Page 17 of My Hellion, My Heart
Henry exhaled, wondering for the hundredth time if he should tell her about his proposal. He’d wanted to wait until he had a solid answer from Rose.
“Yes,” he said. “And without specifics…it involves the marriage stipulation on the inheritance.”
He felt her pull on his arm, and then her body sagged against his. Henry stopped and braced her, to keep her from slipping down to the floor. “Mother? What is it? Is something the matter?”
She righted herself almost immediately, shaking her head and pressing a hand to her cheek. “Oh, I’m sorry. Just a little dizziness. How embarrassing. Please, it’s nothing.”
She wasn’t only speaking to Henry, but to all behind them, who had stopped short in alarm as well.
“Are you certain?” Henry asked, inspecting his mother’s color. Her cheeks were not flushed, but drawn, as if she’d been about to faint.
“I must have stood up too quickly from the sofa,” she said, again tugging his arm and indicating that they should carry on toward the dining room.
He relented, his grip tighter on her arm until he delivered her to her chair at the head of the table. Henry took his own seat at the opposite head of the table, his eyes shifting from his mother to Irina, seated just two chairs down from his on the right.
Her head was turned to the man at her right, and by the man’s smug grin, she was unleashing her illuminating smile upon him. The smile that brightened her eyes and crinkled the bridge of her pert little nose. The smile that showed one slightly turned incisor. A charming imperfection in an otherwise perfect countenance.
The soup course was delivered, and Irina had still not ceased conversing with her neighbor. They chattered like magpies, their heads bending toward one another. Marginally, yes, but noticeable. At least it was to Henry.
As he glanced around the table after their soup bowls were cleared away and the main course was presented, he saw that the other guests, each one conversing with their own neighbors, seemed unaware that Irina and the fop beside her were so openly flirting.Gibbons.That was his name. Sir Lawrence Gibbons.
Henry picked at his beef tenderloin, his gaze catching on his mother’s. She frowned at him and then flared her eyes a bit, as if to tell him to stop glowering. He felt the heavy expression on his face then and tried to lift it.
Irina laughed at something Gibbons said, and the prick of annoyance returned, as sharp as that little penknife she kept in her reticule. Gibbons was a good-looking man, only a handful of years older than Irina. Henry thought back to the betting book and the columns of names he’d seen. Had Gibbons been among them? He couldn’t recall. As a baronet and landed gentry, rather than a peer, a princess would indeed be a fine catch. His blood simmered anew.
“Princess Irina.” Henry heard his own voice cut down the table, slicing into the buzz of conversation. Mouths closed and eyes turned toward him, including those that had, thus far, not glanced his way. This was his punishment, he realized. He’d rebuffed her kiss on the balcony, and now she was attempting to ignore his presence.
“How are you enjoying the London season so far?” he asked. It was a bland question, one that would not elicit anything more than a bland answer, but at least it had worked to sever her conversation with Gibbons.
“I’m finding that I like London,” she said, pausing briefly to glance at Gibbons, “very much indeed.”
The bastard accepted the compliment with a lecherous smile. Henry throttled his fork.
“Do you not wish to return home to St. Petersburg? You’ve been away for years now,” Henry continued, wishing he could pick her up and carry her aboard a ship heading back to Russia right then and there.
She glanced at him coolly before again looking to the man at her right. “Not yet, my lord. I am rather taken with your city.”
What was the chit doing? She would make a spectacle of herself if she kept addressing Gibbons so openly, a man she had just met this evening, most likely when they sat down to the dinner table.
“Well, in that case, Your Highness, you really must not stay in Essex for too long,” Lady Vandermere put in. “It is such a pity that you must go so early in the season.”
Why the woman was so distraught over Irina’s plans to leave, Henry could not fathom. She did not have a son in want for a wife. Perhaps a nephew? Or, more likely, she was just a busybody matchmaker living vicariously through the young debutantes every season, especially as her own daughter remained woefully unattached.
“I enjoy London,” Irina replied. “However, even when I return from Essex, I do not intend to parade myself around with the sole hope of procuring a husband the way I might a side of beef.”
She gave a little laugh, though it was the only sound in the marked fall of silence. Even Lady Vandermere did not seem to know what to say. Henry watched Irina’s smile fall off and her eyes round a bit as she realized that what she’d meant in good humor had not been received as such.
“I only mean to say that marriage should not be treated as if it were a commodity,” she said with a shrug, in an attempt to explain herself.
It only served to stiffen the backs of nearly every guest around the table.
“Marriageisa commodity, Your Highness,” Henry said, sitting forward and setting his fork down for good. “For those of our set, people must make connections that benefit not only our own positions but those of the tenant farmers who work our lands.”
Irina lifted her chin, as if in preparation of battle. Henry braced himself.
“I understand how your system works here in England—”
“Then you should understand that a loss of income or a poor match resulting in a lack of funds could devastate hundreds of families we are charged to protect and cultivate. I would have thought a young woman of your position would have learned that by now.”
