Page 35 of Let Me Be Your Hero
“Forewarned? They seem kindhearted,” Izzie noted as he led her into the music room.
“They are,” he agreed. “I don’t mean to complain, but, well. The easiest way for me to explain is by showing you this.”
He pulled out a huge case in dark brown leather. It was almost as long as Izzie was tall. It looked heavy and exceptionally unwieldy to Izzie’s eyes, but he placed it on a glossy rosewood table as easily as if it were a flute or violin.
“This,” he said, snapping open the metal buckles, “is a contrabassoon.”
The instrument was enormous. Gleaming brown wood covered with delicate silver keys curved around in loop after loop.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a contrabassoon,” Izzie noted, gently pressing a key.
“And that is why they purchased it,” Archibald noted cheerlessly. “Not because any of our guests might wish to play it. Trust me, they don’t know how. But because nobody else has one, and it’s as expensive as one of our carriages. They had this notion that having such an instrument in our music room would be a good way to show off how very wealthy we are.”
Izzie cringed. “It seems a shame. To have such a beautiful instrument, and for nobody to play it.”
“Exactly.” Relief flooded his eyes. “That’s actually why I decided to learn to play it myself. Because it seemed like such a waste. But then…”
She nudged him with her elbow. “But then?”
He cringed. “That was around the time my parents started urging me to start looking for a wife. And they had this idea thatmy serenading young ladies on the contrabassoon would be the perfect means to subtly show off how wealthy we are.”
Izzie bit her lip at the image because, as absurd as the idea of a romantic bassoon serenade seemed, she didn’t want Archibald to feel that she was laughing at him.
He noticed her struggle. “It’s all right. You can laugh. Goodness knows everyone else did. What made it even more ridiculous was the fact that I’d just started to play, and I was absolutely atrocious. But they thought it a marvelous idea, and I couldn’t find a way to tell them they were wrong without hurting their feelings. And I would never want to do that.”
Izzie’s heart squeezed. This man who was to be her husband, who had beaten a swarm of attackers senseless as easily as she might lift her teacup, had a heart as squishy as a sponge cake inside his hulking exterior. This, she decided, was a good thing.
Something else occurred to her. “I also noticed that your parents call you Archie.” She might be mistaken, but she thought she had detected a pained look in his eyes when they’d used the nickname.
He grimaced, confirming her suspicions. “Yes. They do.”
She gave him a speaking look. “I take it that you do not wish for me to call you Archie, too?”
He sighed. “I must confess, I’ve never felt like much of anArchie. Not even when I was six years old. ButArchieis”—he waved a hand, struggling to explain—“the son they want. A young Corinthian. A man-about-town.”
“Archieis a fashionable nickname,” she mused. “And your parents seem to like things that are fashionable.”
“Lord, is that the truth,” he muttered.
She tapped a slender finger against her lip. “What if we could come up with something even more fashionable?”
He chuckled but looked down. “I don’t think anyone would describe me as fashionable.”
Fashionable probably wasn’t the right word. Archibald was never going to be one of those men who spent hours practicing the art of handling their walking stick in the mirror so that everyone would exclaim over the way he sauntered down St. James’s Street on the way to his club.
But he had a timeless masculine appeal that Izzie preferred.
Muchpreferred, if she was being honest.
She circled him, studying his profile. “I think you’re right aboutArchie, in any case. As an author, I can say that if I was writing you as a character in my book, I would never call youArchie.”
He snorted. “I doubt very much that any author would name a character Archibald Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy.”
“Indeed, what sort of idiotic author would give their character such a name? Only imagine how her hand would cramp each time she had to write outMister Nettlethorpe-Ogilvyfor the simplest piece of dialogue attribution. No”—she tapped her lip, considering—“were I to give you a nickname, I think it would be… Thorpe.”
“Thorpe?” He looked up, startled.
“Thorpe,” she repeated. It was simple. Unpretentious.
