“I see,” Joan said, one eyebrow raised. “I wouldn’t have imagined it, given Lord Greywick’s disdain for the animal tents at the fair.”
“I dislike seeing animals abused for human entertainment,” Thaddeus said, knowing how woodenly he spoke. He tried to smile, but it probably looked more like a grimace.
“We could give you a couple of peacocks for your zoo,” the duke suggested.
“No, we couldn’t!” Joan said indignantly. “Fitzy and Floyd aren’t going anywhere.”
“They scream at each other,” His Grace told the duchess. “I’m sure you’ve already been an unwilling audience to their nightly battles.”
Joan laughed. “Parth always says that when the day of Revelation arrives, we will miss the announcement, because Fitzy and Floyd are louder than angelic trumpets.”
When the gong rang for the meal, Thaddeus, as the second-most highly ranked gentleman in the room, ought to have escorted his mother to the dining room. But she attached herself to Otis, which left Joan.
Tonight she was dressed like a perfect lady, a member of the peerage. Her gown was yellow, paler than a lemon, with skirts embroidered in golden leaves. The sleeves ended at her elbow with fine pleats falling away from her arm.
She looked like a lemon ice, one of his favorite things in the world.
As they followed the others from the room, Joan slipped her hand into the crook of his arm. “I’ve been trying to think how to break the news to my father that I plan to perform Hamlet on a public stage in Wilmslow,” she said thoughtfully.
A curse escaped his lips before he could catch it back.
“Goodness me,” she said, laughing. “I can scarcely believe what I heard, Lord Greywick. The paragon of English society indulging in disrespectful language!”
He stared down at her, lips pressed into a line, and then made himself open them to say, “You called me Lord Greywick.”
She smiled up at him, and he realized with a jolt to his gut that she didn’t wear a scrap of face paint. Nothing on her lips. No beauty patch, nothing.
She was ordinarily, intrinsically this beautiful. Every day.
Thanks to the Prussian, a voice in his head pointed out, but the words meant nothing. Except they did.
A future duke couldn’t consider marrying a woman whose bloodlines weren’t impeccable. Something he knew long before Lady Bumtrinket began handing out her unwanted advice.
“I was shielding your reputation,” Joan explained, her eyes earnest. “Your mother may be within earshot.”
“My mother,” Thaddeus repeated, trying to pull his thoughts together.
“The duchess?” She looked at him inquiringly. “Your mother, that duchess. I’m sure you don’t want her to think that we’re on intimate terms.”
“In case she assumed that we were courting?”
“Well, she wouldn’t assume that, would she?” Joan said matter-of-factly. “No one above the rank of squire has properly courted me, unless I forced the issue. I enticed a few aristocrats into kissing me, but that was just to see the panic on their faces when they realized that honor obliged them to propose. My father would have enforced marriage, even over their parents’ strenuous protests. I enjoyed terrifying them into proposing, but I never wished to marry any of them.”
He frowned at her. “Conversation with you is trying. I generally follow the subject, but I find myself at sea. Are you talking about kissing that poor fool Anthony Froude?”
“I had reasons,” she said secretively.
He waited.
“One of my sisters overheard him telling a friend that I gleamed like false gold,” she admitted. Any other young lady would be unhappy, recounting the tale. But Joan merely sounded a trifle disgruntled and broke into a smile. “It took me a mere twenty minutes to bring him to heel and then kiss him in full view of his mother. I wanted him to panic.”
“About marrying you? A few days later, he told me that he’d never be happy with another woman.”
Joan shrugged. “He was just embarrassed and making up for his flirtation with gilt, not gold.”
“No,” Thaddeus stated. “He’s not. You are gold. You brought him to his knees, and he stayed there. As did the others, Joan. Their proposals had nothing to do with honor, and everything to do with desire.”
Joan looked up at him with a faint smile. “I don’t believe you, but I think it’s kind of you to suggest it.”
Prism bowed as they passed the butler to enter the breakfast room, where only one table was set this evening. The butler ushered Joan to a place, and an odd possessive twinge went through Thaddeus like a shrill noise when he realized she wouldn’t be beside him. He drew out her seat, and she happily settled between Lady Knowe and Otis.
For his part, he moved around the table to sit between the Duchess of Lindow and his mother, two charming ladies.
But . . .
Not what he wanted.
That was such an odd thought that he spent most of the meal wrestling with it. He never bothered about what he “wanted.” In fact, the idea was anathema. Only weak people had “wants” and “desires,” impulses that they put ahead of gentlemanly conduct.
Like his father, for example.
He hadn’t seen his father for over two years, not since His Grace made such a horrendous suggestion that Thaddeus nearly threw a punch at his sire, barely restraining himself in time.
They existed in a state of frigid warfare. The only engagement he had with his father was missives from the duke’s solicitors.
The very thought of those letters put Thaddeus in a foul mood.
From the moment he was born, he’d been molded to become a duke. His nanny, his tutors, his schools, his friends, his mother . . .
All of them.
They looked at him and saw a title, and a man who needed to be shaped to live up to the honor.
At some point he glanced to his left and right, just to make sure that he could keep gnawing over his childhood. His mother was happily chatting with Lady Knowe, and the duchess was flirting with her husband. The Duke of Lindow looked ten years younger than his age, and his duchess was beautiful.
Why the hell shouldn’t His Grace give his wife a smoldering look, particularly since Thaddeus had the distinct impression that the Duchess of Lindow would do everything in her power to distract her husband from his lingering grief over Horatius’s death tonight? Hell, he envied the man.
He wanted the same in his—
The idea startled him so much that he physically jolted and then snatched up his wineglass and emptied it.
“Is everything all right, dearest?” his mother asked, turning to him with a look of concern.
“Of course,” he said, summoning a smile from somewhere. “Do return to your conversation.”
“If you don’t mind,” his mother said. “Lady Knowe is telling me about some fascinating cures for a cold.”
Thaddeus went back to brooding. He’d like to have a healthy, satisfactory intimate life even at the age of fifty. Or sixty. He wasn’t actually sure of the duke’s age.
Of course, he had to marry for that to happen. He would be a duke someday, and that required a duchess.
The problem was that if he thought about marriage, the sound that echoed in his ears was the sweet, throaty moan that Joan uttered when he was kissing her.