“A poet is he?”
“Yes,” she groaned. “A good one too.” Which made it all the worse.
“Ah. Your suitor, I assume?”
“Suitor” was too simple a word for her relationship with Ronnie, which involved a lot of private family history. “He’s my cousin. Well, half cousin, as my father and uncle had different mothers. But he has convinced himself that we are fated to be wed.”
“And as a practical woman of science, you do not believe in fate.”
She didn’t believe in a lot of things, but at the top of the list was Ronnie’s fantasy. He thought fate had cast them as prince and princess in a make-believe future. She thought her cousin’s obsession with her silly at best, but more likely a dark and dangerous thing. “I do not wish to wed the man,” she said baldly.
“Well, the solution is obvious then, isn’t it? I shall join you today as an afternoon caller, and Ronnie will not be able to press his suit upon you.”
“That would be lovely,” she said sourly, “if you actually did as you say. But we both know what will really happen.”
“We do?” he countered, all innocence.
She tossed him her most irritated, ugly, and angry look, but it did absolutely nothing to diminish his smile. “Oh leave off, Mr. Anaedsley, I haven’t the time for it today.”
“But—” he began. She roughly jerked her hand from his arm and stepped away to glare at him.
“Five minutes after greeting everyone, my father will be excited to learn about your latest experiment.”
“Actually, it is your father’s experiment. I only execute the task he requests—”
“Two minutes after that,” she continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “the two of you will wander off to his laboratory. Uncle will follow, and I shall be left alone. With Ronnie.” She spoke her cousin’s name as she might refer to one of her father’s experiments gone horribly wrong.
“Perhaps your uncle will remain—”
“Uncle desires the union above all things.”
Clearly, she’d flummoxed him. He didn’t even bother denying his plan to disappear with her father. And yet the more she glared at him, the more his expression shifted to one of charming apology. That was always the way with him. She’d even taken to calling him Lord Charming in her thoughts, and as she was not a woman prone to fairy tales, the name was not a positive one.
“I see your problem, Miss Smithson,” he finally said. “Unfortunately, when I said we had been spotted, I wasn’t referring to your half cousin.”
She blinked. “What?”
His eyes lit up with genuine warmth as he gestured behind her. Then, before she could spin around, he opened his arms in true delight.
“Mr. Smithson, how absolutely wonderful to see you out and about. Why your daughter was just telling me that she feared for your existence. Was begging me to bring in a London physician—”
“What?” her father said as he strolled down the drive toward them. “Mellie, I’ve told you I’m right as rain.”
“Papa? Where did you come from?”
“Down at Mr. Wilks’s barn. Been looking at the sheep to see if the lice powder worked.”
Damn it all! She should have known he’d be inspecting the neighbor’s sheep. They were the subjects of his current experiment, after all. And naturally he’d be there instead of in his lab where he’dpromisedto look at what she’d done. “But you have been ill,” she said, rather than snap at him for ignoring her latest chemical experiment. “You complain of the rain. It makes your joints ache.”
“Well, that’s what old men do, my dear.” Then her papa turned to Lord Charming and embraced him as if the man were a lost son. It had always been this way between them, starting from when her father had been Mr. Anaedsley’s tutor more than a decade ago. The two adored each other, and it was so pure a love that she couldn’t even be jealous of it.
Well, sheshouldn’tbe jealous, but she was. Especially as she knew that her plans for the day were doomed. The two would go off with her uncle and leave her with Ronnie. And worse, the main purpose of the day—the sole reason she had asked for her uncle and cousin to visit this afternoon—was completely destroyed.
And it was all Mr. Anaedsley’s fault.
* * *
Trevor Harrison Anaedsley, grandson to the Duke of Timby, was not a fool, though he often chose to appear one in public. In truth, he had an engineering mind-set that led him to see how people fit together, one with another, such that society marched at a steady, appropriate, even mechanical pace.