“He did ask to marry me. And it’s not as if I told him no.”
“Oh, no, you didn’t tell him no,” her father said. “You only told him what a mistake he was making by asking you in the first place.”
“You know that wasn’t what I said to him.”
“You might as well have, Lavinia. What were you thinking, telling the viscount you could never love him? No gentleman wants to hear that. No one wants a wife who would say such a thing.”
“If he doesn’t want to marry me under those circumstances, I think he has a right to know that that’s the way I feel,” Lavinia insisted. “I’m not trying to trick him, Father.”
“No one said anything about trying to trick anybody, but you must understand that a gentleman doesn’t want to hear what you said spoken aloud! Lavinia, Lord Hennington is not a fool. He knew there was a chance you didn’t feel true love for him. How long have the two of you known one another, after all?
“You’re a lady. A part of your responsibility in marriage is to allow your husband to tell himself whatever he wants to about your feelings for him.”
“I should have encouraged him to lie to himself?”
“You should have let him believe you loved him, even if you didn’t truly feel that way. It’s not so much for him to ask of you.”
“He was glad I was honest,” Lavinia said. She kept her chin up. Her father could say whatever he liked, but she knew her choice had been the right one. “I’m not going to question what I did, Father.”
“I just don’t know how to express my disappointment in you. After everything I did for you. Giving you extra time to find your own arrangement. Allowing you to choose who you wanted to marry instead of making the choice myself—you’ve ruined that possibility, by the way. No one is going to have you now.
“I had a match in mind for you before Lord Hennington came to me, but now that I’ve told that gentlemannoonce, I don’t think there’s a chance of bringing him back. And when word gets out about the way you treated Lord Hennington, you canbe sure that no one will ever want you again. You’re doomed to spinsterhood now.”
“I don’t care.”
“You don’tcare?”
“I wanted to fall in love, Father.”
“If I have to hear you talk about how you wanted to fall in love again, I may be ill. You’ve thrown your life away because of that silly dream.
“I haven’t thrown my life away,” Lavinia said. “I have made my life my own. It would have been throwing my life away to enter into a marriage I didn’t want just for your sake.”
“For my sake?” her father exploded. “Are you so eager to defy me that you’re willing to embrace spinsterhood, Lavinia? Truly, is that what you want? Is that going to suit you better than a marriage to that nice young gentleman would have?”
“It isn’t about defying you, Father. But if you’d like to see it that way, I won’t try to stop you. The truth is that you’ve always been more interested in what you think I ought to be doing than you have in my happiness. I didn’t understand that for a very long time. I thought there was something wrong withme.
“Even at Harbeck Manor, during the party—I thought that if I could just fix what was the matter with me, I could find someonewho would love me. Then I could make you happy. That’s what I’ve been trying to do. I was never trying to defy you.”
Her father stared at her. It was clear that she had left him speechless.
“But you don’t care about that,” Lavinia went on. “Because for you, it’s never been about my happiness. You don’t care that I thought I was too flawed for any gentleman to ever choose me. And if you think I didn’t put in any effort, you haven’t been paying attention. I did everything I could to try to make myself appealing to the gentlemen at that party. I wore the most flattering gowns I could.”
She hesitated, on the verge of telling him how she had obtained those gowns, but then she held back. No doubt he would try to make her pursue a courtship with the duke if he knew about their connection—he was obviously desperate to see her married to anyone at all at this point—and Lavinia couldn’t bear that. She wouldn’t be able to take it if she had to witness her father scrambling for the duke’s attention and the duke rejecting them.
She continued what she had been saying instead. “I danced with anyone who asked me,” she said. “I practiced my conversational skills until I knew I would be a pleasure for them to talk to, so that people would no longer consider me odd and talk about me behind my back. And I was successful at all of that.
“I did win the attention of a gentleman. You can’t say that I didn’t give it my best effort. If it was true that I was just tryingto rebel against you, Father, I wouldn’t have done any of those things.”
“But if you were willing to fall in line with my expectations for you, you would have accepted this proposal without making so much trouble about it,” her father pointed out. “I don’t know why you couldn’t just do that. You told me you liked him!”
“I do like him! Don’t you see that that’s the reason I couldn’t bear to lie to him, Father? Didn’t you see the look on his face? He wants to marry someone who loves him. He deserves that. Would you want to be lied to if you were in his shoes? Would you really want a lady to simply go along, as you said, and allow you to believe whatever you wanted, even if it wasn’t the truth?”
“Perhaps I would want that,” her father said stubbornly.
“Well, perhaps you would, then. But I know that I wouldn’t, and based on what we saw today, I don’t believe Lord Hennington would have wanted that either. I believe I did the right thing for both myself and him.”
“I hope you still feel that way in twenty years when you’re all alone in the world,” her father glowered.
