“I know,” Allan said. “Even now, I think there’s a chance you’ll change your mind.”
“What is it to you?” Seth asked. “Why do you care if I marry or not? I’d have thought you would give up on all this after the first time I told you it wasn’t going to happen. But you’re almost as persistent as my mother.”
“I’m not as persistent as your mother,” Allan said. “But maybe I do think she has a point, Seth. She cares about you. You don’t want to hear what she has to say, but?—”
“She has no authority to tell me what to do with my life,” Seth said.
“No, she doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean her advice is bad. It’s the same advice I would give you if I thought you would take it.”
“That I should just get married, and never mind to whom? Never mind how I feel about it?”
“No, I didn’t say that,” Allan said patiently. “But I do think you should at least consider marriage—especially now that you’ve met a lady who means something to you. Seth, I know you like you’re my own brother. I care for you like a brother. I want to see you happy, and that’s not something I’m going to give up on. I think you’ll be happy if you allow yourself to find love, and maybe—just maybe—this young lady is the person you’re meant to find it with.”
“I don’t think you believe all that,” Seth said. “I think you want to get married?—”
“I do.”
“And I think you want me to get married along with you, so you don’t have to worry about moving into this new stage of your life on your own. I think you want us to have wives and children at the same time.”
“Certainly I would like that,” Allan said. “I’m not going to stand here and pretend I wouldn’t. But, Seth, you know me better thanthat. If I honestly believed that you couldn’t be happy in that life, I wouldn’t be arguing for it.”
Seth sighed and stared out at the horizon.
“She’s lovely,” Allan said gently. “I can see why you admire her, you know.”
“I never said I admired her.”
Allan ignored that. “You admire her because she’s beautiful, of course, but also because she’s unafraid to be who she is. I see how unusual she is. I hear what people say about her—that she’s strange and awkward—and she’s not afraid to stop being that person.
“You like that about her, I think. You’ve finally met someone who challenges you instead of simply trying to be what they think a duke would desire so that she can secure a good marriage. If it was me she had expressed an interest in, I would be flattered as well.”
“Now you truly don’t know what you’re talking about,” Seth said. “She hasn’t expressed an interest in me.”
But his mind traveled back to last night’s kiss.
It was true that he had been the one to initiate it, but then, she certainly hadn’t pulled away. She hadn’t done anything to end it. In fact, Seth had been left with the impression that if he hadn’tended things when he had, she would have allowed them to go on for quite a while unchecked.
Allan was right. For whatever reason—he wasn’t going to try to guess at her motives—she had expressed interest in him.
And there was the fact that she had openly admitted to feeling nervous around him. Seth had spent so much time contemplating that fact that it hadn’t occurred to him to consider that he felt nervous around her as well. But he did.
And that was a strange thing, because he almost never felt ill at ease around ladies. Sometimes they bored him, and sometimes they irritated him, but it was very uncommon for him to feel like this—as if every moment was alive with the possibility that things might go either very right or very wrong between the two of them. As if every little thing he said or didmattered, because there was something he wanted—something he hoped for out of every exchange.
That was how he felt around Lady Lavinia. He actually cared how each of their exchanges went. He wanted her to think highly of him.
Why? Why did he want that? What possible difference could her opinion make?
He didn’t know the answer, but he couldn’t deny what he felt.
He looked over at Allan. Was it possible that his friend was right? Did he have real feelings for Lady Lavinia? He didn’t want to believe it—but how else to explain the fact that he had kissed her? That had been a terrible idea. He still hadn’t permitted himself to truly examine what had been going through his mind at that moment.
Maybe he was afraid of what he was going to find.
“None of this is real,” he said, feeling as though he was grasping at straws.
“What do you mean? None of what is real?”
“Everything you’re talking about. People believe they have these feelings for one another, but it never lasts,” he said. “That’s why so many people marry claiming it’s for love. But it isn’t. It doesn’t have anything to do with love. It’s a momentary attraction, that’s all, and it takes a fool to allow himself to be hoodwinked by it.”
