“She can chatter on at times.” Mary laughed lightly. “That is just Caroline.”
“No, Mary.” Layton shook his head. “It is a miracle. A miracle.” The last word he whispered, his own astonishment at the change in his daughter nearly undoing him. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her fingers almost reverently.
“Sir?”
“No,” he objected, voice low, her fingers mere inches from his lips. “Do not ‘sir’ me to death tonight, Mary. You are a guest this evening.” He held her hand still, astoundingly reluctant to let it go.
“Guest or not, I shall have to ‘sir’ you, as you call it, once your family has arrived. It would be highly improper to do otherwise.” A tender smile touched Mary’s face.
How he longed to hold her to him in that moment, to plead with her to look at him that way always. Her soft reminder, however, put things back in their places, brought back memories of failure he had no desire to relive.
Layton released her hand. “Forgive me, Miss Wood.” He hoped his disappointment was not too obvious. He was, after all, in the wrong, the one encroaching and pushing the bounds of propriety.
She opened her mouth as if to speak. What she meant to say, he would never know. Caroline’s shouts of “They’re here, Papa!” rang through the room, and the moment was lost.
“Count to five, Caroline,” Mary instructed quietly.
Caroline stopped on the spot, her lips moving silently as she transformed before his very eyes from a shouting, jumping child to a calm, demure young girl. He was pleased to see her smile hadn’t faded and even more pleased to see Mary’s smile had grown as she watched Caroline. Smiles hadn’t come so easily at the Meadows since Bridget had left them. Sanders stepped inside the room, his usual look of pomposity firmly fixed on his face. Why Sanders’s stuffy posturing should suddenly bother him, Layton couldn’t say. The butler cleared his throat and announced, his voice full of self-importance, “The Right Honorable the Earl of Lampton. The Right Honorable the Countess of Lampton. The Honorable Captain Stanley Jonquil.”
Layton managed not to roll his eyes. Why must Sanders announce Layton’s own family as if they were visiting nobility? They were visiting, and they were nobility, but it was still ridiculous.
The new arrivals all filed in as Sanders completed his overblown announcement. Stanley, as Layton could have predicted, barely hid a smile at the pompousness of their arrival. Layton had to admit his younger brother cut quite a dash in his blue Dragoon’s uniform. With his arm almost completely healed and much of the pallor he’d borne the past months gone, he looked like a healthy twenty-two-year-old again.
Mater wore her customary black. Her face, as always, was lit in a broad smile, her eyes twinkling merrily. Her smile broadened when she looked at Caroline and softened when she turned to Layton. She sat on a sofa, looking entirely satisfied with life. She nearly always looked that way.
Philip’s appearance made Layton shake his head. Absurd was the best word for it. Philip was considered an out-and-out dandy: bright colors, affected drawl, an excessive number of fobs on his watch chain, quizzing glass ever at hand, and a certain air of careless stupidity. It was truly absurd. Philip was probably the most intelligent person Layton knew and was at times serious to a fault. The charade had begun the year Layton and Bridget had married, and Philip hadn’t dropped it yet.
“Welcome to Farland Meadows, Lord and Lady Lampton, Captain Jonquil,” Caroline said in a tone of voice that told Layton in an instant she’d spent some time memorizing her little speech. She curtsied quite perfectly.
That golden eyebrow of Philip’s arched in surprised amusement. “Miss Jonquil.” He executed a flourishing bow, which set Caroline to giggling.
“Oh, Flip!” She laughed. “You bow almost as good as Mary!”
Philip pressed his hand to his heart as if wounded. “Almost as well as Mary? Almost? And who, I must ask, is this Mary, whose bows so far outshine my apparently paltry efforts?”
“He’s silly like you, Papa!” Caroline flashed an enormous smile at Layton that melted his heart in an instant.
“Yes, dear.” Layton smiled back. “Your uncle Flip is excessively silly.”
“I should call you out for that, young man.” Philip eyed Layton through his quizzing glass. “Silly, indeed.”
“No, no, Uncle Flip.” Caroline looked up at Philip. She popped her fisted hands onto her hips, elbows jutted out as if ready to read him a deep scold. “Papa is supposed to call you out. But only if you give me a handkerchief and tell me to keep it because you think I’m a beautiful, very grown-up girl. But you only say that after I tell you I will clean all my junk off it and give it back to you. You say you don’t want it back even with all the junk scraped off.”