“Well, honey,” Houston said aloud, deepening her voice, “just make sure you keep your hat on straight. Real ladies do, you know.”
Trying to cover her laughter, Houston fell back onto her bed. Wouldn’t all of Chandler be surprised, she thought, if she decided to accept Mr. Taggert’s offer?
She sat upright. What in the world would he wear to the wedding? Perhaps a red suit with gold tassels on it?
Still laughing to herself, she finished undressing and put on her nightgown. It had been quite nice to receive another marriage proposal, to find out that at least not everyone took it for granted that she was Leander’s personal property. Everyone, including Houston, knew what her future was goin
g to be. She and Lee had been together so long that she knew what he ate for breakfast, how he liked his shirts done.
The only unknown question was the wedding night. Well, perhaps after that one night Leander wouldn’t expect her to do it again for a long time. It wasn’t that she didn’t like men, especially after what happened, the night before her friend Ellie got married, but sometimes touching Leander seemed, well . . . incestuous. She loved Leander, knew she’d have no difficulty living with him, but the thought of lying with him . . .
She climbed into bed, puffed a quilt over her and prepared for sleep. I wonder how Blair did with Leander, she thought briefly. No doubt he’ll be in a bad mood tomorrow because, of course, he and Blair must have had a quarrel. They couldn’t possibly spend hours together and not be at each other’s throats.
With a sigh, she drifted into sleep. Today had been an adventure; tomorrow she would be back to her humdrum everyday existence.
* * *
Houston had to ward off Leander’s advances as he helped her into his carriage, and again she thought how oddly everyone was behaving. All morning Blair had been evading her, and she looked as if she’d been crying. Houston hoped Blair and Lee hadn’t had a serious argument last night, and that Lee hadn’t found out they’d traded places. Houston had tried to talk to Blair about last night, but Blair had just looked at her as if her life were over and run from the room.
At eleven, Lee had arrived to take her on a picnic, a pleasant surprise, and Houston had heard Blair shouting at him on the front porch. To further confuse her, Lee had been quite forward with her physically in the middle of the street and Houston had thought she was going to have to slap his wayward hands.
Now, feeling as if she’d walked into the middle of a play and understood nothing about what was going on, she sat beside Lee in the buggy. He just drove, saying nothing, but he was smiling. Houston began to relax. Nothing too bad could have happened last night if he was smiling.
He drove her to a place of big rocks and tall trees that she’d never seen before, miles out of town, secluded and enclosed.
He had barely helped her out of the carriage, in such a hurry that she nearly fell, when he grabbed her in a smothering embrace. She was fighting so hard to breathe that at first she didn’t hear him.
“I thought about nothing else but you last night,” he said. “I could smell your hair on my clothes, I could taste your lips on mine, I could—.”
Houston managed to pull away from him. “You what?” she gasped.
He began disarranging her hair and looking at her strangely. “You aren’t going to be shy with me today, are you? You aren’t going to be the way you were before last night, are you?”
While he was talking, Houston was thinking, but she didn’t believe what she thought could be the only answer to his bizarre words. Blair couldn’t have . . . Couldn’t have made herself available to Lee? Could she? Impossible.
“Houston, you’ve proven to me that you can be different, so there’s no need to go back to being the ice princess. I know what you’re really like now, and I can tell you that if I never see that cool woman again, I’ll be even happier. Now come here and kiss me like you did last night.”
Houston suddenly realized what else he was saying besides telling her how wonderful Blair was. He’d not only enjoyed Blair last night, but he never wanted the cool woman he was engaged to to return. She pushed free of him. “Are you saying that I wasn’t like I usually am last night? That I was . . . better?”
He smiled in an idiotic way and continued raving about how wonderful Blair was.
“You know you were. You were like I’ve never seen you. I didn’t know you could be like that. You’ll laugh at this but I was beginning to believe that you were incapable of any real passion, that beneath your cool exterior was a heart of ice. But, if you can have a sister like Blair who starts fires at the least provocation, surely some of it had to rub off.”
He grabbed her again before she could say a word and gave her an unpleasant, lip-grinding kiss, and when Houston managed to escape, she saw that he was angry.
“You’re carrying this game too far,” he said. “You can’t be wildly passionate one minute and frigid the next. What are you, two people?”
Houston wanted to scream at him that he was lusting after the wrong sister, that he was engaged to the cold, frigid one and not the fiery one he seemed to prefer.
It was as if Lee read her thoughts, because his face changed.
“That’s an impossibility, isn’t it, Houston?” he said. “Tell me that what I’m thinking is wrong. No one can be two people, can she?”
Houston knew that what had been a simple game was becoming serious now. How could Blair have done this to her?
Lee walked away and sat down heavily on a rock. “Did you and your sister trade places last night?” he asked softly. “Did I spend the evening with Blair and not with you?”
Somehow, she managed to whisper, “Yes.”