Read With This Kiss: Part One for Free Online Page B

ringing in her ears. Then her heart started beating again, a sort of death march. She’d known it. She’d known it the moment she saw Colin’s eyes meet Lily’s. She saw the joy in his face.
    “What did you say to him?”
    “The same thing I say to anyone who asks. No daughter of mine will marry before she is twenty, no matter how dear a family friend her suitor may be. And frankly, that goes double for Lily. I want her to be a bit steadier before she contemplates a match. Your mother and I are firmly against youthful marriages; you know that.”
    “It worked for the two of you,” Grace managed. But her voice wobbled.
    “Not at first,” her father said. “Not at first.”
    At that moment, Lily herself drifted into the room, looking as fresh as if she hadn’t danced away the night. “The world seems so dark ,” she said, pausing. “Colin has left to rejoin his ship.”
    Grace took a deep breath. “You’ll see him on his next leave.”
    “But it won’t be the same, will it?” Lily said. “Colin dances so beautifully. I feel as if I’m flying when we waltz.”
    “I thought the two of you looked lovely together.”
    Lily narrowed her eyes. “I thought you left the ball before he arrived. He should have asked you to dance before me!”
    “I didn’t give him the chance,” Grace said hastily. Hell had no fury like Lily if she thought her older sister had been spurned.
    “He should have found you,” Lily said indignantly. “You’ve been writing him for half your life. That was remarkably impolite of him. Perhaps I’ll write him and say so!”
    The duke wrapped an arm around each of them. “I’ll write the lad and let him know that you won’t be writing any longer, Grace.”
    She nodded.
    “I shall write him instead,” Lily said. “I promised. And he is a family friend, Papa.”
    Grace’s heart warped at the idea of not taking up her pen to write Colin. What would she do with her life? Sometimes she felt as if she lived merely to find the funniest moments and put them onto paper, to capture a face so amusing that it would make Colin laugh in the midst of battle.
    But she didn’t touch her pen. She cried a great deal that week, but she didn’t write a word. By Sunday, she had pulled herself together. She couldn’t live merely to write letters to a person who rarely bothered to answer her.
    She had obviously created a romance in her head and heart that didn’t exist. She was always imagining what he was thinking in response to her letters, but she must have been wrong. Perhaps he didn’t even keep her letters.
    That saddened her, but it also made her angry. If someone had written her , written her every month for years, she would have searched him out immediately on her return to England. She would have danced with him all night, if she could. She would have thanked him herself, not just sent a message through her sister.
    She wouldn’t have proposed to someone else. Not ever.
    The crate came the next morning. Inside was a simple wooden box, marked with her name. She opened it cautiously, finding rumpled pink silk with a slip of paper on top. Her name was written on the paper, with a simple Thank You .
    For a moment she felt sick, physically ill, as if the ground was pitching under her feet.
    “Oh, look!” Lily crowed, looking over her shoulder. “I knew Colin couldn’t be so impolite as to not thank you for all those letters. He should have asked you to dance, but this is even better.” She plucked up the silk cloth that lay on top before Grace could stop her. Below was a neat line of small round bladders. “What on earth are those?”
    “Please let me do that,” Grace said. But she was too late; Lily had already grabbed one of the bottles. “It’s a pig’s bladder filled with paint.”
    “A bladder ? Ugh!” Lily cried, dropping it. “It’s all wired shut, Grace. How on earth will you get the paint out?’
    Grace took it back. “You pierce the bladder with a tack and then