Page 36 of Let Me Be Your Hero
Masculine.
Just like him.
“Thorpe,” he said again as if testing the way it felt on his tongue. “Thorpe. I… I like that. Quite a lot, actually. I doubt my parents would use it, though. I don’t even know how I would go about asking them. They’ve been calling me Archie my whole life, and as I said”—he dropped his voice low—“I would never want to hurt their feelings.”
Her lips twisted into a wry smile. Already a plan was forming in her mind. “Leave everything to me. That is, if you’re sure you like it. If we’re going to convince your parents to call you something else, it’s important that it feels like the real you.”
“No, I’m sure.Thorpefeels much more like the real me.”
Izzie nudged him with her elbow. “Speaking of the real you, I know shockingly little about you, especially considering that we’re to be married tomorrow. Won’t you tell me more about yourself? Perhaps about your work at Nettlethorpe Iron?”
Izzie had asked some shocking questions in her day, but she hadn’t thought this was one of them. Yet Archibald flinched as if she’d delivered a withering set-down.
“Archibald?” she asked. “Is everything all right?”
“Of course,” he said hastily. “I, uh… Why don’t I show you the upstairs?”
He was already towing her through the door and toward the red-carpeted stairs.
“Are you certain nothing is the matter?” It was a good thing she was wearing boots and trousers. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been able to keep up with his brisk stride. “I have an appalling tendency to say precisely what springs into my mind. I hope I did not speak out of turn.” Although, thinking about what she had just said, Izzie was struggling to grasp how she might have given offense…
“You didn’t.” His eyes were sincere. Beseeching, even. He gestured toward the upper floors, seeming eager to change the subject. “You remarked upon the lack of Gothic novels in the library. It occurred to me that you might like to choose a room for yourself. Not as your bedroom. I mean”—his ears turned red—“you’ll have one of those t-too, of course, but… um…”
She squeezed his arm, unable to resist teasing him. “Will I be needing my own bedroom? Perhaps we’ll want to share.”
Now his entire face was scarlet. “I, uh… I wouldn’t mind. But maybe you would. We’ll figure that out after the… the wedding.” He cleared his throat. “But I thought you might like to have a study. Or a library, or office… whatever you want to call it. Youcan keep all your books in there, and we’ll also get you a nice desk, so you’ll have a place to work on your writing.”
A place to work on her writing! An image sprang to mind of the library of her daydreams, with tall windows and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covering every wall...
She tamped down her excitement. Archibald probably had something much more modest in mind. And really, it would be such a luxury to have any room for her own use. The notion of a snug writing nook held tremendous appeal.
“I would love that, Archibald.” She felt tears pricking. “What a thoughtful suggestion.”
“There’s a particular room I have in mind,” Archibald said as they reached the top of the stairs. “Let’s see what you think of it.”
He led her halfway down the red-carpeted corridor. The door he tried proved to be locked, so he asked the footman positioned at the top of the stairs to run and fetch the key from the butler, Giddings.
While they waited, Izzie looked around. She noticed that the wall at the end of the hallway was curved and recalled that from the outside, the house had had round towers on each corner. “Oh! Is this one of the towers?”
“It is,” he confirmed.
“I thought they were just a façade. I didn’t realize there were tower rooms!”
The footman had returned with a ring of keys. Archibald was flipping through them, looking for the right one.
Izzie gazed longingly at the arched wooden door that led into the tower room. She wondered what it looked like on the inside. A castle tower—the very notion seemed inherently romantic!
Archibald was still busy with the keys. Maybe she would just have a quick peek…
She was just poking her head through the door when Archibald hissed, “Izzie! Wait!”
CHAPTER 18
As Archibald watched Izzie stride through the tower room door where his grandfather lay resting, his heart flew and his throat constricted. Was this it, the moment that his fragile dream of having Izzie as his wife came crashing down around him?
Thanks to his parents’ influence, Archibald could perform a somewhat convincing pantomime of being a gentleman. But there was no such hope for John Nettlethorpe. He had an East London accent and the colorful vocabulary that went with it. Archibald’s grandfather drank gin, not brandy, and his favorite sport was cockfighting, not horseracing. The second he opened his mouth, Izzie would understand precisely what kind of family she, the daughter of an earl, was marrying into.
Heart in his throat, Archibald peered around the door. His body sagged with relief when he saw that his grandfather was asleep.
