And Mrs. Spencer was standing over them, surveying what appeared to be a wildly indecent sleeping arrangement though all parties were fully clothed.
“I can take the birds outside if you’d like,” Pru said, scrambling to her feet. “Silly chickens shouldn’t be in the house!”
“They were in your room, Miss Valentine!”
She felt the woman’s voice all the way down to her fingertips. From the moment Pru stepped onto the property, she understood Mrs. Spencer could kill a man at twenty paces. But this was the first time she was well and truly scared.
“I found these chickens in your room!” Mrs. Spencer bellowed. “Roosting because they had plenty of space to do so, my randy assistant having flown the coop!”
“I haven’t flown the coop,” Pru insisted, using a foot to feel for her shoes. She swallowed, the taste of the wine thick on her tongue. “I was helping Mr. Seton with his, er, writing. And fell asleep.”
“Passed out, more like, judging from the smell and your purple mouth. Is there a particular reason you’ve decided to cop off with my biographer?”
“Cop off?” Win said, immediately prodded into consciousness. “Is someone copulating? That hardly seems fair.”
“Lord Almighty!” Mrs. Spencer said and tossed up her hands.
The woman shook both fists at the ceiling, which sent the birds flapping about the room. The chickens spent the better part of five minutes disrupting papers and banging into windows and walls until finally releasing themselves out into the hallway.
“No one’s copulating,” Pru mumbled and scooped up her shoes. “Not to worry.”
With both shoes gripped to her chest, Pru scooted to the room’s periphery and tried to slither out the door. Mrs. Spencer kicked it closed.
“No one’s leaving until you confess your sins.”
“You’re not a priest,” Pru said. “And I don’t have any sins.”
“More’s the pity,” Win said as Pru shot him a look. “Aw, Mrs. S., we’re not copulating. Don’t you worry, all body parts have remained with their original owners.”
Pru scowled again, an error in judgment to be sure. Her cute glower was an invitation, a call to increased cheekiness.
“Don’t give me any of your seductive gazes, Miss Valentine,” he said with a wink. “This poor old man can’t handle your wiles.”
“That was a glare, not a gaze!”
“Miss Valentine, I didn’t take you for such a harlot!” Mrs. Spencer said.
Pru groaned. Her mistake, thinking Win Seton was a chum for those few minutes. It astounded, his dire lack of social graces. No surprise he was thirty-four and unmarried. The bloke was a fiasco.
“Nothing happened,” Pru said. “I was trying to save your alleged biographer from mental collapse. He’s being impossible on purpose.”
“It wouldn’t be accidentally now, would it?” Win said with a chuckle. “Anyway, a harlot is not so bad an insult. ‘If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.’”
It was a quote Pru recognized immediately, but it did not make her any less cheesed.
Okay, perhaps it made her a touch less cheesed. The very slightest.
“Very nice, Seton, with your D. H. Lawrence,” Mrs. Spencer said, picking up on the reference as quickly as Pru had. “He was a friend of mine, you know. I have a book of his sexually explicit drawings in my library.”
“Please. Show them to me straightaway.”
“You are both ridiculous,” Pru said. “As I told you, nothing happened and Mr. Seton would be lucky to experience one of my seductive gazes.”
“Here, here,” Win said.
“Edith Junior vowed that you were a nice girl,” Mrs. Spencer said. “Tight with one of the best families in Boston. What would the Kelloggs think of these exploits in the boudoir?”
“I don’t think the Kelloggs would much care.”
“Kellogg?” Win asked. “As in the foodstuffs?”
Pru nodded. She moved from the barricaded doorway and slumped down into Win’s writing chair.
“Mrs. Spencer … I am a nice girl,” she insisted, though it didn’t sound remotely convincing. “This is a misunderstanding.”
“What’s to misunderstand about you taking sexual advantage of my biographer! You’re not even French!”
“How many times do I have to say it? There’s nothing sexual! He wishes there was something sexual!”
“I like the way you say ‘sexual,’” Win said and wiggled his brows.
“Oh good grief! Don’t you think he’s more the taking-advantage type? I’m a fresh, young innocent girl of only nineteen. He’s a grizzled old bachelor.”
“Why, I’m gobsmacked,” Win said. “Simply beside myself! Miss Valentine, tell her the truth. Here I was, innocently pecking away on my manuscript—”
“I wouldn’t touch you with someone else’s hands!” she barked.