Page 16 of Bound By her Earl

The sooner he was out of their lives, the better.

After his visit to the Rutley sisters, Benedict returned to his house feeling curiously drained of energy. He wanted to blamehis sudden exhaustion on Miss Emily Rutley and her endless argumentativeness, but as the visit had stretched on, he’d found himself wishing formoreof her arguments, oddly enough. He’d been strangely disappointed when she’d sat there quietly, massacring her embroidery.

He shouldn’t feel that way. He should feel pleased that the woman had finally seen sense and had left him to his perfectly aimable conversation with Miss Amanda.

Except…

Well, it had been a bit boring, hadn’t it?

Miss Amanda, with the occasional interjection from her twin, had kept up a perfectly suitable conversation. She’d put forth perfectly reasonable questions about his life and work and had offered responses that were polite and thoughtful. But he’d seen no true spark of interest in her, except for when she was talking about that strange bit about the horses.

And he’d certainly felt no spark of interest when she’d talked about things she’d read in the gossip columns.

Pretending to feel that spark when it didn’t exist had been far more tiring than he’d anticipated. And, worse, he’d spent the whole time fighting to keep his eye from wandering back to Miss Emily, fighting to keep his mind from wandering back to their unfinished argument or the way she’d bitten that plump lip of hers…

He threw open his front door with more violence than was strictly necessary. He wasn’t going to think about it now, either. He was going to return to his study and attend to the day’s work and leave the thorny tangle of courtship for tomorrow. Or several days from now. Next week at the latest.

“Oh,thereyou are, Benedict!”

Or perhaps, he realized with a barely stifled sigh, he was going to deal with his mother.

Benedict supposed that deep, deep down, he probably loved his mother. She was his mother! People loved their mothers, didn’t they? He found, however, he had to admit that he sometimes struggled toaccessthat love for his mother, given her persistent conviction that the world was against her and that it was Benedict’s job to both hear her (endless) complaints on the subject and to resolve her (unceasing) woes.

“Hello, mother,” he said, not bothering to conceal the weariness in his tone. It didn’t matter. No matter what he did, no matter how he acted, his mother would find a way to be sour about it.

As gossip told it, the Dowager Countess of Moore had been considered a great beauty in her day; it was her bewitching green eyes and thick raven tresses that had lured the previous Earl of Moore into her orbit. Despite marrying a rich, titled man who thought she hung the moon, Priscilla Hoskins had long suffered the abiding conviction that her beauty should have earned her something more in life.

She had spent all of Benedict’s life searching for this ‘something more,’ usually in the arms of other men—both before and after her husband’s passing. Benedict had been only eleven when he first heard the rumors that he was not his father’s son in truth, though the late Earl, who had never once looked upon Benedict with suspicion, had been quick to put end to those rumors.

“Who on earth told you such nonsense?” asked the Earl angrily, furrowing the strong brows that would appear on Benedict’s own visage a few years later as he entered his adulthood. “I shan’t have you listening to a word of that, Ben. I shan’t.”

And he hadn’t. He’dheardit again, of course, but he’d not listened. To Benedict, his father’s word was absolute; he’d never been given reason to doubt it. When the late Earl had died some five years prior, leaving Benedict a titled lord at one and twenty, he’d felt his father’s loss like a hammer blow to the head.

Priscilla had scarcely seemed to notice.

Benedict supposed he could see traces of that beauty who had captured and broken his father’s heart in the pinched visage of the annoyed woman who stood before him. It was hard, but he supposed he could manage it.

“Where in the good Lord’s name have you been?” his mother cried dramatically as if Benedict was a child who had escaped from the nursery and not fully grown. “You are always gone, Benedict. Why are you always gone?”

Benedict handed off his hat and coat to his butler, who did not so much as blink at the Dowager Countess’ high, plaintive whine. The staff, alas, was well accustomed to such theatrics.

“I was paying a call,” he said shortly, knowing his mother wouldn’t probe further. She didn’t really care where he’d been, no matter what her question implied. What she cared about was that he hadn’t been available the moment she wanted him. “Can I help you with something?”

He started walking into the house, knowing she would follow.

“I should think so!” his mother huffed, close on his heels. “It’s my allowance, Benedict. It’s a disgrace. A disgrace! Do you mean to shame me in front of all my friends? Are you hoping to give me fits? Because if I have to be seen in the ancient fashions that I have in my wardrobe for one moment longer, I shall have fits. And then you shall have to send me to one of those sanatoriums on the Continent, so I can take in the healing waters. But maybe that is your plan! Perhaps this is your plan to get rid of me.”

Benedict stopped walking—not because he wished to give credence to this absurdity but because he had nearly reached his study, and if she entered his study, he would have to practically pry her out with a crowbar.

The hallway was, to its credit, a much less comfortable place for a lengthy session of complaints.

“Mother,” he said, digging deep into his reserves of patience as he turned to face her, “I am not trying to get rid of you.”

His mother’s lips were pursed so tight that one might have thought she’d been sucking on a lemon.

“You have a funny way of showing it,” she said prissily.

He sighed then looked directly at her for the first time since he’d entered the house. His brow furrowed.

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