Page 17 of A Lord's Chance
Lloyd’s brown eyes shimmered. “Yes. Very much, my mother especially.”
“Tell me about them.”
“There’s not much to tell about my father. He was a diplomat, so I didn’t see him much. It was normal for him to be away travelling for months at a time, leaving me with my mother, and when he returned, he spent all his time with her. A son was important for the future, but his true love was her.”
“A diplomat. Aren’t you lords?” Nobbie asked the easiest question, because it vaguely sounded like Lloyd’s father was a bit of fool for ignoring his son. Did Lloyd know that his father treated him like property? An heir, not a person? He’d seen it too many times in his dealings with the ton. He unclenched his fists; he couldn’t fight a dead man on Lloyd’s behalf, and he didn’t want to ruin Lloyd’s memories when nothing good could come of him pointing this out.
“Yes. My great-grandfather was a banker who negotiated some of the British East India Company contracts with the Crown and was made the 1st Baron of Lawndry for his efforts. My grandfather grew up in India and worked there too. He married my grandmother, Harleen Vastrakar, and he became the first Earl of Lawndry. My father followed the same path into diplomacy, and he probably expected to go to India since his mother taught him Hindi, but he was sent to Switzerland where he fell in love with my mother.”
“What number Earl does that make you?”
Lloyd grinned. “I thought you were good at numbers?”
“I am. But have you considered that I want to hear it from you?” Nobbie liked teasing Lloyd, especially when he had the baffled expression which made his nose wrinkle.
“Are you teasing me?”
“Yes.” Nobbie kissed him on the mouth, then lay back on the sheepskin rug.
“Obviously I am the third Earl of Lawndry, and maybe the final one too.”
His chest tightened. “Why?” He could guess—Lloyd might feel the same way he did—but he was a coward and he wanted to hear it from Lloyd.
“I suppose I could marry a woman and carry on the line, but it wouldn’t be fair to her.” It wasn’t like Lloyd to be so evasive, and it made Nobbie’s shoulders hitch closer to his neck.
“Why not?” Did he want to know? Yes. No. God. Fuck. He needed to know why.
“Because I think I’m falling in love with you.”
“Are you certain?” Nobbie couldn’t breathe.
Lloyd shook his head. “I am not certain. It remains a distinct possibility, however, and that would mean ... if you were receptive to the idea, that is ... well, it might mean that there will never be a fourth Earl of Lawndry.” Lloyd gave the most ‘Lloyd’answer that was possible to say. It made complete sense that Lloyd would want to be as certain about love as he was about his watches.
“What happens to the title then?” As if that was the most important question. Fuck, he didn’t care about some pompous aristocratic thing, but it was easier to ask that than deal with the concept of love. Fondness and kisses weren’t love, were they? Earnest’s poems about love were always about great passions, not this gentle sense of belonging and homeliness. Nobbie had never had a home, not really, and now he’d had a week at Lloyd’s home, he was beginning to crave it. With Lloyd? Yes.
Lloyd growled under his breath. “Why did you ask that question? Now I have to think about how my mean Uncle Baldric will become the Earl if I die.”
“Then you’d best outlive him.” He joked, rather liking the idea of Lloyd living a long life. Together with him.
“I don’t have any other relatives. The Lawndry’s weren’t great breeders. Baldric has no children either, just a misery wife.”
Nobbie tilted his head curiously. He’d done enough work with Adam to know that it was rarely the woman’s fault, and bitterness often came after a woman understood how powerless she was in a marriage. Being someone’s property would do that to anyone.
“No children?”
“No. It doesn’t matter. The title can go into abeyance and the crown will gift it to some other worthy recipient one day. I’ll be dead, so it won’t matter to me.”
“I suppose that is technically true.” Nobbie sat up, pleased for the distraction from his own thoughts. A silence surrounded them both and it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Nobbie was happy to wait while Lloyd figured out his thoughts. This week he’d noticed that it sometimes took Lloyd a while to think throughwhat someone had said, and that he didn’t cope very well with sudden tangents or changes.
“I don’t want to think about being dead because it means thinking about how upset other people—” Lloyd stared at Nobbie, “—might be. It was the hardest thing about my mother dying.”
“What?”
“She wasn’t there anymore to talk to about anything. We shared a passion for horology, and I often find things, like your watch, that she would’ve loved to have heard all about. It’s been almost the same amount of time without her as I had with her, and I still turn around and want to say, Hey Mother, you’d love this.”
Nobbie’s chest ached. “The good thing about growing up in an orphanage since I was a baby is that I don’t have parents to miss.”
“You have them now.”
