The Secret Wallflower Society - Jillian Eaton Page 0,8
than he does at home.” She hesitated. “Unfortunately, true gentlemen don’t exactly grow on trees. It’s going to take a few days.”
“I only have eighteen of them,” Calliope reminded her.
“Yes, well, that is a problem. Unless…”
“Unless?” she asked expectantly.
Helena nibbled her bottom lip. “Never mind. It would never work. He would never work.”
“Who?” Calliope leaned forward in her chair as a tendril of hope unfurled within her breast like a boat opening its sails and reaching up for the breeze. “Who would never work?”
“He’s a confirmed bachelor,” Helena muttered, speaking more to herself than to Calliope. “Hasn’t attended a ball for years. I don’t know how we’d coax him out. But if he did come, and he saw her…” She lifted her head, a smile slowly dawning. “Do you know, I think I have someone. The perfect someone. But,” she cautioned when Calliope gasped in excitement, “it is not going to be easy to win his favor. He’s a recluse, and a bit of an ogre. But he’s also sinfully handsome, not to mention wealthy, and while he likes to bark, he’s never bitten. I even fancied him myself, a long time ago. Until I discovered he’d rather read a book than attend a ball.” Her nose wrinkled. “I could never marry a man like that.”
Helena was right. He sounded absolutely perfect.
“What is it his name?” Calliope asked breathlessly.
“Leopold Maven…the Earl of Winchester.”
Chapter Three
Helena was right about two things.
Leo was handsome. Sinfully so.
He was also wealthy. Embarrassingly so.
But in terms of his bite, she couldn’t have been more wrong. His teeth were sharp, and he did not hesitate to use them on those who annoyed him, those he despised…and those who refused to leave him to his misery.
“Go away,” he told his valet flatly when the short, thin servant with brown hair he kept neatly combed to the side knocked briskly on the partially opened door to his study.
“There is someone here to see you, my lord.” Robert Corish had worked his way up from a lowly footman to become the Earl of Winchester’s personal valet, and he was immensely proud of his accomplishment. Although it hadn’t come without sacrifice. There was a reason he was the earl’s seventh valet in little under seven years. Leo chewed them up and spit them out with alarming regularity, yet try as he might – and he had tried – he’d been unable to shake Robert loose.
The valet’s family had served the Mavens for nearly a hundred years, and in all that time Robert was the first to rise to the highest rung in the servant hierarchy. With his family depending on him (he had a wife and three grown daughters, all of whom worked in the house in some capacity or another) and his pride on the line, he wasn’t about to be driven out of his position. No matter how much abuse he suffered or how many times Leo threatened to fire him. Which, at last count, hovered somewhere around two hundred and thirty seven.
“Tell them I am not accepting visitors at this time.” Dipping his quill, the earl signed his name with a hard jerk of his wrist before setting the missive aside to dry and reaching for another.
Glancing at the enormous stack of papers sitting in front of his employer, Robert forced back a heavy sigh. It was difficult to watch a man you admired and cared for – Robert did care for Leo, much as a father might care for a wayward son – turn more bitterer and harder with each passing day. With no social life, no friends, and no living family of which to speak, Leo had allowed himself to be consumed with work. It was the only thing he cared about. The only thing that kept him going. And it pained Robert to know that Leo devoted more time and energy into those pieces of paper than he did to any living being. Especially since he’d seen how different the earl had been with his beautiful young wife and son.
A horrible thing, to lose a wife. Even more horrible to lose a child. Robert had never experienced the first but he and Alice had wept over two sons, both stillborn. He did not know what would have happened to him – to them – had they stopped trying for children. His daughters were everything to him, and without their presence, their light and their laughter through the years, he knew he would be a vastly