“Certainly, but sit down. Take a glass of wine with me.”
“I’ll sit, but no wine.”
And she did, and immediately began drumming her fingers on the table, waiting, angry, impatient. Dimitri waved the servants away and returned to his seat, feeling quite put on the spot. What could he tell her? Certainly not the truth.
“I was coming to see you,Babushka,” he began.
“Three weeks late?”
So she knew he had been here that long. He was just wondering what else she knew when she added, “I wrote you no more than a month ago, and I know very well you couldn’t have received my letter yet, so that isn’t why you’re here. Now, out with it. What are you doing here, and why must I be the last to know about it?”
“You wrote me? Was it anything important?”
“You’re not putting me off, Dimitri. I demand to know what you’re up to. Why, you have my own son keeping secrets from me. He must know you are here, or you wouldn’t be using the townhouse.”
Dimitri sighed. “You mustn’t blame Uncle Thomas. I asked him to say nothing for the present, because I knew you would insist I join you in the country for a visit. But what I am doing is just too important… I have to stay in London,Babushka. I have to make sure she doesn’t disappear again.”
“Who?”
“The lady I want to marry.”
Lenore’s brow shot up. “Oh? As I recall, you said you would be married by the end of last year. When that didn’t come about and when I received your news about your half-brother’s return from the dead, I assumed you were no longer in any great hurry to tie yourself to any one woman.”
“That was before I met Katherine.”
“Not Katherine St. John!” Lenore gasped.
“How did you know? No, don’t tell me. I suppose I have made a complete fool of myself. With as many times as I have been turned away from her door, the whole town must know. And chasing her down Piccadilly was a piece of lunacy, especially when she managed to elude me anyway.”
“Very well, I take it you have followed Lady Katherine here, and that’s why you’re here now. But what about earlier this year?”
“I was looking for Katherine then too. I thought she had returned here, but I was mistaken. The most I could find out then was that she was supposedly traveling on the Continent, where, no one knew exactly.”
“You could have at least come to see me for a day or two, as long as you were here,” Lenore complained.
“I’m sorry.Babushka, but I wasn’t very fit company at the time. I was in fact quite out of sorts when I found Katherine wasn’t here, as I thought she would be, and I had no idea where to look for her next.”
“Desperate, were you?” Lenore smiled now for the first time. “If I didn’t know better, I might think you were in love.”
Dimitri frowned. “Is that such an impossibility?”
“No, of course not. It’s just that I’ve met Lady Katherine and she’s a formidable lady, for all that she comes in such a small package. You won’t find her jumping to do your bidding, my boy. You won’t find her agreeing with your every opinion either. She’s been too long running things her own way and won’t be easily adaptable to a subservient role, if indeed she is adaptable, which I highly doubt. She’s a lady who knows her own mind, not exactly the type I would have expected a man of your temperament to want for a wife.”
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”
“I’m not, eh?” Lenore chuckled.
She could tell him a thing or two, but she decided not to. Why give the boy ammunition he didn’t need? He had had things too easy all his life. It wouldn’t hurt him to have to put forth a little effort to get what he wanted this time, and if little Kate gave him a hard time of it, so much the better. Of course if he failed to win the lady in the end, that would be a different story. Lenore wasnotgoing to be denied her first great-grandson.
“You say Katherine won’t see you?” Lenore asked now. “Why is that?”
“I wish I knew. When we were last together, we argued, but then we often argued, so that was nothing out of the ordinary. She had just become my—well, that is neither here nor there. The point is, she ran away, disappearing completely, and now that I’ve finally found her again, she refuses to speak to me. I have much to make amends for, certainly, but she won’t even give me the chance. It’s as if she’s afraid to see me.”
“Whether she is or isn’t is beside the point. If she’s the one you want, my boy, you’ll just have to find a way, won’t you? And I think I’ll remain in London awhile to keep tabs on your progress. You will of course remember to invite me to the wedding, if there is to be one.”
Dimitri remained where he was after his grandmother left him, her humor much improved, his much worse. If only he didn’t have the feeling that she knew something he didn’t.
Chapter Forty-one
