Page 26 of If I Loved You
Emma shook herself. She needed to stop fretting about her own inadequacies. It was unlikely she would ever again have an opportunity or the need to visit London. She wanted to enjoy every aspect of the experience, and not have it ruined by her childish and dour insecurities.
They passed over a small bridge which spanned a narrow stretch of water. On either side of the road over the bridge, stood many artists, painters with their easels and canvases set just so, facing the water. Their deft hands twirled and dotted and swiped paint-filled brushes across their works-in-progress. Several ladies posed along the bridge, their parasols open, their gazes tipped toward an artist while he rendered their image into the foreground of his picture. The carriages slowed with the congested traffic. Emma shifted toward her right, leaning her arms upon the side of the vehicle to better view each painting as they crawled past.
One artist, mixing paints upon his palette, caught sight of her as the carriage ambled by. Emma smiled at him. The man in the beige linen smock let his jaw gape while his brush jammed carelessly into his cerulean blue. He pursed his lips into a kiss,which he sent along to Emma followed by an oily but roguish grin.
Emma laughed at this and waved to him as the carriage moved slowly away from the bridge. When the painter had turned back to his subject, Emma pivoted and found the earl watching her, surprising her with a generous grin.
They took almost a full turn around the park, exiting after the earl consulted his time piece and announced today’s session would start within the hour and they should call it a day.
Emma spent the evening alone, missing Bethany already, and loathe to occupy her time with snooping around this house for fear of running up against the formidable Mrs. Downing. With little else to do after taking dinner in her room, she dressed for bed and retired early, though wrestled for some time with anxieties and unease. And thoughts of Zachary Benedict, the source of most of her disquiet.
Chapter Ten
GLANCING AROUND THEsumptuous private parlor of Lady Marston’s immense city home, Zach ignored the tea waiting for him upon a near table and waited his godmother’s inimitable presence. Aside from happening upon her in Hyde Park yesterday, he hadn’t seen her since his father’s funeral.
Leticia Durham, nee Brent, and his own mother had been bosom confidantes since before they were married. Leticia was as hard and cynical as Barbara Benedict had been soft and comely, was icy compared to Barbara’s warmth, but they had been inseparable. Zach recalled that his father had never much use for Lady Marston, not while his wife lived, though well he tolerated her friend to keep peace. Ironically, his mother’s passing had seen a shift in the relationship of his father and his godmother. They’d become their own sort of bosom pals, finding each other often at events, and Lady Marston, a widow for many years, sometimes serving as hostess for his father at Benedict House and here in the city. He’d not ever thought there was anything to their relationship other than their need to hold on to each other as a means of hanging on to the memory of his mother.
“He was the best of men,” Lady Marston had shocked him, having uttered these words to him at the grave of his father.
Lady Marston just now stepped into the well-appointed room, reserved strictly for family and close confidantes, her daughters-in-law excluded, Zach recalled with some hint of absurdity.
He stood, just as Lady Marston barked, “It’s a damn good thing you didn’t make me have to hunt you down inside this city, boy.”
His lips quirked. Her private person was so much more amusing than her still hard public persona, though remained more bark than bite, he knew.
“I imagined you would have questions,” he acknowledged, taking her hand, leading her to the blue damask wing chair. “Alas, I need your help as well.”
She barked out a laugh. “I’m not sure you do, boy. I don’t know that I’ve ever been witness to a pair going so far out of their way to make unseen eyes at each other.”
Zach laughed and sat in the matching chair across a small table from her. He admitted, “I’m not entirely sure I care to know exactly what that might mean, ma’am.”
She sighed and gave him a look riddled with exasperation. “I’ll leave off commenting on that bit of nonsense and allow you to tell me where you came upon so dangerously pitiable an ingénue.”
Zach cocked a brow. “Pitiable? Emma?”
“I don’t care how remarkable you think she is, that girl is no match for you,” barked the dowager, finally taking a moment to fix her tea, the set having sat untouched between them until now.
He debated this, considering the context of the lady’s statement against what he knew of Emma Ainsley’s stubbornness.
“My father left her a pretty sum in his will.”
This raised the mighty woman’s brow, until it lowered and her lips parted. “Pray do not tell me she is the imp from some inn down near Hertfordshire.”
“He told you about her?” Zach was aghast.
But Lady Marston quickly shook her head. “I’d taken him to task for having defaulted on a dinner party I’d had. Said he’d been waylaid down there—but wait, he specifically said by acharming and dimpled blonde. Those were his words. Oh, I gave him hell, told him he was too old for things of that nature. But your Miss Ainsley, while admittedly alluring, is neither blonde nor dimpled.” Her eyes skinnied with shrewdness.
Zach was rather pleased to be able to baffle his godmother with the news, “Ah, but her daughter is.”
Lady Marston sat back in her overstuffed chair, while so many manifestations of emotions crossed her face: jaw gaping with disbelief; eyes narrowing with calculation; nose wrinkling with displeasure.
“Bloody Hades, what did he do?”
To save her further erroneous assumptions, Zach laid out the truth of Emma’s tale, and his father’s connection to her, or at least the truth as he understood it. His father had happened upon her while his carriage was stuck. He’d been perhaps initially taken with Emma’s decency, and then more so by darling Bethany, that he’d visited often, regularly, and had benevolently thought to increase her circumstance by way of his final bequest.
Lady Marston rolled both her eyes and her head when the telling was done.
Another sigh preceded her assessment, “He was a fool. I say that with love, you know that. God’s wounds, he was softhearted. But there is good news, in that the child is not his. Are we sure about this?”
