Page 31 of Lady, Behave
She caught some sanity. “It’s wicked of you to speak of such things so early in the morning.”
He winked at her and put on his hat. “When you’re wholly mine, any minute of the day will be divinely wicked.”
That set fire to her longing for him.
“Be good until I return.” Chuckling, he ran his fingers up into the wealth of her hair and held her there as he kissed her once again, this time like a Viking raider invading a round keep, taking a woman who should be his. “Then you and I will be naughty together.”
He opened the door and turned to look over his shoulder.
“How can you leave me…?”Wanting you?
He hooted. “I see you’d prefer I stay. But dangerous, that, my sweet. You’ll recover. I want to see you bloom for me when I return.”
“Oh, go! You terrible man. Making me guess what in the world you are about!”Being too damn cryptic.
“I save my best words for the finest ending. Awful of me, but do remember, darling. I love you.” He widened his eyes as he affirmed that with one nod. Then he put on his hat and left her standing alone at the door wishing she could take him to bed.
She shook there for many more minutes watching him leave. Blinking away the confusion of what had just happened, she frowned, shook her head, and finally, trudged up the stairs.
Men, she concluded, needed women to bring them to their senses. But of course, at the moment, she had none of her own.
Minutes later, she realized she rather liked that. She was indeed senseless from Gyles’s kisses—and because she loved him, that made perfect sense.
The threat of ruin because Grandpapa had been less than an honest man drifted away in a new euphoria.
*
Two days later,Gyles settled into the squabs of his coach. He would miss his friend Lex’s wedding to Imogen tomorrow, but he had laid out his reasoning and apologized for his inability to appear. Lex, a gracious fellow, had understood.
Speed was what Gyles was after to settle his own affairs. Now that the house on the Steine was fully staffed, aired, and appointed, he had dealt with his parents this morning. They were angry he’d left the pavilion but saw there was nothing they could do about it. They would face more that they could not change in a few days.
He sighed. The driver pulled away with all due speed for the north road to London. Eager was too mild a word to describe Gyles’s intentions to speak with his new solicitor.
He had engaged the new man last year for himself alone. Quietly. The group whom his father and his grandfather before him had employed for decades had served ably. Indeed, the family solicitors for the Dukes of Stonegage had a long history of loyalty, as they should. However, upon Gyles’s return to London once Napoleon was in Elba, he had received so many appeals by his father to hand over hundreds of pounds to pay debtors that Gyles had sought a way to ensure the duke learned nothing of his own finances. On advice of the new solicitor, Gyles had switched banks, and the new bankers were duty-bound to reveal nothing of his affairs to anyone, even his father.
But he had need of that same solicitor now to build a stronger wall between the Stonegage influence and his own. Gyles would not be thwarted in the matter of choosing a bride by his father’s petty desire for a painting. The duke might want it as a matter of family pride, or he could covet it in the hope of selling it to line his coffers. Family pride had not influenced his father to try to borrow funds to ransom Gyles away from the French thirteen years ago.
Bankruptcy had been his father’s excuse then. Gyles had never questioned the viability of that. The matter of Gyles’s marriage was not, at heart, a money matter. Not for Gyles, who was flush and could marry the poorest girl on earth if he so chose. For his father, however, finances had always been a touchy subject. Now he would not permit the duke to dictate his future happiness by denying him the woman he wanted as wife. By the grace of God, Gyles had survived his father’s inability to pay his ransom.
Indeed, he’d survive his father’s latest challenge, full bore.
“To deny your father the ability to approve your marriage courts disaster, Heath.” His good friend Hadley Sherborne, Viscount Grey, had been most adamant in his warning about it the other morning as he and Fitz accompanied him on his search for a rental house. Gyles had heard of Grey’s arrival last Friday in Brighton from Martindale. Learning of Grey’s particular troubles with his own father over an offer of marriage to a woman his father did not approve of, Gyles called upon him at Grey’s summer home on the Steine. He needed perspective on how to fight his own father’s opposition to his pursuit of Addy.
“I expect a war,” Gyles said and waved away the Grey butler’s offer of coffee or breakfast. Grey looked the worse for his worries over how to win back the woman he truly loved. His golden hair was askew, and his forest green eyes were red with lack of sleep. Rumor had it Grey was in town to woo Laurel Devereaux back to his arms. “But it’s thirty-three years late for my father to disown me. My parents’ signatures on the day of their wedding are in the chapel registry at home. The name of my mother nor my date of birth cannot—woe unto my father—be denied.”
“Ha!” His friend chuckled as he used his serviette to wipe the corners of his mouth. “Mine threatened it anyway.”
Gyles scoffed. “How?”
“Follow Shakespeare’s advice. ‘First we kill all the lawyers.’”
“My father might think of that. Though I will say,” Gyles sighed, “that he is not one to give over to me easily.”
“Superiority is drilled into them from birth.”
Gyles countered with a grin. Indeed, his friend’s father was a noted peer of the realm valued for his blue blood—and his arcane stubbornness. “A trait they’ve engendered in us, too.”
“Imprisonment had as much to do with yours.” His friend knew well his past.
