Sweet Love of Mine

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Sebastian ushered her inside silently, shielding her frame with his body from the crowd of curious onlookers who had gathered about on the pavement outside Weatherly House. Emily did not heed his coaxing up to her private chambers and instead swerved to the left, resuming her vacant spot by the window. “Em,” he said mildly. “Perhaps you should rest.”

“It was my mother, Sebastian.” Emphatically, she perched her delightful little derriere on her floral lace cushion and turned her profile away from him. Sunlight immediately warmed the contours of her face. “She might come back.”

He was sceptical but refrained on telling her so. The surety in her own voice, of her own convictions, pricked his conscience and his soul. He was not the one to dash her hopes. Instead, he slipped his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers and leaned against the nearest wall, watching her quietly and speculatively, until he remembered that he wanted to send a servant after the woman Emily had chased down the street.  At present, he was loath to leave the dejected girl by the window but he owed her the promise he had made.

Casting her one last furtive glance, Sebastian strode down the hallway in the direction of the study he used to conduct business when he was in residence.

Sophie interjected him with as much force as a barrelling boulder hurtling towards him. In a blur of puce lace, she latched onto his arm and forcibly hauled him into an adjacent parlour room- one of the less frequented ones. This one, he fleetingly noticed, was rather pink. Garishly so- the walls were striped with it, the furniture dotted with it along with several faded flowery assemblages of tactless design. One could quite lose their accounts in such a room. “I say,” he grumbled disparagingly, ignoring the nauseatingly feminine parlour he was in and focusing instead on his injured pride at being physically manhandled by an aging woman half his size. “Unhand me, you veritable baggage.”

“Bah!” Having secured his presence within the wretchedly pink chamber, Sophie enunciated his entrapment with a heavy slam of the doors. “I am hardly assured of your availability these days for an audience. Why should I be sensitive to your physical wellbeing?”

“Because I am your grandson?”

She snorted dismissively and waved her gnarled hand about. “One can never be sure.”

“Sophie!”

“I am not, of course, saying your mother was a tramp.”

“Was she?”

She snorted again. “Who’s to know?”

“Sophie!”

The cane thumped imperatively against the thick rug lying dustily against the floor. Sebastian eyed it critically and wondered if the servants even avoided the tawdry room. “That is neither here nor there. Shall I call for some prunes?” she mused flightily.

“Gads, woman. You dragged me in here for a purpose. Spit it out- I’d like to send a man out for Emily.”

“Oh!” Sophie’s bejewelled cane thumped triumphantly again. “Emily, yes! I have to tell you something very important, my boy. First, do not bother with the prunes. I do not feel inclined for them any longer.”

Sebastian stifled the urge to curse. “I assume you were going to say something pertaining to Emily?”

“What’s that now?”

He ran his hand through the side of his dark hair, gritting his teeth in frustration. Besides the indubitable errand he had to run, he could not trust Emily not to run off again after some elusive brown-cloaked stranger. The girl was too volatile and distraught. Lord knew she could probably catch sight of a mongrel’s ragged tail and believe it to be the edge of a cloak. “Damnation, Sophie, but you are trying! I have to send men out in search of Emily’s mother-”