Accidentally in Love by Claudia Dain Page B

dim-witted Kit. Oh, he was wonderful, Greek god wonderful, but he had to be dim in the extreme. Was he not aware that he loved her to distraction?
    No reference to Greek gods had ever made mention of their brilliant intelligence. She could forgive Kit his blindness where she was concerned, as long as it was corrected. By a marriage proposal.
    “Where are they meeting?” Emeline asked.
    Pip, her eldest brother, chortled.
    Mama eyed Pip. Pip’s chortle died in his throat.
    “Emeline,” Mama said, “I suspect that it will be, perhaps, a difficult adjustment for you to treat Mr. Culley in the correct manner after the unusual intimacy that our family has enjoyed with his. Yet that is what we must all do.” Mama eyed Harry. Harry took another huge bite of his muffin and chewed with obvious gusto. Mama had met her match in Harry. “Of course, we must never refer to him as Kit. That is most inappropriate. He is Mr. Christopher Culley. You, Phillip, are no longer Pip.” Pip, fifteen and beginning to squirm under Mama’s tight rein, made a mutinous movement of his mouth but refrained from uttering a mutinous word. “Seymour,” Sig, thirteen years old, kept his eyes upon the pages of his Latin grammar. “Seymour!” Mama repeated. Sig kept reading.
    “Sig. Mama is calling,” Harry said, brushing his hands together, the crumbs flying.
    Sig looked up, gave Mama a cool, bland stare and waited. Sig was, perhaps, the child most like Papa.
    “You must remember that your name is Seymour, not Sig,” Mama said.
    “I know my name, Mama,” he said.
    “I sometimes wonder,” Mama muttered.
    “I know I’m Horace, Mama,” Harry said. “I simply prefer to be Harry. Pip has been calling me Harry, and Seymour Sig, and Philip Pip for years and years. He likes us to call him Kit. He’s the one who gave us these pet names, Mama. He couldn’t possibly find it offensive.”
    “I should think he’d find it offensive if we stopped using them. Something of an insult, isn’t it?” Pip said.
    Emeline kept her own counsel. Kit had never, ever given her a pet name. It was most unfriendly of him. As the two most illustrious families in Wiltshire, a designation of questionable status, Wiltshire being Wiltshire, the Culleys and the Harlows had been in each other’s pockets from Emeline’s earliest memories. As the eldest, Emeline had the longest memories of them all. Kit had brought his younger brother, George, round to their house nearly every day once his father had died.
    The quiet of the Culley house had worn him down, pressed down upon him, made each day hours longer than it should have been. This is what he had told his mother, who had repeated it to Mama, who had not repeated it to Emeline but she, from the age of four to the age of seven had fit quite neatly under the round table in the corner of the west drawing room and had made it her own private domain. It had been a fort in the pine-scented forests of New York, a tent in the shimmering heat of Madras, a medieval keep on the heathered edge of the Scottish highlands. From her secret fort, she had learned much about Kit. As she was already half in love with him, listening to his mother pour out her heart to her mother had made her love for him all the more poignant. This boy, this boy only three years older than herself, needed someone to love him.
    She loved him. He needed her.
    Kit, the dolt, had never seemed to realize that.
    “You were children. He is a child no longer,” Mama said. “He is in Town for the Season looking for his own bride, most certainly. He will likely take a few years to make his choice from amongst the many fine girls who will catch his interest, but that is not our concern. He must be free of the encumbrances of old relationships as he devotes all his energy to making new connections.”
    There was not a single syllable of that proclamation to which Emeline was not in violent opposition.
    He would not take years and years. He would not look about. He