“Melodrama? He could have sought someone of sufficient steel.”
“As you have done?”
“Your steeliness is my good fortune, but the dowager isn’t my mother. I have no special duty of respect or care. I suspect that like most men, he simply didn’t want unpleasantness.”
“That’s not entirely my experience,” she said, but her mind was mostly on the bed. Perhaps he didn’t have his own. Perhaps this one was shared. There was one way to find out. “May I see your rooms?” she asked.
“Of course.”
He opened the door, and there was her answer—a bedroom similar to hers, but with a more comfortable atmosphere. Of course, it had been lived in until the fifth viscount’s death, and then by Braydon for the recent while. It was also more pleasantly decorated, despite a darkening use of brown. It seemed the fifth viscount hadn’t had a taste for winter, but not for summer, either.
“Did he spend most of his time away because of the house,” she asked, “or did it become as it was because of his neglect?”
“Perhaps he simply avoided the war between his women.”
“Then he shouldn’t have complained of the result.”
“I have no evidence that he did.”
The conversation was wandering because of her awareness of the bed.
A book lay open on a table by the chair. What did a man like this read on the night before his wedding? A riding crop lay on the chest at the foot of the bed. A sheathed cavalry saber hung from the raised escutcheon in the back of the bed. Marcus, too, had kept his sword on display. Did that indicate that Braydon felt some nostalgia for the war?
She’d given Marcus’s sword to his mother. Lady Cateril had been touched to tears, but it had been no sacrifice for Kitty. The sword and other war remnants reminded his mother of his glory days, but to Kitty they were symbols of his suffering.
The silence felt oppressive. “How long is it since you came here?” she asked.
“Five long weeks.”
She turned a look on him. “It can’t be so dreadful as that.”
“I’ve never had a taste for country living.”
“Poets have poured out praise of it.”
“Then they are welcome to it.”
She had to fight a smile at his hint of surliness. He must have seen it.
“I’m London born and bred,” he said. “I find fields and coppices pleasing enough to observe in passing, but severely lacking as a habitation for anything but cows and sheep.”
“This is hardly living in a field,” she pointed out.
“But if I walk outside, how far is it to civilization? You’re a town person, too. Do you not feel the same?”
“Perhaps living in Beecham Dab reduced the suffering. May I suggest that you suffer from lack of congenial company, sir, not from an excess of fields?”
“You may, but it would be discourteous of me to agree.”
She felt heat rise in her cheeks.
“I apologize,” he said. “That wasn’t meant as it sounded.”
“It takes time to discover congeniality,” she agreed, but they were walking on eggs here. Was he, too, unsure of marital-bed protocol? He’d never been married at all.
She strolled idly about the room, past a glossy wooden washstand that held shaving equipment. She’d shaved Marcus when his hands had been unsteady. Braydon would need no such service. Marcus had favored clove-scented soap, but the scent here was different. Rosemary, perhaps, but with other ingredients.
This was the bedroom of a different man. A different husband. Would he expect different behaviors? Was he waiting for her to initiate something?
