She frowned into her tea cup at his first set of comments. He was just being stubborn, but she thought she could wait him out and he would tell her sooner or later. He had to want something from her, after all, or else he wouldn't have been so stubbornly emotional about her wanting to leave. Then he asked her what she wrote, and she set the teacup back down on the tray a bit too hard, demonstrating the sudden frustration she felt at the question. Emotional blackmail, again, and now he was trying to use it not only to get her to stay, but to get her to keep doing... this, whatever this was. She couldn't do this. She was right in the middle of everything, now that the article had been published, and she had to focus if she was going to pull it off. She didn't have time to be manipulated into becoming this man's friend, or lover, or whatever it was that he wanted from her. Emotional crutch, from what it seemed like so far.

"Right now, I write idiotic anonymous scandal pieces for Witch Weekly," she said curtly. "And that's all I'll have time to write for the next several weeks, I should think, while I try to work us out of this mess. In the meantime," she said, standing and smoothing out her skirts. "You may write me if you like, but not before five in the afternoon. I can't have someone at the House of Lytton noticing I'm receiving letters from Lachlan MacFusty. And if you think, for some reason, we need to see each other, I'll need at least three day's notice," she continued abruptly, as though this were a business transaction. "And we'll keep to the same schedule as tonight, and you'll have to get biscuits from somewhere."