The Proposal

she did not. She threaded her needle through the linen cloth and set it aside.

“I suppose that somewhere in the world,” she said, “there is someone else with as great a sense of inferiority as you possess, Lord Trentham, though it must surely be impossible that there is anyone with a greater sense.”

“I do not feel inferior,” he said. “Only different and realistic about it.”

“Poppycock,” she said inelegantly.

She glared up at him. He scowled back.

“If you really wanted me, Hugo,” she said, “if you really loved me, you would fight for me even if I were the queen of England.”

He stared back at her. His jaw line was granite again, his lips a hard, thin line, his eyes dark and fierce. She wondered for a moment how she could possibly love him.

“That would be daft,” he said.

Daft. One of his favorite words.

“Yes,” she said. “It is daft to believe that you could possibly want me. It is daft to imagine that you could ever love me.”

He resembled nothing more than a marble statue.

“Go away, Hugo,” she said. “Go, and never come back. I never want to see you again. Go.”

He went—as far as the door. He stood with his hand on the knob, his back to her.

She glared at his back, buoyed by hatred and determination. But he must go soon. He must go now. Please let him go now.

He did not go.

He lowered his hand from the knob and turned to face her.

“Let me show you what I mean,” he said.

She looked back at him, uncomprehending. Her hands were all pins and needles, she realized. She must have been clasping them too tightly.

“This has all been a one-way thing,” he said. “Right from the start. At Penderris you were in your own world, even if you did feel awkward at landing there uninvited. At Newbury Abbey you were in your own world and among your own family, not a single one of whom, I noticed, was without a title. Here you have been right in the center of your world—in this house, on the fashionable circuit in Hyde Park, at the Redfield House ball, at the garden party yesterday. I am the one each time who has been expected to step into a world that is not my own and prove myself worthy of it so that I can aspire to your hand. I have done that—repeatedly. And you criticize me for not feeling at home in it.”

“For feeling inferior,” she said.

“For feeling different,” he insisted. “Does there not seem something a bit unfair about it all?”

“Unfair?” She sighed. Perhaps he was right. She just wanted him to go and be done with it. He was going to go eventually anyway. It might as well be now. Her heart would be no less broken a week from now or a month.

“Come to my world,” he said.

“I have been to your house and met your sister and your stepmother,” she reminded him.

He looked steadily at her, without any relaxing of his expression.

“Come to my world,” he said again.

“How?” She frowned at him.

“If you want me, Gwendoline,” he said, “if you imagine that you love me and think you can spend your life with me, come to my world. You will find that wanting, even loving, is not enough.”

Her eyes wavered and she looked down at her hands. She stretched her fingers in an effort to rid them of the pins and needles. It was true. He had been the one to do all the adapting so far. And he had done well. Except that he was uncomfortable and unsure of himself and unhappy in a world that was not his own.

She would not ask how again. She did not know how. Probably he did not either.

“Very well,” she said, looking up again, glaring at him defiantly, almost with dislike. She did not want her comfortable world to be rocked more than it already had been by meeting and loving him.

Their eyes continued to do battle for a few silent moments. Then he bowed abruptly to her, and his hand came to rest on the knob of the door again.

“You will be hearing from me,” he said.

And he was gone.

While Gwen and Lily had been on Bond Street this morning, they had met Lord Merlock and had stood talking with him for a while before he offered to take them to a nearby tea shop for refreshments. Lily had been unable to accept. She had promised her children that she would be home in time for an early luncheon before they all went to the Tower of London with Neville. But Gwen had accepted. She had also accepted an invitation to share his box at the theater this evening with his four other guests.

She was still going to go. She was going to do her best to fall in love with him.

Oh, how absolutely absurd. As if one could fall in love at will. And how unfair to Lord Merlock if she were to flirt with him as a sort of balm to her own heartbreak without any regard whatsoever for his feelings. She would go as his guest, and she would smile and be amiable. Just that and no more.

How she wished, wished, wished she had not taken that walk along the pebbled beach after her quarrel with Vera. And how she wished that having done so, she had chosen to return by the same route. Or that she had climbed the slope with greater care. Or that Hugo had not chosen that morning to go down onto the beach himself and then to sit up on that ledge just waiting for her to come along and sprain her ankle.

But such wishes were as pointless as wishing the sun had not risen this morning or that she had not been born.

Actually, she would hate not to have been born.

Oh, Hugo, she thought as she picked up her embroidery again and looked in despair at the lovely silky green petal of her pink rose.

Oh, Hugo.

Gwen neither saw nor heard from Hugo for a week. It felt like a year even though she filled every moment of every day with busy activity and sparkled and laughed in company more than she had done in years.

She acquired a new beau—Lord Ruffles, who had raked his way through young manhood and early middle age and had arrived at a stage of life perilously close to old age before deciding that it was high time to turn respectable and woo the loveliest lady in the land. That was the story he told Gwen, anyway, when he danced with her at the Rosthorn ball. And when she laughed and told him that he had better not waste any more time, then, in finding that lady, he set one slightly arthritic hand over his heart, gazed soulfully into her eyes, and informed her that it was done. He was her devoted slave.

He was witty and amusing and still bore traces of his youthful good looks—and he had no more interest in settling down, Gwen guessed, than he had in flying to the moon. She allowed him to flirt outrageously with her wherever they met during that week, and she flirted right back, knowing that she would not be taken seriously. She enjoyed herself enormously.

She took Constance Emes with her almost everywhere she went. She genuinely liked the girl, and it was refreshing to watch her enjoy the events of the Season with such open, innocent pleasure. She had acquired a sizable court of admirers, all of whom she treated with courtesy and kindness. She surprised Gwen one day, though.

“Mr. Rigby called this morning,” she said at the Rosthorn ball. “He came to offer for me.”

“And?” Gwen looked at her with interest and fanned her face against the heat of the ballroom.

“Oh, I refused him,” Constance said as if it were a foregone conclusion. “I hope I did not hurt him. I do not believe I did, however, though he was understandably disappointed.”