Page 4 of Luring His Lordship
“Have you considered Lord Neville?” Lady Asquith asked. “He seems an excellent marital prospect.”
Millie covered her choke with a cough. “Neville?” She slanted a glance toward the precise corner where Neville had hidden himself away with Lord Asquith and their mutual friend, Lord Blackwell. “Never.”
“Why not?” Lady Asquith asked. “Neville is intelligent, admired, and reliable.” Lady Asquith nodded to herself. “A solidly moral gentleman.”
“Nevilleissolidly moral.” As solidly moral as he was profoundly irritating. “A man like him,”one pompous and certain of everything, “is likely to desire a bride who is…”
She frowned.
How could she best describe the kind of perfect, proper bore the little lordling would choose? The kind of young lady who studiedThe Mirror of Graces, that exhaustive etiquette book for young ladies, on a nightly basis.
“Conventional?” Lady Asquith suggested.
“Yes.” Millie sucked in. “Neville will choose aconventionalbride.”
One of the genteel, pastel-clad young ladies gathered around Lady Jersey, for instance. One—two—no,threeof them were currently casting simpering glances in Neville’s direction.
Millie couldn’t help a slight scowl.
Whatcouldthose young ladies be thinking?
Couldn’t they see he was deep in conversation with his friends?
No female smile, no matter how shyly admiring, had any chance of catching Neville’s attention. Neville was… well, extraordinarily,unpleasantlymale. She’d known that much from the moment she’d first laid eyes on him. Men like him, men like her father had been, were always more interested in their male companions than they’d ever be in their future wives.
“Millie, your face isspeakingagain.” Lady Asquith leaned in and lowered her voice. “And using the usual, dry tone, too.”
Millie took up a proper, disinterested posture and then began slowly wafting her fan.
Still, a subtle frown persisted.
They were discussing the little lordling, after all.
Millie formed her own list of qualities for Neville—one very different than Lady Asquith’s had been.Pompously infuriating. Insufferably dull. More rigid with self-righteousness than a vicar in a bay of bare-bottomed, bathing beauties.
She brightened.
Good alliteration, that. Deliciously naughty, too. Not to mention accurate! The man practically begged to be taught a lesson.
Thoughnotby her, of course.
Ifshe wereforcedto marry, she wouldn’t choose Neville. Nor—she glanced again in the direction of the three friends—would she choose his friend Blackwell. Blackwell had a glib quality she could not quite trust, despite the fact that Nettie relentlessly sung his praises.
“If only Asquith were a possibility,” Millie said aloud.
“Pish.” Lady Asquith shook her head. “You only say that because you’ve known him most of your life.”
“True,” Millie reluctantly agreed.
Asquith had been the first—and the only—young man of the peerage any of the Wainwrights had known as girls.
Lady Asquithtutted again. “The way your father kept you all confined at Willowhurst was a travesty.”
Atravesty?
Her fatherhadstrictly forbidden visitors from town. And Lady Asquith had to demand a god-mother’s privilege to visit Cassie and Eliza on a yearly basis. Still, Millie had been quite content when the Wainwright ladies were on their own.
If anything, the infrequent times her father had taken up residence had been thetravesty—the mockery of what should have been.
