Worse and worse. Apparently, he was one of those men who were content with their wives quietly doing doily work and breeding rather than making clever conversation.
“What of children?” She couldn’t keep the agitation from her voice. “What if my defect runs in the family—imagine your heir, unable to write.”
He shrugged. “My heir will be wealthy.”
This, apparently, settled the matter to his satisfaction. Frustration crackled through her like an electric current and launched her to her feet. “We have scarcely spent an hour in each other’s company,” she said, “nor exchanged a single letter. We know nothing about one another.”
He clasped his hands behind his back. “What is it you need to know?”
“I cannot see how you would possibly suit me.”
A sardonic gleam lit his eyes. “I suffer no misplaced vanities, Miss Greenfield—I know you wouldn’t have chosen me for a suitor. But be assured that I’ll keep you in the comforts to which you are accustomed as well as any man in your circles.”
She raised her fingertips to her temples. “I’m aware you are a wealthy man,” she said. “But I had very much hoped to marry a friend.”
“A friend,” he said, slowly, as if it were a foreign word eluding a confident pronunciation. His Scottish brogue was showing, too.
She half turned away to look out over the rooftops of London. “Yes, a friend,” she said thickly. “I wished for a husband who shares his time with me, who would enjoy inhabiting our own small world, which we alone created. And he would be kind.”
Would a man like Blackstone know how to be kind? These were not the questions she should ask him, nor the things she should hope to expect. She had been taught the tenets of a good marriage and a good wife since girlhood and understood very well that a woman should desire marriage only insofar as it finally allowed her to fulfill her highest purpose: becoming a mother. Only a selfish girl would dream of romance and companionship with a man before she thought of all the lovely children she could nurture. She was selfish, then. She also understood a marriage was best when much of it was spent apart, giving a wife free rein over the domestic sphere, and in turn, she’d never prevail upon her busy husband’s time for attention. Unfortunately, she had a feeling she would desire a lot of attention from her husband. In her wildest dreams, she loved and was loved allconsumingly and beyond reason. The heated emotion in her chest boiled higher.
“I wished for someone who has fine hands,” she heard herself say. “Someone who is content to spend his Sunday afternoons reading to me, someone who takes me to Italy when the weather turns dreary in London so we can study the old masters and discuss them while drinking hot chocolate in the shadow of the Duomo.” She glanced at him. “Have you been to Florence, Mr. Blackstone?”
“Yes,” he said coolly. “I’ve been to Florence.”
“And do you read?”
“Aye, I know how to read,” he said, his voice colder still.
“I’m referring to novels. Do you have any favorite novels?”
His dark brows pulled together. “No,” he then said. “I read Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, if you’d count that. But no other novels, no.”
So he had read one novel in his life, one about a murky financier and banking scandals. She swayed on her feet. “I’m afraid we shall never suit.”
Mr. Blackstone bared his chipped tooth in what she supposed was a smile. “Courage,” he said. “We’ve ten minutes—you may find something to please you yet.”
Unlikely. And they both knew she would have to accept him regardless, unless perhaps he confessed to something truly outrageous, something of the magnitude of regicide. He wouldn’t confess to any such thing, and the purpose of this conversation had been to find something, anything, that would make the days leading to the wedding more pleasant. There had to be something good in the strange turn her life had taken. Thus far, his answers only filled her with more dread. She looked at him thinking that she had kissed him; she had kissed this snarling, taciturn mouth—twice. It had excited her. What had possessed her?
She slumped back down into the chair and gestured at the chaise lounge across. “Have a seat, if you please.”
He sat, unnervingly shrinking the dainty piece of furniture with his frame.
She decided to continue with something simple. “What is your given name?”
Apparently, it wasn’t so simple—he had stiffened infinitesimally at the question, and for a moment, his gaze went straight through her as though he were not seeing her at all. “My name is Lucian,” he finally said.