Does he regret becoming involved in my chaotic life? Does he wish for a simple marriage to the daughter of a Duchess with no past and no thought in her head?
He gave her his arm as they alighted and set foot on the porch. Reaching for the door knocker, he rapped thunderously. A footman,Randall, received them with a kind nod at Catherine. From there, he ushered them into the foyer beyond, where they were greeted by Aunt Nora.
She swept forward like a magpie in court silks, all false sweetness. “Catherine, dear. What a surprise!”
Her uncle followed suit, heavy-jawed and even heavier in the stomach. His hair was fire while his wife seemed composed entirely of monochromatic, gray and black. Uncle Benjamin gave away his emotions with a narrow-eyed stare that adjudicated the pair. Behind them stood a guest, a lanky man with a thin face, his smile too slick.
The Earl of Stafford.
“You look pale, my dear,” her aunt tutted fussily. “The curse grows worse, I see.”
“Then perhaps we should not be standing in the hall as though we were at Court,” Stafford put in smoothly, “but instead resting in comfortable seats. The purple drawing room?”
Aunt Nora peeped at him and revealed the same narrow-eyed stare her husband had just exhibited.
“Quite,” Benjamin said after a moment, “please, follow us… Your Graces.”
“To what do we owe this pleasure?” Aunt Nora chirped, falling in beside Catherine.
“Questions I should like answered,” Catherine murmured.
“What a coincidence!” Stafford bellowed with a throaty chuckle.
He was older than Aaron and regarded him with a challenging stare, as though his equal. Catherine patted her husband’s arm more than once, feeling the tension in those coiled muscles. She prayed he would ignore the provocation until she had discovered what she wished to know.
“Rather, we will go to the breakfast room,” Aunt Nora quickly interjected, “the drawing room has not been completed.”
Catherine tilted her head. “The renovations still aren’t complete?”
Thatparticular renovation had commenced a year before and was supposed to have concluded before the beginning of the summer.
What can have persuaded Aunt Nora to delay her precious renovations for so long?
Aunt Nora liked nothing better than the expenditure of money in pursuit of the latest fashions, whether that was clothing or interior decoration.
“What coincidence?” Aaron harkened back to the previous comment calmly as they all strolled across the hall to the open door of the breakfast room.
Stafford grinned. “I have never received an explanation for being jilted by my fiancée.”
Aaron glared at the man.
“You do not deserve an explanation. Nor a fiancée.”
Catherine stroked his arm. Those muscles were iron cables twisted to their physical limit. If they snapped, they would unleash a terrible potential energy.
“You look awfully pale, Catherine,” Aunt Nora repeated into the charged silence as the group rounded the breakfast table.
It had been cleared except for a large fruit bowl and a basket of bread.
“I should take care, Your Grace,” Benjamin said with a sidelong glance, “the doctors could never say for certain that the disease was not contagious when it struck down my sister-in-law and her husband.”
Catherine glanced at Aaron, who was regarding Benjamin with a deadpan stare.
“Then your devotion to your niece’s health, and that of your wife, not to mention the Earl of Stafford, is all the more laudable,” he drawled vacantly. “How you must have feared contagion.”
Benjamin cleared his throat, shifting in his seat uncomfortably.
“She is our niece,” Aunt Nora said as though that explained all.
