“How are you?”
Her eyes looked happy, but her smile was tight.
“I wish I could be alone with you. All of these people…” She trailed off. “And what Hartley did. It was ghastly. I am afraid—well, that he won’t take the humiliation well.”
“I know. But I’ll handle him,” he said, pressing her closer to him. “And soon you’ll be mine. Think of all the wicked things I can teach you.”
She laughed up at him and now, he thought, she really did look content.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “This is right. I know that it is.”
She nodded.
“And think of how delighted Mr. Redmond will be. Two married lady editors. Extremely respectable.”
Henrietta laughed and a thrill went through him.
“I can’t believe,” he said, whispering into her ear. “That I am so lucky.”
She pulled to face him, her eyebrows arched. “I must tell you that many of the ladies think that I’ve got the better bargain. They’re awfully jealous that I have brought down the Unlandable Viscount.”
“They don’t call me that,” he scoffed.
“They do!”
He held her close for her cheek, knowing he was pushing the boundary of the acceptable.
“Trem,” she said, “What I said before, in the bower, what I wanted to tell you—”
But the music was winding down and they had to part.
“We can speak of it later,” he assured her, taking in her sweet fragrance once more.
She looked up at him, her expression for a moment inscrutable.
Finally, after much toasting and an amateur performance of Ovid led by Lady Worthington in a shockingly sheer gown, the carriages were called for.
When his carriage arrived, Trem bid goodbye to Henrietta. He could feel the eyes of the lingering guests on him. He kissed Henrietta’s hand and loudly promised to call on her tomorrow. He heard a few ladies in the crowd gasp—why, he wasn’t sure. It might be that jealousy Henrietta had spoken of, but he preferred to think it was their shock at seeing how brazenly he eyed his fiancée. And little do they know, he thought, that that was undoubtedly the most proper physical contact we have had in the past twenty-four hours.
Even still, the gravity of his situation didn’t dawn on him fully until he was alone in his carriage. Only in the silence of the coach, with Henrietta’s tantalizing scent still lingering on him, did he fully realize his fate.
It was real.
It was true.
He was getting married.
Volume the Second
Chapter Fifteen
Henrietta took a deep breath. She had known this morning at Breminster House would be very uncomfortable for her. And already she had been proven very, very right.
She was sitting as usual at the breakfast table with John and his wife, Catherine, and their two-year-old baby, Griffon Breminster III, Marquess of Forster. The heir to the dukedom was attempting to screech and throw porridge at the same time. The head footman, Cresley, was looking on in horror, but his parents were oblivious. Because they were too busy interrogating Henrietta about her secret courtship with Trem. And how Hartley could have been so confused as to think that she had agreed to marry him—when she had not.
They wouldn’t call it an interrogation. But it most certainly was.
“I don’t understand how Hartley could be so muddled,” Catherine fretted. “How could a young man make such a mistake?”
