Royal Weddings(29)

And yes, it was most likely the money he was disappointed about, but there was only one way to be sure.

“I should never have expected this of you,” she said. “Getting drunk after being jilted. Could you not do something less clichéd?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “A sharp-tongued wench it is. You’d have been the devil to live with. I’m well out of it.”

“You’re not the most accommodating individual yourself,” she said. “You come storming into a place—fee, fie, foe, fum—knocking aside any small, annoying things that get in the way. Like people.”

“If you refer to those pests who were sniffing at your skirts, that’s exactly what one does with vermin.”

“In my world, those are eligible men,” she said. “But they haven’t titles—”

“Or a shilling to their name—”

“Neither have you,” she said.

“But I’m an aristocratic debtor,” he said. He waved his wine glass in the air. “No, better than that—a peer. They can’t imprison me for debt. I should have ignored it, the way my father did. Trouble is . . .” He brought the glass close to his face, swayed the glass a little, and watched the wine slosh against its sides. “Trouble is, the houses are falling down. On my head. Plaster.” He looked up at the ceiling of the inn parlor. “Sitting there at home, drinking a little wine, minding my own business, and down come little bits of the ceiling.”

He drank, set down the glass on the table at his elbow, and refilled it from one of the bottles crowding its surface. “Is that what put you off?” he said. “Everything falling to pieces? But it isn’t every room. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“You told me,” she said. He’d described the state of his houses and properties with a disarmingly matter-of-fact wit. Everyone said he was an overbearing, conceited, arrogant bastard. But she thought he was charming, and funny, too. And she found his sarcasm sweet. He was nothing like any other man she’d ever met, and she’d met scores. From the time she was seventeen, they’d been descending upon Little Etford to try their luck at winning her heart—and the ridiculous marriage portion her father had saddled her with.

All in hopes of this.

A title.

And of all the men, all the well-behaved, eager-to-please men, she had to fall in love with him.

“Very well,” he said, nodding. “No hard feelings. But it’s damned inconvenient, Barbara. You might have told me sooner.”

“So that you could have courted someone else.”

“Of course. I had a list.” He drank, then refilled the glass. “My aunts made it. Didn’t I tell you?”

“No.”

“Gad, I thought I told you everything. So easy to talk to.”

That’s what she’d thought, too: He was so easy to talk to—though of course nobody in Little Etford would believe that.

“After we’d learned precisely how my sire had left matters, my aunts compiled a list of suitable females,” he said. He set down the glass, pushed some of the bottles out of his way—leaving one teetering near the table’s edge—and with one long index finger he made as though to write on the stained table. “Here is Miss So and So, the daughter of a Brighton jeweler. Fifty thousand pounds. Here is Miss This and That, the daughter of a physician. Seventy-five thousand. Ah, here is Miss Findley. Two hundred thousand. Let me at her, I said. Let me at Miss Findley. I don’t care if she’s snaggle-toothed, squinty, and flatulent.”

“I know it wasn’t easy for you,” she said.

He shrugged. “Men go to war and chance having their heads blown off. All I had to do was find a rich girl to wed. Not a problem. I’ve never been squeamish.”

“Yet it must have hurt your pride to be obliged to come to a provincial nothing of a place, to a public assembly, no less,” she said. She’d ached for him, for what it must have cost such a man to be forced by circumstances to stoop so low.

“It hurt my brain,” he said. “I felt as though I’d traveled to Madagascar or Outer Mongolia, to observe the quaint customs of the natives. I was all amazed to hear you speak English . . . of a sort.”

Was that what she’d seen in his face when he’d been introduced to her? Amazement? Was that what had made his dark eyes warm and had softened the taut set of his mouth into a hint of a smile?

“But there you were,” he said. “Three and twenty, with such a fortune, and still unwed. Impossible, thought I. The chit must have a wooden leg. Or perhaps she runs mad at odd times, and howls at the full moon. But there you were.”