With Love (Blackwood & Friends #1)

Chapter 6- Shall I Compare Thee to a Beetle?

Chapter 6- Shall I Compare Thee To A Beetle?

Aaaaaahhhhhhh-

"Thank goodness," Blanche said, coming into the entryway and now two sets of grey Blackwood eyes were skewering her in place. "That's certainly an improvement, Nicki."

Aaaaaaahhhh-

"You are looking queer," Blanche was saying, tilting her head to the side curiously as she looked up at Nicola, still frozen on the stairs. "Did you eat shellfish again?"

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH-

"Perhaps it is merely your incessant badgering, sister, that has caused Miss Eversley to feel ill," Jason drawled, giving Blanche a wry smile that tilted one corner of those sensually wide lips upright.

Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. With a firm mental shake, Nicola forced her mind to quit the internal screaming of her horrified sensibilities, and quite possibly pin the most cadaverous smile in history to her tight, straining cheeks. Both Jason and Blanche gave her concerned looks as she woodenly completed her descent.

Oh, God, the box. He has the box. The box. The box with the letters. The box with my soul. The dirty, sordid box- "I am quite alright," Nicola explained, voice a tad too high pitched. She discreetly cleared her throat- act normal, damn it!- and tried again. "You know how I am before your grandmother visits."

A poor excuse, but it seemed to convince them that naught was amiss, even though her entire damn life was about to end! How could she be so stupid, so absent-minded as to leave the one sole object with heaps of evidence that spouted blithering nonsense about the dearest most blistering secret of her life? Oh, she was doomed, utterly doomed, she would return to London as soon as this meeting was over, she would claim a sickness, indeed she would consume mounds of shrimp willingly and render her stomach a riotous mess for days simply to eradicate herself from the Blackwoods' immediate circle.

Jason appeared to grimace slightly in sympathy and Nicola had to force her mind away from her dismal thoughts and focus on the conversation transpiring around her, her eyes desperate to stray to that dratted wooden box tucked beneath his arm but she dared not risk it lest any suspicion that hadn't already been allotted to her be strewn her way. "Lady Wilhelmina could not depart us soon enough," he agreed with a simple quirk of his lips- always humorous, always funny, as if he found amusement with everything he saw and everything he did. Nicola felt she might cast her accounts into the vase of hydrangeas that graced the centre of the hall on a polished wooden table. "But I suppose she is family." He shrugged jauntily at that and gave a very direct look towards Blanche. "Lord knows, you can't choose them."

"Oh, off with you!" his tiny sister snapped and made to leap for him but he darted nimbly up the stairs.

"Uh-uh, Bee!" Jason teased in a sing-song voice, climbing the steps two at a time with long, sure strides. "You'd best behave or our dearest grandmama will have your head!"

Fuming, Blanche glared after him for a moment, then turned to Nicola, who had hardly been paying the interaction any attention while she fought back waves of panic. Jason, with her box securely in his possession, had disappeared and he had cast nary a look of disdain, disgust, repugnance her way from the confessions that therein lay. If he had read the letters, he would know of what they contained- endless written diatribes of her unrequited love for him. He would have surely reacted to that knowledge in some way or the other. But no, he had seemed... positively normal. And, Nicola mused frantically as she attempted to reason herself into calmness, why would he cast suspicion that she were the author when none of the letters had ever been signed in her name? No, she had never used her name when she wrote those declarations... never. So she was innocent, and even if he did somehow find reason to think she contrived the words on those vellum parchments, she could deny it, for what proof would he have?