As You Wish (The Summerhouse 3)

The way he said that made the blood rise in her cheeks. “I guess I was. A bit.”

“Are you kidding? That first day I was so scared of you I couldn’t say a word. I was afraid of what you’d do to me. Anybody who could sail over the cabbages like you did has to be dangerously strong. I was worried you might—”

Her look made him stop. Laughing, he got out of the truck.

Olivia walked away with her nose in the air, but she was repressing a smile. It was so good to hear humor. For weeks all she’d heard about this guy was how hard he worked. And she’d seen his body. She’d never once thought he might have a brain—or a personality.

As it always was, the front door to her parents’ house was unlocked. Inside, she looked around as though seeing it for the first time. She and her mother had decorated it. The current style was for bright colors and wallpaper painted on aluminum foil. But they had stayed with subdued colors of sand and cream and the pink of an early morning sunrise. She still liked it, but she had never before noticed the many photos of her around the long living room.

Kit didn’t say anything but began walking about the room and looking at the framed pictures. Her parents had insisted that she have a professional shot done in every costume she’d worn for a play, whether in high school or college. In one she wore a short pixie cut for Joan of Arc. She wore a nun’s hood for a high school play. Her favorite was a snapshot when she had on a flat-topped newsboy cap, her face solemn. She’d been home from school for the holidays and listening to her dad when her mother took the photo.

Kit picked that picture up and looked at it for a moment before setting it down. “Beautiful and talented,” he said softly, his voice even deeper than usual.

Olivia waved his compliment away as though it meant nothing, but she was quite pleased. “I’ll just get my clothes, then we can go into town and...” She wasn’t sure what they would do.

She hadn’t meant for him to go to her bedroom with her, but he followed her down the hall. Telling him to stay out seemed too provincial. She reminded herself that she’d lived in New York, so middle-class morals were beneath her.

Her room was in the same colors as the rest of the house. The wall behind her bed was papered in a very subtle pink-and-cream stripe. She and her mother’d had a crisp exchange of words about Olivia’s insistence of putting the paper on only one wall. But Olivia had seen it in a magazine and was adamant.

The pictures around the room were prints of Impressionist paintings: Renoir, Matisse, Degas.

As she opened her closet door, she glanced at him. He was standing in the doorway, looking very serious, and seemed to be studying what he was seeing. He looked like a director trying to decide if this was a good set for the scene he wanted to shoot.

With his hands clasped behind his back, he came into the room. “After careful observation, I have decided that in spite of your common ancestry and your family’s lack of prominence in an unremarkable town, I will consider you as my companion for an evening. Perhaps even for dinner.”

Olivia’s jaw dropped nearly to her chest. Of all the—When he picked up a copy of the script of Pride and Prejudice from her bedside table, she realized what he was doing. He was playing a version of Darcy.

She kept the look of horror on her face. “You insult me, my family, even my ancestry, yet you believe I will go out with you? Sir! I will never set foot in your company.”

Kit stiffened. “You say this because of what you have been told about me. Let me assure you that it is the Wicked Children who have taken away my dignity with their purple woolen chains of humiliation.”

“It has taken no chains to show your overweening pride. Your lack of garments, even to fawning about in the near nude brings your own disgrace.”

Kit opened his mouth to reply, but he couldn’t hold back. He started laughing. “My mother would agree with you, but I...”

Olivia waited for him to continue but he said nothing else.

He sat down on her cream-colored chair. “I was thinking of buying some bikes for those rapscallion kids. Anywhere around here I can get them?”

Olivia pulled a jumper and three blouses out of her closet and put them on the bed. “Trumbull’s Appliances can order what you want, but otherwise you need to go to Richmond or Charlottesville.”

“That’s the same way we do it where I live.”

“Oh?” she said in an encouraging way.

“Warbrooke, Maine. The town was founded by an ancestor of mine and it’s full of my relatives. If we don’t want to marry a cousin we have to go out of state.”

“And what if you do want to marry a cousin?” She pulled out a Bill Blass pantsuit, off-white with gold buttons. She was tired of wearing worn-out dresses all the time. Maybe one evening they could use the big mahogany table in the dining room.

“That’s as likely as your going out with the kid who delivers the propane.”

“I don’t know... Alfie’s kind of cute.”

“He certainly thinks you are.” There was venom in Kit’s voice. “And the guy who said he stopped by to see the old men couldn’t take his eyes off you.”

Olivia looked at him, startled. He was frowning deeply. “That’s Ted. His father owns the furniture store. I hardly know him.”

Kit didn’t reply, but he seemed annoyed. He got up, mumbled something about seeing her later, then left the room.