Seven Minutes in Heaven(15)

That was the problem, right there. Something ran through his family bloodline that converted rules into mere suggestions.

“I hope to return tomorrow with a new governess.”

“Lumpy was good-hearted,” Lizzie said, as if she were discussing a newly deceased acquaintance. “It’s just that she had a tendency to overlook the big things for the small ones.”

Ward had the unnerving conviction that the world had gone awry; before Lizzie came along, he’d always understood grammatical English sentences. “What big things?” he asked.

“She was very upset by Otis’s betting scheme, whereas she might have seen it as an example of ingenuity, or even resourcefulness.”

“Miss Lumley considered it an ethical lapse.”

“That’s the small thing. She could have looked at the bigger part of it, and seen that Otis is afraid and that’s why he is hoarding money under his mattress.”

Ward was silent.

Because he didn’t often have instincts, he tried to obey the rare ones he had. He reached out and pulled his sister across the sofa and wrapped an arm around her. She was stiff for a moment, and then her thin, knobby body leaned against him.

“Do you suppose that you could tell your brother that as big parts go, my fortune is a very big one indeed? And that I already changed my will and the two of you will inherit the whole thing?”

The room went very, very quiet while Lizzie thought about it.

After a while, Ward looked down and found that she had fallen asleep. Dark eyelashes lay on pale skin. He took a moment to look, because he rarely saw her without that blighted veil.

She had the promise of great beauty. Right now, she was too thin, and her face was too strained, even in sleep.

Anger is a reasonable response to having a mother like theirs, a terrible mother in anyone’s judgment. It’s just that there’s nowhere for that anger to go when the lady is dead.

Ward picked up Lizzie and carried her upstairs to bed.

Otis had crawled into Lizzie’s bed. Ward carefully laid her next to him and watched as they adjusted themselves on the narrow bed as if they’d been sleeping together their whole lives.

There couldn’t have been much room in a traveling theater caravan.

He pulled up the blanket to their chins. A mother—a real mother—would give them each a kiss. He knew that to be true because the moment his father married his stepmother, Roberta started popping into his room at bedtime to kiss him.

He had disliked it, as he recalled. Or at least, he had complained at the time.

He bent down and gave Otis and Lizzie kisses.





Chapter Six





Monday, April 20

Snowe’s Registry



Ward arrived at Cavendish Square a good half-hour early, only to have the housemaid at the registry inform him that he’d have to wait, as Mrs. Snowe was busy.

Within ten minutes, he felt like a wild animal trapped in a china shop. He’d just spent five hours cooped up in a coach; the last thing he wanted to do was sit. He prowled restlessly around the room, spindly gold-and-pink furniture seeming to edge closer, like yapping dogs aiming to take a leak on his boots.

He set his jaw. He’d be damned if he’d quit the place simply because the room was stifling and close. The sensation was merely an odious consequence of the time he spent in Britain’s worst prison.

He’d go mad living in the midst of all this ladylike clutter. A good reason to be happy his betrothal had died on the vine. It was a hell of a lot easier to find a new governess than to find a wife.

All he’d had to do was persuade Mrs. Snowe to give him a replacement. Whereas a replacement for his fiancée? Who was, by the way, blissfully married to a duke?

Not so easy.

More to the point, the debacle of his engagement had clarified how little he understood women. He had truly believed he and Mia were in love.

In retrospect, it was more accurate to say that he’d deluded himself into believing it. His jaw still clenched involuntarily when he thought about the months he’d wooed Mia, gently coaxing her to kiss him, never touching her improperly, curbing his impatience to make her his.

Only to be thrown into prison by one of Mia’s relatives the night before his wedding. He’d escaped two weeks later, but his fiancée had already married the Duke of Pindar.

Whom—as it turned out—Mia had loved since she was a girl.

Hurrah for His Grace.

Ward had talked himself into believing sugary twaddle about their feelings for each other, when in reality Mia had been hankering after another man.

By the time the housemaid reappeared, Ward had reached the same conclusion he had had the night before: he would use every weapon he had against the children’s grandmother—his grandmother—before he’d marry.