Page 9 of Her Rogue to Ruin
Her aunt beamed a satisfied smile. “That’s wonderful. You don’t get out enough.”
“I go out nearly every day.” Portia chuckled as she glanced at her aunt.
“To work. I meant for pleasure or visiting with friends.”
“I attend my widows’ club meetings scrupulously.”
Aunt Claire tipped one dark brow dubiously. “I still don’t quite understand what you do there, but you always come home with plans and some task Lady Fiona has set you.”
“I like to help.”
“Yes, of course. You’re a caretaker by nature.”
“I suppose I am.” Portia wasn’t certain her aunt meant it as a compliment.
After moving in with her, Portia had been reticent to tell the truth about her marriage. When she had, her aunt had comforted her and sympathized, but she’d also pointed out how Winston Hastings had manipulated Portia, and how, at times, she’d allowed him to.
In their six years of marriage, she had never been able to provide him with an heir. The guilt of that failure weighed on her, and he had wielded it against her on numerous occasions. When he was angry, it was the sharpest weapon he possessed, though Portia knew his first wife had also failed to conceive. If the problem was a medical one, it likely laid with Hastings. Yet she still felt an enormous sense of not living up to expectations. And she’d felt longing too. Shedidwant to be a mother.
“That’s precisely why I think you should get out and about town more. Accept more invitations.” Aunt Claire flipped through the items of post. “Looks as if there might be a few here too.”
“I give every invitation due consideration.”
“And you reject many of them.”
“But I do accept some of them.” Portia approached her aunt and turned. “Help me with these hooks?”
“Oh, Dr. Carmichael stopped in yesterday,” her aunt said as she worked the fastenings on Portia’s gown. “I forgot to tell you. He asked after you, of course.”
“He’s fond of you.”
Aunt Claire scoffed and Portia felt the puff of air against her nape. “He’s fond ofyou.”
Dr. Carmichael made regular visits to an elderly patient who lived just up the lane, and one day many months ago, he’d struck up a conversation with Aunt Claire, who’d been out tending the bright red geraniums in her window box.
Since the acquaintance had begun before Portia had come to reside in the cottage, she knew the gentleman’s real interest was in her aunt.
“Why don’t you wish to acknowledge his interest in you?” Portia caught her aunt’s gaze in the cheval mirror in the corner of her bedroom.
“I suspect you know why, my dear.”
Once the hooks were unfastened, Portia shimmied out of the gown and laid it out carefully on her bed. Then she took up the day dress she planned to wear to Pemberton House . “I’m not certain I do,” Portia said when she turned back to her aunt. “Tell me.”
“Well, it’s fear, of course.”
Portia frowned. Fear was nothing she associated with her aunt. She’d been the youngest of her siblings and “a bit wild” in her youth, by her own admission. Then realization dawned. Though the doctor visited now and then, the two shared only brief chats over tea. Perhaps there’d not been sufficient time to build trust between them.
“You’re afraid he’s not truly a good man?”
Her aunt jerked back in surprise. “Heavens no, that’s not it at all. Daniel has a sterling reputation. Mrs. Isles, the one he visits, heaps praise on the man anytime she speaks of him.” She cast her gaze down at the carpet and ran the toe of her boot over a curving vine in the patten. “And I may have sought out a few of his articles in medical journals.”
Portia smiled, pleased to hear her aunt finally admit the extent of her interest in the good doctor. She liked him too, mostly because he was so kind to her aunt. He’d also shown a polite interest in Portia’s artwork and had sat for a quick sketched portrait on one occasion a few weeks ago.
“I’ve never been a wife, have I?” Aunt Claire approached the window and pulled the curtain aside. “I see couples promenade in our little square at times and wonder what that life might be like. To share my time, my space, my very self with another day in and day out. I’m a spinster by choice, not because I never received proposals.” She glanced back at Portia with a bittersweet grin.
“How many offers?” Portia guessed at least three. Her aunt was intelligent, kind, and a strikingly lovely woman.
“Five,” she said on a near whisper. “Though Mama and Papa only knew about three of those. The other two were impulsive, words spoken in the heat of…” Her eyes glittered as she turned away from the window. “Well, those stories are better left in the past. But there were the two meaningless proposals and then the three that were very formal, all of them from men I couldn’t imagine spending weeks with, let alone a lifetime.”
