Page 32 of The Trouble with Tweed

He laughed. “You’re the one who’s treating gentlemen as if they’re some sort of interchangeable cog in the machine of your life.”

“I am not.” She frowned, then nibbled her lip.

“Even the tedious set are still people,” he said. “They will all have their own ideas about what they want for their futures. I doubt many of them would be happy to find out their wife selected them because she thought they were boring.”

“Well, of course I’m not going to tell them that,” she said. “And I know that they’re people, with their own wants—not only for the woman they marry, but also for their future.”

Michael looked at her. “Tell me, Claire, what is it that you want?”

She blinked at him. “I’ve already told you.”

“You’ve told me what you intend to have, not what you actually want,” he argued.

Claire frowned and turned her head, ostensibly to watch the swans in the nearby pond, but Michael thought it was more likely she didn’t wish to answer. Or look him in the eye, for that matter.

“What about children?” he asked.

“What about them?”

“Do you want them?”

“Of course.” Her tone told him she found his question idiotically obvious. She was still staring at those blasted swans—he couldn’t see which expression she wore, though her tone hinted at her irritation.

“But you’d see them raised by a man you don’t love?” he pressed.

“I’d see them safe. I’d see them well fed and warmly clothed.”

He frowned. “The two aren’t mutually exclusive, you know.”

She turned back to him and tilted her head. “Pardon?”

“You can have both.”

Claire scoffed. “Some people have that luck, certainly. However, I don’t. If I must choose, I choose security, warm fires, footmen to keep the riffraff out, no heartless bill collectors threatening to…”

“Threatening to what?” he growled.

She shook her head. “It hardly matters.”

“It matters to me.”

Claire sighed as if hearing the seriousness in his words, as if knowing that he wasn’t going to let the subject drop until he had some answer on it. “My brother Richard wasn’t just a rake. He left us, essentially.”

“What do you mean?”

She sat stiffly and said, “He took lodgings across town. He ignored our letters when we told him we couldn’t pay the bills. In those early days, Margaret saw him once on the street. He turned and walked the other way.”

“Are you certain he saw her?” Michael’s eyebrows drew together. He couldn’t imagine any man, let alone a gentleman, acting in such a fashion towards his own sisters.

“She was certain. We kept asking him to come home, to deal with the creditors, to do something. But he shut himself away in that tenement house and proceeded to drink the last of the estate’s funds.”

“Claire, I’m so sorry.”

She lifted her elegant chin and blinked rapidly. “It was a long time ago.”

“Not that long. Besides, I doubt there’s any span of time that will heal the pain of a brother turning his back on you like that. What a coward.” His hands tightened on the reins, and it took great effort for him to loosen his hold so that he wouldn’t tug at the horses.

“Thank you for saying that.” She paused, then cleared her throat. “I went down there once.”