Page 63 of Finding Lord Landry

I blinked at him and opened my mouth to correct him but felt the warning squeeze of his hand. I clamped my mouth closed after murmuring my thanks.

Once she was gone, Landry glanced back at me. “You’re having trouble…?”

I felt the eyes of the media on us through the window. This wasn’t the time to explain that I was having trouble sleeping. Having trouble breaking the habit of holding him at arm’s length. Having trouble not throwing myself into his arms and begging him to build a life with me for real.

The weight of everyone’s expectations pressed down on me, and I remembered the purpose of this outing. We were supposed to be selling our romance.

I picked up Landry’s hand and pulled it to my lips, kissing each knuckle one by one without taking my eyes off his.

“I’m having trouble keeping my hands and mouth off of you,” I said with a teasing, flirty smile.

Landry’s eyes heated, but his smile didn’t return. I reached for his other hand and began doing the same.

Until I came to a warm gold band on his ring finger.

My stomach lurched with a silly, lightning-fast worry he’d somehow either gotten secretly married when I wasn’t looking or he’d been married all along. But then my brain kicked back in, and I shot him a look.

“Fuck,” he hissed, pulling his hands back to fumble in his pockets. “I have one for you, too.”

“Baby,” I said between my teeth, still fronting a smile as the server approached. “Tread lightly.”

He spoke at a normal volume as he pulled something out of his pocket with a dramatic flourish. “I just got this back from the jeweler. Apparently, the delay was due to its age and historical significance.” He reached for my left hand and began sliding a ring onto my finger. “In the Victorian era, men wore wedding rings on their pinky fingers. Those would have probably fit your slender ring finger, but I didn’t like any of the ones in our family collection.”

It took a minute for the paparazzi to realize what they were seeing through the window, but once they did, they quickly scrambled to get closer.

I concentrated on keeping my hand from shaking. “So this one is…?”

His eyes bored into mine. “It is a gimmel ring from the eighteenth century. It’s actually formed of three separate gold bands. My ancestor, the eighth earl, had it made as a symbolic gesture for his lady love. During the betrothal, he wore one of the bands, she wore the other, and the person who’d introduced them—who happened to be her brother and his friend—wore the third. During the wedding ceremony, all were placed in the bishop’s hand for a marital blessing and then placed together, as you see here, on the groom’s finger. There was a matching one for the bride, but it was lost after her death. We believe it was actually buried with her.”

I glanced down at the design. Two hands were clasped together, almost like a Claddagh ring design but more primitive and blocky.

“There’s a heart inside,” Landry murmured. “Hidden beneath the hands. Each hand is on a separate band, and the heart is on the third. You can separate them to see when you take it off.”

As soon as he released my hand, I pulled it close to my heart and covered it with my other hand. “Thank you,” I said, forgetting for a minute that none of this was real. “I mean… I’ll, uh… I’ll take good care of it.”

I stood and leaned over the table, grasping his face and kissing him tenderly. “Thank you,” I murmured again softly. “You are a good man.”

He stretched his head from side to side and cleared his throat. “Don’t know about you, but I’m in the mood for an açaí bowl!”

As the performance brunch continued, I couldn’t help but glance down from time to time to see the antique ring on my finger. No one had been within earshot when he’d told me the details of the ring. His description of its history hadn’t been for the press. It had been for me.

My mind reeled with this new reality, the one in which Landry Davis,myLandry, was heir to a long and storied earldom complete with a rich, chronicled history as evidenced from this piece and everything in Hawling House, as well as the kind of familial expectation and pressure I couldn’t even wrap my head around.

I’d been under family pressure myself. Pressure to go to college, to graduate and get a good job. And then, when I’d given up the “good” job as an entry-level market research analyst to move to New York, pressure to find an even better oneandmeet a successful gay man I could settle down with, too.

Within a month of moving, I’d run out of money, not because I hadn’t saved properly for my move but because I’d fallen for an apartment rental scheme and had been too mortified by my own stupidity to ask my parents or grandmother for help. I’d plastered the city with resumes and had taken a temp job as an assistant in the meantime… which was how I’d ended up at Sterling Chase.

“What are you thinking about?” Landry asked, shaking me out of my memories.

His hair was perfectly styled to look messy. His eyes were bright with curiosity, but his mouth was still set in a fake smile. My hand was loosely held in his as his fingers toyed idly with mine, rubbing every now and then across the patina of the old ring.

“I was homeless when I started working for Sterling Chase,” I admitted.

His fake smile evaporated with the steam from his coffee.

FOURTEEN

LANDRY

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