Page 34

Chapter

SEVENTEEN

The door to the dimly lit tack room swung open to reveal his aunt sporting an expression so sour it would curdle milk.

“So this is where you are hiding?” Aunt Almeria leaned against the frame rather than her walking cane and skewered him with her glare.

“Now that the mystery has been solved, the only question that needs answering is whether you are hiding out here like a pathetic coward or sulking in here like a petulant child?”

The jury was out on that one, as Guy wasn’t sure himself quite why he was still sequestered here at ten o’clock at night, but he maintained an air of unruffled aloofness regardless.

Instead of replying, he focused on the ledger he hadn’t managed to focus on in the two hours since he had been pretending to focus on it, jotting a random number in one of the columns to make it look as if he had been.

“As you can plainly see, I am working.” He said that without lifting his head.

“I had to relocate to a temporary study after the world and his wife laid siege to my house and rendered it impossible to concentrate.” Which was sort of the truth and the excuse he had made to his poor footman, who had been sent to surreptitiously retrieve everything that he’d left on his desk there while everyone else was having dinner.

In truth, he couldn’t imagine the forty-odd people currently encamped in the house were quiet, but he hadn’t ventured back there to check since he had stormed out of it at the crack of dawn this morning.

God, how he hated birthdays!

This one would certainly go down in history as one of the worst. What the blazes had his mother been thinking to invite fifteen blasted debutantes and their matchmaking mamas for a week?

Did she seriously think he would just roll over and pick one?

That he was either that shallow or that desperate in his dotage that just any woman would do?

When most of those twittering, fawning, fluff-for-brains, spoiled daughters of the ton weren’t his sort of woman at all!

What precisely would he spend eternity talking about with a woman who only knew about ballrooms and Mayfair? The two biggest things he detested!

And as for the sort who was his type… he couldn’t bear to think about Lottie’s betrayal without wanting to punch the wall.

Or wanting to flagellate himself with brambles for how close he had come to throwing all caution to the wind and leaping into the murky waters of romance with both feet again with a virtual stranger.

So much for once bitten and twice shy! Or of lightning not striking in the same place twice.

Thanks to Lottie, he had endured the second most awful public humiliation of his life!

Clearly hadn’t learned his lesson well enough the last time he’d donned the rose-tinted spectacles of besottedness and been made a fool of!

Last night, like the absolute blithering rose-tinted, spectacle-wearing idiot he obviously still was, he had foolishly thought he had known enough about her to take the plunge. Then she’d gone and stabbed him in the back. Et tu, bloody Brutus!

Thank goodness their kiss had been interrupted before he’d lost his head completely and bared his heart to the duplicitous witch. He owed Longbottom a debt of gratitude for saving him from that catastrophic mistake in the nick of time.

Except he didn’t feel particularly grateful yet. Instead, after an entire day of licking his wounds, he felt stupid and foolish. Disappointed and hurt.

So, so, so very hurt that it made his poor, bludgeoned heart ache. “I presume you tracked me down at this late hour because you have something pressing to say, aunt, so kindly get it over with because I am busy.” Busy feeling betrayed.

“Your mother went to bed in tears tonight after the unfair and disrespectful tongue-lashing you gave her.”

“If you are referring to the private conversation I had with my mother when she ambushed me on my way out this morning, then it was hardly unfair.” Although it had been more a tongue-lashing than a conversation.

She’d complained that he’d bolted from his surprise dinner and then disappeared before the dessert without so much as a thank-you-all-for-coming-but-I-am-tired, and he had replied—shouted actually—something along the lines of “you’re blasted lucky I even turned up for the meal and you can shove your stupid parlor games where the sun doesn’t shine. ”

“I reluctantly agreed to a birthday dinner party on the day of my birthday, set strict parameters for the occasion, and she ignored every single one of them to put on a surprise she knew I would hate. Therefore, if anyone has disrespected anyone, then she is the guilty party.”

His aunt’s only reaction to that unpalatable truth was to roll her eyes. “She’s also been close to tears all day trying to explain away your absence, despite the brave face she has put on for your guests, so I hope you are proud of yourself.”

“They are not my guests.” While he was filled with guilt at the news that his mother, who rarely cried, had done so because of him, he had to defend himself on that score too.

He wasn’t going to be painted the villain of this piece when he was the victim!

“I did not invite one single person currently ensconced in my house to be there!” Each time he thought of all those people, he felt queasy.

“They are her guests—and yours—and whatever plans she has made behind my back with them are her problem and not mine. As you can plainly see…” Guy swept an expansive arm to encompass his stack of ledgers, papers, and his moonlit estate outside.

“I have a million more important responsibilities to attend to.”

“Boo-hoo, poor you.” His aunt clomped closer.

“I suppose, in your tiny, closed-off mind, that justifies your failure to return to those guests last night? Legitimizes the temper tantrum you subjected your poor mother to when she had the audacity to tell you off for leaving a dinner that she, and a great many other people, worked hard to lay on for you? Excuses you from failing to attend every meal or activity today? Of failing to pop your ungrateful head into the room, even, for two minutes to say hello to all the people who traveled all the way here to see you? When the very least you could do is offer your profound apology for your unforgivable absence.”

“To apologize, I would have to feel some regret at missing them.”

“Do you take delight in insulting so many good people, Guy? Does it make you feel better about yourself?”

“‘Delight’ is too strong a word for the indifference I feel toward them, aunt.”

“Indifference? To good people who have come here with no other motive than to help you to celebrate your birthday? Shame on you!”

Good people, his arse! “Are you claiming they have no other motive?” Guy’s stunned laugh was bitter.

“Do you and my mother honestly think that I was born yesterday? Or did you not consider me canny enough to notice that every family invited conveniently also has a single daughter of marriageable age to parade under my nose?”

That was just one of the things about Lottie’s involvement in this awful situation that bothered him.

Hurt him more than the surprise had. She had known it was a cattle market and that he was the prize bull up for sale and she still hadn’t told him.

Even when they had buried the hatchet and settled their differences and grown closer.

Close enough that he had considered her a friend.

Close enough that he had been compelled to kiss her last night and had come within a gnat’s cock of asking to be allowed to court her!

If she had any reciprocal romantic feelings for him, it made no sense that she would be party to that.

Nor would she send him into the lion’s den without warning him.

Ergo, he could only conclude that her loyalties lay elsewhere, his feelings weren’t returned, and that he had wasted them on the wrong woman yet again.

“This whole mockery of a surprise house party is merely my dear mama’s latest unsubtle attempt to get me to make her some grandchildren.

” Which, ironically, he would have been right up for last night with Lottie.

But that was yesterday, when he’d not been thinking straight.

Today, he didn’t even want to look at her, let alone touch her.

A shocking lie which he hoped if he repeated often enough to himself, he might eventually believe!

“My dear mama has put me out to stud in a field full of mares and she doesn’t care which one I mount so long as I mount one of them.” Whichever way he looked at it that was insulting. And humiliating.

So, so very humiliating.

Aunt Almeria turned her nose up as if horrified. “Don’t be vulgar, Guy!”

“Whyever not, when it is vulgar?” He had feelings, after all.

And foolishly futile hopes and dreams about the sort of wife he wanted to spend eternity with.

However, in one fell swoop, his mother had reduced him to the appendage between his legs and not the man who actually owned it!

“Is it any wonder I want no part of it?”

Aunt Almeria pulled up a stool, and as soon as she perched upon it, sniffed the air with distaste. “It stinks in here! It’s a wonder you can breathe, let alone work, with this acrid stench in your nostrils. It’s making me gag.” For effect, she did. “The smell is suffocating.”

“I’m quite used to the aroma of a stable.

” He certainly preferred it over the bitter stench of betrayal.

Thanks to all his stuttering and stammering before the kiss, Lottie also knew that she tied him in knots and he hated that he had given her that power over him.

Feeling so emotionally exposed made him feel physically sick.