Lydon.
Pique transformed into puzzlement as she swung around to an abrupt stop. Before she could open her mouth, he said, “I haven’t had an opportunity to properly congratulate you on your impending nuptials, just the two of us.”
“Haven’t had an opportunity?” she asked, incredulous. “You haven’t been home in weeks.”
He shrugged, a marquess utterly indifferent to bourgeois standards of time. “A man has business to attend in the general course of life.”
Her brow creased with a sudden suspicion. “You haven’t left Cumberbatch in London, have you?”
The stubborn man had refused to come with her to Primrose Park. “I’m valet to a marquess, not your nursemaid.” Then he’d extended an object toward her. “Now, you strap this little beauty to your thigh, and you’ll be all right.”
It was a knife.
A knife that presently lay undisturbed in her valise.
Cumberbatch meant well.
It was almost touching.
“The old bugger insisted on coming.” Lydon shook his head, bemused. “Getting rather vocal in his opinions in his dotage. Might need a new valet soon.”
Beatrix’s fists clenched at her sides. “Don’t you dare even think of it,” she said through gritted teeth.
Cumberbatch was too aged to find another place.
He was theirs, for life.
Though they weren’t within earshot of the party, they were within view, so Beatrix decided it best that she stay put and let Lydon have his say, rather than put on a spectacle of her running away and him chasing after her. “You have something to say to me?”
A serious glint entered Lydon’s eye. “You’ll want to get on those nuptials in quick order.” He glanced around the grounds of Primrose Park meaningfully. “You’ve caught yourself a right keeper.”
Beatrix felt not only the skyward lift of her eyebrows, but also the effect of having herself struck dumb.
“I doubted you had it in you.” Doubts that yet lingered in his eyes, in fact. “No idea as to thewhys andhows of this impendingunion, but you’ve done it. I’ll say this for you—you’ve always been a clever one.” And on he went… “Now, you get those vows spoken and that marriage register signed.”
Beatrix’s cheeks burned. The tips of her ears, too. The bald-faced audacity!
But as much as she wanted done with this conversation, she did have a matter to air… “You brought Blaze Jagger.”
A statement of the obvious; the question implicit.
Why had he brought the fox into the henhouse?
Lydon remained unbothered. “Figured it was all the same to Deverill if I brought a new friend.”
“Friend?”
Lydon kept surpassing himself in degrees of audacity. Jagger was many things—adversary…family—but notfriend.
Lydon searched her eyes for any knowledge they might reveal. “Jagger might say some unpleasant things to you. Don’t believe a word of it.”
“And what might he say?” She didn’t let Lydon answer. “That he’s the holder of all your debt?”
Lydon gave a lordly sniff of dismissal.
“Or,” she continued, “might he say he’s my brother?”
That got Lydon’s attention. “Load of rot. I shared a bit of fun with his ma on the rare occasion, and I’m guilty of—what?—crimes?”
