The Golden Season by Brockway Connie

Author:Brockway, Connie
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Onyx

Chapter Eighteen

The next day Ned paced up and down in front of the Stanhope Gate that led into Regent’s Park and pulled out his pocket watch. He checked the time once again. It was five thirty, half an hour past the usual time Lydia arrived for her daily drive down Rotten Row in her dark blue, lacquered barouche, its bright yellow wheels flashing behind a pair of handsome black horses.

He’d arrived on foot rather than riding the bay gelding Borton had insisted he make use of. Today he’d wanted closer contact with Lydia than simply riding alongside her as her coachman drove up and down the lane. Though he knew he presumed in hoping she would invite him to share her carriage, he had decided to take the chance. His experience of last night had made his path clear to him.

Far from being cowed, Phillip and Harry had been delighted by the melodramatic ending to the evening. They’d spent the coach ride to Josten’s town house drunkenly debating the relative merits of guns versus rapiers as dueling weapons. They had not noted that he’d absented himself from their discussion and a good thing, too. Had he spoken, he certainly now would be regretting having lost his temper to an even greater degree.

The only time his knavish nephews’ spirits had been dampened was when they’d reached their destination and he’d flung open the carriage door and issued the curt order, “Get out.”

The two had blinked at him in confusion, making no effort to move.

“Are you deaf?” he asked. “Get out.”

“But . . . but, what about our money?” Harry, either the bolder of the duo or the more simple-witted, had blurted out.

There had been no second request for “their money” and Ned took grim satisfaction in imagining the boy’s valet’s attempt to remove Ned’s boot print from the seat of Harry’s pants.

He’d little doubt that within a day or so he would be reproached by Nadine or Beatrice for his unnatural lack of avuncular affection and the outrageous manner with which he’d treated their darlings. He was not looking forward to that meeting. In truth, there was little in London to recommend itself to him. Last night’s events had brought home how little he had in common with his so-called peers, the members of the beau monde.

Too many were caught up in the minutiae of politesse and social pettiness that he found baffling. They valued things he did not understand and which he had no desire to understand. He found himself impatient with much of Society and vexed by the realization that he did not know his place in it. Perhaps he did not have a place in it.

And yet he had fallen in love with the haute ton’s reigning jewel. He was well aware of the irony of that. It didn’t matter, his heart had become a thing separate from his will. And now his heart was demanding more. Somewhere over the last weeks, keeping hush about his family’s financial straits had gone from being a strategic evasion to a sin of omission.

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