Woo'd in Haste Read Online Free PDF Page A

make a good impression on Bianca. “What do you observe, Thomas?”
    “About what?”
    “About what, Mr. Dore,” Miss Smith corrected.
    “About anything. When you go outside to . . . what do you like to do, Thomas?”
    “Fish. I like to fish.”
    “Very well.” Unfortunately, that was one pastime Luc knew very little about. “When you are out there . . . fishing . . . you decide if you have found a promising spot how?”
    “We always go to the same spot. The stream has plenty of trout.”
    “So you know because you repeat the experiment again and again and get the same result. How would you determine if a different spot had a good supply of fish?”
    “I’d ask my father?”
    Luc laughed. “What if you were by yourself?”
    Thomas’s forehead crinkled as he thought. “I suppose I’d observe.”
    “Observation is very good,” Luc agreed. “For example, today I am observing you and Miss Smith so that I know best how to teach you.”
    Miss Smith laughed and Luc relaxed a bit inside. His very first lesson taught. That hadn’t been so bad after all.
    T he day passed painfully slow. He had hoped teaching would not be as interminably boring as he remembered being the student to be. Instead, the day was stressful, as if he were still a student about to undergo exams. At some point during each lesson, Miss Smith turned to him and asked him to elaborate on some small detail. Thankfully none had been about anything he did not know, but there had been a close call with a discussion of Pompeii. Luc had avoided providing the specific year of Mount Vesuvius’s eruption by describing his experience when he visited the archaeological site.
    That offered only brief respite from the agony of his return to the schoolroom, and from being so close to the object of his affections and yet so far. However, after lunch, when he learned Bianca had left to visit a friend and was not expected until the next morning, the rest of the day was like walking through Vesuvian lava.
    Not that he had anything against Thomas.
    In fact, the next day, when Miss Smith left them to their own devices for the morning, Luc started to relax. No longer performing for show, Luc found himself appreciating details of Latin over which he had despaired as a youth. Somehow everything was much easier and it was strange to think it had ever been difficult for him. Better yet, Thomas was clearly intimidated and impressed, and it was fun having a young boy look up to him.
    It was just after lunch, after realizing that once again a day would pass without so much as a glimpse of Bianca because she was attending the dinner at the Colburn house to which Reggie had invited the Mansfields but not their new tutor (an ironic injustice that knifed at Luc incessantly), it occurred to Luc that he could mine Thomas for information. Surely Thomas would have insights into Bianca’s likes and dislikes, dreams and more.
    “Does your sister like lavender biscuits as much as you?” he asked over tea.
    Thomas shook his head. “Much more. Bianca loves anything sweet. Miss Smith says she keeps the sugar trade afloat.”
    “Is there anything else she particularly likes?”
    “Books.”
    “Any hobbies?”
    Luckily Thomas didn’t seem to identify this interchange as out of the ordinary and as the interrogation it so clearly (to Luc) was.
    He thought of the pastries he’d tasted in Vienna, Budapest, and Paris, each more decadent than the last. And there was a little patisserie in London that made a decent effort of his favorite tortes and cakes. If he were not pretending to be an impoverished tutor, he’d send for a box of delicacies with which to woo Bianca.
    Over the course of the afternoon, he peppered in a dozen or so little questions. And by the end of dinner he knew that Bianca preferred cocoa to tea, loved anything a particular shade of yellow, enjoyed walking across the property and the three-mile walk into town (which Thomas didn’t like as much). She hated to