Thursday—November 26th, 2020

Night of Lady Danbury's Thanksgiving Bash, 8h10 pm

Cancer tended to invoke either panic or pity, but Penelope was coming to realize that there were decided advantages to being a perpetual wallflower.

First of all, no one really expected her to dance at parties, which meant that Penelope wasn't forced to hover at the edge of the dance floor, looking this way and that, pretending that she didn't really want to dance. She could sit off to the side with the other wallflowers and chaperones. She wanted to dance, of course—she quite enjoyed dancing, and she was surprisingly good at it, not that anyone ever noticed—but it was much easier to feign disinterest if people thought you couldn't physically dance.

Too extraneous activity and all that...

Second, the number of hours spent in dull conversation was drastically reduced. Portia thought that any type of social activity would take too much out of Penelope, and so she'd never thrust her younger daughter in the path of every eligible bachelor like she did with Phoebe and Philipa. She did force Penelope to meet the new head of Global Hastings, but that was, of course, in and out of itself, an exception—everyone who was anyone had introduced themselves to him tonight. Penelope felt sorry for him, in a way—the man looked just about as miserable as Penelope felt in this kind of event.

And finally, and maybe the best part of it all, she could eat without being judged because nobody ever spared a glance in her direction. It was maddening, considering the amount of food generally on display at parties, but women on the hunt for men weren't supposed to exhibit anything more robust than a bird's appetite. This, Penelope thought gleefully (as she bit into what had to be the most heavenly eclair), had to be the best sick perk of all. "Hmm. Good God," she moaned. 

"That good, eh?"

Penelope choked on the eclair, then coughed, sending a fine spray of pastry cream through the air. "Colin," she gasped, fervently praying the largest of the globs had missed his ear.

"Penny." He smiled warmly. "It's good to see you."

"And you!"

He rocked on his heels—once, twice, thrice—then said, "You look well."

"I feel well," she said, too preoccupied with trying to figure out where to set down her eclair to offer much variety to her conversation.

"No more scarves, uh?" he said, gesturing to her chin-length brown hair. "It looks nice."

"And it's all mine."

She smiled, he grinned, and the ice was broken. It was strange, because one would think her tongue would be tied the tightest around the man she loved, but there was something about Colin that set everyone at ease. Maybe, Penelope had thought on more than one occasion, part of the reason she loved him was that he made her feel so comfortable in her own skin.

"El tells me you had a splendid time in Greece," she said.

"I don't know what it is, but I seem to have a splendid time wherever I go."

Penelope found herself smiling with him. His good humor was infectious. "Don't say that to your mom," Penelope said emphatically. "She misses you when you're gone."

He leaned in. "Come, now, Penny, surely you're not going to start in on me? I'm liable to die of guilt if you do."

"You can't say 'die' near me, Colin. My therapist says so."

His narrowed eyes matched his crossed arms to perfection. "You've always been cheeky, did you know that?"

"I'm assuming you intended that as a compliment?"

"I'm fairly certain I'd be endangering my health if I'd intended it any other way. Can I say 'endangering' and 'health' or do your therapist frowns upon that too?"

Penelope was standing there hoping she'd think of a witty rejoinder when she heard a strange, wet, splattish sound. She looked down to discover that a large yellowish blob of pastrycream had slid from her half-eaten eclair and landed on the pristine wooden floor. She looked back up to find Colin's eyes dancing with laughter, even as his mouth fought for a serious expression.

"Well, now, that's embarrassing," Penelope said, deciding that the only way to avoid dying of mortification was to state the painfully obvious.

"I suggest," Colin said, raising one brow into a perfectly debonair arch, "that we flee the scene."

Penelope looked down at the empty carcass still in her hand. Colin answered her with a nod toward a nearby potted plant. "No!" she said, her eyes growing wide.

He leaned in closer. "I dare you."

Her eyes darted from the eclair to the plant and back to Colin's face. "I couldn't," she said.

"I think you should."

It was a dare, and Penelope was usually immune to such childish ploys, but Colin's half-smile was difficult to resist. Squaring her shoulders she dropped the pastry onto the soil. She took a step back, examined her handiwork, looked around to see if anyone besides Colin was watching her, then leaned down and rotated the pot so that a leafy branch covered the evidence.

"Penelope Featherington," Colin said, a hand over his heart, "I knew you were a badass at heart. I even wrote that in a bathroom stall in GH High."

"No, you didn't."

"I did though. It's in the boy's bathroom. I'll show you sometime."

"You're a terrible liar, did you know that?"

He straightened. "Actually, I'm an excellent liar. But what I'm really good at is appearing appropriately sheepish and adorable after I'm caught."

"What," Penelope wondered, "could I possibly say to that?" Because surely there was no one more adorably sheepish (sheepishly adorable?) than Colin Bridgerton with his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes flitting along the ceiling, and his lips puckered into an innocent whistle.

"You can continue being the only girl who truly gets me, Penny."

She snorted. "Yeah, right. The only girl. That's me." She watched his face carefully. "You know, that's why you were never punished as a child."

Colin immediately straightened to attention. "Excuse me?"

"It's just that—" she leaned in, as if imparting a grave secret— "when you make that face, I think you could get away with murder."

He coughed—not to clear his throat and not because he wasn't feeling well, but rather because he was so damned startled. Penelope was such a funny character. No, that wasn't quite right. She was... surprising. Yes, that seemed to sum her up. Very few people really knew her; she had certainly never developed a reputation as a sterling conversationalist. He was fairly certain she'd made it through three-hour parties without ever venturing beyond words of a single syllable.

But when Penelope was in the company of someone with whom she felt comfortable—and Colin realized that he was probably privileged to count himself among that number—she had a dry wit, a sly smile, and evidence of a very intelligent mind, indeed.

He wasn't surprised that she'd never attracted men; with a disease like hers, it was easy to scare people away. Everyone walked around eggshells with her, as if they feared she might break at the slightest touch. And she wasn't a beauty by any stretch, although upon close examination she was more attractive than he'd remembered her to be.

Her brown hair had a touch of red to it, highlighted nicely by Lady Dunbary's nickering old fashioned chandeliers. And her skin was quite lovely—that perfect peaches-and-cream complexion. But Penelope's attractiveness wasn't the sort that men usually noticed. And her normally shy and occasionally even stuttering demeanor didn't exactly showcase her personality.

"So you're saying," he mused, steering his mind back to the matter at hand, "that I should consider a life of crime?"

"No," she replied, a demure smile on her face. "Just that I suspect you could talk your way out of anything." And then, unexpectedly, her mien grew serious, and she quietly said, "Whereas I only ever get to use the cancer card. Which isn't nearly as fun."

Colin surprised himself by holding out his hand and saying, "Penelope Featherington, I think you should dance with me."

And then Penelope surprised him by laughing and saying, "Oh, that's very sweet of you, Colin, but you don't have to dance with me."

His pride felt oddly pricked. "What the hell do you mean by that?"

She shrugged. "I'm the sick girl. Nobody expects me to dance. And I don't really mind. You don't have to ask me just so that I don't feel left out."

"That's not why I asked," he protested, but he knew that it was exactly the reason.

She gave him a faintly pitying look, which galled him, because he'd never thought to be pitied by Penelope Featherington.

"If you think," he said, feeling his spine grow stiff, "that I'm going to allow you to wiggle out of a dance with me now, you're delusional."

"Colin, you don't have to dance with me just to prove you don't mind doing it," she said.

"I want to dance with you, Penny," he insisted. "Take my hand."

"Very well," she said, after what seemed to be a ridiculously long pause. "I guess it wouldn't be nice for me to refuse."

"It wasn't nice of you to doubt my intentions," he said as she accepted his outstretched hand, "but I'm willing to forgive you if you can forgive yourself."

"Oh, I do believe I'll manage," she replied, which made him smile.

"Excellent. I'd hate to think of you living with the guilt."

*

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