“You’re a beast,” she hissed, blinking back the sting of tears. After a deep inhalation she warned,

“Don’t ever mention that night to me again.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Regretting it?” Despite his cavalier tone, his expression turned guarded.

“No,” she whispered, and for a moment their gazes clashed. “I’ll never regret it.”

However, she feared she would learn to if he continued to debase the memory. And that she could not endure. She had arrived at several conclusions since that night. One of which was that she would do her duty, find a husband and be a good wife—even stomach the required intimacies of the marriage bed with a man other than Nick. What else could she do? He showed no indication of stopping her husband hunt.

And secondly, when life became too dull, or she felt especially lonely in her marriage of convenience, she would pull out the memory of their one night from the far recesses of her heart like an old trinket to be stroked and cherished. Her one night with Nick would be enough. It had to be.

The memory must remain untarnished. No small feat on her part. Especially when he did such an excellent job of being unpleasant. Her best chance lay in avoiding him.

“You might insist on remaining here as my watchdog, but we don’t have to keep company. Let’s agree to keep our distance, shall we?”

He shifted in his saddle, the leather creaking beneath his weight as he mulled over her suggestion. “It will do more harm than good to present the picture of estranged relations.”

She stared back in mutinous silence, her chin set at a stubborn angle even as she acknowledged the truth of his words. Blast him. The thought of Nick trailing her about the place sent a nervous tremor through her. How could she pretend to care for another with the one she truly wanted watching?

Her face must have revealed some of the shock her revelation yielded, because his brow creased in concern. “Meredith, what is it?”

She stared at him dumbly, seeing nothing as her mind reeled. She wanted Nick. And not just in the carnal sense. She loved him. Since the night she had met him in the corridor outside the nursery and glimpsed the forsaken boy, her heart had longed for him, had wanted, irrationally, to erase all his hurts. When he had followed her into the fields after Sally Finney’s death and taken her into his arms, she had forgotten the dead woman’s blood staining her hands. Forgotten everything save him.

“Meredith.” He nudged his horse closer and grabbed hold of her wrist as if he expected her to swoon and fall from her mount. “Are you unwell?”

 Yes, her mind screamed. Vastly unwell. She would never be well again. Not as long as she was in love with a man who insisted she marry someone else. A man who thought she was the greatest wretch to walk the earth.

She lifted her shoulders in a shrug of calculated indifference to belie the turmoil rolling inside her. “I’m fine,” she lied, voice faint.

With a twist of her wrist, she freed herself and wrapped her fingers tightly about her reins, adding in a firmer voice, “Shall we ride back to the house and announce your arrival? The ladies will be pleased. Most of the gentlemen are out hunting. Your presence will be appreciated.”

“Very well,” he agreed, his eyes studying her doubtfully. Clearly, he didn’t think her well. Only Meredith didn’t care. He could think whatever he liked as long as he never thought her in love with him.

Chapter 20

The ladies retired to the drawing room after dinner and took up their embroidery or correspondence discarded from earlier in the day. The gentlemen ventured to the library to smoke their cigars and do whatever it was that men did in the absence of women. Meredith busied herself with a letter to Maree at one of the small writing tables, pretending not to feel Lady Havernautt’s eyes drilling into her from across the room.

“How long were you married. Lady Brook-shire?” Lady Havernautt’s blunt question quieted the hum of feminine conversation.

The interrogation had begun. Meredith had been expecting it for some days. The other ladies watched with avid interest as she lifted her head to smile politely at Teddy’s mother, a morbidly obese woman who spent her days wedged in a wheelchair specially made for her substantial girth. She was unsure whether Lady Havernautt used the wheelchair for any physical handicap other than being too obese to walk. Upon seeing her physical condition, it was clear why the viscountess no longer traveled to Town. Meredith felt a stab of sympathy. Perhaps she would be equally ill-tempered if she was confined to a chair.

“Seven years.”

“And no children?” Lady Havernautt’s frown disappeared into the folds of fat lining her chin.

“Can you not conceive? A woman is of no value to her husband if she cannot give him a son.”

Countless stares swung Meredith’s way. Her face grew hot under so much attention. She choked back several retorts, all totally inappropriate. She could not offend her hostess and potential mother-in-law. This she knew. But neither could she submit meekly to the rudeness of her probing questions. It would set an intolerable precedent if in fact she became Lady Havernautt’s daughter-in-law.

“And what of a husband’s value?” she asked directly. “I find it interesting how one immediately assumes the wife is responsible when a couple does not bear children.”

Her comments generated a tittering of scandalized whispers among the ladies present. Lady Derring nodded approvingly at Meredith from across the room, assuring her that she had not overstepped herself. Portia winked encouragingly.

“And have you any reason to believe your late husband responsible for your lack of offspring?”

Lady Havernautt challenged. “How do you know that the failing does not lie in you?”

Meredith longed to astonish them all and confess that she knew, without a doubt, that the fault rested with Edmund, that his unwillingness to consummate their marriage might have something to do with it. Instead, she answered sweetly, “I have no evidence it is my fault, so I will not leap to that conclusion.”

“You appear unusually confident that you are not barren,” Lady Havernautt accused, a hard glint to her eyes.

“Only another marriage would resolve the speculations on that account,” Lady Derring inserted smoothly from across the room, for whatever reason not bringing up her alleged miscarriage.

Perhaps because that would not necessarily hearten Lady Havernautt’s misgivings. Whatever the case, Meredith was grateful not to have that particular lie bandied about.

The vicountess clearly wanted her son married to a woman capable of producing heirs, and although there were never any guarantees on that score, she knew she would not come across as the strongest candidate with seven years of marriage behind her and no offspring to show for it.

“A grave risk for her next husband, would you not say, Your Grace?” Lady Havernautt demanded, glaring Meredith’s way.

Thankfully, the gentlemen chose that moment to rejoin the ladies, carrying with them the faint odor of cigars and a welcome rumble of conversation.

Teddy immediately knelt beside his mother’s wheelchair, his voice solicitous as he asked,

“Mother? You are not too tired, are you? You have pushed yourself today.”

Lady Havernautt adopted a plaintive tone, her hand fluttering weakly in the air, not at all resembling the fierce dragon of a moment ago. “Perhaps I should retire. It has been a trying day.”

“Shall I have one of the maids wheel you to your room?”

Lady Havernautt grasped Teddy’s hand in one of her pudgy paws. “Why don’t you push me to my room and read to me a bit before bed. Your voice always soothes me so.”

He looked from his mother to his guests, his expression uncomfortable. Meredith pasted a courteous smile on her face to conceal her incredulity. He could not mean to abandon a score of houseguests in order to read a bedtime story to his smothering mama!

“Very well, Mother.” With a deep sigh, Teddy moved behind the wheelchair, granting Lady Havernautt the opportunity to settle a look of triumph on Meredith. Score one for Mother.

“Everyone, please entertain yourselves. I will return shortly.” Although he addressed the room at large, Teddy focused an apologetic gaze on her. She gave a brief nod of acknowledgment before he wheeled his mother out.

When they were gone, she scanned the room, catching sight of Nick within a small circle of men.

His gaze met and captured hers. Amusement sparkled in the dark depths. That her predicament with Teddy and his dreadful mother was the source of such amusement went without saying. She sniffed and returned her attention to her letter, a little mystified as to why Lord Havernautt’s pandering to his insufferable mother did not worry her more. Pinning her matrimonial hopes on a mama’s boy should most definitely elicit worry. Strangely, she could not stir herself to care.

“It seems you have been abandoned.”

She looked up as Lord Derring dropped inelegantly into the chair across from her. She gestured to the crowded drawing room. “Hardly abandoned, Your Grace.”

“Well, can one not be alone in a crowded room?” Lord Derring swirled his glass of port and took a healthy swallow, appearing to be on his way to blissful inebriation. “I find that to be the case,”

he muttered philosophically as he carelessly waved his glass, its contents sloshing over the rim, spilling down his fingers and dribbling to the floor. Unmindful of the Oriental carpet he stained, he continued, “All these gels without an intelligent thought in their prim little heads. But the ol’

dame says I have to pick one.” He nodded to his grandmother reproachfully.

Welcome to the club, Meredith thought with a decided lack of charity. “There are quite a few accomplished young ladies here, Your Grace.”

“Yes,” he murmured, his lips hugging the rim of his glass. “They can all play the pianoforte and recite their lineage like any well-taught child. But those aren’t exactly the traits I desire in a wife.”

And what, she wondered, could those traits be? The ability to overlook his excessive gambling as he dragged them into financial ruin? Nick’s absolution of Lord Derring’s debts would only serve as a reprieve, not a permanent solution, if his recent presence at the Lucky Lady was any indication. In no time he would be facing debt again. His family right along with him. Poor Portia. Meredith only hoped the girl married and removed herself from her brother’s damaging sphere before then.

He turned assessing eyes on her. “You’re not like them,” he observed, a touch of wonder in his voice, as though this realization had just occurred to him. “You have intellect, maturity, confidence. Must be your state of widowhood.”

“Or my advanced years.” Sarcasm tinged her voice.

Lord Derring guffawed. Others swung curious glances their way.

“That’s what I mean. Such wit,” Lord Derring said in too loud tones. She eyed the drink in his hand suspiciously, suspecting he was already inebriated. “Too bad your dowry is what it is. I mean it is entirely respectable—I have inquired— but I’m needing more than a respectable sum.”

Aside from wondering how the sum of her dowry came to be public knowledge when she herself did not know the amount, she doubted Croesus himself could supply enough money for Lord Derring to gamble away.

“Lady Meredith, would you care to take the air on the veranda with me?”

The voice, that deep, dark slide of velvet, sounded above her head, firing her blood. Her eyes cut upward, noting the hard set of his mouth, the darkness of his gaze, which demanded compliance.

Lord Derring tipped his head back to look up at Nick. “Caulfield, old man, still can’t get over you’re an earl.”

“Likewise,” Nick murmured, hardly sparing a glance for the duke as he held out his hand for her.

“Suppose it makes it easier to countenance that I lost so much coin to a peer and not just some commoner.” Lord Derring laughed heartily, oblivious that he had gained everyone’s notice. From across the room his grandmother’s face reddened at his thoughtless remarks. She clearly did not relish her grandson advertising that he had a gambling problem before potential brides, even if it was fairly common knowledge among the ton.