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Richard gritted his teeth. Thompson had been with him for eight years, long enough to show such cheek.
“Will you show me the way?” Iris asked.
Would he show her the way?
“To my room?” she clarified.
He stared at her. Stupidly.
“Could you show me to my room?” she asked again, looking up at him with a perplexed expression.
It was official. His brain had stopped working.
“Richard?”
“My correspondence,” he said suddenly, grasping onto the first excuse he could think of. He desperately needed not to be alone in a bedroom with Iris. “I really need to check on that first.”
“Sir,” Cresswell began, undoubtedly to remind him that he employed a perfectly good secretary.
“No, no, best to get it over with. Must be done, you know. And there’s that letter from my aunt. Can’t ignore that.” He affixed a jolly smile to his face and turned to Iris. “Mrs. Hopkins should be the one to show you your new rooms, anyway.”
Mrs. Hopkins did not look as if she agreed.
“She was in charge of the redecorating,” Richard added.
Iris frowned. “I thought you said you had not redecorated.”
“The airing out,” he said, punctuating with a meaningless wave of his hand. “She’ll know the rooms better than I, anyway.”
Mrs. Hopkins pursed her lips in disapproval, and Richard felt like a young boy, about to be reprimanded. The housekeeper had been as much a mother to him as his own, and while she would never countermand him in front of others, he knew she would make her feelings known later.
Impulsively, Richard took Iris’s hand and brought it to his lips for a brief kiss. No one would accuse him of ignoring his wife in public. “You must rest, my darling.”
Iris’s lips parted with surprise. Had he not yet called her his darling? Bloody hell, he should have done.
“Will an hour be sufficient?” he asked her, or rather, he asked her lips, which were still delightfully pink and parted. Good Lord, he wanted to kiss her. He wanted to slide his tongue in and taste her very essence, and—
“Two!” he blurted out. “You’ll need two.”
“Two?”
“Hours,” he said firmly. “I do not wish to overtax you.” He looked over at Mrs. Hopkins. “Ladies are very delicate.”
Iris frowned adorably, and Richard bit back a curse. How could she look adorable when she frowned? Surely that was an anatomical impossibility.
“Shall I see you to your bedchamber, Lady Kenworthy?” Mrs. Hopkins inquired.
“I would appreciate that, thank you,” Iris replied, her eyes still pinned suspiciously on Richard.
He gave her a wan smile.
Iris followed Mrs. Hopkins down the hall, but before they turned the corner, he heard her say, “Do you consider yourself delicate, Mrs. Hopkins?”
“No indeed, my lady.”
“Good,” Iris said in a crisp voice. “Neither do I.”
Chapter Eleven
BY EVENING, RICHARD had come up with a new plan. Or rather, a modification. One he really should have considered from the beginning.
Iris was going to be angry with him. Spectacularly angry. There was no getting around that.
But perhaps he could lessen the blow?
Cresswell had said that Fleur and Marie-Claire would be gone for two weeks. That wasn’t going to work, but a week could be managed. He could have his sisters fetched home after only seven days; that would be easy enough to arrange. His aunt lived but twenty miles away.
And in the meantime . . .
One of Richard’s many regrets was that he had not had the time to properly court his new wife. Iris still did not know the reason for their hasty marriage, but she was no idiot; she could see that something was not quite right. If Richard had had just a little more time back in London, he could have wooed her the way a woman ought to be wooed. He could have shown her that he delighted in her company, that she made him laugh, that he could make her laugh. He could have stolen a few more kisses and awakened the desire that he was certain lay deep in her soul.
And then, after all that, when he dropped to one knee and asked her to marry him, Iris would not have hesitated. She would have gazed into his eyes, found whatever sort of love she had been longing for, and she would have said yes.
Maybe thrown herself into his arms.
Blinking back tears of happiness.
That would have been the proposal of her dreams, not the shabby, calculated kiss he’d thrust upon her in her aunt’s hallway.
But he’d had no choice. Surely, when he explained everything, she would understand that. She knew what it meant to love one’s family, to want to protect them at all costs. It was what she did each year when she played in the musicale. She didn’t want to be there; she did it for her mother, and her aunts, and even her eternal-thorn-in-the-side sister Daisy.
She’d understand. She had to.
He had been granted a one-week reprieve. Seven full days before he had to come clean and watch her face grow even more pale at his betrayal. Maybe he was a coward; maybe he should use this time to explain it all, to prepare her for what must come.
But he wanted what he could not have before the wedding. Time.
A lot could happen in seven days.
One week, he told himself as he went to collect her for their first supper together at Maycliffe Park.
One week to make her fall in love with him.
IRIS SPENT THE entire afternoon resting in her new bedchamber. She’d never quite understood how sitting in a carriage could leave a body so weary when sitting in a chair in a drawing room required no energy whatsoever, but the three-day journey to Maycliffe had left her utterly exhausted. Maybe it was the jostling of the carriage or the poor state of the roads this far north. Or maybe—probably—it had something to do with her husband.