Page 11 of Nothing Compares to the Duke
“If I’d said anything you would have commandeered a pony cart and ridden off to some distant village where no one knew your name.”
“I still might.” Bella quite liked that idea.
“Bella, please.”
“We must give her at least one good reason not to,” her father said playfully.
Hearing lightness in his tone eased the worry weighing on her heart.
Her mother let out a half-hearted chuckle. “Because we have house guests arriving who expect to be entertained for a fortnight?”
And just when I have a book to finish.Dozens of slips of paper decorated the wall in her sitting room.Some were riddles, others contained word problems or logic conundrums. Every time she thought of a new one, she added it to the collection and then to the pages of her manuscript. She was so close to adding finishing touches.
“You needn’t choose any of them,” her father told her in his rumbling baritone.
“Edmund, we’ve discussed this.” Mama’s quelling glance would have given other men pause, but her parents had been married for two decades and her father wasn’t a man to be put off easily.
“They’re all fine young men, of course,” he conceded. “Your mother chose with care.”
“But without consulting me,” Bella couldn’t stop from blurting.
Her mother strode forward. “What would you have said, dear girl? Would you have agreed to meet them? We do not wish to force your hand.”
“And yet four men are descending on Hillcrest and I had no choice at all.” Her voice had taken on a reedy quality she hated. Petulance didn’t suit her.
“The choice shall always be yours to make.” Her father’s firm unwavering manner always made her believe him. “We only long to see you happy.”
“I’m happy as I am.” Bella felt the hollowness of the claim even as she spoke it. Loneliness weighed on her more often than she liked to admit. She kept busy and there were always things to do. But at moments, just every once in a while, it felt as if something was missing.
“Marriage does have its merits.” It was rare that her father fell into the softer tone he’d used when she was a child, but he wielded it now as he approached to stand next to her mother. His gaze turned soft, filled with warmth. “You are our only child. We wish to see your future secured, with a home and a man who is worthy of you.”
Bella swallowed the protest that welled up.
“Who are they?” Bella had learned long ago that one couldn’t form a strategy without information.
“You will meet them soon enough. Guests have been arriving for the last hour. By six they will all be gathered in the drawing room, my dear.” The smile her mother offered was encouraging, but her eyes gleamed in that way they did when one of her plans had turned to triumph.
Bella’s father stepped forward and offered his arm as if he meant to escort her to the drawing room immediately.
“I will greet them, of course, as visitors to our home. But I make no promises,” Bella told them with the same vein of stubbornness that made her want to bolt from the room. “I saw no names I recognize at those place settings. These men are strangers to me.”
“Arabella, don’t be churlish—”
The moment her mother’s voice began to rise, her father spoke up. “We ask only that you meet them, my girl. Speak to them. Consider that they came here because they wished to make your acquaintance. Nodifferent from the young bucks you encountered at all those silly balls during your Seasons.”
“Better not to mention those gentlemen,” her mother added.
With a little grumbling sound, her father came forward and took her hands in his. “You deserve the finest of suitors, my girl. And I’ve yet to convince myself any of them deserve you. But do consider whether any of the lads downstairs might suit you.”
Bella clasped her father’s hands.
They’d been endlessly patient. She knew of parents who arranged marriages with more concern for titles and bloodlines than their daughters’ happiness.
She longed to tell them the truth, but it was one she could barely admit herself.
Clever young women who hoped to publish their own book one day did not allow their heart to be smashed by a man who hadn’t even bothered to send a letter in five years. A man who’d become a duke and probably didn’t even remember her anymore.
“I should prepare to greet our visitors,” she told her parents. Then more softly to her father, “I’ll do my best.”
