Page 17 of The Trouble with True Love

He moved to the balustrade, watching with a hint of envy as Lady Hunterby crossed the lawn toward the folly in one corner of the garden. A tryst, he couldn’t help but feel, was far more entertaining than dancing with women he had no interest in, or searching in vain for an aggravating girl who clearly had no interest in him.

“I took your advice.”

Rex turned at those words, glad of a distraction, and found Lionel Strange coming toward him across the terrace. “Lionel? What an agreeable surprise to see you. I had no idea you’d be at Auntie’s ball.”

The other man shrugged, but there was a curious tenseness in his demeanor that belied the nonchalant gesture. “I’m sometimes invited to these things. I suppose even your aunt Petunia finds it hard to scrounge up enough single men for a large ball.”

Rex noted the slight slur in Lionel’s words and his unsteady gait as he came across the terrace, and he felt a glimmer of surprise. Lionel was seldom drunk. “I’m sure that’s not why she asked you,” he said as the other man halted in front of him. “It’s probably because she knows we’re friends and I think quite highly of you.”

“We’re friends?” Lionel echoed, laughing a bit too loudly. “Are we, indeed?”

“Of course we are.”

“Then you have some damnable notions of friendship.”

Rex frowned, his surprise deepening into concern. Even on the rare occasions Lionel had indulged in alcoholic excess, Rex couldn’t recall him becoming belligerent or boorish. “I haven’t the least idea what you mean, but either way, I’m sure you weren’t invited just to balance the numbers. My aunt would never invite anyone of whom she didn’t have a good opinion. And you’re an MP, a man of position in your own right. It’s not as if you’re an insignificant nobody.”

“Perhaps, but we both know I’m not top drawer.” There was an unmistakable bitterness in the words. “Geraldine knows it, too, apparently.”

Rex’s frown deepened at the mention of Dina, and so did his concern. “What do you mean?”

“As I said, I took your advice. This very evening, as a matter of fact. Do you want to know the result?”

Rex wasn’t sure he did, given his friend’s obviously inebriated state, grim countenance, and bellicose manner, but a man couldn’t shirk when a friend was in difficulties. “I do want to know. Tell me what happened.”

Lionel shook his head, laughing a little, but there was no humor in it. “Exactly what I predicted. She agreed wholeheartedly with my suggestion that perhaps we should part, declared that I was right—that she in factwastoo good for me. And then she left me flat.”

“What?” Rex blinked, a bit taken aback by this piece of news. Dina was, first and last, a flirt. It didn’t seem like her to walk away without leaving Lionel some means to pursue. “Did you go after her? Give her the speech I suggested?”

“Oh, yes.” Lionel’s expression got a bit grimmer. “But I barely got halfway through it before she stopped me, declaring that she knew I’d try something like this.”

“Something like what?”

“Lady Truelove had warned her to expect it, she said.”

Rex blinked, still utterly at sea. “Lady Who?”

“Lady Truelove. It’s an advice column.Dear Lady Truelove. God, Rex, surely you’ve heard of it. Don’t you ever read the papers?”

“You know I don’t.”

“People write to Lady Truelove with their romantic problems, and she advises them on what to do.”

Rex studied his friend’s angry face and began to wish the other man had sought advice from this Lady Truelove instead of him, but of course, it would never do to say so. Instead, he tried to make sense of the situation at hand. “Geraldine wrote to an advice columnist in the paper?”

Even as he said it, he knew how absurd that notion was. Dina might be a flirt, but she was also discreet. She’d never do such a thing.

“She says not. But it hardly matters either way. The letter described a situation so much like her own that she decided to take the advice Lady Truelove had offered the correspondent. It was Providence, Dina said.”

“You’re not serious?”

“Oh, but I am. The letter, from some woman calling herself ‘Bewildered in Belgravia’, claimed that the man she loved had led her to expect marriage, but that he was now expressing reluctance to actually marry her.”

“Well, that is rather a common tale, I daresay—”

“Just like us, Dina said. She said it was as if Lady Truelove was talking straight to her. After reading the column for myself, I could see why she came to that conclusion.”

“Nonetheless, it is just a coincidence.”

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