Page 35 of The Luckiest Lady in London

Assuming, that was, The Ideal Gentleman had a heart at all.

* * *

“I’m in your debt, sir,” Louisa told Lord Wrenworth the next time she saw him.

A week had flown by since the day he was presented to her family. During that time, Frederica made a quick appearance at the afternoon tea party Lady Balfour had hosted to welcome the Cantwell ladies to London—and she’d gone to the dressmaker’s in an open carriage, wearing only a veiled hat that didn’t do much to hide her face at all.

“That is terrible. You will only ever be able to pay me with my own money,” he said as he handed her up into his carriage. It was pouring again. Since they were now affianced, however, he was allowed to fetch her from the bookshop on his own. “But joking aside, do you mean to tell me that my words had some effect on your sister?”

“Yes. She now has a mirror permanently attached to her right hand and studies herself constantly.”

“Sounds like symptoms of a mental disorder.”

With his walking stick, he knocked on the ceiling of the carriage to signal the coachman that they were ready to go. Louisa had not seen him with that particular accessory since they were last in the town coach together, before his proposal. She couldn’t stop herself from staring a moment at its ebony handle.

And he certainly didn’t help matters by moving his thumb in a slow circle around that stylized jaguar head.

“Take your hand off it,” she said.

He looked at her with a half smile that made everything inside her shift and drop, and set the walking stick aside. “Better?”

“No, not really. But what were you saying?”

He smiled again. “That your sister’s new tendency to study herself constantly in a mirror sounds like an affliction.”

“It does, but it is a much better affliction than the one she’d suffered for so long. We are all delighted. My mother especially—she is beginning to speak again of Frederica as the future spouse of a very wealthy man.”

She looked at him sideways. “In fact, she thinks rather wistfully of you as that very wealthy man. I believe she is ever so slightly embarrassed that you will have me instead, when she has so much prettier daughters.”

“Your mother actually thinks that any of her other daughters could possibly hold the slightest temptation for me?”

She ought not to, but she adored the dismissiveness of his tone.

“That is a very smug smile on your face, my dear, dear Louisa.”

“That is a very smug sensation inside my heart, my dear, dear Lord Wrenworth.”

The carriage turned a corner and his walking stick went sliding. They both reached out, but she caught it first.

“Maybe I ought to keep a better grip on it,” he said.

She laid the walking stick across her lap. “There, I’ll make sure it isn’t up to mischief.”

He glanced at the walking stick for a fraction of a second longer than completely appropriate, before he looked up into her eyes. “By the way, our marriage settlement is being drawn up as we speak. When you meet your solicitor again, he will tell you that you will have five thousand pounds a year in pin money.”

She nearly dropped the walking stick. “Five thousand!”

“Don’t be so loud, don’t look so astonished, and don’t, for goodness’ sake, appear grateful. I would not be able to show my face in Society if it became known that my wife managed to squeeze only eight hundred pounds a year out of me.”

“You offered me only five hundred,” she said indignantly.

“And you were the worst negotiator ever, asking for only a thousand from a man who has two hundred thousand a year. Shame on you.”

Her face heated. “Well, you have always known that I am a country bumpkin.”

“I thought you were ambitious. You were certainly more ambitious where telescopes were concerned.”

“Your proposal caught me off guard.”