Page 42 of Miss Prim and the Duke of Wylde
For decades, her salons had been renowned the length and breadth of the country and, indeed, far beyond its borders.
As Meg and Drago neared, her ladyship beckoned imperiously.
With smiles, they presented themselves.
Her expression one of gracious approval, her ladyship looked from one to the other. “Meg Cynster and Drago Helmsford. I must admit I am quietly amazed. The pair of you have managed to turn the ton on its collective ear, but in the opposite of the usual way. I have not heard of anyone, grande dame or otherwise, who had even dreamed of matching the two of you, but now you’ve presented us with the fait accompli, the alliance seems so very obvious and so obviously perfect in every way.” She beamed at them both. “I predict great things will come of this. Indeed, your marriage will be the making of you both.”
Meg hid a wary blink behind an appropriate mask of glowing happiness. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Indeed.” Also smiling genially, Drago bowed.
“Yes, well, now I’ve made that pronouncement, I will, of course, expect you to live up to it.” Lady Palmerston held up a warning finger. “And before you slope off, apropos of living up to expectations, I am holding a soirée—one of my usual gatherings—next Monday evening. You will both receive invitations shortly, and I will expect to see you there.”
Meg slanted a look at Drago, even as she said, “Of course, ma’am. We’ll definitely attend.” Regardless of any other invitation, one could not refuse a summons from the current Prime Minister’s wife.
“Excellent.” Lady Palmerston nodded. “Now you’ve declared your intention to wed, there’s no reason not to embark upon establishing yourselves within the necessary circles.”
With that, she released them, and they moved on, past the last carriages.
“Done.” Drago looked ahead to where his curricle waited in the care of the stable lad.
“Indeed.” Despite their morning’s foray having gone without a hitch, Meg felt strangely discombobulated. Not unhappy, no. In fact…
Drago took her hand, and her senses, as usual, leapt and skittered—a sensation she was, at last, learning to ignore. He helped her up to the seat, and she sat and, while he paid the stable lad and exchanged a few words, she stared at the carriages lined up along the avenue—the scene of their recent triumph.
Thatwas it. For the hour and more it had taken them to complete the circuit, she’d been absorbed, engaged, and actively focused, using her knowledge and her social skills to further the fiction of their engagement. And during those minutes—all those minutes—the restless inner yearning she’d grown so accustomed to over recent years had simply not been there.
She’d felt satisfied. Fulfilled.
She still did.
Mulling that, when Drago climbed up to sit beside her, she agreed that they could return to Half Moon Street, where luncheon awaited them along with their mothers, keen to hear how their morning had played out.
CHAPTER7
The following day saw Drago and Meg strolling the lawns of Lady Derby’s riverside pavilion in Chelsea. The thick grass was dotted with round white-painted wrought-iron tables and matching sets of chairs, and at the lower end of the gently sloping expanse, beyond a line of trees, the waters of the Thames rippled and gleamed.
The sun was beaming strongly, which was just as well as her ladyship had somewhat recklessly declared her event would be a picnic.
Drago cast a decidedly jaundiced eye over the many matrons with daughters in tow and the more youthful gentlemen hauled along as escorts. “If her ladyship wasn’t a connection, I trust we wouldn’t be here.”
Fetchingly gowned in a plum-colored dress trimmed with ivory lace, Meg dipped her head his way. “Probably not.” She glanced at the other guests and confirmed, “I suspect we’ve been touted as the main attraction. Otherwise, there’s little benefit to be gleaned for us—few new connections we might be thought to need to forge.”
“In that case, let’s keep walking.” When they’d attended the theater the previous evening, he’d discovered that, just as at the ball, as long as they were on the move, people tended not to intercept them. In his opinion, such behavior was more driven by said people wanting to see with whom they were intending to engage rather than any hesitation over boldly accosting them.
Yet even here, in rather less exalted circles, there were those with whom Meg informed him they needed to engage.
He wasn’t entirely surprised that she included his aunt Edith in that number, especially as she was seated alongside two of his older connections.
One of those was Lady Rampling. After exchanging kind words with Meg, her ladyship fixed him with a knowing look. “You are to be commended, Wylde, for exercising the sense you were, as a Helmsford, undoubtedly born with. To have snapped up a Cynster—one of the last available of your generation, too—shows a fine sense of what is due to your position.”
Drago couldn’t think of how he was supposed to respond to that, so he merely arched a laconic brow.
Yet as he and Meg circulated, twined with the often-effusive felicitations ran a steady stream of approbation, mostly directed at him—that he’d been so clever to offer for Meg—but occasionally at her, too. Old Lady Connaught even went so far as to ask—more or less seriously—whether Meg’s spurning of all other suitors over the past nine years had been because she’d always had her eye on becoming the Duchess of Wylde.
He had to hand it to his supposed betrothed; she laughed and blithely agreed, which everyone listening correctly interpreted as her being too kind to coldly deny the ageing lady’s ridiculous notion.
The event was well advanced—the picnic served and consumed and the guests relaxing in a postprandial daze—when he spotted George and Harry sidling along in the shadow of a tall hedge.
