Who Wants to Marry a Duke - Sabrina Jeffries Page 0,81
ask questions she might not like the answers to.
Thorn pulled her close. “What they’re in is lust.” He brushed a kiss to her lips. “I know the feeling.”
She did, too, but she was hoping for both love and lust from him. Which really wasn’t fair, given her uncertainty about her own feelings. “You don’t think it’s more than lust?”
“I think they think it’s more than that. And they’re entitled to their delusions.”
He tried to kiss her again, but she was having none of it. “The way your parents were entitled to theirs?”
His face clouded over. “I’d rather not talk about my parents right now. Not when my sister will return any minute and prevent me from stealing a kiss.”
“Too late,” Gwyn said cheerily from the door. “I’m back. And now that you two are engaged, I think it’s high time we discuss the wedding.” She walked in. “Although perhaps we should wait for Lady Norley.”
“Absolutely not,” Olivia said. “I love Mama, but she does much better if you offer her a fait accompli. Otherwise, she dithers forever over each decision and ends up with nothing to show for it.”
“Here’s what I discovered from planning my own wedding not that long ago,” Gwyn said. “You should start with the guest list. Then we’ll know exactly how large or small the wedding is, and where we wish to have it.”
“Here,” Thorn said. “It will be here. I’ll acquire a special license tomorrow when I’m in London, and then we can have it as soon as possible. But here.”
Gwyn eyed him and Olivia suspiciously. “Is there something you’re not telling me about why you have to marry so hastily?”
Thorn blinked like a fox caught in torchlight.
Olivia shook her head. “Your brother hasn’t considered that his demand sounds questionable when weddings usually take weeks to plan.” She smiled at Gwyn. “But no, there isn’t a reason for haste. Just the fact that your brother is the impatient sort.”
“Oh, you mean, he’s a man,” Gwyn said.
“Precisely,” Olivia said. “And like a man he just assumes that what his bride-to-be wants is the same as what he wants.”
“I can hear both of you, you realize,” he said sourly. “Trust me, we do,” Olivia said.
“We just don’t care,” Gwyn added.
They both laughed. Oh, how Olivia was enjoying being able to join Thorn’s sister in teasing him.
“But getting back to the guest list,” Olivia said, “shouldn’t we decide where we want it first? Because if, for example, all the dukes of Thornstock have been married at Rosethorn, then I wouldn’t want to go against tradition, and there would be plenty of room for a large wedding and breakfast. But if Mama truly wants me to marry from our parish church and have the breakfast at home, then I couldn’t have as many people.”
Gwyn tapped her chin. “If I remember what my mother said, her wedding to our father did take place here. I wonder how many people attended.”
“Just ask her when you ask who was invited to the house for our birth,” Thorn said dryly.
“Oh!” Gwyn cried. “I just figured out how to learn who went to that house party as well as who was at Grey’s christening. And we don’t even have to tell Mama the truth about why we’re asking. We’ll just say we want to invite those same people to your wedding!”
Olivia frowned. “But I don’t know any of those people, and some of them are likely to be dead, anyway.”
“She’s not talking about actually inviting them to our wedding, sweeting,” Thorn said. “She’s talking about using that as a ruse to gain the guest lists from the two house parties without alarming our mother needlessly. Then we can compare the lists to figure out who attended both parties. Because that could seriously narrow our suspect list for who killed Mother’s first two husbands. Assuming it’s the same person for both.”
“That’s brilliant!” Olivia said.
“Why, thank you,” Gwyn said.
Olivia frowned. “But if your villain paid someone like Elias to do the actual poisoning and the tampering with the carriage, we might not find ourselves any closer to the truth.”
“I don’t know,” Gwyn said. “I suspect that whoever this is probably wouldn’t have trusted a henchman for the actual murdering. It could too easily come back to him or her. After all, Elias might have told us who’d hired him if he’d been afraid of being charged with murder. But since Elias knew he probably wouldn’t hang for what he’d done . . .”