Page 9 of Lady, Behave
“She is not suitable.”
“An earl’s granddaughter meets the standard of a marquess.” He undid a few buttons of his waistcoat and brushed his hand down his thigh as he crossed one leg over the other.Her looks sear my brain with their perfection, and her forthright manner thrills my world-weary soul.“I like her eligibility and her aplomb.”
“A duchess needs more than that to be a proper spouse.”
He knit his brows. His mother would have her due or take longer to acquire it than if he simply let her have her head. But he was very tired of her pressing him on the issue. “A marchioness needs style. Gravitas. An understanding of her role in the world and in her husband’s estates. I can attest to Miss Adelaide possessing the first two. We might imagine what good she could accomplish on the estate of a man who owns eleven thousand acres and has administration of eighty-eight tenants.”
“Someday, the future duchess of Stonegage will have twice that to attend to.”
“Not soon, Mama. The current duchess is hale and hearty. Feisty, too. She takes on her son in the middle of the night when he is quite exhausted and needs his bed.”
She raised a hand.
“But!” He interrupted her attempt to take charge. “You will have your way. I’d like to oblige you. Unfortunately, I’ve talked with her and learned much of her, more than you know. You cannot talk me out of this!”
“She’s lovely. I grant you. But in her veins flows the blood of a villain.”
He winced. “A bit strong, wouldn’t you say, for one so young and beautiful?”
“You know the Barrymores are friends with the Regent.”
“Distant cousins, are they not?”
She nodded, her nostrils pinched at the mention of three brothers who had caroused with Prinny and even pimped, it was said, for him.
“And the Earl of Barry who left his mortal coil a year ago was estranged from those infamous others, as I understand it. So what did he do, Mama? Eh? Fight with Papa? Over what? Or buy horses out from under you? Might he have done worse and sold my whereabouts to the French twelve years ago? You know that my friend the Earl of Martindale and his father were betrayed to the localgendarme.”
“No. Not any of that. Your capture was accidental. Serendipity. Not like that poor man and his son, your friend.”
“Well, out with the reason! Because unless you can tell me the old earl murdered someone and his dead son, too, we will not speak of this again.”
“The son was blameless.”
“I see,” Heath said, his patience thinning. “Good to know. So the grandfather was…?”
“A crook.”
“All right!” He inhaled. So many men were crooks these days. Taking what did not belong to them. Women, money, advantages. “And he was a gambler? A horse thief? A what?”
“A fence.”
Heath stared at her. His mother was a striking, lovely woman. With red-gold hair, even at her age of fifty-five, she had skin that glowed clear and pink. She smiled, and the world smiled with her. She frowned, and she took your skin off. Do her wrong, and she never forgot or forgave. There was much more here than her simple declarations of the old earl’s criminal behavior. What was it? “Very well, Mama. The old man was a fence. Of what?”
“Paintings, sculpture, jewelry. Oh, not the small trifles. Not rings or stick pins.”
“But of watercolors and portraits? Parures? Rubies from India?”
“Yes! Diamonds and sapphires worth fortunes,” she confirmed.
“Yours?” he asked because this was where this was going, wasn’t it?
“No.”
Heath waited. No words were forthcoming. “I take it then that you want something the old earl possessed.”
“Your father does.”
“What?”
