no brains, they couldn’t seem to help themselves from falling under the spell of her sugary smiles and blue eyes. To Jeremy’s cynical mind, it proved that mankind was endlessly optimistic.
What woman was as simple as she appeared?
Let alone one who appeared to be such a thoroughly proper young lady? Perfection was always a mask.
“To clarify my point,” Jeremy said to Greywick, “kittens or no, you have no competition in me. I’m not one to wed, even given the fact that a mere marquess could never take precedence over a duke.”
“A title does not determine whom a lady marries,” Betsy said tartly. “It may be hard to conceive, but myriad reasons dictate why a lady would choose another man over you.”
A less observant man might have been foolish enough to believe the enchanting portrait Betsy offered at this moment: rosy lips and cheeks, a sweetly peaked chin, wide blue eyes that darkened when she was thoughtful.
She appeared angelic.
Sort of. If you ignored the independent look in her eye, and unbelievably, most men seemed to do that.
“So, have you answered Greywick?” he asked, ignoring her comment. Given the women who had tried either to seduce or to compromise Jeremy in the last week alone, he wouldn’t have trouble marrying a lady—if he had the inclination to do so. “I think you should take him. I’ve been watching you mow down swaths of suitors in the last two months and he’s the best of the lot.”
He could read the answer in her eyes.
Poor Greywick.
Being flatly rejected was undoubtedly a new experience.
“You’ve been staying in Lindow Castle for quite some time?” Greywick asked, looking somewhat displeased. Apparently, he didn’t entirely believe that Jeremy was disinclined to court this duke’s daughter . . . or any duke’s daughter.
Betsy intervened. “Lord Jeremy has been helping my brother North enlarge his stables.”
Nice of her not to tell the truth.
Of course, she didn’t know the whole truth.
One evening he’d set off to meet Parth in Vauxhall Gardens, only to discover that idiots were setting off fireworks, which sounded remarkably like cannons. Next thing he knew he woke up in Parth’s house—having lost the memory of an entire week.
He still couldn’t get around that.
Greywick nodded. “You were always excellent with horseflesh. I remember the black mare you brought to university.”
“Dolly,” Jeremy said, his mouth easing into a shadow of a smile.
“Do you still have her?”
“I—no,” he said, pushing away the memory of what happened to Dolly. She had the heart of a lion, but she couldn’t save herself on the battlefield, any more than he could save her.
Greywick wasn’t interested in Dolly’s fate, and why should he be? He had eyes only for Betsy. She certainly looked the part of a docile duchess.
Yet she was as fierce as her brothers—aye, and slightly mad, the way all the Wildes were. God knew, when he and North had been in battle together, North had played the berserker on occasion.
There was that time when North dived off a cliff and swam down the river to the HMS Vulture to warn them—but that train of thought led to darkness, and Jeremy forcibly cut it off, returning his attention to the farce about to unfold before him.
Betsy saw bleak desolation cross Jeremy’s eyes at the mention of his mare, and decided that chatter with an old friend wasn’t helpful. “Now that we’ve clarified Lord Jeremy’s lack of interest in marriage,” she said, “perhaps we should return to the ballroom, Lord Greywick.”
She gave her suitor a merry smile, emphasizing that she didn’t care in the slightest that Jeremy Roden had been so perishingly rude about the possibility of marrying her.
Of course she didn’t want a proposal from Jeremy Roden.
But did he have to make it so obvious what he thought of her?
Kittens? Love notes? She didn’t even own a diary.
From the age of fourteen, she had never allowed herself to have infatuations, the way other girls did. Half her class in the seminary had swooned at the mere mention of her older brother Alaric. They collected prints of him supposedly engaging in heroic exploits.
They were the only prints Betsy bought as well. Attention to any man other than a family member would be interpreted as erotic interest. Her gowns were a tad more demure than fashion demanded: her hands always gloved, her ankles out of sight, her lips untouched by color. No one could accuse her of flaunting her assets, with her breasts tucked away in a bodice, perhaps with a lace fichu for