the most delicious pink. I’ve called her a dormouse on and off since we were children. Not that we were schooled together, of course, but our mothers enjoyed each other’s company.”
“I believe I shall wear my striped walking dress,” Betsy said, dismissing talk of duchesses.
“Excellent,” Aunt Knowe said amiably. They paused outside Betsy’s door.
Then Aunt Knowe swooped down as she often did—she was precisely the same height as her twin, which made her remarkably tall for a woman—and enclosed Betsy in a warm embrace. “You don’t have to marry him, dearest.”
“Is that a new scent?” Betsy was nothing if not cunning when it came to changing the subject of conversation.
“From Paris!” her aunt exclaimed, instantly distracted. “Après Something or Other.”
Betsy came up on her toes and kissed her aunt’s cheek. “I must change.”
Aunt Knowe widened her eyes. “I’ve just had a frightful thought, Betsy. Your daughters might look like dormice. Characteristics from noses to teeth are hereditary.”
As if Betsy could forget that salient fact.
Her mother’s sinful blood was racketing about her body, because she had no sooner caught sight of Jeremy’s shoulders in the billiard room than her heart started racing, and she felt bewilderingly weak at the knees.
Whereas the dormouse’s son had a noble nose that didn’t quiver like his mother’s, and thick hair that appeared to be always in order, and a deep voice that by rights should make a maiden’s heart go tippity-tap.
He was The One, obviously. She would never horrify him in the bedchamber. Their headmistress had been very straightforward about wedding nights, over a special tea Miss Stevenson had held with girls about to debut.
“Welcome in the bedchamber is expected,” Miss Stevenson had said. “Enthusiasm would be a grave mistake; vulgarities, even in secret, destroy a man’s love for his wife.”
Betsy had felt her face burning with shame, but she hadn’t said a word. And no one had spoken to her.
But she hadn’t forgotten.
Inside her room, Betsy leaned against the door and tried to shore up her resolve. Her weakness for Jeremy posed a challenge, by which she could prove to herself that a golden-haired Prussian would never cause her to desert her husband and children.
She had the bloodlines that Thaddeus required.
But if she wanted a happy marriage, she could never, ever let him know that she had inherited her mother’s passionate nature.
Chapter Twelve
An hour later, Jeremy strolled down to the entry feeling extremely irritated with himself. Betsy was a perfect mate for Thaddeus. He should be celebrating the fact, but instead he was combating an ever-growing feeling of possession, as if somehow the snappish billiard-playing girl who wanted to wear breeches was his.
Ridiculous thought.
He hardly knew her.
The feeling he had was as awkward and conflicted as the shame and guilt he felt for surviving the war. He was thinking about how useful it would be if one could simply excise uncomfortable emotions out of one’s mind, when he realized that Betsy’s future mother-in-law had reached the entry before him.
She was shaped like a small barrel, the kind that holds beer. Barrels weren’t painted pink, nor embellished with a great many feathers, but the duchess was patently uninterested in such dictates. She had likely been told she was charming in pink as a girl, and had seized on the color as a rule, never interested enough to try green or blue.
Jeremy liked her. He’d found that eccentrics didn’t bother to make unkind or pitying remarks; as a whole, they weren’t interested in him.
“I saw you leaving the ballroom last night,” Her Grace said, without preamble. “Your halo was a mess, but now I see you’re bandaged about the head. Wounded in an affair of honor, were you?”
“No,” Jeremy said. “Shot by a madwoman, if you must know.”
“It’s a bleak world when a person can simply shoot whomever they wish,” the duchess proclaimed.
“Yes,” Jeremy agreed, shoving images of pistols and cannon smoke into the corner of his mind.
“I don’t agree with war,” the duchess stated.
“Neither do I,” Lady Knowe said. They both jerked about to discover she had emerged from the study, drawing on a pair of long lilac-colored gloves. “Where is Prism, for goodness’ sake? Or a footman? What is this, a castle or a dairy?”
“Why a dairy?” the duchess asked.
“Because the two of you look somber enough to milk a cow. It’s a very serious business, milking. I tried it as a girl.”
“There she is,” the duchess said with satisfaction, looking past Jeremy.
Betsy was descending the stairs wearing blue stripes, which was an agreeable