Chapter Text
“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
If Kate Sharma had to bet her entire bank account on who could possibly be uttering those words to her, she’d be more likely to wager that Mr George Knightley himself had escaped the planes of his literary existence than the alternative. She would also, apparently, be bankrupt, because Anthony Bridgerton, in his non-fictitious glory, was sadly standing alive and well before her.
Of all the trains in the city, of all the cities in the world, it had to be this one.
He stood, runway-ready in his work attire beside the seat opposite her, shit-eating grin on his face as if he took no greater joy than hours-long rides on public transportation. He barely looked like he’d worked at all that day, not a curled hair out of place. Kate supposed he probably didn’t work at all, the work he was currently doing on her nerves notwithstanding.
Someone this infuriating shouldn’t be this attractive – it barely seemed genetically possible. Maybe he wasn’t real. Maybe she’d fallen asleep during her commute and this was one of those terrifying lucid dreams Colin tried to rope everyone into inducing by making them promise to lay ramrod straight while falling asleep on that camping trip last summer. It hadn’t worked then, but maybe it was happening now. Maybe that poltergeist she’d tried to summon with Edwina and Daphne via an internet-informed and wine-fuelled séance at a teenage sleepover finally crept its way into the mortal realm. Maybe this was a brain tumour Eloise was convinced she had every time she so much as had a headache after a night of drinking.
Before she had a moment to consider the possibility of her having some sort of malevolent audio-visual hallucination, he continued on.
“Emma? Really? Didn’t peg you as the romantic type.”
“And I didn’t peg you as someone who could read, let alone quote a Jane Austen character verbatim, but here we are.” She tried to compose herself, placing a finger between the pages of her novel to mark her place while continuing to size him up. “I’m sure if we hazard a glance outside, some pigs will be flying soon.”
“But you do peg me?” he returned with a smirk dirty enough to pollute three oceans, no doubt planning this very retort as soon as he’d boarded the carriage. He’d probably scripted this very exchange, knowing she couldn’t possibly refuse to rise to the bait.
Well, she’d be the one that got away then. She’d change the topic.
“What are you doing here?”
That had him. “What am I doing … here? On a train? I thought you would have figured out how travelling from one location to another works by now.”
“Not on a train,” she pursed her lips, “this train.”
“I finished work 30 minutes ago. This was the first train headed to the country,” he replied easily, now leaning against the seat opposite her as if he were getting his photograph taken for a perfume ad. A smattering of dark hair poked out from the button he’d undone at his collar, a little more sparse than the hairs covering his forearms exposed by the rolled up sleeves of his shirt.
She absently thought about how in some cultures, photography was feared for capturing one’s soul. Not a superstition for him to worry about, then. Surely only a soulless ghoul would be purposely torturing her after a work week that had left her haggard, right before a journey that would deprive her of contact with a comfortable bed for multiple hours.
His arm flexed, just so, and she gulped away her distraction.
“You’re not driving?”
“I wanted a longer ride.”
She grinned this time, perhaps even more filthily than he had moments before. “Don’t we all?”
He mirrored her expression and raised an eyebrow. “Are you not going to invite me to sit with you?”
“Can you behave for 2 hours?”
A wolfish grin consumed his face. “Oh my darling Kate, I can do whatever you want me to do for however long you want me to do it.”
Never one to back down from a challenge, she replied with a breezy wink to mask the reel of images her traitorous mind conjured up at the thought.
“Good boy,” she added for good measure as he made himself comfortable opposite her, thankfully without knocking into her crossed legs.
He’d locked eyes with her at that, mouth only slightly parted. Maybe she’d unsettled him a bit, too. Good. He needed to be ruffled up – too pristine, and kempt, and occasionally uptight. Always put together, always restrained. Always duty-bound. Always reminding everyone within earshot of just how duty-bound he was. Always tempering the fire that smouldered behind his eyes, restraining himself, redirecting and rerouting any semblance of passion into tightly-wound composure.
Sometimes she’d stoke the embers, just to sneak a glimpse at something she wanted to see unbridled, to glance at something playful and warm instead of calculating and bordering on cruel. He had such a lovely smile when he was unguarded, that traitorous part of her brain loved to remind her. She needed the other parts of her brain to stage a mutiny, because the horny captain of her mental ship was clearly about to steer her off a ledge.