Page 27 of In With a Chance

“Yes, right,” Gwen blustered, hoping to goodness the man hadn’t realized that she had momentarily completely forgotten the gentleman to whom she was engaged. “Yes, he was very… Very…”

Bother.

How was she supposed to describe him without making the man sound so…dull?

Gwen had never been one for adventure. Not proper adventure, like Michael. The man had been desperate to leave the nest before she had been old enough to understand what the nest was.

She wasn’t like Jessy or Reeny. They seemed so—well, at ease with their husbands. There was a natural calm with them whenever they were with Reginald and Wilfred, something coming over her sisters that Gwen only ever spotted when they were with their husbands.

No, she did not have that with Lord Ravenshurst. Whatever it was.

Lord Frasemere was smiling. “He is very what?”

Very nothing, Gwen wanted to say. And that was one of the reasons that she liked him, wasn’t it?

The Marquess of Ravenshurst was calm, and quiet, and nondescript. He had no strong opinions and no strong preferences. He could take or leave most entertainments and had no close friends—save for Sir James and his wife, who really was more of a sister—mother? She shivered again at the marquess’s strange comparison—to Lord Ravenshurst.

That… That blandness was one of the reasons that Gwen was so happy with him. He demanded nothing from her and was therefore not disappointed when she gave him nothing.

And she was happy. She was.

“He is very nice,” Gwen said, perhaps more defensively than she ought.

The baron grinned. “Oh, nice. That’s nice.”

“Don’t laugh!”

“I’m not laughing!” protesting the man, laughing.

Gwen glared. “There is nothing wrong with being nice.”

“Oh, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it,” said Baron Frasemere with a shrug. “But it’s hardly the sweeping off your feet, exciting thrill in your chest, your whole body alive to him in a new sort of feeling that one hopes for from a love match, is it?”

Sternly ignoring the exciting thrill in her chest as Gwen glowered into Lord Frasemere’s astonishingly stupendous eyes, she said coldly, “Well, it isn’t a love match.”

“You don’t say,” said the man quietly.

And it was the hum, the almost growl in the man’s voice that made her hesitate.

Why was he able to step into her life and immediately upend it? Why did this Ernest Quintrell, this Baron Frasemere, somehow know precisely what he needed to say to irritate her?

It was a trait her irksome brother had, and yet there was something very ‘not brother’ about Lord Frasemere that Gwen could not quite put her finger on.

She very much wanted to put her hands back on the man, but that was neither here nor there.

“Most marriages are not love matches,” Gwen pointed out hotly.

“Really?” The baron frowned. “I thought in your family, it was rather more common to marry for love.”

Blast him. “That’s not the point!”

“It’s my point. It’s the point I’m making,” said Lord Frasemere mildly. “Do you not think it very strange that your whole family—your parents, your two sisters, your brother, even some of your cousins, from what I can make out from the gossip that managed to reach me in Yorkshire—all of them married for love, and you aren’t?”

She was not going to allow herself to be irritated by this man. She was not!

Irritating man.

“Just because I am different from my family,” Gwen said as haughtily as she could manage, “that does not mean I’m wrong.”