Page 34 of Bad Luck Bride

Pam looked up, fixing that limpid brown gaze of hers on his face. “Once we’re married, I expect we’ll need one.”

“I don’t see why, since we’ll be living in Egypt.”

“Of course,” she agreed at once. “But you have this hotel venture with your friend, Lord Calderon now, and I thought—”

“Yes?” he prompted when she fell silent and looked down.

Pam didn’t reply for a moment. She pulled her hands from his, apparently distracted by an undone glove button, and as she movedto remedy the problem, he studied her bent head, wondering just what was going on inside it.

“I thought,” she said slowly as she worked to push the button at her wrist back through its hole, “you’d want to stop on here for a bit longer than we’d originally planned. You know, until the new hotel is well established. I heard you tell Papa at dinner the other night that things there are at a crucial stage right now.”

“Well, that’s true enough, but by the wedding, it will all be sorted. And afterward, Simon will have my proxy for anything the board needs to vote on. He can easily cable me in Cairo if any sort of emergency decision has to be made, or if he comes across other properties the company may wish to purchase. We can’t stop on here too long. I have other hotels to run.”

“I see,” she said with a nod, but still preoccupied with her glove, she didn’t look up, and he began to feel uneasy. “So there’s no need to visit Cook’s and change our itinerary?”

Was that really her only concern? he wondered. “No need at all. We’ll spend the wedding night at the Savoy, just as we planned, then leave for Paris on our honeymoon the next day. We’ll spend a few days in Paris, a couple weeks in Italy, then we’ll continue on to Constantinople, then Cairo.”

As he spoke, he thought suddenly of Kay and the plans they’d made to go to Africa together, and how she’d balked at the last minute, and he wondered with a sudden flash of alarm if history was going to repeat itself. Was Pam getting cold feet? Granted, he’d made it very clear that Africa was where they’d be living, but then… he’d made that clear to Kay, too, all those years ago. Would Pam, like Kay, shy at the jump and decide living in England wasmore important than he was? Could he find himself jilted at the altar a second time?

“Cairo is where the vast majority of my business interests are, Pam,” he felt compelled to remind her. “So that’s where we’ll have to live. I told you that when I proposed. Surely you remember?”

“Of course,” Pam agreed. But though she’d finished fiddling with her glove, she didn’t look at him, and when she started to turn as if to resume their walk, he put his hands on her shoulders, stopping her and turning her once again to face him.

“Afraid you’ll be homesick?” he asked gently.

That made her smile a little. “How well you understand me. I suppose it stems from being in England again after so long away. Seeing all my friends, knowing it may be a long time before I see them again… well, it’s giving me a bit of a pang to think of leaving them so soon. We were only in Egypt a couple of months during our tour, you know. It wasn’t long enough to make any real friends there.”

“Don’t I count?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, her smile widening a bit at his teasing. “I didn’t make any female friends.”

“But you will,” he assured her. “There’s a substantial number of British people living in Cairo these days. You’ll have a whole coterie of bosom companions before you know it. And we British love to spend our winters in warm climates. You know that yourself. Remember what it was like for you and your parents when you were staying at my hotel there? You were always running into people you knew.”

“True. But they weren’t staying. Like me, they were on holiday. Besides, we won’t be living in your hotel.”

“No, but we’ll only be a short carriage ride away. And you’ve seen my house several times already, so you know it is every bit as luxurious as my hotel. Electricity, hot and cold laid on in the bathrooms, and plenty of servants for you to boss around.”

Unexpectedly, she laughed. “I remember thinking the first time we dined there how much more modern your house is than any of Papa’s estates here.”

“And the first time I saw you coming up the steps of the veranda there, do you know what I thought?” Despite the fact that he could feel her mother’s disapproving gaze boring into his back from the other side of the flower beds, he moved closer to Pam, close enough that her skirt hem brushed the toe of his boot. “I remember thinking that with you there, my house finally felt like home.”

“You did?” she asked, looking surprised, her voice wistful. “Did you really?”

“Really. You won’t be homesick, at least not for long. And it’s not as if we’ll never come back to England again. I shall have to come home occasionally to tour the hotels with Simon, see how things are going, that sort of thing. When I do, I daresay you’ll want to come with me.”

“Can I?”

“Of course you can come with me, darling. I’d be lost without you. So you see? There will be opportunities for you to see your family and your friends. But, to return to the subject that started this discussion, we don’t need a house in London.”

“No,” she agreed. “Not yet. But…” She paused, smiling, slanting him an unmistakably flirtatious look even as she blushed. “We will need one when the children come.”

As agreeable as the thought of making babies might be, hisuneasiness once again came to the fore. “Why,” he asked, treading carefully, wondering if he was about to get into deep waters, “should the children make any difference there?”

Her eyes widened, flirtation giving way to surprise at the question. “Because we’ll want our sons educated at Eton and Oxford, of course. Surely you agree, being an Etonian yourself?”

He thought of his Eton education, an education that had proven of little practical use. Hell, if he hadn’t insisted on breaking with family tradition and enrolling in London’s Royal School of Mines to study mining engineering, he’d probably still be stone broke, and Pam would be marrying some other chap.

Pam, however, gave him no chance to express his opinion. “They’ll scarcely be twelve before Eton,” she went on. “We can’t just ship them off halfway around the world on their own at that age.”

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