He nodded.
“But I don’t know... that is, what are you supposed to do with love when someone kills it at the root? Maybe it just needs to recede, like that flood at the end of the road.”
He didn’t know. He wanted to offer her solace and answers, and it quietly maddened him that he could say nothing of value.
“Lorcan, I have never told a soul any of this,” she whispered. She gave a little laugh.
“I am honored,” he said quietly, after a moment.
But abstractedly.
“I think it’s upset me... more because it seems the point at which everything in my life seemed to have gone terribly wrong. I grieved him so. I tried but I could not disguise it. I wanted nothing to do with men for a few years. And of course this is hardly appealing to new suitors, who didn’t precisely clamor, anyway. Something about the whiff of rejection hanging about me, no doubt. There were a few who tried, and then lost heart, it seemed. And then... my father revealed to me he’d lost our fortune. Over the past five or six years, he’d gambled it away. We’re living in the caretaker’s cottage, for now. My brothers don’t yet know it has come to this. It was my idea. I was able to find someone to temporarily rent our home. I asked about very delicately, very discreetly. My father told them he prefers to live in a smaller home, now that his children are grown.”
“Clever. I am certaineveryone believes him.”
She momentarily seemed to have gone mute. Regardless, she did not reply.
“Your father was counting on Havelstock to pay his debts, I imagine.”
He imagined her scrambling, discreetly, to find someone to rent their family home, and he knew a fresh surge of fury. Because her father, being an earl, of course could not go begging.
“Yes. And marrying the Earl of Athelboro will at last put an end to...” she humorlessly quirked the corner of her mouth “...my calamitous fall. And my family’s calamitous fall.”
He went still. Holy Mother of God.
“The marriage proposal... he’s an earl?”
He said this as if he experienced no emotion whatsoever about it.
And yet. He had somehow not expected this.
Though of course she was the kind of woman who could, and would, marry an earl. She’d been raised to do precisely that sort of thing.
He ought to be pleased and relieved for her.
“I would be his third countess.” She produced a ghost of a very bleakly amused smile.
“Surely, he hasn’t a harem? They frown upon that in England. Or is it more of a Henry the Eighth sort of thing?”
“He’s just been unfortunate. Or, rather, his previous wives certainly were. He does have five children who need a mother.”
Lorcan went still. “Five,” he said carefully.
She didn’t reply.
“How old is he?” He thought he could guess it pretty well.
After a long moment she said, “Fifty-six.” Her voice was frayed.
“Only a few years older than my father,” she added dryly when he said nothing.
And then when it seemed he would never speak, she said, “I’ve only met him once, for a few hours. He was pleasant.”
“He decided he could see himself with you for a lifetime after only a few hours?”
There was a peculiar echo in his head when he said it. As though someone else was asking him the very same question.
Only it wasn’t a question. It sounded like the voice of truth.