“Late?” His eyebrows shot up. “At what time is breakfast served, pray?”
“At eight o’clock sharp,” she said.
“Sharp. I see.” He strolled farther into the room, his hands at his back, and circled around the easel so that he could see what was displayed there. “And whose rule is that, my lady?”
“Gil—” She did not complete the name or try to cover up her mistake. It had been Gilbert’s rule—the Earl of Wanstead’s. Theformerearl’s.
The present Earl of Wanstead turned his head to look at her. He said nothing for a few moments—he did not need to. But she would not dip her head or look away from those cold eyes. She had not been mistaken last evening about his hostility toward her, she thought.
“Perhaps,” he said, the courtesy in his voice at variance with that look, “you would present me to your daughters?”
He commended Tess on her painting and her choice of bright colors. She beamed happily up at him. He looked down the columns of Rachel’s work and commented on its neatness and accuracy.
“You have made only one mistake,” he said. “I wonder if you can find it for yourself. It is in the second column.”
Far from being offended, Rachel bent her head over the page and began to check her figuring, a look of intense concentration on her face.
Christina resented his interference—quite unreasonably so. He had not said or done anything that might be called high-handed. But she was very aware that though he had never been named the children’s guardian, but that everyone of her acquaintance acceptedherin that role, nevertheless by law she could not as a woman be their sole guardian. That made him ...
“Can they be left to their nurse’s care?” the earl asked now. “May we adjourn to the library?” He offered his arm.
Christina turned away to give some unnecessary instructions to the girls and their nurse. Then she preceded him from the room, pretending that she had not noticed his arm. She could not bear the thought of touching him.
How foolish! After longer than ten years—a lifetime, an eternity—she was afraid to touch him.
She was still wearing black this morning, from her lacy cap on down to her slippers. He found the fact annoying, though he was not sure why. It seemed excessive, perhaps, to mourn so ostentatiously a man who had been dead for well over a year—even a husband. Yet there was no other sign of brokenhearted grief in her. She bore herself proudly, even arrogantly, with straight spine and lifted chin. But really, he decided as a footman opened the library doors and she preceded him inside the room, how she chose to mourn was none of his business. Nor was the depth of her feelings. She was just Gilbert’s widow. Nothing else.
But he felt irritated.
“Take a seat,” he said, directing her to one of the chairs beside the fire. He did not immediately take the other. He stood with one arm propped on the mantel, looking down at her.
“Thank you,” she said and seated herself. Her spine, he noticed, did not touch the back of the chair. She had sat thus last evening too, both in the dining room and in the drawing room. It must be an uncomfortable posture, but that too was her business. She was looking at him with cool inquiry.
“Well, my lady,” he could not resist saying, though he had not intended to do so, “there is a certain irony in this, is there not?”
She did not pretend to misunderstand him. “I suppose you would consider it so,” she agreed.
“You chose to marry money,” he said. “Yet you find yourself at the end of the day dependent upon the very man you rejected for money—the one who now possesses it all.”
If he had intended to disconcert her, he had failed. Her face registered nothing but disdain. “A gentleman,” she said, “would not remind a lady of her dependency, my lord.”
No, he would not. It was unpardonable of him to have said what he just had. He had not intended to say it. Indeed, he had resolved to treat her differently today. But the desire somehow to hurt her, or at least to gloat over her, was alarmingly difficult to quell.
“A gentleman.” He laughed softly. “But the general consensus of opinion at Thornwood has always been that that is something I am not.” His father, besotted with an opera dancer, had first taken her for his mistress and then married her less than eight months before he, their only child, had been born. “I am sure you were informed of that even before my subsequent, ah,careerconfirmed the fact.”
“Gilbert would not have your name mentioned here,” she told him coldly.
He smiled and turned his head to gaze into the coals. She was not without her own desire to hurt, then. Why? Did she regret her decision? Or did she merely resent the way it had turned out? “Was it worth it, Christina?” he asked her. “Marrying for money?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it was.”
Well. What had he expected her to say? And what had he wanted her to say? That she had made a mistake? That she should have put love first? He would have despised her even more than he already did if she had said that. Besides, he had not brought her here in order to vent a bitterness he had not known he felt so rawly or to rake up a past that should have been long forgotten.
“Your younger child is a mere baby,” he said. “How old is the elder?”
“Seven,” she replied.
“They have a nurse,” he said. “Do they also have a governess?”
