inner thighs to her knees. Her toes had curled up inside her evening slippers.
She had wanted to weep.
She had asked him to romance her and had expected—if she had expected him to take up the challenge at all, though he had said he would—lavish gestures, similar to what she was getting from Mr. Rochford. Instead, in all the days since, she had had a pink rose each morning and a touch of his little finger to hers last evening.
It was laughable.
But she still, even after a few hours of sleep, felt like weeping.
She wanted . . .
Oh, she wanted and wanted and wanted.
What Avery had.
What Alexander had.
What Elizabeth and Camille and Abby had. And Aunt Matilda.
She wanted.
“Mr. Rochford has asked to take you rowing on the Thames this afternoon during the garden party?” her mother asked, speaking softly so as not to wake the baby.
“Yes,” Jessica said. “I promised that I would go out in one of the boats with him.”
“It is going to be a lovely day,” Anna said. “It already is.”
Jessica wished it were raining. She really did not like Mr. Rochford, she had decided last evening. He tried too hard to be charming and deferential. He smiled too much. All of which she might have ignored or at least excused on the grounds that he had not been to London before and was new to the position of prominence with the ton into which his prospects had thrown him even though his father was not yet officially the Earl of Lyndale. What had turned the tide against him last evening was the story he had told about the supposedly dead earl, his cousin. It might be perfectly true. She had no reason to believe it was not. But it included serious charges, involving even debauchery and murder. Ought he to have volunteered that information to a group of strangers in the middle of a party? About his own family? He had shown poor taste at best. At worst, he had been deliberately smearing the name of his father’s predecessor in order to make himself and his father look better by contrast. More legitimate, perhaps. How unnecessary. The law itself was about to make them legitimate.
Would she have been so offended if his dead cousin had not happened to have the same name as Mr. Thorne?
Gabriel?
Yes, of course she would. She did not like to hear people blackening the reputation of someone who was incapable of defending himself—or herself. Especially that of a relative. She could not imagine any of the Westcotts doing such a thing.
“You are right,” she said in answer to Anna’s comment. “It is not even windy. It is going to be a perfect day for a garden party.”
After a few hours spent at the House of Lords, Avery Archer, Duke of Netherby, and Alexander Westcott, Earl of Riverdale, had a late luncheon together at White’s Club.
They were not natural friends. At one time Alexander had viewed Avery as little more than an indolent fop, while Avery had considered Alexander a bit of a straitlaced bore. But that was before Harry was stripped of the earldom and his title and entailed properties passed to Alexander, a mere second cousin. It was before Avery married Lady Anastasia Westcott, the late earl’s newly discovered and very legitimate daughter. The crisis, or rather the series of crises that arose from those events and subsequent ones, had thrown the two men together on a number of occasions, not the least of which was a duel at which Avery fought—and won—and Alexander acted as his second. Their encounters had given them at first a grudging respect for each other and finally a cautious sort of friendship.
They spoke of House business and politics and world affairs in general while they ate. Once Avery discouraged a mutual acquaintance from joining them by raising his quizzing glass halfway to his eye, bidding the man a courteous but rather distant good day, and pointedly not asking for his company.
After their coffee had been served, Avery changed the subject.
“To what do I owe this very kind invitation?” he asked.
Alexander leaned back in his chair and set his linen napkin beside his saucer. “Jessica is giving serious consideration to settling down at last, is she?” he asked.
Avery raised his eyebrows. “If she is,” he said, “she has not confided in me. Nor would I encourage her to do so. That is a matter for my stepmother to worry her head over. Or not. My sister is