Married to the Rogue (Season of Scandal #3) - Mary Lancaster Page 0,82
and agreeable place to work. In fact, he now preferred it to the room he had earmarked as his study in the beginning—probably because he liked the idea of spending time here with Deborah.
Instead of waiting for her to come in, he strode off to meet her, but when he reached the top of the staircase, it was not his wife he found below but Sir Edmund Letchworth and Frederica Ireton.
“Ah, there you are!” Letchworth said. “We have just been hearing that Mrs. Halland is not at home.”
“Come up, and we’ll have tea anyhow. She shouldn’t be long.” He rather wished Letchworth had come without his sister, but after their last conversation, he didn’t want to send him away.
“We received your card this morning,” Frederica said, gliding up the staircase, “and of course, we shall be delighted to come on Thursday. Mama, also.”
“Good,” he said. Other people in the neighborhood were more likely to take their lead from the squire, but the Letchworths’ acceptance would certainly smooth the way. He led them into the terrace room, although, since it was clouding over, they elected to stay inside.
“Deborah will be sorry to miss you,” he said politely. “She went to the village to call on her mother.”
“Oh, so did we,” Frederica said. “She’s not at home. Apparently, she is calling on the squire’s wife. But at least Mrs. Halland’s expedition was not entirely wasted since she met another old friend instead.”
Letchworth frowned at her.
“I hope she did,” Christopher said. “She has many old friends in the village.”
“Oh, this one was not a Coggleton resident. Just a gentleman passing through en route to London.”
“Frederica,” her brother warned.
Frederica smiled. “His name is Crosse.”
Christopher kept his expression amused. “Why, Frederica, you are full of surprises. I never thought of you as a small-town gossip before. And here is tea.”
Along with tea came Dudley and Georgianna, who had been out riding. Their presence and that of his grandfather, who wandered in later, was something of a relief to Christopher, for he did not wish to be constantly dodging Frederica’s poisonous arrows.
He understood she was lashing out with any weapon she thought might hurt, but he was not about to believe her nastiness. Or give in to it. There was no quarrel to be had. He preferred his wife, not just to Frederica, but to any woman he had ever known, past, present, or even future. There was no contest here.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Letchworth murmured when he and Christopher found themselves with a moment of privacy on the terrace. “And you are right. I’ve been judging Lucy by an impossible standard, by my own wishes rather than by the reality of inevitably divided loyalties. She has done nothing wrong. But I rather think I have. Do you think I am too late to make amends?”
“That rather depends on your reasons for jumping to such conclusions in the first place.”
“You mean if I truly loved her, I would not care for her past? As you do not care for your wife’s?”
“I believed my wife’s explanation. But you were right that our cases are different,” he added awkwardly. “I had no love or belief in love to upset my judgment.”
Letchworth thought about that. “I don’t know if she loves me either,” he said in a rush. “After all, she seems pretty keen on Ned Copsley.”
Christopher’s lips twitched. “No, she doesn’t. If you are talking about Sunday, she was polite to Copsley, but then, he has never been impolite to her.”
Letchworth flushed. “I don’t know what to do,” he confessed.
“I think the first thing you need to do is talk to Lucy, apologize for your incivility, and either part or get to know each other.”
Letchworth cast him a rueful smile. “You make it sound so simple.”
“Oh, other people’s love affairs are always simple.”
His own seemed to grow more complicated. As the Letchworths departed, he could not help looking beyond his instinctive defense of Deborah and wondering about the man Federica had mentioned. Did he have something to do with the letter she hid from him? Mostly, he worried that she was in some kind of trouble and wondered if he should force the barriers of privacy she had erected over this matter, to protect her from whatever might threaten her.
But just occasionally, nasty little suspicions tried to creep into his mind. Was this man a lover from her past? And if she kept the letter from him, what else was she hiding?