Page 49 of Inconvenient Honor
Papa, forgive me, but I just turned down a duke’s heir. I must leave with Sahin Pasha, she sobbed. Pray God I get away unseen.
The Maltareport failed to distract Richard; it also failed to engage his attention. He stayed at his desk late into the night after visiting Lily, picked it up repeatedly the day after, and still it lay in pieces around his office one more day after that.
This is not how I work, he thought, pushing the report back one more time. Women make me crazy. The sooner I offer for Sarah Wharton and get my life back to normal, the better.
He picked up a group of forms and requests requiring signatures, signed eight, and sent five more back to underlings with sharply worded notes. The clock chimed half past eleven in the morning.
The day gaped in front of him. For an odd moment, his entire life gaped in front of him.Damn,he thought, tossing aside his pen. When did you become melancholy? Will would laugh at you for this.
The earl could lighten anyone’s mood, but Richard remembered he planned to leave for the country the next day. I need to see him one more time before he escapes to his turnips and his children. The walk may do me good.
It didn’t. He arrived at Chadbourn House in a worse mood than he left Horse Guards.
“What has you so blue-deviled?” his friend asked over a heartier meal than Richard would have gotten at Sudbury House. They ate informally in the family’s sunny breakfast parlor.
“I am not blue-deviled. Not all of us are blessed with a frivolous nature,” Richard said, even though a black mood lay behind his visit.
“So you say.”
“I’ve decided to offer for Lady Sarah.”
Will grunted. “You don’t look happy about it. Trap is yawning?”
“No man goes to it willingly.”
“Some of us do.” The earl smiled beatifically. “It depends what bliss awaits.” He raised his eyes up, but whether to heaven or his bedroom, Richard couldn’t say. When he looked back at Richard, he sobered.
“What of Lily Thornton?” he asked softly.
“The Thornton woman is not my problem! ‘We are finished,’ she said. I’ll be damned if I act like a mooncalf over that woman. Lady Sarah is. I have three days until Lisle’s deadline.”
Will’s eyebrows shot up. “You make it sound like an execution! Don’t do it.”
“I need to get it over with,” Richard told him, “before this marriage business interferes with my work any further.”
“Nothing interferes with your work.”
Richard ignored that salvo. Perhaps coming here wasn’t a helpful idea.
“What’s new with you?” he asked.
“Very little. Catherine is anxious to get home; she’s too busy packing to join us. Children are more easily managed and certainly better enjoyed in the country. Have you seen Jamie lately?”
“Not for two weeks. Why? What is our newly elevated baron up to?”
“I don’t know, That’s why I asked. He’s been even more blue-deviled than you for over a week, something deep and not at all like him. He turned down a dinner invitation. He never turns down a free meal. I went over to his rooms yesterday to see about him.”
“And?”
“Gone. Scampered without paying his tab. No one could tell me where.”
Richard reached inside a pouch cunningly sewn into his waistcoat and pulled out a tiny fold of paper with notes in his most crabbed handwriting. He scribbled another note. “I’ll look into it,” he said.
“I hoped you would. Finding people, including lost majors and barons, is a bit of a specialty for you.” He raised a teacup in salute.
“My agents found you well enough that time in the Peninsula.”
“They got Andrew out of that hell of a French prison, too. You never told me how you managed that one,” Will said, looking at him under lowered lashes.
