Page 5 of My Hellion, My Heart
His breath hissed from clamped lips.
In the drop of silence, and with Camilla and Mary exchanging a worried glance, he heard the slam of the doorknocker two stories below. Stevens would answer the door, and whomever it was would leave their card. It would be among the others Stevens would present to Henry in the salver at luncheon. There was no reason for him to stand and excuse himself so that he could see who was calling.
And yet he did.
The women stared at him, their eyebrows raised in surprise.
“I’m sorry,” Henry said. More was needed. Something coy and playful, and perhaps reassuring. He should go to them, tap them both on the backside and thank them for their brief diversion. But again, it felt as if simple speech was beyond his grasp. “If you’ll excuse me,” was all he managed to get out before going to the door and exiting into the corridor.
Once there, Henry gulped in air and felt the shake of his hands. He’d just left them standing there, naked. What kind of man was he to turn down an invitation to tup two women at once?
Deranged, the voice murmured again.
Henry pushed it away and straightened his collar. His cravat was still loose, but who the devil cared? He was in his own home. Though at the moment he felt a stranger to everything around him.
His butler’s voice drifted up the open, twisting stairwell from the foyer below. Henry glanced over the banister as he descended, saw the black-and-white tiled floor and Stevens’s shiny, bald pate as he dropped the calling card into the silver salver set upon the credenza.
“Who was it?” Henry asked as he came down the last flight of carpeted steps.
Stevens turned and took a crisp bow before answering. “A footman from her ladyship, Lady Langlevit’s residence, my lord.”
He extended the salver to Henry, who spotted his mother’s familiar cardstock easily. The pale pink color with spring green embossing never failed to amuse him. The Countess of Langlevit was just shy of her fiftieth birthday, and yet she insisted on the kind of calling card a blushing debutante would choose. She had aged well, and only ever having borne one child, had kept a girlish sort of figure he supposed, but those were not the things that made his mother appear young. It was her bright presence. Her smile. She was like an eternal springtime, and there was not a soul in London who did not adore her. Including her wretched son.
Of course, that did not mean he was eager to answer her summons. Henry knew exactly what she wanted to discuss, and it weighed on him. It was his birthday, his thirtieth, which meant one thing to the Earl of Langlevit: he needed to marry and perform his filial duty to produce the next heir. It was not a request made by a woman yearning for grandchildren, but a necessity stated within the letters patent attached to the Langlevit title, issued by none other than the tyrannical King Charles I.
Henry did not want children. Nor did he want a wife. However, thanks to an archaic stipulation written into the Langlevit title, herequiredboth. For the past six generations, every Earl of Langlevit had been held to the unusually rigid requirement of marrying by the last day of his thirtieth year and getting to work producing an heir or suffer being stripped of the title, all holdings, and inheritance. And for the past six generations, every Earl of Langlevit had likely tried to figure a way to wriggle free from the restriction, one that was unlike anything found in the letters patent of other peerages.
Two hundred or so years ago, King Charles, who had a penchant for ruling as his own conscience saw fit, granted a peerage to a friend—a friend he wished to see married. Most specifically, to the king’s own cousin. Charles awarded the man an earldom with the precondition that he marry by age thirty, or else the title and holdings would revert to the Crown. The monarch’s exact language did not release future heirs to the earldom from that one precondition, however, and so every heir since had been forced to meet the requirement.
It was absolutely preposterous, Henry thought, but it was also irreversible.
After his father’s death seven years ago, Henry had become earl—and the countdown had begun. He’d known he could not simply sit back and allow the Crown to revoke his family’s legacy, not when his mother depended upon the income of her late husband, and not when the tenants working and living upon Langlevit lands depended upon him for their security. A title in abeyance would spell uncertainty and possible disaster for them. Henry had a duty to them all, just as the previous earls had. It was marriage. Not the guillotine.
No. Henry would heed the rules of his inheritance and marry. Though he’d waited until the last minute, it remained his responsibility. His duty. With the season getting underway, there would be a pool of prospects in town, but Henry had already come to a decision. He could not abide the endless balls and dances and crowds, and then the game of calling on the young woman he selected, plying her with flowers and making small, polite conversation in the hopes that she would accept him and not the several other young men vying for her hand. Just the thought of it exhausted him and made his pulse leaden.
Hell, he couldn’t even make it through an encounter with two nude women in his own bedchamber.
What Henry wanted was to propose to a woman who would not require the romancing a debutante would expect. What he wanted was a woman who would answer him quickly and be amenable to a simple and fast ceremony. What he needed was a widow, and he knew just the one: Lady Carmichael, the widow of one of Henry’s closest childhood friends in Essex. It had been two years since John had died, and Rose was alone in Breckenham with a young son and about to cease half-mourning. The timing was right.
If she were to accept his written proposal, which he had sent to her home near Breckenham two days prior, he would break ties with the light-skirts he often sent for while in London, like the two upstairs. Town, with its noise, crowds, social requirements, and close quarters, always caused a buildup of tension and panic deep inside of him. Henry hated it. Fought it. Tried to reason with it. But there was only one thing that helped to silence the noise: the base act of sexual release. No emotion attached, no conversation, no pleasant company. Just sex.
Thinking of Rose in such a way, as a means of release, made him feel slightly ill. But if he had to marry, he’d rather it be to someone he trusted. Someone who knew him…who didn’t have to be warned about his erratic behavior, or of the night terrors brought on by ghastly memories that he could never escape. Along with the countess and a select few in the War Office, Rose and John had been the only ones who knew the truth of what he had endured while he’d been held captive in France. As far as sexual release, he would secure a discreet mistress—he simply couldn’t fathom using Rose that way.
Henry had broached the marriage requirement with her twice before. Once, long before she and John had married, and she had laughingly promised that should they both be unattached by the time they were thirty, she would consider it. Then she and John had fallen in love. After John’s death, Rose had claimed she would never marry again. She didn’t need to. John’s estate provided more than enough for her and their young son.
The second time was eight months ago, when Henry had called upon her to check in on his godson, William. Rose had been the one to bring up the subject.
“Your time is running out, you know,” she had told him, bouncing William, who was the spitting image of John, on her lap, while they sat in the garden.
“I won’t be a fit husband to anyone, Rose, you know that.”
She had clasped his hand and squeezed. “You’re robbing yourself of the chance to be happy.”
“Happiness is an illusion.”
“And you are a cynic, my lord.” She shook her head. “There has to be a young lady out there for you.”
Henry’s voice was quiet. “No blushing deb deserves a man like me.”
