a seat at Nick’s Broadwood and folded down the music rack, then petted the instrument as if it were an obedient mistress. “So tell me what you seek in a wife, Nicholas. The hunt doesn’t seem to be progressing, and the Season doesn’t last forever.”
Satan’s hairy testicles. “This line of questioning—upon which you seem fixated—does not bode well for our friendship, Valentine.”
There was no heat in Nick’s reply. He’d never go a round of fisticuffs with a friend whose hands were so very talented. Instead he went to the sideboard and poured them each a brandy. “Any woman who marries me has to understand it will be a marriage for the sake of appearances only, and leave me in peace for the rest of my days.”
Val’s opening flourishes at the keyboard came to an abrupt pause. “In God’s name, why?”
“Why what?” Nick set Val’s drink on the piano’s lamp stand.
“Shame on you.” Val moved the drink to a little music table. “Why wouldn’t you, of all the randy creatures on God’s earth, marry a woman to take to your bed?”
Nick lowered himself to the sofa and regarded the drink he really did not want. “Firstly, I don’t need to marry to find women by the pairs and trios in my bed. Secondly, I do not intend to have children with my wife, because my size makes me poor breeding stock. Thirdly, I will not take advantage of some sweet young thing by taking her to my bed, then tossing her over while I go look for livelier game elsewhere, thus precipitating endless painful and avoidable scenes involving many damp handkerchiefs, broken vases, and hurt feelings.”
“You are full of tripe,” Val said calmly. When he resumed playing, the clever bastard chose a lullaby. Sweet, lyrical, and perfectly suited to cadging confidences from unsuspecting friends. “First, you adore women and invariably make them happy, at least bed-wise. There are witnesses to this, Nick. Eyewitnesses. Second, you are superb breeding stock, being handsome, intelligent, prodigiously healthy, and, for want of a better word, lusty. Find a great strapping country girl and space your children, but do not tell somebody who is only a bit shorter than you that size makes you dangerous to your wife. Third, even you have lost your appetite lately for the easy conquests, if you can call them that. You are posturing to take a real wife, my friend.”
The little song lilted along, while Nick considered firing a pillow at Valentine’s head.
“I am posturing to court the semblance of a real wife.” Nick stretched out on the long sofa, his drink resting on his chest. “The fiction must be credible, at least until one of my brothers can go about the business in earnest.”
“You are serious about this,” Val said, frowning at Nick over the lid of the piano.
Nick waved a hand. “I killed my mother, you know.”
Val didn’t dignify that with a rejoinder, and the music grew even softer. “If you were going to marry in earnest, what sort of wife would you seek?”
Nick didn’t answer. He kept his eyes closed, let his breathing slow and deepen, let the music wash through the melancholy Val’s choice of topic left in his chest. What sort of wife would Nick choose, if he had any sort of meaningful choice?
A woman who could love him, of course. A woman who didn’t care he’d be an earl, who didn’t care he was too damned big to fit even in a ballroom, who didn’t care that the one thing he must never do was attempt to secure the Bellefonte succession.
***
“Leah danced the supper waltz with Reston again,” Darius said as he appropriated a drink from his brother’s decanter.
“And that’s good?” Trenton Lindsey, Viscount Amherst, watched his younger brother pour, thinking Darius’s eyes held a hint of something desperate.
“It’s good. She seems to like him, and he’s not Hellerington. The talk about Reston seems harmless enough—he enjoys the ladies of a certain reputation, but nothing more condemnatory than that. Have you seen Reston?” Darius tossed the drink back and punctuated the question with a glower.
“I doubt it. I do not circulate, to speak of, unless I’m escorting Leah. You know that.”
“He’s big,” Darius said. “Enormously tall with the muscles of a stevedore.”
A hazy impression tried to coalesce from the swampier regions of Trent’s memory. “Blond? Like Wotan or Thor in evening dress?”
Darius eyed the sideboard, his expression shifting to include a touch of consternation. “Berserker of the Bedroom is one of his nicknames. Biggest