Page 37 of The Matchmaker Meets her Duke
"How fortuitous."
Her eyebrows shot through the roof. Her tone was chiding as she said, "I know you don't mean that." Of course, he didn't mean that. What stroke of terrible fate was this, running into this woman just a day after he had dredged up the bits and pieces of his past to Pandora? He would have chosen to meet anyone other than his brother's former betrothed today.
Emmett could not say he had ever been her friend. He did not know the woman she had turned into after Vincent's passing, but Emmett knew that Victoria had always seen him through the eyes of her then father-in-law and husband-to-be: precipitate, stubborn rascal, black sheep; simply, irrevocablyless thanhis brother.
And she had made no secret of her buying into these thoughts of him, nor did she ever try to get Vincent off his back during those times that he teased and propped him with his browbeater words when their father wasn't looking.
But not for long, because Emmett soon grew a thick skin, cultivating an air of regal nonchalance as he aged. He did not go to church, because his father did. He chased after women and kept mistresses because his father did not. He became a rake because his father abhorred rakes. If he could not please his father very well, then he would displease his father too well.
From then on, it had been nothing but miserable verbal lashings and fiery threats until Vincent passed in a coach accident that had claimed with him the life of the coach driver as well as a poor newsboy crossing the road. Victoria had clutched her midriff and crumpled by Vincent's grave, her cheeks swollen with grief, the whites of her eyes dulled into a mournful red. She looked much better now, Emmett admitted to himself. Color in her cheeks, the gleam of newly found love in her eyes.
"I think of him often, you know."
"Who?"
"Don't play oblivious, Emmett. It doesn't suit you." Emmett backed away. He did not want to be having this conversation now or with his brother's betrothed, or with anyone for that matter. As if he needed her assurance, or words of solace. As if he cared.
"You look very fine, Miss Beaumont," he said, turning on his heels. "I hope that you have a lovely evening ahead."
"It's Lady Nottingham now," she corrected. "And he was jealous of you, did you know?"
She was trying to bait him. Was she bored? Was she pining still over a dead man? Whatever it was, she was saying that only to make him stay a bit longer, to make him say more than he wished to stay. To trap him with his own words, somehow. Still, Emmett let her words grab at him, too easily like fish in a net.
"Who?"
"Vincent."
"Lady Nottingham…I respect what you might have shared with my brother, but you really don't have to make it into what it wasn't."
Victoria flicked a dismissive hand, the rings on her fingers catching the light of the chandelier. "Come on, Emmett, look at you. You're taller, you're better looking. The girls gravitated toward you, the governesses loved you. You light up a room and he didn't and everything that he did was out of jealousy, not hatred. Your brother didn't hate you, Emmett."
"And of course, you would be in the best position to know that. Tell me, did my father also not loathe me, and see me like everything he had lost in Vincent? Or that figment of my imagination may remain intact for the time being?'' She stared at him, her lips parted but devoid of sound.
"Ah, I didn't think so." Emmett turned away and made his way half furious to the garden. He should have made up an equally vague excuse and bustled out of her presence as Ashton did. He should not have let her purposeful words hook him into a conversation that stirred up memories he was not enthusiastic about reliving.
No, it wasn't meredisinterest. It was his ever-present disfavor of Vincent and, after all these years, a stubborn yearning for a dead father's approval.
It was frustrating annoyance at himself for the life that he had lived for a long time, thinkingwhat would Vincent doand doing the exact opposite of that. It was not really living. He knew that. Still, he had kept at it, with a driven lack of marital ambition, with the many beautiful but shallow women until his grandmother had sat him down, slapped her crow-head cane down on the hard plane of his shoulder, and imperiously croaked, "I will have this no longer, do you hear me, Emmett?"
From then on it had been dreadful ball after dreadful ball until his engagement to Lady Andrews, and thenLady Datura'sseeing to the end of it. Lady Datura.Pandora,his wife. His.
Where was she?
He needed to be with her. Her dazzling smile would pluck him from the depth of these dank feelings. Her warming presence would command him out of unwanted memories. Emmett's eyes swept across the ballroom, but he caught no sight of her. Then he saw the swirl of her gown in his peripheral vision, and when he turned it was to the back of his wife heading to the garden.
He felt a twinge of curiosity, followed by puzzlement. What had she set out to do out there?
ChapterSixteen
Pandora pinched her face tight, trying her best not to let her amusement show. It would greatly aggravate the Dowager and that was one thing Pandora could well do without tonight: getting on Emmett's grandmother's nerves.
Beside her, Ashton's sister and the new Duchess of Wellington, heaved a slight but very well exhausted sigh as both dowagers went at it again.
"But a rather lovely party you've put together, Your Grace," Emmett's grandmother said to the Duchess. The tone with which she said this, however, one would assume it was an accusation she was making and not a compliment being offered.
"Yes, I have my grandmother to thank for that," said Henrietta, placing a small, proud hand on Lady Brexley's back. Pandora watched the imperious woman stiffen under her own granddaughter's touch. But her head remained held high in the presence of Rose's grandmother's loathful gaze.
"Oh truly? How lovely indeed. I wouldn't have imagined your grandmother capable of any more than cunning and thievery. But I suppose women are full of surprises in their old age."
