Page 87 of Anything But a Duke
“Iverson, Mrs. Ashby. My name is Aidan Iverson.”And I’m here to marry your daughter.
“The man who is in league with Diana.” She gestured toward the drawing room. “You’d better come sit down, sir.”
For long silent minutes after they’d both taken a seat, she simply stared at him, studying and assessing.
Aidan decided that it was best to jump straight in. “Mrs. Ashby, I regret that we have not had the chance to meet until now, but I’ve come to know your daughter well and I...”
When his voice trailed off because he wasn’t certain how to phrase the rest, Mrs. Ashby filled the quiet.
“What is it that you do, Mr. Iverson?”
“I own several commercial enterprises, Mrs. Ashby. I also invest and help others do the same.”
She chewed on this information, clasping her hands in her lap and holding a slight noncommittal smile on her face. “And who are your people, sir?”
Aidan’s hands tensed into fists against his thighs. He’d loathed the question when the matchmaker had asked him weeks before, and he hated the question now. There was still so much he didn’t know, but he owed Diana’s mother whatever he did know.
“My mother was in domestic service for much of her life.”
He braced himself for her revulsion and judgment. Waited for her to scoff at the very notion that he could deserve her clever, beautiful, stubborn daughter.
“Well,” she said after an endless stretch of nerve-racking quiet, “then you’ve come quite a long way, haven’t you, sir?”
A jolt of shock rippled through him. He’d expected scorn or haughty disdain, not the respect he saw in the older woman’s eyes.
“Yes, Mrs. Ashby, I suppose I have.” She had no idea. Anyone who had not spent years inside the grimy walls of a Lambeth workhouse could have no idea.
“And now you’ve come about my daughter.”
“I have.”
“You’ve spent a great deal of time with her recently.” Diana’s mother glanced toward the hallway, toward her daughter’s workshop. “She’s very committed to her work.”
“I admire her commitment.”
“You must convince her there’s more.”
“More?” Aidan didn’t know whether he could convince Diana Ashby of much she wasn’t willing to consider on her own. If anything, she’d been the one to change him. But to show her what kind of life they could build together, to shower her with the affection she deserved—that he could do.
“In some ways, she takes after her late father.” She gestured toward the framed technical drawings Aidan had noticed when he’d visited the Ashby a fortnight past. “In the end, he did nothing but work. He’d disappear into his laboratory not just for hours but days. Something drove him relentlessly.”
Aidan’s pulse thudded loudly in his ears. She spoke of her late husband, but she might have been speaking of him. Or of Diana.
“Ambition is well and good,” Mrs. Ashby said softly, “but there must be more. The joy of spending time with others. Contentedness in quiet moments.”
“Yes, I’m learning that lesson, Mrs. Ashby.” He would give half his bank account for another night like the one he’d spent with Diana. That was joy. That was contentedness.
“I hope she will too.” Mrs. Ashby leaned forward and tapped her cane on the rug. Quietly, she told him, “You have my blessing, sir. Though I suspect what you’ll be most in need of is perseverance.”
Diana sat in the low lamplight of her workshop and listened to the echoes of voices in the drawing room down the hall. She couldn’t make out their words, but her mother’s voice and Aidan’s deep, warm timbre were unmistakable.
She’d heard someone arrive nearly half an hour earlier, and she’d known instinctively that it was Aidan.
He’d vowed before that night they’d spent together that he would not think of the future, but he was an honorable man. No matter how often he told himself he wasn’t a gentleman, Diana knew that he would behave like one in this matter.
Aidan had come to offer for her, and she could barely breathe through the pain of knowing that she would have to refuse him. What a change a couple of weeks had wrought. She’d bargained with her mother to prevent the very possibility that she would need to enter the marriage mart. Now she choked back tears at the prospect of turning away a proposal.
“Diana?” Aidan called to her softly from the threshold of the conservatory.
