Chapter 11
After luncheon Byron couldn’t stop thinking about the way Catriona Burns looked up at Bret, eyes shining, her love obvious. His own expectation of marriage did not include feelings of that nature. His father had taught him welclass="underline" one’s wife should be a chaste woman of good breeding. Passion between a husband and wife was out of the question.
The new Countess of Oakley, as his father had instructed him time out of mind, should be virtuous, well mannered, and above all, show respect if not fawning submission to her husband.
Respect and submission wasn’t what Catriona felt for Bret.
Envy was an uncomfortable emotion. It felt like a dark, raging burn in his veins.
Before he chose Opal to wed, he had danced with every maiden on the marriage market who fell into his purview—which left Scottish girls such as Marilla and Fiona to the side—and then he had made what he thought was a reasoned, intelligent decision.
His thought process had been a bit embarrassing, in retrospect. He had decided that Opal would make a good mother. He hadn’t known his own mother well, since she had run away with his uncle—his father’s younger brother—when he was just a child. They had gone to the Americas, and for all he knew, they were there still.
Still, it didn’t help to know that he had a reason to feel unsure of himself around women. His father’s freezing tirades, which invariably emphasized female lust, had clearly affected him.
He would have sworn that Opal was chaste; among other signs, he had never detected the faintest shadow of desire when she looked at him. Now he thought back to the docility with which she accepted his compliments, her downturned eyes, and the way she turned her head to the side . . . He had been a fool.
It wasn’t that he wanted to make a fast woman his countess. An unblemished reputation was of supreme importance. But . . . he would like to have his wife love him. Enough so that she wouldn’t leap to another man’s bed.
What’s more, if Bret could make a woman love him, Byron damn well could as well. His competitive edge rose to the surface. He could make a woman look at him with wild delight. He could bind her to him so persuasively that she would never look at another.
Marilla Chisholm was an obvious candidate. She was pretty, devastatingly so. Her curls were soft as butter, and her eyes a delightful blue.
And the fact that her youthful spirits led her to behavior that would be classified as outrageous by the strict matrons who ruled the ton. . . well, that was all to the better. After all, she was trying to kiss him, rather than a dancing master. She was probably just innocent of the ways of the world.
To be fair, his fiancée had not shown any reluctance to accept his kisses, to the best of his recollection. It was he who had thought to protect her maidenly virtue, never venturing more than to give her a chaste buss. If he had kissed Opal more passionately, would she have turned to him, rather than the dancing master?
He rather suspected that might be the case.
One could almost think that she had deliberately planned that he should discover her in a compromising position. When he’d entered the room, she had seemed neither shocked nor dismayed. He had stood there, consumed in an incandescent rage, and Opal watched him as she pushed away her dancing master, smiled prettily, and said, “Well, I suppose our betrothal is at an end.”
The more he thought about it . . . the more he was convinced the whole scene was calculated. She probably paid that dancing master for the kiss. That was how much she wanted to get rid of him. Of him, the Earl of Oakley.
Yet his figure was agreeable, if not better than that. His nose was Roman, as Marilla had pointed out, but not overly so. He was wealthy and titled.
But he hadn’t bothered to woo Opal. In fact, he’d been something of a pompous ass about it, bestowing his hand upon her with the expectation that she would consider it life’s greatest blessing.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t recognize the prototype. His father had judged people solely on their claims to bloodlines and estate. No maid in the late earl’s presence raised her eyes above shoulder level unless spoken to. No child, including his own, spoke unless invited to do so. No woman, including his own wife, expressed disagreement with one of Lord Oakley’s opinions, at least to the best of Byron’s memory.
He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. He might have inadvertently fallen into some of his father’s habits of mind and conduct. But that needn’t mean he had to retain them; he was, after all, possessed of a free will. The late earl had been a cold-blooded man whose only deep concern was for his reputation. He had sent Robin to Rugby after the comte died because of what people would say if he didn’t; but he wouldn’t let Robin come home on holidays because of the French “taint” in his nephew’s blood.
He, Byron, didn’t have to take after his father. He could be spontaneous and warm. Amusing, even. Charming. All those things that Robin was and he wasn’t . . . but only because he hadn’t ever really tried.
He couldn’t imagine himself in love—but he could damn well make a woman fall in love with him. For a moment he considered Fiona Chisholm, but there was something in her gaze that suggested she was unlikely to succumb to tender feelings. Some sort of reserve that echoed his own.
Lady Cecily was pretty as a picture, but his friend Burbett had mentioned that he was as good as betrothed to her, so there was no point looking in her direction.
That left Marilla. She was lively, beautiful, and—for the most part—well mannered. Her joie de vivre would keep him young. He could play blindman’s buff with his children someday.
Byron took himself downstairs that afternoon resolved to win Marilla’s heart. He would begin by reiterating the request he had made to her to address him by his Christian name.
If he married someone like Marilla, it would prove to Taran that he wasn’t stuffy, like his father. The more he thought on it, Marilla was practically perfect. The other young ladies seemed to regard her as something of a leader: witness the way that they followed her suggestion of blindman’s buff.
Leadership was a good attribute for a countess.
He reached the bottom of the stairs, hesitated, and then turned into the library rather than the drawing room. Even given his new determination to consider Marilla as a countess, it was something of a relief to find that she wasn’t in the room.
In fact, the library’s only occupant was Marilla’s sister, Fiona. She lay on a sofa before the fire, reading a book, dark red curls tumbling down one shoulder. Her spectacles were surprisingly winsome, he thought. Really, it was enough to make one think that they might become fashionable.
As he walked over to the fireplace, she looked up from her book, and her brow creased for a moment. He could tell perfectly well that she had momentarily forgotten who he was. This was a woman truly unimpressed by his consequence.
“Lord Oakley,” he prompted, adding, “but please call me Byron; we are all on terms of the greatest familiarity at Finovair.” It wasn’t at all hard to ask her that. In fact, he would rather like to hear his name on her lips.
She swung down her legs, rose, and dropped a curtsy. “Lord Oakley,” she said, her eyes shadowed by curling eyelashes.
Byron bowed to the young lady and then walked over to stand in front of the sofa. He nearly sat down without being invited to do so, because that was the way people on easy terms behaved. Or at least, so he thought. But his breeding got the better of him and he remained on his feet. “We all agreed to address each other by our Christian names,” he informed her, hating the hectoring tone of his voice even as he spoke. “Mine is Byron.”
She regarded him silently for a moment. Her eyes were just as green as they had appeared last night, and her spectacles perched on a delightfully pert nose.