Page 71 of Better Than a Duke
As they left the milk wagon behind, his mother leaned out the coach window again. “Y—”
“Firstly, Mrs. Silbern is sister-in-law to a viscount and granddaughter to an earl,” he interrupted. “She is not low company. Secondly, I’m very interested to know if Pauline asked you to speak with me today.”
“Of course not. She has come to see me several times, mostly to lament that while she finds you and Rebecca endearing, you continue to keep her at arm’s length and she can’t fathom what she’s done wrong. You’re horrid to me, Beckett, but previously I’d always thought you ridiculously kind and caring to everyone else. Evidently you are more like me than either of us realized.”
“The hell you say.” She meant her words to cut, but then she’d always had a knife for a tongue. “If Pauline has concerns about me,” he continued, “she can bring them to me.Yourcounsel I put in the same rubbish box where I put your good wishes, ill wishes, compliments, criticisms, and curses. Good day, Mother. No, not good day. Just day.”
He kneed Charlie into a trot as the coach had to slow in the increased Pall Mall traffic of riders, shoppers, vendors, and pickpockets. Between Rebecca’s silence and his mother’s bombast his entire day felt like lemons. And if Rebecca didn’t want this match to go forward, he needed to figure out why.
He dismounted at White’s, wrapping Charlie’s reins around a post and heading inside. “Has Lord Nyfeld arrived?” he asked the first footman he came across.
“No, my lord. I believe you have a message at the front, however.”
Inwardly sighing, seeing at least three former friends, one of whom abruptly found something remarkably interesting in the newspaper while the other two went momentarily blind until hepassed, he returned to the front of the club. “You have a note for me?” he asked. “Hentrose.”
Another footman produced a folded note from a desk drawer. “Yes. Here you are, my lord.”
Beckett opened it. Nyfeld apologized, but a pressing personal matter had arisen and required his attention. No doubt it involved Lord Nyfeld not wishing to spend an hour chatting either about dead spouses—which Beckett had long ago realized seemed to be firstly what every one of his married male friends thought would happen—or about girl children, which was even worse. He hadn’t expected to arrange for their children to play together, as Nyfeld’s oldest was only five, but it would have been nice to be able to chat with an old friend. To at least ask if the earl knew more about Pauline Grenedy and her family than he’d been able to discover on his own. Perhaps he needed to begin a widowers’ club.
Evidently if he wanted his old friends back, he was going to have to remarry. That hardly seemed a good reason to do anything, however, considering how most of them had abandoned him ten years ago, and how the ones he did still see on occasion, like Nyfeld, had no idea what to make of him. Iris had said much the same thing about her own former friends.
Iris. To himself he could admit that she’d become the sticking point in his mother’s schemes. She followed the rules of Society only up to the point where she disagreed with them. And she refused to be walked over and ignored. He admired that, admired her, and he certainly lusted after her, but on the list of requirements he’d made before deciding to remarry, he’d had two necessaries: his wife would have common sense, and she would be a woman who by practice and example would encourage Rebecca toward propriety and politeness. Iris wasn’t even in the same book, much less on the same page.
Still, she’d become a friend, a confidante, and a lover, and after traveling across London with her and Edmund and Rebecca as they viewed wax heads and Egyptian mummies, balloonists and puppetry, he’d come to trust her opinion and her insight, and to appreciate her sharp, cynical sense of humor, and even her anger and frustration.
“Damnation.” If she’d been one of his male friends, he would likely have gone to find her, offered to purchase her breakfast, and chatted with her until his poor mood evaporated. But she wasn’t a man. She was a woman. A very attractive woman, with a keen mind, a keen wit, a healthy skepticism about Society, and a kiss that made him want to rhyme things.
She claimed to be nothing but a mother now. If that had been his only wish for Rebecca, she would have more than sufficed. But when he looked at Iris, he didn’t see some matronly figure in a mob cap. And no business partnership would suffice. Even now, even very nearly engaged to another woman, he could barely keep his hands and his thoughts off her.
“My lord?”
Starting, he looked up.Hmm. One of the Grove House grooms stood by his foot, staring up at him. Evidently, he’d ridden past his own house and over to the neighbors’. “Yes?”
“Are you going inside? I can take your horse, or return it to your stable, if you prefer.”
“I—Yes. Please take Charles home, if you would.” Dismounting, he handed over the reins and walked up to the Grove House front door.
Tollins pulled it open as he reached it. “The children are in the garden,” the butler informed him.
“Are there digging tools present?”
“Itisa garden, my lord.”
“So it is.” As he strolled into the house it occurred to him thathe hadn’t been looking for Rebecca. Thank God she was there, though, because otherwise he would have had no damned excuse at all for visiting.
As he passed the morning room, he heard Iris’s voice. Her angry, sharp one. He slowed. “So you felt the need to ride all the way over here and inform me that my nonexistent future child will never be recognized as a Howard.”
“Your children, singular, plural, current, and hypothetical, will never be recognized as having any sort of claim to the Howard name, titles, or fortune.”
He recognized the distinct nasal voice that had always reminded him of a honking goose. Francis Howard, the Marquis of Elmond—the Duke of Trent’s older son and heir. The man was certain of his own importance in the world, and had absolutely no sense of humor to make him the least bit palatable.
“I only have one child, Lord Elmond,” Iris returned, and Beckett could hear her clenched jaw in her words. “And I’m well aware that he is not a Howard. He is a Silbern, and content to be so.”
“I hope you don’t think me a fool, Mrs. Silbern, because I am clever as a fox. You may pretend that your only interest is in providing companionship for an old man in exchange for lifting your son’s profile in the world, but I know the truth. All of us do. And I have already hired solicitors. You will gain nothing by my father getting a child on you. If you attempt to wrest any portion of my inheritance from me, or to disparage my late mother in a challenge of my own legitimacy, I will see to it that you are exposed as a gumptious fusty lugs who took advantage of a doddering old man, and that whatever brat you bear likely isn’t even his.”
Well, someone was about to get pummeled. Beckett took a step closer to the half-closed door. The tail end of a light green skirt crossed the section of room he could see, the motion quick andprecise. Elmond deserved getting cracked over the head, but the halfwit would make certain everyone knew who’d struck the blow, and Iris would be finished in Society.
“Tell me more things you won’t allow me to do,” Iris stated, her voice clipped.
