Scandal Meets Its Match (The May Flowers #7) - Merry Farmer Page 0,17
ostentation, no matter how well Papa’s businesses did.”
“Businesses?” Phineas asked. “Plural?”
“Papa started out life as a card sharp,” Lenore explained with a proud grin. “He was unbeatable, if the tales he spins are accurate. He actually won my mother in a bet as they were both traveling west on the Oregon Trail.”
Phin’s cool look of seduction broke into a smile of undisguised delight. “That could be the most American thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s true,” Lenore said, reaching for the bottle of wine on the table and pouring for both herself and Phin as if she were the hostess and not a guest. If he intended to make the evening a cozy one, then she would participate to the fullest. “Once they reached Haskell, Papa tried his hand at a couple of different businesses. Unlike other men who tried multiple things because they failed, Papa succeeded at everything he put his hands on. He tended to get bored easily, though, and he still does, so he would start one business, sell it to someone just moving west, then start another. That all resulted in him owning one of the more successful ranches in Wyoming.”
Which, of course, made him a target for some of the more cut-throat ranchers who were causing so much trouble in the state at the moment, but the range wars were the last thing Lenore wanted to think about on what was shaping up to be a lovely evening.
“And what about you, Mr. Mercer?” she asked as they both started in on their supper. “What made you decide to publish erotic stories as a means of making a living?”
Phineas laughed. “I assure you, I don’t know what you mean,” he said, looking right at her. He was a brilliant liar, she had to give him that. The fact should have made her uneasy, but strangely, it only made her heart beat faster and made it harder for her to sit still. “I am but a humble member of the gentry,” he went on. “My father is a baronet, Sir Anthony Mercer. Our family has an ancient and dilapidated estate in Yorkshire that provides almost no income. Which has meant that my brother and myself have been forced to seek our fortunes elsewhere so that we might support our ailing father and three younger sisters, Hazel, Gladys, and Amaryllis.”
Lenore’s brow rose and her heart fluttered. She hadn’t expected Phineas to be so open or so domestic in his conversation. She’d expected the two of them to trade barbs and to tease each other mercilessly throughout supper in a way that would make Bonnie’s girls back home blush, until the moment their passions were so worked up that they couldn’t resist spilling into each other’s arms. Somewhere along the line, she’d planned to withhold affection from him until he confessed to authoring Nocturne just so that she would put him out of his misery. Now she found herself leaning closer to him, warmed by sentimentality.
“It must be difficult to be so far away from your family,” she said, fully aware that her tone had changed to something just as nostalgic as his talk of his family.
“It is,” Phineas said, shaking himself slightly, as though he, too, realized how far off course from his intentions he’d veered. “But Yorkshire is just a train ride away, whereas Wyoming….” He sent her a pointed look.
Lenore swallowed the bit she’d just taken, her throat squeezing as she did. She missed her parents and siblings terribly, and her chances of ever seeing them again were slim at best. “They write to me as often as they can,” she said, reaching for her wine.
She drank more of it than she should have in one gulp. How had the evening gotten so far off track already? She had to pull herself together and focus on her intentions if she was going to prove that Phineas was the man he refused to admit he was.
“So, has Lady Hamilton come knocking on your door, demanding blood yet?” she asked, batting her eyelashes teasingly at him and spearing a parsnip on her plate with particular ferocity.
Phineas’s expression melted back into the calm seduction it had been when she’d first arrived, something she had a feeling both of them were more comfortable with for the moment. “I don’t know what you can be referring to,” he said with an arch of one brow. “I barely know Lady Hamilton. The encounter in the Pickwick family’s hallway the other day was the most