. She had never begrudged them the time
she spent; she did it because she loved her family.
    She wasn’t sure she knew how to let
someone help her instead.
    She tightened her hand about his, letting
his warmth seep into her. “Of course I’d have done it alone.”
    “Tell me.” His voice dropped even lower,
and she leaned in to listen. “If I had offered that evening—would you have let
me assist you?”
    She looked up into his eyes. He watched
her with that expression in his eyes—desire, she realized, and dark despair
that ran so deeply, it was almost outside detection. He wasn’t asking out of an
idle desire to know.
    “But you didn’t. You didn’t offer.”
    He shut his eyes.
    And then the door burst open, and William
snatched his fingers from hers. She pulled her hands away and tucked them
behind her back with alacrity and jumped away.
    James darted through the entry, his face a
picture of excitement. But even he was sufficiently observant to see she’d
sprung from William like a guilty child. It was easy to think of him as her
younger brother, as a child. But when he looked from Lavinia to William, his
lips thinning, she realized he was not as young as he’d once been.
    “We’re closed,” he said, in a chilly tone
of voice. “And you—whoever you are—you’re leaving.”
    Before Lavinia could protest, William had
pulled away and was walking out the door.
    James looked her over, his gaze resting
first on her flushed cheeks and then on the telltale way she put her hands
behind her back. Then he cast a glance of pure scorn at William’s back. “I’m
leaving, too,” he announced, and he followed William out the door, into the
cold.

CHAPTER FOUR
    L AVINIA’S BROTHER,   William thought
wryly, was a thin spike of a boy. Attach a sufficient quantity of straw to his
head, and he’d have made a passable broom. In polite society, he might have
served as a chaperone, a place-holder designed to do little more than observe.
But James Spencer, this pale wraith of a child, apparently believed he could   protect   his sister from someone who threatened
her virtue. He had been alarmingly misled. Standing outside Spencer’s on the
freezing pavement, James folded his arms—a posture that only emphasized the
sharp skin-and-bone of his shoulders.
    There was a saying, William supposed,
about guarding the cows after the wolves had already come a-ravening. The adage
seemed rather inappropriate as cows could only be eaten once. He’d promised
himself he’d not importune her again, but one touch of her hand and he’d been ready
to go a-ravening all over again.
    James tapped his toe, frowning. “Did you
kiss her?”
    Oh, the barren and virtuous imagination of
callow youth.
    “Yes,” William said. It was easier than
resorting to explanation.
    James peered dubiously at William, as if
trying to ascertain whether there truly was a patch on his