But then why had she reversed her position when her brother had threatened to force a marriage?
“Seth, I’m speaking to you,” his mother said.
“Leave me alone,” he told her. “Leave me in peace. Don’t you think I would have come to dinner without being prompted if I intended to be there?”
“You’re going to make me eat alone? I wanted to talk to you.”
“Perhaps I ought to hire you a companion so that you’ll have someone to talk to. Maybe that would get you to stop plaguing me.”
“Seth!”
“Mother, please. I indulge quite a lot from you. I insist that you leave me to my thoughts.”
“I know there’s something the matter with you,” she insisted. “You haven’t been yourself since we returned home from that party. Slouching around the house, looking as though you’re a million miles away. It’s—well, it’s highly improper!”
“Improper.” Seth rose to his feet. “That’s all you care about, isn’t it? Propriety. What if I were to tell you that I didn’t care for propriety at all? What if I told you I was tired of the very sound of the word?”
“Seth, I don’t know what’s come over you. You’re not acting like yourself at all.”
“I’m acting exactly like myself. Perhaps you’ve never seen me as I truly am, but the fault for that lies with you, Mother, not with me.” He held up a hand.
“Don’t try to argue with me. I know what you see when you look at me. The perfect heir to the dukedom. Someone who will marry an upstanding young lady and produce a son. That’s why you’re so vexed by the fact that it hasn’t happened yet. Every day that I don’t marry is one more day you have to look at me and wonder why I’m not the man you imagine me to be.”
“I know who you are. You’re my son,” she protested.
“You don’t know me at all. If you did, you wouldn’t have to continuously ask me the questions you do because the answers would be obvious to you. If you knew me, you would know why I haven’t married, and why I don’t intend to. You wouldn’t think you could change my mind about it by continually asking me the same questions—you would understand that it isn’t going to happen.
“I’m tired of it, Mother. I really am. I’ve been indulgent with you about these conversations, but it stops now.”
“Just come to dinner,” she insisted. “Come to dinner and we’ll do anything you like. Talk about anything you like. It doesn’t have to be marriage, not if you don’t want it to be.”
But Seth didn’t trust her to keep to her word. They had simply been through this too many times now for him to have any faith that she would stay out of his affairs.
He thought he finally understood why she was the way she was. It was simply that she was unable to see him as anything other than the son she wished she had. She was unable to see what he really was, what he really wanted out of his life, and until she did, she would never accept his choice not to marry.
The trouble was that he needed her to accept that, now more than ever before. It had been easy, even a month ago, to tell her that he simply didn’t want to marry, and to know that it was true.
He no longer knew that it was true. That was the problem.
He should never have given Lady Lavinia that last kiss. He had hoped that it would serve to allow them both to forget about what they had shared, give them the closure they needed to put it behind them, but instead it felt as if it had only strengthened the feelings Seth had for her. Now he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
“I’m not coming to dinner,” he told his mother. “I have things to do. I’ll be in my study.”
“Seth, you can’t hide from me forever.”
“No one is hiding from you, Mother. Not everything is about you.” It was the truth. He was hiding from the necessity to confront his feelings about Lady Lavinia.
If only the house party could have gone on forever. If only he hadn’t been forced to choose between either marriage or letting her go altogether. He could have gone on forever meeting her in secret at night, dancing with her when no one was watching, pretending during the day that there was nothing between the two of them. But that was not the way the world worked.
His valet was waiting for him up in his study. “Will you bring my dinner up here for me, Wallace?” Seth asked.
Wallace nodded. “Of course, Your Grace.”
“And a bottle of sherry as well, I think.”
Wallace nodded. “Your Grace, if you don’t mind—I wonder if there’s something I might assist you with.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Seth said.
