Page 116 of The Marriage Method

It was a dramatic difference from how she’d been behaving in their room not fifteen minutes earlier. One that Miles recognized as being entirely inspired by the change in location. The drawing room was not, after all, a bedroom possessed of only one bed.

For that had surely been the cause of her discomfiture. Miles hadn’t needed to be a mind reader to discern it. He’d observed the initial anxious glance she’d given the bed. Had seen the way she’d avoided looking at it thereafter.

The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on him.

Nell had plainly never considered that the two of them would be obliged to sleep together during their stay at Northwick Hall. While, for the past week…

Miles had been thinking of little else.

“It’s Monday evening’s dance that concerns me, Mrs. Quincey,” Lord Amstead was saying to Nell. “You see our lamentably uneven numbers. I blame Calverley, Pargeter, and Radford. They’re long overdue to marry.”

“Speak for yourself, Amstead,” Pargeter called out with a laugh.

“It’s you who must get yourself to the altar,” Mr. Calverley added from his place on the sofa across from Nell and the other ladies. He was a ruddy-faced country gentleman, slightly older than Pargeter and Radford.

“Too right, sir,” Amstead replied gamely. “I require a lady wife to act as my hostess. In the absence of one, perhaps I might steal yours, Quincey?”

Miles forced his fingers to relax on his sherry glass. It was either that or break the stem in two. “If my wife doesn’t object,” he said.

Amstead directed a coaxing smile at Nell. “Well, ma’am?”

Nell took his cajoling with good humor. It was only her eyes that betrayed a certain calculation. That familiar, sleepy tigress look. Miles recognized it, even if no one else did. She was studying the baron as intently as any great cat, searching for clues, weaknesses. “You may borrow me, certainly,” she said. “Though I warn you, my lord, I am not at my best.”

Lord Amstead patted her hand. “It’s the weather. Cold as the dickens this morning. Makes every ailment seem worse. My late lamented father would have been crying out for his hot water bottles and rugs, God rest his soul.”

“Sir Walter and I were saddened to hear of your loss,” Lady Belwood said.

“As were we all.” Lord Amstead heaved a dramatic sigh. “But life must go on. I consider this party a celebration of my dear father. One that has been too long delayed.”

“An excellent notion,” Mrs. Thompson said. “These inflexible rules of mourning are too restrictive on the present generation. Why adhere to them for another six months as a matter of form when your father’s life should be celebrated?”

“Well said, madam,” the heavily bewhiskered Mr. Thompson concurred. He sat across from his wife, a teacup balanced on his beefy knee.

“He had over seventy long years, did he not?” Lady Belwood inquired.

Amstead’s lips thinned as he drank his sherry. “Three-and-seventy, my lady. Very nearly four-and-seventy.”

“Do you shoot, Quincey?” Mr. Radford asked.

“I do,” Miles said.

“Do you prefer a ten bore or a twelve bore?”

“It depends on the game,” Miles said. “I trust Amstead will provide what’s necessary.”

“Oh, he’ll outfit you with guns and a loader, all right. Though I far prefer bringing my own. You should, too, next time you come. Bag more birds that way.”

“Do you often shoot here at Northwick?”

“Not as frequently as I’d have liked,” Radford replied. “Amstead’s father wasn’t keen on hosting guests. He kept himself to himself, and his children under lock and key.”

Overhearing them, Amstead broke off his conversation with the ladies. “Not quite under lock and key,” he retorted. “My father wasn’t a tyrant.”

Radford lowered his voice for Miles’s ears alone. “Pretty near to one, if you ask me.”

“His children, you said,” Miles remarked quietly in reply. “He had a daughter, I believe?”

Miles recalled seeing her name in the peerage. She’d been the child of the late baron’s second wife, born more than ten years after his first wife had given birth to a son. There had been no further mention of her, neither in Debrett’s, nor during the course of Miles’s and Nell’s research into the family.