Sera Belle’s wedding day
February 14, 1817
Woodbury, England
Dinah Belle discovered Graham Abernathy, third son of the Duke of Rivington, lying flat on his back in the front entrance of the gardener’s cottage on the day of her youngest sister’s wedding. The house was a modest single-level dwelling that abutted the fishing pond of the 200-acre ducal estate. She had been sent by one of her elder sisters, Bridget, on a fool’s errand—Was there any other kind?—and in her haste had swung open the front door—crack!—into his head.
She’d glanced down at her feet when she heard his ensuing groan and cringed at the sight. Never in her seventeen years had she come upon a man, or woman for that matter, in such a state.
“Lord Graham, I did not see you.” She paused, compelled to defend her perfect eyesight. “Likely because you are in such an inconvenient and improbable location for a man of your stature.”
By stature she did not only allude to his status as third in line to one of the oldest titles in England but to his height of over six feet. While several of his friends managed to tower over him, his head was two lengths higher than hers. To fit in the entry of the gardener’s cottage, his neck must’ve had to contort into a near right angle and his legs fold into a shape resembling a pretzel.
A draft carried into the cottage. The flagged floor must have already been cold. A shiver trembled through Graham.
Dinah squeezed inside, closed the door behind her, and studied the mess of man at her feet.
Graham was dressed for the wedding—a smart charcoal-gray coat, matching breeches, and a white linen shirt that may have been pressed when he put it on but was currently rumpled. Her mind whirled with reasons as to why he could be lying near-comatose on the floor, and nearly all of them led to the conclusion that he, while also on a fool’s errand—possibly even the same one on which she had been sent since he, too, was at the cottage—had slipped and fallen, and likely hit his head, too.
Though she was also dressed for the wedding—a pink Empire-waist gown with pearlescent petals sewn into the hem and sleeves—and in no hurry to rumple her attire, she leaned over Graham’s groaning form, intent on helping the man back to the main house where he could seek medical attention. Or be propped upright in a church pew long enough to get through the ceremony and then receive medical attention—the more likely scenario given her priorities for the day.
No sooner did she and Graham come face-to-face than noxious fumes of alcohol stung her eyes, assaulted her nose, and sent her rearing up to her full height. Dinah shook her head in distaste. She had caught her father drunk on two occasions. Both times he had been in his study gripping her mother’s favorite pelisse and bathed in a cloud of her gardenia perfume, which he insisted on purchasing every year although Dinah no longer had a mother to wear it. Dinah had, both times, exited promptly, shut the door, and left her father to his own devices. They had never spoken of the incidents. Leaving Graham, however, with the wedding of their siblings imminent, was not an option.
He clutched his head, opened one bloodshot eye, and muttered something.
She leaned over to catch his words. “Pardon?”
His throat rasped. “I’m fine.” Another acidic plume of breath puffed from his lips.
She coughed and waved a gloved hand in front of her nose.
“I am,” he insisted on a weakened breath. It was typical Graham. He never complained, never spoke a hurtful word, and never drew attention to himself.
“I see.” While she could see he was clearly intoxicated, she could not see why, nor did she know what to do now. It was late afternoon. Her youngest sister, Sera, was due to wed Graham’s eldest brother, Thomas—Tom, the Jolly Giant, as Dinah and her sisters called him—heir to the Duke of Rivington, in an hour’s time.
Graham had helped very little in the course of organizing the event and had no cause to feel stressed enough to drive him to drink, much less drink to excess. Most troubling of all was the degree to which such behavior seemed against Graham’s general character. While Dinah would hesitate to call herself a friend of the family’s, an understanding had existed between their fathers for years involving Sera’s engagement—granted, to another of the Abernathy sons but now was hardly the time to stir up old gossip.
As a result, Dinah had enjoyed several opportunities to study the character of each Abernathy. Graham was the middle child, a merry sort of gentleman. He always had a smile too easy shared, a laugh too carelessly offered. Not that he was a rake or of irreparable reputation. He was popular, and friendly, and seemed imbued with a natural desire to make everyone like him. However, since the odds of all people favoring the same type of cheese, much less the same person, was improbable as it was, he and his quest for popularity were, in Dinah’s opinion, strange.
So his drunkenness during an event of such great importance to both their families was even stranger.
He made no move to rectify his inconvenient position on the floor, and she steeled her voice. “Get up.”
He turned on his side as if he were curled atop a mattress and not cold, hard stone. His tangle of dark hair, which clearly hadn’t seen the better side of a brush since morning, flopped in front of his face so only the tilt of his nose and the patrician jut of his chin peeked from beneath the silky locks.
She set her hands on her hips and glanced through the cottage to see if she could find anything to aid her. While the back bedroom boasted a door, the rest of the house—the kitchen and a parlor with small fireplace—was visible in an open floor plan from the foyer. She opened cabinets and checked in closets, but since calling it a gardener’s cottage was a misnomer—the gardener lived in town and rode in for work with his crew every morning—and there was no one currently in residence that she knew of and she could find nothing of use.
Through the kitchen window, Dinah could see the pond and gentle rolling hills of Woodbury’s meadows, as well as the imposing brick-and-granite exterior of the hall itself. She could make out a few figures dotting the green landscape. Likely the footmen, readying the carriages in a line along the main drive. They would carry the guests from the estate to the parish church.
Carriages that she and Graham needed to occupy shortly.
She nudged his shoulder with a lambskin-covered toe. “Get. Up.”
Graham flopped like a fish to his back, his hair falling away from his face. He studied her through slit eyes that, despite their ire, were a deep, friendly brown, much like the gentle eyes of the first pony she had ever ridden. That was Graham’s talent, she supposed—his air of amicability.
Another glance around the cottage yielded no weapons with which to threaten him, but she could see empty drinking glasses on the table and books strewn about the sofa. Surely Graham hadn’t been living in the cottage. She’d seen him at dinner last night, more somber than his usual self, but she had attributed the mood to his affecting the more serious nature of his father for the occasion.
Regardless, she needed no weapons. She had her superior intellect with which to battle him—or at least with which to rig a device to carry him outside.
She stomped around Graham and kicked his outstretched leg. “I’ve no time for nonsense.”
She was sure her sisters were positively panicking back in the main house given all that was left to do for the ceremony at this late hour. The ballroom was being set up for a formal reception, and there had already been some disasters involving a kitchen fire, an upturned flower wagon, and God knew what else. The stress of discovering one member of both the bride’s and groom’s families missing was likely to send her eldest sister, Alice, who was organizing most of the event, into hysterics. (Or not, Dinah acknowledged. Alice was eerily composed in a crisis.)
“Stop, you annoying woman,” he growled.
She didn’t think she’d ever heard him utter an insult before. “I do not appreciate your characterization of my sex in the pejorative,” she snapped. She nudged him with her foot again, harder this time.
He grabbed her ankle with his bare hand, and she froze, holding her breath.
The heat of his skin seared through her thin stocking. Whatever she knew of human anatomy, there must be an unknown nerve that existed at the exact point of contact between the pad of his thumb and the indent of her ankle. A nerve that sent a spark up her leg and finessed its way up the curve of her back to the slope of her neck. A pleasant sensation, or more than that, she admitted. It was a heady, addictive, sharp blade of delight.
She’d barely had time to consider this medical breakthrough when Graham scrambled up, stammered an apology, and turned to run out the door. Only instead of running out the door, he ran into the door. With a smack of his head, he fell back, unconscious.
* * *
Graham awoke gasping her name, Lily, as though it were air and he would suffocate without it. The pain returned. Not just the pain of having lost Lily, the love of his life, to another man but the throbbing in his forehead where he’d struck the door, the pounding in his brain from the booze, and the ache in his leg where Dinah had kicked him. Twice. Possibly three times. Perhaps more. Who knew what she’d done while he was unconscious?
He hadn’t awakened on the sofa, either, oh no. Dinah was no tender angel of mercy. He was still lying on the hard stone, its chill seeping into his bones.
“How long have I been out?” he asked.
“Two minutes and thirty-eight seconds.” Those fathomless gray eyes peered down at him without an ounce of sympathy.
Of all the Bayswater Belles, why, oh why, did it have to be Dinah who had found him after a bout of secret drinking—the last ounce of which he needed to make it through a ceremony intended to cement the union of two people when he himself could now never imagine a union of any kind for himself—rendering him unable to operate a stupid doorknob?
Alice, the Bossy Belle, would have been preferable. There would have been a lecture to endure, but at least she would have seen him to the sofa in a trice and brought ice to soothe his head.
Bridget, the Bookish Belle—who was also quite the romantic—would have cooed over him and fanned his face while begging for his tale of sorrow and woe.
Charlotte, cruelly dubbed the Bovine Belle, a nickname he loathed to even think much less utter, would have seen to his comfort.
The youngest, Sera, the Belle Belle, his soon-to-be sister-in-law, possessed beauty that rivaled the effects of laudanum, so at least gazing upon her would have eased his suffering.
But Dinah? She not only glared at him, she not only judged him, she not only allowed him to suffer, but she wouldn’t care one whit about his lost love. She would have no sympathy for the circumstances that had driven him so far afield of his own character.
For someone so unaccountably heartless, she looked like a kindhearted pixie. Dinah was the most petite of the Belles. Her blond hair was arranged in the new tousled style, with sprigs tucked beneath her ears. She wore the mask of a gentle fairy—unfortunately, one who would never grant a wish or engage in anything she believed to be nonsense.
“Who is Lily?” she asked.
He winced as something lurched within him when Dinah said her name, as if its very existence were tied to his heart and tugged it alive. Or ripped it apart. If he was going to be melodramatic, he may as well commit to it.
Dinah stared down at him with those guileless gray eyes. All five Belle sisters were said to have the same color eyes, the only feature they shared with one another and with their father, industrialist Dominic Belle. But in the years since the Belle sisters had attached themselves to the Rivington legacy and, thus, had the privilege of being in his family’s sphere, he’d noticed subtle differences. Dinah’s eyes were wide set and big as saucers, leading to the completely misleading appearance of waifish innocence.
“Never mind,” Dinah said tartly. “I see.”
The inexperienced man might believe Dinah gazed upon him with concern, but he knew the expression for what it was: judgment.
He, Graham Abernathy, third son of the Duke of Rivington, one of the oldest titles in the kingdom, war hero, and all-around popular chap, was being judged by this slip of a girl. It was enough to send him scrambling to his feet, where he swayed. He set his hand on the wall and braced himself so as to not to empty the contents of his stomach in a most ungentlemanly manner.
“What do you think you see, Miss Dinah?”
“A man mooning over a woman he cannot have.”
“It hardly makes you Bow Street material.” He felt energized by the insult as it left his lips. Graham couldn’t remember the last time he’d let loose such feelings. It was invigorating, unfortunately too much so. He gave up all pretense of standing on his own and leaned against the wall entirely.
“I do wonder at the timing of it.” She tapped her finger against her plump, pursed lips. “Why should your brother’s wedding to my sister cause you so much distress over this mysterious Lily?”
He winced again.
“Ah, you do not like the sound of her name? Lady X, shall we say? I presume she is a lady.”
“She is a paragon of womanhood—kind, saintly, and beautiful beyond compare.” His head pounded with each declaration.
“Even when measured against Sera?” She studied him curiously.
He was aware of the mulish pout of his lip. “Your sister is quite exceptional, as you well know, but to me, Lady X has her own unique charms.”
“As much as I would like to continue solving this mystery of Lady X, I must confess I was drawn here by other purposes that I now must abandon to see you to the house. I shudder to think of the consequences if your state is discovered by your father.”
He straightened, and his lips compressed in a grim line. The thought of his father was always a sobering one. There was no man more humorless than August Abernathy, the Duke of Rivington. His father’s temperament had been enough to send his youngest brother running from an engagement to Sera Belle, forcing the widowed Tom to step in. Not that anyone who laid eyes on Sera felt Tom’s plight to be a hardship. There would be a wedding, and damn it, Graham was going to be there to witness it.
He took a few steps, but his stomach trembled and he keeled over. Dinah was at his side and used her shoulder to help him stand upright. The relief he felt leaning against her could not be overstated. “Thank you.”
“You can thank me by breathing in the other direction,” she muttered.
He shifted his head to turn away from her, embarrassed at his state. Even more embarrassed by how much he wanted to simply wallow.
Graham did not know how Dinah managed it, but she saw him out of the cottage, across the green field skirting the pond, and back to the house. She somehow shielded his condition from the rest of his family and her sisters, who were, thankfully, distracted by the upcoming happy event. After hiding him in the salon, she brought him water and a thick, black, noxious concoction that reeked of licorice. She forced it down his throat and then bundled him into one of the carriages, along with a distant cousin who prattled on endlessly. He closed his eyes and rested his head against the cushions, steeling himself against the bounce and sway that rocked the contents of his stomach.
On the cushions opposite him and his cousin, Dinah shifted restlessly. In the sway of her skirt, he saw a flash of the pale curve of her ankle. The memory of warm skin beneath his fingertips slipped through his mind. The hand that had grasped her stockinged leg earlier tightened. He stared out the window.
They arrived at the church just as the sun set in the west and bathed the meadow in gold. Dinah assisted him down the steps, into the church, and pulled him into a private pew so they were hidden from others. She inconspicuously brushed her gentle hands against his brown locks and worked through the knots along his temples. The cool touch of her hands was soothing upon his brow, and a sigh slipped from his lips.
She bit off a word—probably an oath. “How could this happen to you?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
She cocked her head and her fingers stilled. She was touching him, far more familiarly than was appropriate, but in her oddly diligent desire to help him, she seemed not to have realized it. But he did. He felt the caress of her fingers keenly, and the accusing look in her eyes, as well. “I wouldn’t understand?” she repeated.
“Not because you aren’t intelligent,” he said, realizing immediately the reason for her irritation. “We know you’ve more brains than all of us. But you’ve also more sense. I’m afraid that you need a heart to understand my state of affairs.”
Her hands dropped to her sides. “Need a heart?”
His balance swayed. He leaned into the wood frame and rested his head against it, his eyes closed.
“I have a heart.” She poked him in the side. “I love my father.” Another poke. “My sisters.” And another. “All four of them.” All emphasized with pokes.
“God, woman.” He grabbed her finger, and his stomach roiled. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so careless with his words—or his hands.
“My heart purely has the good sense to have sense.”
He released her and met her gaze with as much sincerity as he could muster under the circumstances. “I apologize. I was unkind. I am not at my best today.”
The stubborn set to her jaw slowly eased, as did the wet emotion in her eyes. “When I asked how this could happen to you, I meant today of all days. A day meant for happiness. The timing doesn’t make sense. Unless . . .” Her voice trailed away, and she studied his face.
He felt her gaze, the cogs of her brain turning. Dinah was brilliant. Enough so that he and his brothers had remarked upon it. Even their father had spoken to it, to wish that his sons could have been gifted with but an ounce of Dinah’s intellect.
He winced at the reminder.
“That missive you received yesterday after breakfast . . . It was from her, wasn’t it?” she guessed. “Bearing news.”
The truth of it slew him even now, a lash across his chest. “She is engaged. Her father accepted an offer. I cannot help but wonder if I had been in London instead of the country preparing for this wedding, if I had done things differently, if my father—” There was no use wishing for another father.
“I understand fathers,” she said. “But you have rank and fortune enough to engage any woman. Does she not love you?”
He hoped his irate look was answer enough.
“Your father doesn’t approve, then? She is poor? You mustn’t look so fiercely at me for speaking the truth. I do not mean her poverty as a commentary on her character. It is the only logical conclusion. You both share feelings, yet you cannot marry. I assume your father forbade the arrangement because it was not advantageous.”
“He does not know my feelings for her,” Graham muttered, slouching back against the wall. “He likely does not know she exists at all.” Although he could imagine his father’s reaction. And it would involve his head and a platter.
“Her father disapproves?” Dinah ventured. “Her fiancé has a loftier title than you do?”
“Her”—he couldn’t bring himself to say fiancé—”suitor is but a physician.” The truth tasted bitter in his mouth.
“A physician? And that was preferable to you?”
Graham buried his face in his hands. He had thought he wanted to discuss Lily, but hearing Dinah’s incredulity only made him feel worse.
“Were you not clear in your intentions?” she asked.
“It apparently would not have mattered,” he said. “The letter indicates their understanding predates our association.”
Dinah sat back, her brow crinkled. “Are you implying she misled you deliberately or—”
“Absolutely not,” he roared, then recollected where they were. In a box pew. In a church. At his brother’s wedding. “The fault is mine. I must have misunderstood. I must have been blinded by my affections. I am the one who must have subjected her to unwanted attentions she did not have the maturity or experience to deflect.”
“If English ladies have but one skill from the cradle, it is to navigate the marriage market.”
He was already shaking his head and scowling, although she’d yet to finish her argument. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand this much: you don’t want to be understood.”
With that, she stuck her head out the door and must have found the church sufficiently empty, for she pulled him out and led him to the groom’s side.
* * *
Dinah was relieved to note that while Graham was in no shape to dance, he was at least standing upright—although propped against one wall of the ballroom—and back to his usual charming ways, judging by the tittering laughter of the society matrons circled around him like predators with easy prey. There was nothing like a wedding to bring out matchmaking claws in the gentlest of mothers.
Her father stood a short distance away with his usual sycophants—a man who fancied himself an engineer who wanted to discuss the new steam technologies, a few lords who believed they held enough sway in Parliament to buy them interest in his company, and young bucks who wanted to know the secret to becoming one of the richest men of the ton. She shouldered her way past them when they didn’t notice her and allow her room. She was used to not being noticed. She was short and easily deemed insignificant. It frustrated her to no end.
Dinah had once believed if she were smart enough, quick enough, witty enough, that men would set aside her stature and gender and treat her as an equal. But if anything, they only treated her like a quaint curiosity, an amusement. Even her father was guilty of it.
“There you are,” her father said. With a dismissive wave of his hand, his admirers dispersed. How annoying that he carried more power in a flick of his wrist than she did in her entire being. “Ah, Dinah. To finally know your mother is smiling down from above. Even your logician’s heart must see the beauty in joining our family with that of the Abernathys.”
It appeared her matchmaking father was also not immune to wedding nostalgia, even at the risk of insulting her.
A logician’s heart? Why? Just because she didn’t see the point of marriage, particularly as a business contract? But she did not voice this opinion. It had already fallen on deaf ears time and time again.
“Sera looks very happy,” she said instead.
Sera did glow with joy, though in all fairness, with her feather-white hair and radiant skin, Sera glowed every day. She danced a quadrille with her new husband, a dance their eldest sister Alice had made her practice over and over as this—at sixteen years of age—was not only her wedding reception but her first ball. Dinah felt a ball following a wedding ceremony was a bit excessive, but the Duke of Rivington longed to be excessive, and fortunately for him, her father was an excessive man, as well.
Only an excessive man would want to become the fastest man in the world—at least in parcel shipments, covering territory said to put the Ottoman Empire to shame. Only an excessive man would pine for his long-deceased wife to the exclusion of all else. Only an excessive man would take his wife’s final words, issued in the exhaustion of birth—that he must ensure his daughters marry dukes—as her dying wish, especially when her mother hadn’t known she was dying at the time.
But who was Dinah to voice these opinions? She had been one year old the day her mother died, a fact her sisters and father were quick to point out whenever she claimed to have any opinion on the woman who had borne her.
“Of course Sera is happy! She’ll be a duchess one day, just as your mother wanted for all of you.” His voice cracked on the last word.
Dinah glanced at him, shocked at his public show of emotion.
Tears stained her father’s cheeks. “I neglected my duties for too long, indulged you and your sisters. I blame it on a father’s love, but I cannot, in good conscience, continue. I must see you all married well. And soon.”
Dinah hardly knew what to say. Her father was still obsessed with seeing them all married to men who might become dukes. She supposed the Abernathys were gentlemen enough—except for the present duke, who was a cur through and through—but still, the marriage of a girl of sixteen to someone twice her age?
“But Father,” she said gently, “there is not a wealth of young dukes to share among the ton, much less just your daughters.”
“No need to confound the issue with mathematics, Dinah. A marquis or earl may do under the right circumstances. And who needs young?” With that none-too-comforting thought, he patted his belly as if he’d just enjoyed a good meal, pushed his rimless glasses up the bridge of his nose, and wandered back to his crowd of admirers.
She stared after him with growing horror. To whom would her father see her married? An old, liver-spotted man with rotting teeth but titles to spare?
If only she could cure her father of his heartache over Mother. If only she could find a way to remedy the very existence of love.
Love was the root of all their problems. When she considered its symptoms—the heartache, the irrationality—it almost seemed an illness. And if there was an illness, there must be an antidote.
As her mind began to turn, she walked the perimeter of the ballroom rather than pace in a circle as she usually did when engaged in thought. She could come up with a series of experiments designed to rid the sufferer of the symptoms, because without the symptoms, how could there be the sensation? Once the sensation of love was cured, it stood to reason that all resulting emotional fallacies would also disperse.
If only she could test it. She needed a subject. Someone in love who wanted to be out of it.
Her gaze snapped across the ballroom to Graham, who had taken up refuge by a small alcove next to a table with an expensive blue-and-ivory vase, only to have that refuge invaded by his father.
The man looked in need of rescuing, and she was just the heroine to do it.
* * *
Graham could barely make it through a conversation with his father sober, so surviving his current interaction in his drunken condition would prove the pinnacle of his social accomplishments.
The duke glowered, his now-graying moustache slick over his thin lips. With a sneer, he said, “You will dance, Graham, and with a Belle. I don’t care which one. Work it out with Benjamin as to whom you prefer. It’s not as though I’m asking you to marry the redheaded cow. Their dowries are all the same. By God, that pretty face of yours will be of some use to me.”
Normally he would defend Charlotte—who was redheaded but not a cow, although quite a sturdy woman—but in his inebriated state he had to pick his battles. “I’ve explained, Father, that I am feeling unwell. Something I ate.”
Or drank. Why quibble over details?
“Then go rest your pretty head on one of their laps. Must I undo your breeches on your wedding day, too?”
Graham closed his eyes on a grimace. The best thing he could say of his father was that he never pretended to be anything he wasn’t. He did not pretend to be a loving parent, nor did he pretend to be above money. He was what he was. And that was the best of him.
Spittle flew from his father’s angry red mouth. “By God, Graham.” His head pounded. “You will open your eyes—” pound “—be a man—” pound “—and woo one of the Belles.”
“I am not your whore.” His voice was a strained whisper, and even as the words left his lips, he wanted to swallow them back. What had overcome him? Surely something more than drink. His father words kept swirling in his head. That pretty face of yours. Rest your pretty head. Was that all he was? Was that all people saw of him?
His father reared back, eyes wide, then his face contorted in a sneer.
He was the one his father liked. The one his father approved of. Or so he’d thought.
“You aren’t much of anything, Graham. Easy enough to look at? With a knowledge of music and art? These things fade quickly. You may wear the hero’s mantle from the Battle of Salamanca, but I know the truth. You probably never left the tent. You’ll earn your place in Rivington history or you won’t have one. I’ve already let one son go and you’ll be disinherited just as easily.”
Graham heard his own breath slice the air, and his ribs tightened to cage his heart. He could denounce his father. Run away like his youngest brother, Gray, had. Persuade Lily to elope with him.
But then what? Subject her to society’s censure for breaking her engagement? And how would he support her? What means did he have to take care of a wife? Join the Regulars? Even his youngest brother, the only one among them brave enough to defy their father by leaving the fold, was living at the mercy of strangers from one guest home to the next. No, he wouldn’t do that to the love of his life.
Besides, could he leave behind Tom and Benjamin, whom he loved? Expose them further to their father’s wrath?
He saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. A flash of blond, and his teeth unclenched. His jaw clicked with release.
Dinah made her way toward him with haste and intent. He marked her progress with wariness but also relief. He did not miss how she assessed the situation—his father’s menacing posture, his own tense anger. He swore he could see an opus of thought in a single flicker of her lashes.
She laid her hand on his arm, which seemed to bring his father about. “Miss Dinah,” the duke said with a bow, “might I officially welcome you into our family.”
“Lord Graham has already done so, Your Grace,” Dinah said in a syrupy voice he knew was for his father’s benefit. She turned to Graham with a gracious smile, the first he had seen from her all day. “I thank you for saving me this seat, away from the heat of the dance floor and with a breeze from the windows.” She settled herself onto the bench next to him.
He marked his father’s satisfied and calculating look, and had to stifle the urge to laugh. Dinah really was a remarkable woman to have maneuvered her father so easily.
“I must take my leave,” the duke said. “I am promised to a dance. Until later, Miss Dinah.”
She inclined her head. “Your Grace.” She watched his father’s retreating back with a smile, as if she thought he might turn around at any moment and catch her act. “Forgive me, but he’s odious,” she ground out.
“He is honorable.” He said the words before he could wonder why he was defending the man.
“As you say.” She turned a keen eye to him. “You and your brothers are not like him.”
There was no point in lying. She was too smart for her own good. “No.”
Her gaze roamed his face. “I can help you.”
“You have helped enough,” he said. “Any more and I will have to cut off my arm in your debt.”
“But in helping you, I will also help myself,” she said. “I need you, too.”
His heartbeat startled at the admission. Dinah was the Belle who needed no one. He leaned forward, intrigued. “How so?”
“I believe I can cure you of love. Of your feelings for Lady X.”
Graham felt the contents of the wedding supper, what little he managed to consume, sloshing in his stomach. Her words were so patently offensive, so wrong, one might have thought they were in another language. He couldn’t comprehend her intention. Cure him of love for Lily? She may as well have said she wanted to walk the sky. If she’d been a man, he would have called her out for such an insult. He’d be roaring with anger. Which strangely, he was not. Perhaps it was the earnestness in her face, upturned to his with such hope. She did not intend him the insult that he felt.
She must have taken his silence for curiosity or acceptance, because she continued, “Let me study you. I can come to understand the origin of your symptoms and how to disrupt them. Then maybe I can help you find relief. Then . . .” She glanced across the ballroom. He’d never thought to see Dinah Belle looking lost, but in that moment, he saw the flicker of doubt in the way she chewed her lower lip. When she looked back at him, her face was a mask of quiet determination. “Then I can help my father find relief.”
“Relief from what?” he asked.
“From the memory of my mother,” she said as she fixed her eyes upon him. “She died shortly after Sera’s birth, after she told him that he was to see us all married well, to dukes. A whimsical comment, I believe, but they were her last words and ones he has taken to heart to be fulfilled. Perhaps . . . perhaps if he loved her less, perhaps if I could free him from the bonds of his commitment, he might not feel so compelled to see us all married.”
Understanding dawned. He’d always assumed the Belles would find marriage into his family a coup. Had always assumed any woman would want to marry into his family. The Rivington title was old and its coffers full, thanks to the ongoing tradition of marrying heiresses. It had never occurred to him that perhaps there might be some reluctance in that quarter. Did Dinah not want to marry…ever? And what of her sister’s desires?
“Is Sera . . . Was she willing?” he asked, steeling him against a dreaded affirmative.
She shrugged. “To the degree that it would not occur to her to assert her own wishes if they existed, perhaps. If you ask me whether she had ever sought to free herself from the engagement, the answer is no.”
He released a long breath. “I am, of course, sorry to hear the intimate details of your father’s pain. But I believe you may do him more harm than good with this plan of yours.” He forced himself to his feet. An entire day of speaking his mind was not to end yet, apparently. Instead of telling her what he normally would, instead of politely saying he would consider it or would appreciate her assistance, he told her how he felt. “Love is not a damn experiment.”
For a man who was still half-drunk, he stalked away with relative steadiness and speed.
* * *
Lord G.,
Please forgive the impertinence of my correspondence. I hope this letter finds you in better health than you experienced at the wedding.
I am making inquiries on the matter we discussed, and I hope that in your return to good health, you are better able to consider the offer. To begin, there is a decidedly unproven but general agreement that taking on the intricacies of an emotion may eventually yield the results of that emotion. I request that you begin each day renewed and happy, in the hopes that one day it will prove true.
I am joining Sera and your brother on their honeymoon travels in Italy. I, too, hope to give the matter more consideration on my travels.
D.B.
* * *
Miss D.,
I acknowledge the debt I owe you for your assistance to me on that day. Please note, however, that whatever my health may be, my consideration of your offer is concluded. There is a decidedly unproven but general agreement that one cannot use scientific reason to rule a matter of the heart.
I pray you use your time in Italy to give your consideration instead to the Trevi Fountain. Trevi, so named because it sits at the crossing of three roads (tre vie), is composed of travertine and draped with marble statues that appear to rise from its depths. Truly an accomplishment of human nature and heart.
G.A.
* * *
Lord G.,
I did chance to visit your fountain in Rome, and I thank you for the recommendation. However, upon speaking with the locals, it appears the spectacle is more accurately an accomplishment of human vice, as it was funded entirely by gambling when Pope Clemens reintroduced the lottery into the city for the sole purpose of financing the project.
As with most matters, the heart is entirely moot.
D.B.