“Good Lord, how many of you are there?”
Her lips pinched together. She was trying not to smile. “I have thirty-four first cousins.”
He stared at her. It was an incomprehensible number.
“And five siblings,” she added.
“That is . . . remarkable.”
She shrugged. He supposed it didn’t seem so remarkable if it was all she had known. “My father was one of eight,” she said.
“Still.” He speared a piece of Mrs. Fogg’s famous roast beef. “I have precisely zero first cousins.”
“Truly?” She looked shocked.
“My mother’s older sister was widowed quite young. She had no children and no wish to remarry.”
“And your father?”
“He had two siblings, but they died without issue.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He paused, his fork halfway to his mouth. “Why?”
“Well, because—” She stopped, her chin drawing back as she pondered her answer. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “I cannot imagine being so alone.”
For some reason he found this amusing. “I do have two sisters.”
“Of course, but—” Again, she cut herself off.
“But what?” He smiled to show her he was not offended.
“It’s just so . . . few of you.”
“I can assure you it did not feel that way when I was growing up.”
“No, I imagine not.”
Richard helped himself to two more of Mrs. Fogg’s Yorkshire puddings. “Your home was a hive of activity, I imagine.”
“Closer to a madhouse.”
He laughed.
“I’m not jesting,” she said. But she grinned.
“I hope you will find my two sisters an adequate substitute for yours.”
She smiled and cocked her head flirtatiously to the side. “With a name like Fleur, it was predestined, don’t you think?”
“Ah yes, the florals.”
“Is that what they call us now?”
“Now?”
She rolled her eyes. “The Smythe-Smith bouquet, the garden girls, the hothouse flowers . . .”
“The hothouse flowers?”
“My mother was not amused.”
“No, I don’t imagine she was.”
“It was not always ‘flowers,’” she said with a bit of a wince. “I’m told that some gentlemen were fond of alliteration.”
“Gentlemen?” Richard echoed doubtfully. He could come up with all sorts of things that began with H, and none of them were complimentary.
Iris speared a tiny potato with her fork. “I use the term loosely.”
He watched her for a moment. At first glance, his new wife seemed wispy, almost insubstantial. She was not tall, only up to his shoulder, and rather thin. （Although not, he had discovered recently, without curves.） And then, of course, there was her remarkable coloring. But her eyes, which on first glance had seemed pale and insipid, sharpened and glowed with intelligence when she was engaged in conversation. And when she moved it became clear that her slender frame was not one of weakness and malaise but rather of strength and determination.
Iris Smythe-Smith did not glide through rooms as so many of her peers had been trained to do; when she walked, it was with direction and purpose.
And her name, he reminded himself, was not Smythe-Smith. She was Iris Kenworthy, and he was coming to realize that he had barely scratched the surface of knowing her.
Chapter Ten
Three days later
THEY WERE GETTING CLOSE.
It had been ten minutes since they’d passed through Flixton, the nearest village to Maycliffe Park. Iris tried not to look too eager—or nervous—as she watched the landscape slide by through the window. She tried to tell herself it was just a house, and if her husband’s descriptions were accurate, not even a terribly grand one at that.
But it was his house, which meant it was now her house, and she desperately wished to make a good impression upon her arrival. Richard had told her there were thirteen servants in the house proper, nothing too daunting, but then he’d mentioned that the butler had been there since his childhood, and the housekeeper even longer, and Iris could not help but think that it did not matter that her surname was now Kenworthy—she was the interloper in this equation.
They would hate her. The servants would hate her, and his sisters would hate her, and if he had a dog （really, shouldn’t she know if he had a dog?）， it would probably hate her as well.
She could see it now, prancing up to Richard with a silly dog grin, then turning to her, fangs out and snarling.