He found himself staring with surprise. She was opening the window.
So of course he did the same.
“I know you said you hadn’t read this,” she said without preamble, “but did you even peek?”
“Good evening to you,” he called. “How was the prince?”
She shook her head impatiently. “The book, Sir Harry, the book. Did you read any of it?”
“I’m afraid not. Why?”
She held it up with two hands, right in front of her face, then moved it to the side so that she could see him. “It is ridiculous!”
He nodded agreeably. “I thought it might be.”
“Miss Butterworth’s mother gets pecked to death by pigeons!”
He fought a chuckle. “Do you know, I think that might make it considerably more interesting to me.”
“Pigeons, Sir Harry! Pigeons!”
He grinned up at her. He felt a bit like Romeo to her Juliet, minus the feuding families and poison.
And with pigeons.
“I wouldn’t mind hearing that part,” he told her. “It sounds quite suspenseful.”
She scowled at him, batting away a piece of hair that the breeze had blown into her face. “It happened before the book began. If we’re lucky, Miss Butterworth will get her own pecking before I reach the end.”
“So you’ve been reading it, then?”
“Bits and pieces,” she admitted. “That’s all. The opening of chapter four and”—she looked down, leafing quickly through the pages before glancing back up—“page one hundred ninety-three.”
“Have you ever considered starting at the beginning?”
There was a pause. A rather long one. And then, with disdain: “I wasn’t planning to read it.”
“It just swept you in, eh?”
“No! That’s not it at all.” She crossed her arms, which caused her to drop the book. For a moment she disappeared from view, then up she popped again, Miss Butterworth in hand. “It was so irritating I couldn’t stop.”
He leaned against the ledge, grinning up at her. “It sounds gripping.”
“It’s nonsense, is what it is. Between Miss Butterworth and the mad baron, I’m cheering for the baron.”
“Oh, come now. It’s a romance. Surely you must side with your fellow lady.”
“She’s an idiot.” She looked back down at the book for a moment, flipping through the pages with remarkable speed. “I can’t tell yet if the baron is murderous as well as mad, but if so, I do hope he succeeds.”
“It’ll never happen,” Harry told her.
“What makes you think that?” She swiped a hand at her hair again, trying to get it off her nose. The breeze was picking up, and he was finding the whole thing rather entertaining.
“Isn’t the author a woman?” he asked.
Olivia nodded. “Sarah Gorely. I’ve never heard of her.”
“And it’s meant to be a romance?”
She nodded again.
He shook his head. “She’ll never kill off the heroine.”
Olivia stared at him for a long moment, then immediately turned to the end of the book.
“Oh, don’t do that,” he scolded. “You’ll spoil it.”
“I’m not going to read it,” she retorted. “How can it be spoiled?”
“Trust me,” he said. “When a man writes a romance, the woman dies. When a woman writes one, it ends all tidy and sweet.”
Her lips parted, as if she weren’t sure whether to take offense at the generalization. Harry bit back a grin. He liked her befuddled.
“How is it romantic if the woman dies?” she asked suspiciously.
He shrugged. “I didn’t say it made sense, just that it was true.”
She didn’t seem to know what to make of that, and Harry found that he was quite content just to sit there and watch her as she glared down at the book in her hands. She was utterly adorable, standing up there at her window, even in that atrocious blue dressing gown of hers. Her hair hung down her back in a single thick braid, and he wondered why it was only just occurring to him now that the entire exchange was extremely irregular. He’d not met her parents, but he could not imagine they would approve of her chatting with an unmarried man in the dark, through her window.
In her dressing gown.
But he was having far too much fun to care, and so he decided that if she wasn’t going to concern herself with proprieties, neither would he.
Her eyes narrowed and then she looked back down at the book, her fingers moving stealthily toward the final pages.
“Don’t do it,” he warned her.
“I just want to see if you’re correct.”
“Then start at the beginning,” he said, mostly because he knew it would vex her.
She let out a groan. “I don’t want to read the entire book.”
“Why not?
“Because I won’t like it, and it will be a waste of my time.”
“You don’t know you won’t like it,” he pointed out.
“I know.” Said with utter conviction.
“Why don’t you like to read?” he asked.
“This is why,” she exclaimed, giving Miss Butterworth a little shake. “It’s complete nonsense. If you gave me the newspaper—now that, I would read. In fact I do. Every word. Every day.”
Harry was impressed. It wasn’t that he thought women didn’t read the newspaper. He just hadn’t really given the matter much thought. Certainly his mother had never done so, and if his sister did, she never gave any indication in her monthly correspondence.
“Read the novel,” he said. “You might surprise yourself and enjoy it.”
“Why are you prodding me to read something that you yourself have no interest in?” she asked, with no small degree of suspicion.
“Because—” But he stopped, because he didn’t know why he was doing so. Except that he’d given it to her. And he was enjoying teasing her about it. “I’ll make a deal with you, Lady Olivia.”
She cocked her head to the side expectantly.
“If you read it—all of it, beginning to end—then I will do the same.”
“You’ll read Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron,” she said dubiously.
“I will. As soon as you’re through with it.”
She looked as if she were about to agree, and indeed she opened her mouth to speak. But then she froze, and her eyes narrowed dangerously.
This, he reminded himself, was a woman with two brothers. She would know how to fight. Deviously.
“I think you should read it with me,” she said to him.
Harry had all sorts of thoughts about that, most of them fed by his usual practice of reading novels before bed.
In bed.
“Buy another copy,” she said.
His lovely little daydream popped and disintegrated.
“We shall compare notes. It will be like a reading club. One of those literary salons I am always rejecting invitations to.”
“I am flattered beyond imagination.”
“As well you should be,” she said. “I have never invited anyone else to do the same.”
“I don’t know that the store will have another copy,” he said.