Annoyed, she made herself laugh. “Aunt Knowe saw what happened to your headgear, Lord Jeremy, and declared you a fallen angel. ‘Fallen’ might not be the right word. ‘Wilted’? ‘Flabby’?” She paused for a moment and then said it anyway, because . . . why not? “Or is the term I want . . . ‘flaccid’?” She traded the smile for a mock innocent look.
It felt exhilarating to make a joke in front of one of her suitors. As if she were free to be herself for the first time in a year.
Jeremy pulled off his halo and regarded the way it bent over like a flower in need of water. Then he tossed it to the side. “If you want Greywick to marry you—or any gentleman to marry you—you need to do a better job of appearing ladylike.”
If the viscount had been put off by her unladylike pun, it was all to the better. He obviously would want a paragon as his duchess, given how perfect he was.
She was not that woman.
Rather to her surprise, Greywick’s mouth was quirked in a smile. “I find Lady Boadicea a perfect lady.”
Huh.
The man whom she’d only seen looking as solemn as a judge apparently hadn’t taken offense at her play on words.
“I take it back,” Jeremy said, his eyes narrowing. “You shouldn’t marry that worthless Puritan.”
“I’m not a Puritan,” the viscount replied. “You’re supposed to play the part of one of my oldest school friends, and fight my cause for me. Unless you want the lady in question for yourself?”
The question hung in the air just long enough for Betsy’s breath to catch—and then Jeremy Roden snorted.
Yes, snorted.
And upended the bottle of whisky he was holding as if his response wasn’t denigrating enough.
Chapter Four
Jeremy thought fast while he allowed the liquor to burn down into his gut. He had to conjure up a reason not to marry Betsy that wasn’t too insulting.
Tonight she was dressed all in white, which wasn’t unusual for a young lady. Naturally, her halo didn’t tilt to the side: It sprang from the top of her wig, perfectly positioned to advertise her virtue.
Halo or not, Betsy was far from angelic.
A tempestuous, opinionated, seductive little devil, perhaps.
He didn’t want to marry her, or any other woman. He could scarcely manage his own life. In fact, the evidence was pretty clear that he couldn’t manage his own life since he was living in Lindow Castle rather than his own townhouse.
“I would never marry someone called Betsy,” he stated, lowering his bottle. “Everyone knows that a Betsy must be an adorable girl who gathers roses, loves kittens, and scrawls love notes in her diary. Lady Betsy’s sweet and modest disposition would be wasted on a reprobate like myself.”
“Nothing wrong with kittens,” Greywick put in. His tone indicated that not only did he think Betsy charming—the fool—but he would fill his house with felines if she wanted. The man was seduced.
No, that wasn’t the right word.
Dazzled.
Sun-struck. It was a bit surprising, given how intelligent Greywick was. But then Betsy had efficiently bewitched all the single gentlemen who had visited the castle since Jeremy arrived at the beginning of September.
Brains or no brains, they couldn’t seem to help themselves from falling under the spell of her sugary smiles and blue eyes. To Jeremy’s cynical mind, it proved that mankind was endlessly optimistic.
What woman was as simple as she appeared?
Let alone one who appeared to be such a thoroughly proper young lady? Perfection was always a mask.
“To clarify my point,” Jeremy said to Greywick, “kittens or no, you have no competition in me. I’m not one to wed, even given the fact that a mere marquess could never take precedence over a duke.”
“A title does not determine whom a lady marries,” Betsy said tartly. “It may be hard to conceive, but myriad reasons dictate why a lady would choose another man over you.”
A less observant man might have been foolish enough to believe the enchanting portrait Betsy offered at this moment: rosy lips and cheeks, a sweetly peaked chin, wide blue eyes that darkened when she was thoughtful.
She appeared angelic.
Sort of. If you ignored the independent look in her eye, and unbelievably, most men seemed to do that.
“So, have you answered Greywick?” he asked, ignoring her comment. Given the women who had tried either to seduce or to compromise Jeremy in the last week alone, he wouldn’t have trouble marrying a lady—if he had the inclination to do so. “I think you should take him. I’ve been watching you mow down swaths of suitors in the last two months and he’s the best of the lot.”
He could read the answer in her eyes.
Poor Greywick.
Being flatly rejected was undoubtedly a new experience.
“You’ve been staying in Lindow Castle for quite some time?” Greywick asked, looking somewhat displeased. Apparently, he didn’t entirely believe that Jeremy was disinclined to court this duke’s daughter . . . or any duke’s daughter.
Betsy intervened. “Lord Jeremy has been helping my brother North enlarge his stables.”
Nice of her not to tell the truth.
Of course, she didn’t know the whole truth.
One evening he’d set off to meet Parth in Vauxhall Gardens, only to discover that idiots were setting off fireworks, which sounded remarkably like cannons. Next thing he knew he woke up in Parth’s house—having lost the memory of an entire week.
He still couldn’t get around that.
Greywick nodded. “You were always excellent with horseflesh. I remember the black mare you brought to university.”
“Dolly,” Jeremy said, his mouth easing into a shadow of a smile.
“Do you still have her?”
“I—no,” he said, pushing away the memory of what happened to Dolly. She had the heart of a lion, but she couldn’t save herself on the battlefield, any more than he could save her.
Greywick wasn’t interested in Dolly’s fate, and why should he be? He had eyes only for Betsy. She certainly looked the part of a docile duchess.
Yet she was as fierce as her brothers—aye, and slightly mad, the way all the Wildes were. God knew, when he and North had been in battle together, North had played the berserker on occasion.
There was that time when North dived off a cliff and swam down the river to the HMS Vulture to warn them—but that train of thought led to darkness, and Jeremy forcibly cut it off, returning his attention to the farce about to unfold before him.
Betsy saw bleak desolation cross Jeremy’s eyes at the mention of his mare, and decided that chatter with an old friend wasn’t helpful. “Now that we’ve clarified Lord Jeremy’s lack of interest in marriage,” she said, “perhaps we should return to the ballroom, Lord Greywick.”
She gave her suitor a merry smile, emphasizing that she didn’t care in the slightest that Jeremy Roden had been so perishingly rude about the possibility of marrying her.
Of course she didn’t want a proposal from Jeremy Roden.
But did he have to make it so obvious what he thought of her?
Kittens? Love notes? She didn’t even own a diary.
From the age of fourteen, she had never allowed herself to have infatuations, the way other girls did. Half her class in the seminary had swooned at the mere mention of her older brother Alaric. They collected prints of him supposedly engaging in heroic exploits.