Page 6 of A Deal with the Burdened Viscount (Marriage Deals #3)

Arthur Beaumont sat with the restrained elegance of a man both accustomed to formality and thoroughly exhausted by it.

The drawing room of Beaumont Manor was a masterclass in restrained opulence—walls of ivory silk damask, wainscoted in dark oak, the air perfumed faintly with orange blossom from the cut flowers arranged in a vase on the mantel.

Afternoon sunlight filtered through the windows, striking gleams from the gilt-framed mirrors and turning the crystal finials of the chandelier into tiny prisms of fractured light. It was a room that invited neither comfort nor idleness. One sat in it to be examined, not to rest.

Arthur occupied one of the chairs nearest the hearth, his long legs crossed with deliberate ease. A porcelain teacup rested in his fingers, full but untouched. The steam had long since faded.

Across from him, his mother, Lady Gillian Beaumont, poured her own tea with the same precision she applied to all things. Her spine was a rod of authority beneath her silk brocade gown, and her hat—though far too elaborate for an indoor sitting—had been arranged to maximize both shade and scrutiny. She did not yet speak. She didn’t need to. Her silence was a drawn bowstring.

Arthur glanced idly at the clock ticking faintly. He did not expect to leave before she had said her piece.

Arthur had not yet been asked a single question.

But he was acutely aware that he was already under interrogation.

His mother raised her cup, took a dainty sip, and finally looked at him over the rim.

“You’ve been noticeably absent from several key events this Season,” she said with all the grace of a viper coiling, ready to strike.

Arthur arched an eyebrow, letting the silence stretch. “Have I?”

She ignored the flippancy, reaching for a sugared biscuit she had no intention of eating. “Lady Tilbury’s musicale. The Countess of Merrow’s spring ball. A luncheon hosted by Viscount Ferris, two invitations from the Marchioness of Winthrop. All declined.”

“I wasn’t aware you were keeping a catalogue of my calendar quite so thoroughly,” Arthur replied, the edges of his tone smooth and sharp as cut crystal.

“It is hardly necessary when society does it for me,” she said briskly, setting the untouched biscuit back on its plate. “One does not need to be a gossip to hear the whispers, Arthur. ‘Where is the Viscount?’ they ask. ‘Still unattached?’ They say it with a smile, of course. But make no mistake—every absence is noted under the watchful eyes of the ton.”

Arthur leaned back slightly, crossing one ankle over the other. “Let them whisper. I grow so tired of the tedium of attending to their every whim in order to please people who would happily embroil me in invented scandal at the first opportunity. Arthur inclined his head. “My calendar has, admittedly, not overflowed with enthusiasm for such things of late.”“

“Nor with appropriate attendance,” she snapped. “And what of the Pevensey soirée? Or Lady Forester’s garden promenade last Thursday? Half of Mayfair was there. Half the eligible women in England, in fact.”

“I find soirées and garden promenades remarkably inefficient places to hold conversation.” Arthur retorted.

“You are not there to hold conversation,” she said crisply. “You are there to be seen. To be available. You are a Viscount, not a philosopher.”

Arthur exhaled slowly and returned his teacup to its saucer with the quiet finality of a closing book.

“So I’m to parade myself like a prize stallion, trotted out for inspection while the matrons of Mayfair assess my pedigree and grooming?”

Lady Gillian’s eyes narrowed, though her tone remained deceptively smooth. “That is precisely what your father did. And he secured an excellent match—on his second Season, no less.”

Arthur gave a short, sardonic laugh. “Indeed. And he loved his second horse more dearly than his wife. Perhaps I ought to take notes from the stables.”

Gillian gave him a withering look. “Whispers are one thing, but there is a difference between an air of mystery and disrepute. I rather fear you are heading towards the latter.”

Arthur stood and crossed to the mantel, his hands clasped behind his back as he surveyed the porcelain figurines arranged in a stately array upon the marble shelf, reminiscent of a disciplined battalion. “And what would you have me do, Mother? Begin courting the first girl who looks tolerably well in pale turquoise blue and doesn’t faint during the classical concerto?”

“I would have you attend Lady Maria Lytton’s musicale tomorrow evening, where no fewer than three unmarried daughters of excellent lineage will be present. I would have you escort one to supper. I would have you smile.”

He turned. “You would have me lie.”

“I would have you behave as a gentleman of your station is expected to behave,” she said sharply. “This is not a question of feeling. It is a question of duty. Of legacy.” Gillian’s eyes narrowed. You carry the Beaumont name. That name demands strength, presence—and most urgently, continuity.”

There it was.

He knew the topic would arrive eventually. It always did.

“Continuity,” he echoed, brushing an invisible fleck from his cuff. “By which, of course, you are reminding me of my societal duty to marry and produce an heir.”

“Precisely. Your continued bachelorhood is a dereliction of your duty.”

Arthur’s lips curled faintly. “You mistake me, Mother. I have every intention of preserving our legacy. I simply prefer to do it without being hunted like some particularly well-bred fox.”

“You are not being hunted,” she snapped, “you are being offered .”

He laughed once, without humor. “The difference escapes me.”

A charged silence fell. Only the faint ticking of the clock marked the passage of time.

Lady Gillian set her cup down with measured care. “You may think you have time, Arthur. You may think this game of evasion clever. But the ton is not patient. Your reputation is a currency—one that devalues every year you remain unattached. Soon you will find yourself not desirable, but peculiar.”

“Let them think what they like,” he replied coolly. “I have no interest in dancing attendance on dull-witted heiresses who think Cicero is a brand of cologne.”

His mother inhaled sharply. “You will come to regret such arrogance.”

“I may. But I shall not marry a woman I can neither speak to nor respect.”

A long moment passed.

At last, Gillian leaned forward, interlacing her fingers. “Then find one you can respect. And quickly.”

Arthur’s expression did not change, but something unreadable flickered across his face. He bowed slightly. “As always, your counsel is invaluable.”

Gillian went on, her tone smooth as silk but fortified with steel. “You are thirty, Arthur. No longer a child. The time for indulgent detachment is past. There are a number of perfectly suitable young women this year. Lady Francesca Wexley is the epitome of charm and grace. Miss Lydia Pencombe has a rather significant inheritance, along with the Gresham estates. And Miss Millicent Longbourne—”

“—is only eighteen,” Arthur interrupted, his voice cool.

“She’ll be nineteen this Season. And she carries an impeccable lineage and an even more impeccable set of expectations. She has been raised to be a Viscountess. There is no shame in youth when paired with good, solid training.”

“I’m not looking to train a wife, Mother.”

“No, you’re looking to actively avoid one,” she snapped, her composure cracking for just a second. “You spend your evenings buried in your books or sequestered at your club, sipping brandy and spouting cynicism. And for what? To avoid the very duty your father upheld without question?”

The comparison landed harder than he expected. It was a low blow.

Arthur’s jaw tightened. “My father married at two and twenty and died before he reached the age of fifty. Forgive me if I’m not eager to follow his every example.”

Gillian’s expression flickered. She smoothed her skirt, folding her hands in her lap.

“You are the only son of this house,” she said after a pause, quieter now but no less firm. “The title, the estate—everything we have built, everything we have endured—rests with you. Without a wife, without an heir, the line ends. Our legacy ends. Do you really want to be responsible for that?”

“And what if I were to marry a woman who could not give me the gift of an heir? Would that be my fault, too?”

Arthur’s throat tightened as he realized the error of his outburst. His mother pressed her lips together before a heated discussion became an argument.

The truth of her words weighed on him, not because they were wrong, but because they were weaponized so elegantly. She knew his sense of duty ran deeper than he admitted. Knew he carried the memory of his father like a shadow stitched into every decision he made.

But she also didn’t understand.

Didn’t understand how the idea of marriage—of tying his future to another’s—felt less like legacy and more like a leash.

Not after Sophia.

Not after learning how little love could mean when pitted against ambition.

He set his cup down with a soft clink. “If you’ll excuse me, I have correspondence to which I must attend.”

Lady Gillian didn’t stop him. But he felt her glaring at his back as he left the room, her silence following him like a shroud of disappointment.

***

Arthur escaped to the library.

The moment the door shut behind him, he inhaled deeply, as though shaking off invisible chains. The familiar scent of parchment, old wood, and leather-bound volumes was a tonic for his nerves.

Here, at least, he could breathe.

The room was dim, cool, and quiet. The fire burned low, more for atmosphere than heat. He crossed to the shelves automatically, trailing a hand along the spines of books he’d read half a dozen times. Marcus Aurelius. Locke. Wordsworth. Solace through philosophy, distraction through poetry.

Duty, legacy, heirs.

They were not romantic ideas. They were obligations wrapped in silk and lace, spoken of in tea parlors and exchanged like legal tender at balls.

He could still feel the trace of Gillian’s words in the air.

“Your continued bachelorhood is a dereliction of your duty.”

But what was marriage without affection? Without trust? A clinical transaction? A business arrangement?

He had seen it too often. And once—once—he had believed in something more.

And it had nearly broken him.

He heard the library door creak open.

Soft footsteps. Feminine. Familiar.

“Eliza,” he said without turning.

“How did you know it was me?” she asked, moving further into the room.

“I’ve yet to meet another woman who walks like a cat in slippers.”

Eliza laughed quietly and took the chair nearest the fire. “Mother looked like she was about to launch a Napoleonic war.”

“She already has,” Arthur said, rubbing the back of his neck. “And I am Waterloo, apparently.”

“You do look a bit battered.”

He finally turned to face her, and the sight of her—calm, clever, ever watchful—softened something in his chest. They were close, as siblings went. Too close for him to mask what he felt for long.

“She presented the list again,” he said.

Eliza rolled her eyes. “Lady Francesca? The Gresham heiress?”

“And a girl I’m fairly certain is still finishing her dancing lessons.”

“She means well,” Eliza said, gently now. “In her way.”

“I know,” Arthur admitted. “But I can’t marry someone for duty. I won’t go through the ritual of courtship. Not again. Not...”

“Not after Sophia.”

The name settled in the air like dust.

Eliza didn’t flinch.

“I thought I loved her,” Arthur said, leaning against the mantel. “She chose better, and I still don’t know what to do with that. I simply don’t know how to move forward with trust, and I can’t—”

“No. She chose differently,” Eliza corrected. “That doesn’t make every other woman the same. Some of us understand loyalty, and rate love and trust above wealth and status.”

He didn’t respond. The fire cracked softly.

Eliza stood and crossed to him. “Arthur... you’re allowed to want something for yourself. Not for the title. Not for the family. For you. Despite Mother’s insistence to the contrary, she cannot force you to wed someone with whom you do not see yourself having a good life.”

He looked down at her. “And what if I no longer know what that is?”

Eliza smiled sadly. “Then you start by figuring out what it isn’t. If your current expression is any indication, it is almost certainly not Millicent Longbourne. I’m sure she’s a lovely girl, but she is practically half your age and barely out of school. You need someone more mature, more refined. Someone who will challenge you in the art of conversation… as a bare minimum.”

Arthur laughed despite his deep-seated sense of misery.

She softened. “I want you to be happy, Arthur. And I don’t think you’re nearly as immune to that possibility as you pretend.”

He said nothing for a long while. The fire crackled and popped. The wind moved faintly against the windows whispering like a ghost of another season.

Finally, he looked back at the bookshelves, his eyes trailing the worn spines of childhood favorites and tomes inherited from generations past.

“I’m not ready,” he murmured at last, his voice barely above a hushed whisper.

“Then don’t be,” she said simply, as if it were the easiest thing in the world. “The world will wait for you, Arthur, as will Mother. She can’t force you to marry against your will, or expect you to feel the same way as Father did. But don’t close the door before it’s even opened.”

She stepped closer, and for a moment, the man who had once taught her to climb trees and mend a broken kite stood before her, older now, wearier, but still, in some part of his heart, the brother who had once shielded her from every storm.

“You’ve always looked after everyone else,” she said softly. “Let someone look after you, when you’re ready to let them.”

She reached up on her tiptoes and pressed a kiss to his cheek, the gesture tender and without condition, then turned and walked away, her footsteps fading into the long corridor beyond.

Arthur remained where he stood, his fingers grazing the edge of the mantelpiece, the faint imprint of her affection lingering like warmth from the fire. In the hush of the library, with only the scent of old paper and wood-smoke for company, he felt the walls he had so carefully constructed around his heart shift—imperceptibly, but undeniably.

And for the first time in many a long while, Arthur Beaumont regarded her words not with mere dismissiveness, but with genuine wonder—and pondered whether the future he had so long avoided might not be as unattainable as he had believed, but perhaps awaiting him patiently, just beyond the door he had never dared to open.