disappearing at an imagined call from another family member.
“I am flattered,” he said, smiling back at her. “I am considered an eligible connection, then, for the daughter of a marquess?”
“Oh, I do not doubt that your supposed American fortune and your connections here in England would be looked at very closely indeed if you were to make an offer for me to my father,” she said. “I am his only daughter and he is very protective. I also have a twin brother who would check your credentials just as thoroughly even if Papa did not. But you are Lady Vickers’s kinsman, and she and Sir Trevor are your godparents. Sir Trevor Vickers is a prominent member of the government and is held in high esteem.”
“Ah,” he said. “Then I can aspire as high as to your hand, can I?” He was rather enjoying himself, he realized.
“Well, you can,” she agreed. “But you would be foolish to do so.”
“I am devastated.” He set one hand over his heart and she laughed. “Is it something I said?”
“Hard as it is for my family to understand,” she told him, tapping her closed fan against his sleeve, “I am not ready for marriage yet, Mr. Thorne. Eventually, perhaps, but not now.”
“And I cannot sway your resolve?” The twinkle in her eye told him that she fully realized he was not devastated.
“You cannot, alas,” she said. “This coming autumn the lease will come to an end on the house—my father’s house—where Bertrand and I spent much of our childhood. The tenants will be leaving. Once the house is empty, Bertrand intends to take up residence there, and I plan to go with him. We are twins, you know, and enjoy a close bond. I do not doubt he will wish to marry eventually, and I am quite sure I will too. But first I want to go home. I want to spend time there. With my brother. And with myself.”
“Leaving home, going home,” he said. “They are pivotal, emotionally charged moments in life.” He knew something about them. “I must look elsewhere, then, for a bride.”
They continued to smile at each other, but with a little less amusement than a few moments before. He understood her, and perhaps she knew he did.
“Perhaps Jessica?” she suggested, and laughed. “Now she is eligible. Even more than I am. Though I do pity the man who has to face Avery to ask for her hand. He can be terrifying.”
“I may have to decide if I am willing to take the risk, then,” he said just as they were joined by her twin and a friend she introduced as Mrs. Overleigh.
If he had been invited here as a possible suitor for Lady Estelle, Gabriel thought, then his continued presence here was redundant. Rochford was fawning all over Lady Jessica. How the devil was he going to use this occasion to some advantage in order to romance her? He had not set eyes upon her for three days, and though she might have seen the humor of the pink rose the first day, the joke might have worn a bit thin on subsequent days. Besides, he did not suppose a joke was romantic. But what else was he to do? He found it difficult, even impossible, to be ostentatious. He would feel downright embarrassed about sending a bouquet. The next thing he might find himself doing was kissing his fingertips and blowing her a kiss or gazing soulfully at her.
He discovered as the evening progressed that this was not the sort of party at which one spent the whole time in the same place with the same set of fellow guests. These people were adept at moving about, aligning themselves with different groupings, keeping the conversation fresh and touching upon any number of topics. No one dominated any conversation, though Gabriel suspected Rochford would have done so if he had been allowed. But almost immediately after he had divulged that damning and astoundingly inaccurate information about Gabriel Rochford and his relationship with him, both Riverdale and Lady Hodges deftly turned the subject without being at all obvious about it. Both had perhaps felt that such conversation was not appropriate to the occasion, though young Peter Wayne, one of Molenor’s sons, had been agog with interest.
It was a strange tale Rochford had told. He had been just a boy when Gabriel went to America—a boy he had never met and had known next to nothing about. Yet there had been the