“It’s not funny in the least,” he protested at the expression on her face.
“No, I know. You could have been injured, but luckily, you weren’t.”
“If it had happened to you,” he said, “you might have been seriously hurt. I shall rethink ever riding here again on a crowded Sunday.”
She shrugged. “If you intend to keep company with a middle-class shopkeeper’s daughter, my lord, then...,” she trailed off. Offering him an ultimatum when he had dirt on his riding pants and had a scandalously uncovered head was probably not well done of her.
“Then we shall wait for rainy Sundays and ride here in only the most dismal of weather when there is no one else about.” With those words, she sent him a warm smile. Hopefully, he was not one of those men who nursed a grudge or a slight.
After a moment’s pause, he agreed. “Here’s to rainy Sundays. Luckily, London provides us with many.”
He didn’t even turn for home as she’d half-expected given his present state of disarray. Instead, he ran a hand through his hair, which was the worse for wear and undoubtedly unrecognizable to his valet.
Then he asked, “Shall we ride?”
CHARLES CONSIDERED it to have been a perfectly blissful Sunday, notwithstanding being unseated from his horse and ruining a perfectly good hat. Also despite nearly making a terribly small-minded, patrician remark from which it would have been difficult to recover.
They had continued their ride, returned to her home without further mishap, and dined together with Delia as their chaperone because he thought it inappropriate to invite either of his footmen into Charlotte’s home. All in all, a banner day even if tomorrow would be made more trying by the writs of court he hadn’t completed.
As he sat sipping brandy in his study, however, he couldn’t help feeling he’d missed something important. Besides the obvious when he’d restrained himself from stealing a kiss even though they had about thirty seconds alone while Delia went into the hallway to fetch her needlepoint.
Other than not getting to once again taste Charlotte’s sweet lips, he’d also missed out on determining what she really wanted from him. She knew he could provide her a townhouse and a country estate, horses, and even flowers. There was no reason not to think he could also provide babies, and that would be an extremely enjoyable task.
She would even have a barrister in the family, always useful.
So what was it?
He heard his father scuffling by. “It’s late,” he called out to the earl. “Why are you still up?”
After a pause, the earl’s head came around the open doorway. “I was reading the papers and the latest acts of Parliament.”
“Anything interesting?”
“I would come in and tell you, but you don’t yet have a second comfortable chair. Most inhospitable. I was in the drawing room, but it’s like the Pharaoh’s tomb down there.”
“Which Pharaoh?” Charles teased. In fact, he had meant to get another chair brought in but hadn’t realized his father was waiting for it so they could sit together.
“Bah! Any of them. No matter. When are you bringing that pleasant young woman over again to visit?”
Charles sat up straighter. “That would be highly inappropriate to have a single young woman of good standing over with us two bachelors.’
His father took a step into the room. “But she did before. And it was splendid. No harm done.”
Charles sighed.Had everyone relaxed their morals but him?
“That was an aberration, a mistake, a meeting that became a diner.”
“Don’t you like the girl?” His father frowned. “What’s wrong with you? You probably cannot do better than her. If you face facts, Charlie, you are a little dry and stodgy. She can probably do better than you just about anywhere.”
“How kind of you,” Charles quipped, but it got him thinking. Maybe Charlotte wanted a less dull man, although he wasn’t sure what that meant.
“Should I grow my hair long and spread my seed over many women and then die of a wretched fever in Greece so I can be hailed a romantic hero? That sounds fun.”
“Are you mocking Byron? Poor chap only lived to see thirty-six.”
Charles swallowed. No, he didn’t want his life to end in a decade, nor did he want to wander the world with various paramours. He simply wanted Charlotte and a rather subdued life in his beloved London or with his horses at his Wiltshire estate.
“You might want to be more like that American artist everyone’s talked about since he sued our stuffy art critic.”
