The Trouble with Anna by Rachel Griffiths

Author:Rachel Griffiths
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2025-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 27

THE DOWAGER WOKE THE NEXT morning to her usual aches—the stiff shoulder, the pain in her knee, and the tight finger joints that curled in a bit more each day. Still, she could only think how well she felt. It was tremendously invigorating to watch a proud man make an ass of himself.

The Dowager’s gaze fell on the thick book she kept on the little table next to her bed, and she picked it up and tossed it to the floor. She didn’t need her own special copy of Debrett’s Peerage anymore, marked up with her many scribbled observations on London’s debutantes. It was quite clear she could cross out all her lists and give up the business of finding Julian a countess altogether. Lord Barton had played matchmaker already, bless the old bastard. Of course, the Dowager preferred sedate courtships—and said so loudly when Charlotte was in earshot—but Anna was perfect.

The Dowager shook her head, amused once again by the tricks life played. To think how she’d worried when Julian first announced his intentions, how she had wanted to wail and wave her hands around, all while she’d smiled and tried to scheme up ways to talk him out of it.

As if that were possible.

Julian had many wonderful qualities, but flexibility was not one of them. He handed down commandments as if he were the Archbishop and the rest of them a flock of particularly stupid sheep.

The Dowager did not hold with arrogance—it was so often just idiocy dressed up in fancy clothes—but she excused it in Julian, and not simply because he was her grandson. After all, it was his arrogance, his sheer bloody-mindedness, that had saved them all from the wretched mess his father had left behind.

Her heart gave a stuttering kick, as it always did when her thoughts turned to her lost son, and her aches began to yowl at her once more. Each day gravity pulled her down a bit lower, and soon it would—gently, she hoped—lay her in the ground to rest. The knowledge didn’t scare her much, unless she thought of her boy. Strange how joy let her face the prospect of leaving the world with peace, while her one great sorrow anchored her so firmly here.

Never mind!

The Dowager pulled back the piles of covers, lowered her legs carefully over the side of the bed, and rang for a pot of chocolate. She hadn’t seen how brilliant the match was, not at first. What would a man as guarded as Julian do with someone like Anna, who’d arrived at Mayne so prickled up and wary, with such flashing hurt in her eyes that the Dowager had to fight the urge wrap her up in cotton wool, put her in a little box, and nurse her carefully with dropperfuls of sweetened milk?

Imagine her surprise when Anna grew stronger every day and it was Julian who got the worst from their skirmishes. Not that the Dowager wanted him hurt, of course, so much as shaken up, forced to see beyond his own rigid perspective.

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