Lilah walked away smiling, her heart healing. How her life had changed in just a few weeks. She was running a registry office, she’d loved and lost the man of her dreams, and she was now planning Margarite’s wedding. She didn’t feel happy, exactly. But the sorrow was easier to bear. Until Clara burst into her office wringing her hands in distress.
“Whatever is the matter?” Lilah asked as she rose from her desk.
“It’s all a mess,” Clara declared. “What do I know about planning a ball? I’ve messed up the invitations, the food, and the musicians. Aaron will be so angry. And Liam has gone back to Scotland!”
That last was said on a wail. Which meant, of course, that in addition to running a registry office, getting over losing the man she loved, and planning Margarite’s wedding, she was now also organizing the pomp and circumstance surrounding Aaron’s full ascension to the earldom.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Lilah wasn’t pregnant.That shouldn’t be Aaron’s first thought as he greeted his mother on his front doorstep, but it was the pre-eminent one and there was nothing he could do to change the course of his thoughts. Lilah wasn’t pregnant according to the missive she’d left on his desk.
“Good afternoon, Mother. You are looking well.” He extended a kiss to the air above her cheek. His mother did not approve of her children smudging her cosmetics.
“I’m looking horribly done in. Really, Aaron, you’re an earl now. You need to think of appearances, and your mother cannot be harrying about England in a ramshackle carriage.”
The ramshackle carriage was barely a year old. It was huge, ornate, and it made him cringe every time he saw it. “I did offer to send my carriage.”
“Your ugly thing? All black with a tiny crest. Really Aaron, you’re going to ascend to the title tomorrow. I do hope you’ve paid attention to these details. Otherwise, everyone will think you’re impoverished.”
“I have left the details to Clara. I’m sure everything will be exactly as it ought.”
His mother froze halfway up the house steps. She squeezed his arm as if in terror, then she squeaked his sister’s name. “Clara? Clara!”
“Yes, Mother. She’s—”
“But she’ll make a disaster of everything!”
A month ago, he would have thought the same thing. Indeed, he did think exactly that. But thanks to Lilah’s help, everything would be perfectly fine. “I’ve kept an eye on the planning,” he said. It was the only way he could get any news about Lilah. “I am content with the results.”
“Good God, men are such fools,” his mother huffed. Then she rushed up the front steps with amazing verve. “Where is she? Clara! Clara, come here this instant and tell me everything. Don’t leave out any detail. There may still be time to avoid complete disaster!”
Aaron winced, regretting the fact that he’d cleared his schedule for his mother’s visit. Now he would have to stand with Clara while his mother chastised them both for nonsensical reasons and then tried to change every detail of his celebration. It was exhausting, but it was what a good man did. And it was the perfect cap on a day when he’d learned that Lilah wasn’t pregnant.
“And why doesn’t your butler have an arm? Everything about an earl must be perfect! Imagine opening the door and seeing that every day? Horrible!”
Three hours later, Aaron had a revelation. He wasn’t sure if it was due to the brandy he’d drunk, his morose obsession with Lilah’s empty womb, or the fact that his mother never, ever ceased criticizing everything around her. How had he lived the last year with her? How had he survived his entire childhood? Certainly, he’d known she was shrewish. Anyone could see that. But somehow it wasn’t until right then that he finally saw the extent of her constant nitpicking. She even complained that the air in his home smelled like London. That’s because the house was in London!
And that was nothing compared to what she said of Lilah. His mother hadn’t even met the woman, but she made her opinion clear every five minutes.
“Really, Clara, I thought I taught you better than to rely on the advice of a by-blow. They have the worst taste, you know.”
“Whatever gave you the idea that simple is elegant? Simple is for peasants like that by-blow.”
“Did that by-blow tell you to wear that gown? And style your hair that way? Really, Clara, don’t you have an ounce of sense of your own?”
Aaron grew exhausted correcting his mother. He must have said, “Her name is Miss Rees, and she has excellent taste,” a hundred times. He also complimented Clara on her dress, her hairstyle, and the lack of cosmetics on her cheeks. Unfortunately, it only made his mother more irritable as she exclaimed that he never had the refined taste of an earl.
Normally he simply tuned out her comments, but he couldn’t this time. This afternoon he was excruciatingly aware of how insidious his mother’s attitude was. Especially when he learned that Lilah was spending the night at the home of one of Clara’s friends rather than risk running afoul of his mother. That had been Clara’s foresight. He had been hoping to catch a glimpse of her.
Which was the exact moment he had his revelation.
His mother was an impossible shrew. That much he already knew. What he hadn’t realized until now was how much the rest of society was exactly like her. The political wives who advanced so many of his colleague’s careers? Exactly like his mother. As judgmental, as impossible to please, and the kind of woman he despised. The ladies of thetonwho sought to marry him? Cut from the same cloth. More than one debutante had taken pains to whisper damaging gossip about their competitors into his ear.
It infuriated him. Not just that such petty, ridiculous nonsense dominated the discourse among theton, but that he had spent a great deal of his time playing into it. He had assumed—because his mother and everyone else said so—that an earl must set an example. He must marry the right woman, present himself in the right way, act as was appropriate to his station. And he had allowed them—most especially his mother—to color his thoughts on who was appropriate, what was respectable, and how he and everyone else ought to act.
What a fool he’d been! And he never would have seen it if he hadn’t fallen in love with Lilah. Because she waseverythinghe wanted and yet part of him had fought it—fought her—because she was so very different than anything he’d been taught to value. He’d even suggested that she couldn’t do the work she loved because it would not fit the standard image of a countess.
No wonder she refused him!