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Chapter

FOUR

“Seeing as we are nearly three weeks out, how would you like to celebrate your birthday, darling?”

Guy almost groaned aloud at his mother’s seemingly casual and overbright question because he knew what was coming next.

She always saw his birthday as an excuse for festivities, whereas he hated them, for obvious reasons.

Aside from the hideous social interactions that were foisted on him by the woman seated opposite, birthdays for him only reignited bad memories he would prefer to forget.

In fact, if he could magically erase the fourteenth of September from the calendar for the rest of his life, he would.

Then they wouldn’t have to have this yearly argument.

Instead of groaning aloud, however, he focused on cutting his bacon.

All hopes of a peaceful breakfast now as dead as a dodo while she dredged the fetid riverbed that he preferred not to disturb.

“The same way I celebrated it last year. Quietly.” An answer which he knew already would go down like a bag of gargled nails.

His mother’s teacup clattered into its saucer. “Oh, for pity’s sake, Guy! It is your thirtieth! A milestone! For once I want to celebrate it with a proper party and people! At our Mayfair house like we used to.”

“Then you have my blessing to celebrate it that way.”

“Really?” Hope lit her eyes.

“And I shall celebrate it my way. Here.” The hope died and he was instantly guilty—just not guilty enough to acquiesce.

“Is it any wonder that I am ill!” And so the dredging started.

“For heaven forbid my curmudgeonly only son ever do one thing his poor widowed mother asks of him?” For good measure, she also pushed her untouched plate away.

“I hope that you are proud of yourself for ruining both my breakfast and my life.”

“I decline a birthday party a day’s ride away in that polluted cesspool I loathe and suddenly I have ruined your life ?”

He put down his own knife and fork because his breakfast was ruined now too.

Histrionics and guilt always played havoc with his system, as did any mention of London.

Put them in the same sentence as his birthday and it was a surefire recipe for indigestion.

“You know that late August is one of the busiest times for the estate. It is harvesting time, after all.” He spread his hands in the placating manner which had always worked so well for his father with this woman, despite never working for him.

“The wheat needs to be cut, those fields plowed and fertilized. The winter barley crop needs drilling. The lambs are weaning. The apples ripening. The hay needs to be cut, baled, and stored. The cows need to be brought in from the pasture.”

“You employ countless talented people to do all of those things for you.”

“But I still need to be here to oversee it all.” Which wasn’t strictly true because he did employ countless talented people, none of whom needed to be managed constantly.

But he had to be strategic. “Why don’t we have a nice birthday dinner here instead?

” Seeing as he would have to throw her a bone to get her to back off, he offered her a concession.

“Let’s push the boat out and fill the dining room.

” Which would be tortuous. “Invite the Spencers and the Atkinsons.” The only two tolerable families nearby.

“And your friends the Mayburys—of course.” Guy would honestly rather spear his forehead with a fork than endure an entire dinner with the fawning, overly familiar, and flirtatious Miss Abigail Maybury, who had long made no secret of the fact she fancied herself his wife.

An unpalatable match his desperate-to-get-him-wed mother had begun, much to his complete horror, to encourage.

“You mean we should spend it with the same people we usually dine with when you deign to dine with anyone? How is that pushing the boat out ?”

He feigned some enthusiasm, hoping that was contagious. “What better way to celebrate a birthday than with friends, Mama?” Another concession was clearly needed. “I’ll even agree to all those silly parlor games you love.” Lord, kill him now. “Charades and blindman’s bluff.”

“So you can abandon me to the Mayburys, Mrs. Spencer, and Mrs. Atkinson the second I put the blindfold on while you disappear off with their two husbands to talk about dreary things. Like the shocking price of flour and the latest newfangled farm equipment?” There was no point countering that he found neither of those topics as dreary as an infantile parlor game.

“You could take a few days off for a milestone birthday, Guy. It wouldn’t kill you. ”

It likely would if it involved London.

“I do not see this birthday as a milestone, Mama.” Like a ship in a storm, it was clearly time to change course yet again even though he knew he was headed for the rocks.

“A half century is a milestone. Seventy is very definitely a milestone. Any year after that is a blessed miracle to be rejoiced. But thirty is…” He searched for something profound which would minimize the achievement of managing to exist for a paltry three decades, and when nothing sprang to mind, changed tack once more.

“Why is thirty suddenly more important to you than twenty-eight and twenty-nine were?” As soon as he said that he regretted it because it gave an opportunity that his clever mother could exploit.

Being his mother, she didn’t disappoint.

“Because nine years ago, on his twenty-first birthday, my only son— my only child —solemnly promised me that I would have a house full of grandchildren by the time he turned thirty! That’s why!

” The first bucket of mud was dragged up from the fetid riverbed.

“ You made it a milestone when you made that solemn promise and then you reneged on it!” He had hardly reneged, he’d been unceremoniously dumped, but he bit his tongue rather than give her more ammunition.

“So now the absolute least you can do to make up for my interminable, lonely, and grandchild-less existence is humor me with one measly birthday party in Mayfair—seeing as the last one of those was nine years ago too!”

An occasion so monumentally awful he needed no reminder of it.

Except now there was fat chance of that happening this morning.

The dredging bucket appeared again, filled with a cringing memory of himself going down on one knee in their packed Mayfair ballroom.

Proffering a ring whilst spouting such awful, flowery romantic guff he couldn’t bear to think of the words let alone the huge crowd’s delighted reaction to them.

Then her expression. Triumphant and calculating and not at all what he had imagined after she had led him on during their whirlwind three-week courtship where he had been convinced it was love when it had actually been nothing of the sort.

“If you continue to allow one silly, youthful faux pas to hold you back, Guy, you will never find a wife!” Because of course she went there.

Minimizing that life-changing blow to a mere faux pas.

“You do know that lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice, don’t you?

Just because one woman behaved atrociously, doesn’t mean that all women will! ”

As the acid roiled in his gut, he was forced to remember the worst part of the humiliating debacle—the real object of her desire tapping him on the shoulder.

After which, Guy had had no choice but to stand up and step aside because she’d fallen into the other fellow’s arms. The silence in the ballroom as he had walked out had been deafening. The aftermath just as brutalizing.

All excruciating enough to make him so queasy he feared the little breakfast he had managed to consume was on the cusp of reappearance.

Obviously, his mother knew precisely what he was thinking about. She had been there, after all. As shocked and stunned as the rest of the ton at his sheer stupidity.

“If everyone else has forgotten your… blunder…” For heaven forbid she ever call the total obliteration of his heart, confidence, reputation, and pride the monumental disaster that it had been!

“… it is beyond me why you haven’t. It is long past time you opened your heart to love again as there are plenty more fish in the sea. ”

Except the sea was now poisoned and he had learned his lesson well that love was for fools.

It had certainly made a fool out of him. Such an outstanding one, he had even been featured in a satirical caricature in the London Tribune, complete with a jester’s hat and bells on his boots as he had plighted his troth surrounded by a bejeweled crowd in hysterics.

“My private affairs are not up for discussion.”

Before he could surge to his feet and storm out of the room like he always did when fish and sea and love appeared in the same sentence, his mother surged instead.

“Then let us discuss mine!” She pointed a quaking finger at him.

“Thanks to you, I haven’t only missed out on the blessing of grandchildren to dote upon, I have also missed the joy of nine entire seasons as well!

I am sick of wandering in the social wilderness because my only son cannot spare any time away from his stupid wheat, or barley or sheep or horses or whatever else he fills his entire year with to avoid having an actual life! ”

“The social wilderness!” He would have laughed at that if the accusation hadn’t been quite so preposterous.