Page 13

Chapter

SIX

Guy had been in the midst of a late-afternoon meeting with his estate manager on his top field when he’d seen Aunt Almeria’s cortege trundle up the lane below.

It went without saying that he had groaned aloud at the intrusion.

Not because he hadn’t expected her to attend his enforced birthday party—his aunt always turned up like a bad penny for his birthday.

More that she was a full fortnight earlier than usual and had, typically, packed most of her worldly goods for the occasion.

His mother’s much older and crotchety half sister did not understand the concept of traveling light.

Nor did she understand the concept of boundaries, overstaying her welcome, or the need for personal space.

All three of those things were guaranteed to be encroached upon during her visit and sure to result in a jaw ache from the gritted teeth that had started when he’d spied that first gaudy purple-and-gold carriage.

All her servants and blasted baggage never failed to upset the harmonious equilibrium of his life here, somehow turning the peaceful order of his sanctuary into her space.

Probably because she didn’t so much visit as lay siege.

And his mother knew that! Often complained about it herself!

Yet the traitor had clearly invited his aunt behind his back to help her plan the awful party that he had been blackmailed into.

It was bad enough that his mother was making his life a misery with all her excited plans for the small soiree—but now he also had Aunt Almeria to contend with.

Two overbearing and infuriating women whose only purpose in life seemed to be nagging him narrow about his many failings when one was quite exasperating enough.

There would be no surprises as to the main three topics of conversation for both tonight’s painful dinner and the immediate excruciating future either. The pair of them would feed off each other as they gnawed on him like carrion birds on a roadside carcass.

Topic number one would be his distinct lack of a wife.

Number two would be his distinct lack of offspring because of his lack of a wife.

And number three, his absolute favorite, would be his continued and, to their minds, wholly unreasonable stubbornness to allow them to parade him around society like a prize bull up for auction so that they could find him a blasted wife!

The subtext in that one was always as galling as it was as plain as the nose on his face—that he couldn’t be trusted to find one himself because he had already proved himself to be more than incompetent on that score.

In petty protest of the additional fortnight of misery he was now guaranteed, he had delayed his homecoming this evening to ensure that dinner would have to be late.

His mother was a stickler for dinner at eight sharp.

His aunt wasn’t so much a stickler as a fanatic about that dinnertime, hence it was now almost half past the hour.

Childish his lateness may be, but it only seemed fair that if they were determined to grossly inconvenience him until he turned bloody thirty, that he should be able to inconvenience them in return.

He might even rebel some more and refuse to change for dinner as well because that would really get them both foaming at the mouth.

Such disregard for the proper formalities would be a cardinal sin as far as his aunt was concerned, as she always dressed for dinner.

Even when she’d had pneumonia last winter and had had to eat her meals in bed, she had still insisted on putting on a gown.

Well, he was his own man, despite the looming blasted birthday party he had been bullied into, and a little rebellion would prove to his meddling womenfolk that he wasn’t going to brook any nonsense from either of them!

Not only was he not going to apologize for his tardiness, Guy was going to sit at his table late, eating his food in his work clothes and his decidedly muddy boots after a long day in his fields, and the pair of them would just have to get on with it.

It wasn’t as if he had known to expect his aunt for dinner tonight.

Like everything else about his milestone birthday celebrations, his mother had kept him in the dark about Almeria’s much too early but contrived arrival, so what else should they both expect?

Trumpets? Rose petals?

No, indeed. They could take him as they found him or not at all!

He dismounted and handed Zeus to a waiting groom, then stalked across the yard and into the back of the house.

He forced himself to smile and greet his poor cook, who already looked to be at her wits’ end.

Then he briefly considered the ultimate rebellion of sneaking up the servants’ stairs and not turning up to dinner at all but knew that wouldn’t wash if he collided with any of the enemy on the way.

His own staff might well be loyal to him, but Aunt Almeria’s entourage were paid handsomely to spy.

Besides, he couldn’t keep the pair of them in check on all things pertaining to the bloody birthday party if he wasn’t there.

The tighter he held the reins, the more chance he had of controlling the carriage.

Guy stalked onward, steeling himself for the ordeal to come. He intended to march into his own dining room as if he commanded it but paused midstep when he heard a raised voice inside.

“Somebody needs to tell your cook that tomatoes have no place in a soup, Constance!” Because of course Aunt Almeria had found fault with something already. “The start of a meal should be bland and inoffensive.”

“If only the same could be said about you, aunt.” Pleased with the irony of that statement, Guy shoved through the double doors determined to make a decisive, I-am-the-master-of-this-house entrance. Which backfired spectacularly when he immediately smacked into a person right in front of him.

A person carrying warm tomato soup that he was instantly doused in. “What the…!”

His arms instinctively windmilling to flail the warm liquid away even though the damage had been done, he staggered back several steps, then blinked down at the carnage.

He was pretty much orange from chin to groin.

His favorite buff riding breeches completely ruined unless the laundress could work a miracle of biblical proportions on the stain.

“Oh my goodness! I am so sorry!” Something about the voice sounded familiar and his head snapped up.

Despite the shocked hands covering her face, his gaze locked with a pair of striking eyes the exact same unusual shade of cornflower blue as those belonging to the wasp-tongued, breeches-wearing, bridle-path-averse termagant who had almost killed him in Hyde Park.

“That right there is another reason why tomatoes have no place in a soup.” Aunt Almeria cackled with delight as she pointed at the state of him. “Tomato stains are forever.”

“Please forgive me, I…” The fine feline eyes belonging to the cause of those indelible stains instantly narrowed as recognition dawned for her too. “Oh.”

“ Oh indeed, madam.” He still wasn’t over their previous altercation and had thought of this harridan frequently as a result in the days since.

It wasn’t every day that he was given a thorough dressing-down by a harpy wielding a horsewhip, and that stain on his pride was still fresh too.

Especially as he had thought of at least a thousand pithy retorts to all her accusations in the days since that might have made him feel a bit less mortified about the incident if he’d had the wherewithal to say them rather than gape mutely.

But to find her suddenly in his dining room made him embarrassed and outraged all over again.

Especially as she had made a fool of him for the second time.

“One of these days you might actually look where you are going, madam, and—”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Guy!” His clucking mother bustled over, wielding a napkin that she thwacked him with before using it to smear the soup further around his face in an attempt to clean it.

“Don’t you dare be your usual beastly self to this poor young lady when this unfortunate accident wouldn’t have happened in the first place if you hadn’t just charged into dinner like a bull at a gate.

What on earth were you thinking to fling both doors open with such brute force?

You are supposed to be a gentleman, Guy, not a Viking marauder!

” She gave up on cleaning the soup coating him as the lost cause that it was to fawn over the menace who had flung it.

“Pay him no mind, Miss Travers. My son’s bark is worse than his bite. ”

“This”—the harpy gestured at him with a disgusted flick of her finger—“is your son?” The cornflower eyes fluttered rapidly before she twisted to gape at his aunt instead. “ He is your nephew? Him? ” The word was laced with sheer horror.

“Sadly, yes,” said Aunt Almeria, enjoying the sight of him soaked in soup too much to disguise it.

“Travers—meet Lord Guy Harrowby, the thirteenth Viscount Wennington. Guy, I know it goes against the grain, but please try to be nice to my latest companion. We have only been together a day but I have high hopes that this one shows promise.”

Promise in causing accidents with her reckless clumsiness, perhaps!

“My lord.” Miss Travers’s gaze once again locked with his as the vixen instantly dipped into a curtsy.

The involuntary tic in her cheek and defiant stare telling him in no uncertain terms that she only offered him the expected deference begrudgingly.

“My sincere apologies for…” The wrist flicked again.

This time at the gloopy river of tepid tomato soup now dribbling down his thighs.

“… the spillage.” Just the spillage, he noted.

Not for unseating him from his horse after willfully ignoring the rules of the road or calling him a rude oaf or besmirching his riding abilities or threatening to horsewhip him in Hyde Park.

Or for looking at him right now as if he were something unpleasant stuck to the sole of her shoe.

Then to add insult to injury, she smiled, though it did not touch her eyes any because those pretty blue irises had hardened to ice crystals.

“It is a pleasure to finally meet you, my lord. Your aunt told me a great deal about you on our journey here.”

It was clear she hadn’t found anything at all impressive in what his aunt had told her.

Which all rather suggested Aunt Almeria might have been too honest about him and that troubled him too.

Although why he should care if Miss Travers considered him any more of a big joke than any other random stranger was a mystery—but he did and that rankled.

As did her arrogance in pretending that they hadn’t met because she clearly expected him to keep the skirmish she had mostly caused in Hyde Park to himself.

The insolent minx.

He should put her in her place right this minute by calling her out on it. Make her into the joke instead. That might teach her a lesson or two. She certainly deserved it.

Except she was employed by his aunt and the truth might lose her the job. An awful job she must really need to have accepted it in the first place.

Drat her.

But in the grand scheme of things, having to suffer his aunt Almeria was probably comeuppance enough.

Frankly, if the Valkyrie lasted a week with his unreasonable relative, it would be a bloody miracle.

And in regurgitating the story of how they had collided, he’d likely end up humiliating himself more as his aunt and his mother were bound to find his misfortune in Hyde Park funny.

Just as they both currently found the incident with the soup funny.

His mother was turning pink with her efforts not to howl with laughter.

“The pleasure is all mine, Miss Travers.” He too could smile and not mean it, and he actually did take some pleasure in watching her fine eyes widen as his narrowed. “But please excuse me. Now that I have had my soup, I had best go and change for dinner.”