He tugged at his cravat. “Ain’t in difficulties.”
“Oh, then I must be the one. According to your man of business, paying your present debts will leave me with precisely forty-seven pounds, six shillings, threepence for the remainder of the year. Which means I must either move in with aunts and uncles again or work. I spent ten years as unpaid nanny to their brats. I do not intend to spend another ten seconds. That leaves work.”
His pale blue eyes widened. “Work? You mean,earn wages?”
She nodded. “I see no acceptable alternative.”
“Have you gone loony, Jess? You’re agirl. You get shackled. To a chap who’s plump in the pocket. Like Genevieve done. Twice. You got her looks, you know. If you wasn’t so confounded picky—”
“But I am,” she said. “Fortunately, I can afford to be.”
She and Bertie had been orphaned very young, and left to the care of aunts, uncles, and cousins barely able to support their own burgeoning broods. The family might have been comfortably well off if there hadn’t been so very many of them. But Genevieve descended from a line of prolific breeders, especially of males, and her offspring had inherited the talent.
That was one of the reasons Jessica received so many marriage offers—an average of six per annum, even at present, when she ought to be on the shelf, wearing a spinster’s cap. But she’d be hanged before she’d marry and play brood mare to a rich, titled oaf—or before she’d don dowdy caps, for that matter.
She had a talent for unearthing treasures at auctions and secondhand shops, and selling same at a tidy profit. Though she wasn’t making a fortune, for the last five years she had been able to buy her own fashionable clothes and accessories, instead of wearing her relatives’ castoffs. It was a modest form of independence. She wanted more. During the past year, she had been planning how to get more.
She had finally saved enough to lease and begin stocking a shop of her own. It would be elegant and very exclusive, catering to an elite clientele. In her many hours at Society affairs, she’d developed a keen understanding of the idle rich, not only of what they liked but also of the most effective methods of drawing them in.
She meant to start drawing them in once she’d hauled her brother out of the mess he’d got himself into. Then she’d see to it that his mistakes never again disrupted her well-ordered life. Bertie was an irresponsible, unreliable, rattlebrained ninny. She shuddered to imagine what the future held for her if she continued to depend upon him for anything.
“You know very well I don’t need to marry for money,” she told him now. “All I need do is open the shop. I’ve selected the place and I’ve saved enough to—”
“That cork-brained rag-and-bottle-shop scheme?” he cried.
“Not a rag and bottle shop,” she said calmly. “As I’ve explained to you at least a dozen times—”
“I won’t let you set up as a shopkeeper.” Bertie drew himself up. “No sister of mine will go into trade.”
“I should like to see you stop me,” she said.
He screwed up his face into a threatening scowl.
She leaned back in the chair and gazed at him contemplatively. “Lud, Bertie, you look just like a pig, with your eyes all squeezed up like that. In fact, you’ve grown amazingly piglike since last I saw you. You’ve gained two stone at least. Maybe as much as three.” Her gaze dropped. “And all in your belly, by the looks of it. You put me in mind of the king.”
“Thatwhale?” he shrieked. “I do not. Take it back, Jess.”
“Or what? You’ll sit on me?” She laughed.
He stalked away and flung himself onto the sofa.
“If I were you,” she said, “I’d worry less about what my sister said and did, and more about my own future. I can take care of myself, Bertie. But you…Well, I believe you’re the one who ought to be thinking about marrying somebody plump in the pocket.”
“Marriage is for cowards, fools, and women,” he said.
She smiled. “That sounds like the sort of thing some drunken jackass would announce—just before falling into the punch bowl—to a crowd of his fellow drunken jackasses, amid the usual masculine witticisms about fornication and excretory processes.”
She didn’t wait for Bertie to sort through his mind for definitions of the big words. “I know what men find hilarious,” she said. “I’ve lived with you and reared ten male cousins. Drunk or sober, they like jokes about what they do—or want to do—with females, and they are endlessly fascinated with passing wind, water, and—”
“Women don’t have a sense of humor,” Bertie said. “They don’t need one. The Almighty made them as a permanent joke on men. From which one may logically deduce that the Almighty is a female.”
He uttered the words slowly and carefully, as though he’d taken considerable pains to memorize them.
“Whence arises this philosophical profundity, Bertie?” she asked.
“Say again?”
“Who told you that?”
