Page 48 of The Lady Knows Best

“Merely to avoid losing a bet?”

“You know I never liked to lose,” he pointed out, not for the first time. “But rest assured, this isn’t just about the wager. Or at least, not about the one laid down at White’s.”

Alister twisted on the chair and fixed him with a wrinkled brow. “How’s that? Another wager?”

“Not exactly. More a vow I made to myself. I’ll explain when we get to Lyneham Park,” he said, rising. “I’ll be back tomorrow to help you pack.” Alistair didn’t keep a valet—if he did, his clothes surely wouldn’t be permitted to hang on him in that stiff, ill-fitting way.

“Haven’t you your own affairs to put in order?” Alistair asked.

“I took care of all that before dinner.”

“You were that confident of the outcome?” Alistair marveled, shaking his head.

Miles shrugged. “I needed to do something to take my mind off all the possible ways to be murdered by a duke, a marquess, and an Irishman.”

Or eviscerated by an Irishwoman with a glare like a blade and the mouth of his dreams.

Alistair laughed, though Miles hadn’t entirely been joking.

* * *

“All that pacing might give a person the impression you were eager to get to Hertfordshire.”

Gabriel’s words brought Daphne’s latest trip across the library floor to an abrupt halt. It had always been her favorite room in Finch House, with its warm wood paneling, well-stocked bookshelves that stretched from floor to ceiling, and tall windows framed by dark green draperies.

Windows that just happened to face the street.

Where the traveling coach was being loaded.

Turning her back on the bustle outside, she smiled—perhaps a shade too brightly—at Gabriel instead. “Shouldn’t I be?”

He’d been working at his desk for the last half an hour on some matters of estate business. His study could be closed off from the adjoining library, but he generally preferred to leave the door open. It was a larger, grander version of the arrangement at the Dublin town house in which she’d grown up, where her father’s desk sat at one end of the drawing room, and his—and later Paris’s—law work had always simply been part of the family’s daily living, conducted alongside schoolwork and sibling squabbles and the sounds of a tinkling spinet.

Gabriel pushed aside the account ledger he’d been studying, got to his feet, and came to lean in the doorway. “I’ve been asking myself the same question,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and studying Daphne with a curious expression, “but I can’t quite make out the answer. On paper, it’s an excellent match for any young lady. But should you be eager to marry a man of Deveraux’s reputation? Under these circumstances—any circumstances, really?”

“What nonsense,” she answered with an impatient wave of her hand. “And from you, of all people. Why, you’re the closest thing to a romantic this family has. Well, except for Galen.”

Gabriel chuckled. “No, whenever I get the urge to give vent to my feelings in poetry, I sit down until it passes.” He tilted his head toward the sound of another trunk being brought down—surely Bellis’s last. “Reputation and rumors aren’t everything,” he reminded her, a reference to his own checkered past. “Follow your heart, Daphne. Just know that if we get to Hertfordshire and you change your mind—”

“What a scandal that would be,” she said, trying to sound dismissive of the very notion.

“Wouldn’t even crack the top five scandals this family has weathered.” He pushed away from the door and turned back toward his desk. “I should finish reviewing this report. Try not to wear a hole in the carpet, all right? Zwolf has done enough damage already,” he added with a nod toward a frayed edge. Then he paused. “Speaking of Zwolf . . . and Deveraux . . .”

“If you’re going to make some ridiculous claim about how you can judge a man’s character by whether or not a dog likes him—”

“It’s not ridiculous. And the night before last—”

“Zwolf went right to him. Yes, I saw. We all saw,” Daphne said, trying hard to dispel the mental image of Cami’s expression at the sight of Miles addressing the dog first when they came into the room. “But that dog would pledge his undying loyalty to anyone who scratched behind his ears.”

“I’m well aware,” Gabriel said with a bemused smile. “But Deveraux wasn’t. He might have been alarmed, or annoyed, or any number of things. It’s not every man who’d stoop to pet the dog—especially one so big it hardly requires stooping.”

She knit her brows together. “Are you saying that you think Lord Deveraux’s willingness to scratch Zwolf’s head—in defiance of good manners to the company, I might add—is reason enough to reevaluate his character? That, in fact, I should be eager to marry such a man?”

It couldn’t be eagerness, this fluttering, anxious feeling in her chest and her stomach.

Could it?

No, of course not. She wasn’t eager to marry Miles. She wasn’t going to marry him at all.