Clio felt her cheeks flame.
Helen smiled like the cat who had got the canary.
“Well,” she said smugly. “Isn’t that just the nicest thing I’ve heard in ages?”
“This is your fault,” Clio said as they stood side by side that evening.
“My fault?” Hector protested. She wasn’t looking at him, but somehow she could perfectly picture the look on his face—the one he got when he was pretending to be more irritated than he was. “How on earth do you come to that conclusion?”
She propped her hands on her hips and stared at the bed in front of them.
“You encouraged my cousin,” she said. “And Helen Lightholder isnota woman to encourage lightly.”
Given their present circumstances, Hector felt he could hardly argue this point.
He liked Helen, he had decided that day, in a way that went beyond the pleasant familiarity of listening to her accent. She didn’t put on airs, and, as she informed them clearly, she kept rather lax social rules when at home with family.
“The children dine with us,” she said. “Their governess joins us, too.”
Clio, who was friends with the children’s minder, perked up visibly at this.
“I have to play Grand Lady Godwin sometimes,” Helen continued, “but it doesn’t come naturally to me, so I don’t do it when I don’t have to. Besides,” she added, with a sly sidelong look at her husband, “now that all the younger siblings aregone off, married and in their own homes,someonehas to keep Xander’s feet on the ground.”
“Your commitment to your duty is admirable, my dear,” the duke had said dryly, his smile obscured by the curve of his wine glass.
That was all well and good. Hector had a natural distrust of fussiness in all its forms.
Or perhaps notallits forms, as Helen had proven to him.
“The maid will show you up to your room,” Helen had said at the end of the meal, in between taking a bite of her own pudding and stopping her daughter from trying to put a grape in her nose.
Beside him, Clio’s spoon had stilled.
“Did you sayroom?” Clio asked faintly.
“Oh, yes!” Helen replied, placing the nose-grape out of her daughter’s reach. “My apologies. There is only one suitable for visitors.”
She did not look apologetic in the least.
“Helen,” Clio said with an exaggerated patience that Hector recognized. He found he liked it when it wasn’t being directed athim. “This house has sixteen bedrooms. You cannot mean to tell me that only one is available.”
“Oh, these old houses,” Helen said vaguely, then failed to follow up with anything resembling an excuse.
Hector had heard cautionary tales about the matchmakers of theton, but he’d figured himself safe from such machinations, even before he was married. What Society mother wanted her precious little darling married off to a scarred blacksmith, even if hewerea duke? He’d assumed himself doubly safe once he’d married Clio.
He’d failed to account, it seemed, for Helen Lightholder.
Hector had dared a glance at Xander, but found the man wearing the expression of someone who was very firmly staying out of it.
Since even Hector’s lax sense of propriety balked at outright calling his hostess a liar to her face, they were now here.
In one bedchamber.
With one bed.
It was almost laughable, except for the part where Clio was as skittish as a spring colt. Good God, what did she think he was going to do? Attack her?
He found that the idea of her being frightened of him sat in his stomach like a lead weight.
