Page 68 of Miss Determined
Amaryllis looked as if she’d charge to her mother’s rescue—or something—though Trevor wasn’t yet ready to let her go.
He’dneverbe ready to let her go. “Sycamore collects political prints. Satires, bawdy sketches, cartoons. Pastes them into collections. I don’t understand it, but his other hobby is playing with knives.”
Amaryllis brushed her hand over the fern. “I was afraid that your hobby was… toying with the affections of aging rural spinsters. Making light of their virtue.”
He ached to hold her. To go down on his knees and wrap his arms about her. To swear all manner of undying everythings in three languages.
“I am profoundly sorry to have misled you as to my identity,” he said, forcing himself to sit across from her rather than beside her. “That I have caused you any distress, any distress at all, wreaks calamity upon my soul. I was spying on my solicitors, hoping discretion would yield truths that dozens of quarterly reports have obscured, and my hopes were justified.”
I love you.He kept that part behind his teeth, because a man in disgrace with his beloved hadn’t the right to burden her with declarations.
Also, Sycamore and Jeanette both had acute hearing.
“You’ve caught Purvis at his pilfering?”
“Thousands of pounds of embezzlement happened right under my figurative nose. If you are distressed to learn that I am a marquess, you will be even more displeased to know that Purvis has tried to render me a bankrupt as well.”
Amaryllis caressed the damned plant again. “And now you are to marry the heiress of his choice?” Her tone clearly said she would not be that heiress.
“He’s certainly offering suggestions and has been since I returned to London. I have no intention of gratifying his greed any further, though.”
For the first time, Amaryllis’s self-possession seemed to falter. “He can ruin you, can’t he?”
“He’s apparently a skilled forger in addition to being a cheat and embezzler. He has endless examples of my penmanship, should he want to create salacious letters over my signature, for example. I suspect his attack will be financial, though, a few muttered asides at the club, some pointed silences over supper with his counterparts at other firms. If he chooses to gossip with his fellow solicitors, they will gossip with their clients.”
“And to think,” Amaryllis murmured, “the king believes himself the highest power in the land. In the midst of all this intrigue, looming scandal, and criminal lawyering, how will you find time to do the pretty?”
Jeanette’s voice, an indistinct patter, drifted in from the corridor.
“You mean how will I find time to court you?”
Amaryllis gave him a look severe enough to make his insides go all crozzled. “Precisely. We had discussed a courtship, my lord.”
He had been mendacious before—no escaping that fact—and the antidote was unflinching honesty now. “Does that courtship still interest you as dearly as it interests me?”
“Courtship with Mr. Trevor Dorning did interest me,” she said. “A very great deal. I am torn now between dismay at the circumstances you face, my own smarting pride, and… the need to absorb all that you’ve told me. Embezzlement is a hanging felony, and I understand why you resorted to subterfuge, but I cannot like how you went about it.”
“Can you still like me?”
“Liking has never been at issue, Trev—my lord. The difficult issue is trust.”
Jeanette sailed into the room, all smiles. “My apologies, but Cook started going on about the sauces for tonight’s dinner, and deserting the royal navy on the high seas is easier than escaping Cook’s raptures. Another pot is on the way, along with some sandwiches. What do you suppose Sycamore is getting up to with Mrs. DeWitt?”
Amaryllis spared Trevor the effort of a reply. “I heard Mama laughing a moment ago. She hasn’t laughed in ages, so let’s leave them to their amusements, shall we?”
The second pot and the sandwiches arrived, Sycamore and Mourna returned, and Trevor chatted about the blasted weather for twenty interminable minutes. He kept telling himself that the difficult discussion with Amaryllis had been progress, but perhaps, larking about in Berkshire, he’d grown a little too facile with falsehoods.
Or much too facile.
“Gracious.” Mama peered at the stack of mail just pushed through the slot. “We’ve had more mail in the past week in Town than we get at Twidboro in three months.”
Lissa bent to gather up a half-dozen missives and felt a sense of unreality. Three of the six epistles had been sealed with a crest, two had been franked by peers: Casriel—he was the Dorning titleholder—and… She squinted at the corner of the folded letter.
Bellefonte, another earl. Two of the earl’s sisters had married into the Dorning family, Lady Susannah and Lady Della.
“Lady Della made good on her threat,” Lissa said, setting the stack on the foyer’s sideboard. “The Countess of Bellefonte has apparently seen fit to invite us to some function or other.”
Mourna passed Lissa the bonnet trimmed in pink ribbon. “You know, I’ve longed for just this sort of reception for you. Invitations piling up, the best people getting to know you. I suspected that your Mr. Dorning had some good connections.”
