Page 51

Gwen blinked. “What?”

Ernest had halted, and somehow, she had forgotten her arm was entwined in his, and so she had been forced to stop too. They were standing by a cart on the corner of the crossroads and a portly man was looking eagerly at them with a scoop.

Oh. An ice.

“No, thank you, I don’t wish to bother you.”

“Two strawberry ices,” said Ernest firmly, smiling at the man. “Good business, this late in the year?”

“Hot days like today bring ’em out,” the man said with a grin, scooping a load of what appeared to be sugared ice into little cardboard tubs that he thrust in their direction. “A shilling.”

“‘A shilling’?” Gwen repeated in horror.

The very idea of such little food costing so much…

“Here,” said Ernest quietly. “Keep the change.”

And she had not imagined it; at least, she did not think so. There was a moment of pity—no, of sympathy on the baron’s face that was most astonishing.

As though he understood, just for a moment, the ice seller’s plight.

And then the moment was over, and Ernest was cheerfully handing Gwen her own tub of strawberry ice. “Are you saying that you and Michael have always bickered because you were overlooked?”

“Dismissed is more what I’d call it,” Gwen said automatically before her mind could catch up with her. “I always thought—you…you understand?”

It was impossible. It had certainly never happened; after all, Gwen had attempted to explain this to her own parents and had never gotten very far. The two of them were so enamored with their darling boy that they couldn’t understand how dashed frustrating it was to always be the one desperately trying to be listened to.

But that wasn’t happening now. Though the man was slurping a good deal too much to be considered polite, Ernest was clearly listening to her as they walked along the street.

“Tell me more,” he said politely.

Nothing had ever been so attractive.

Trying desperately not to think about how desperately she wished to step closer to this man, and knowing that she should not, Gwen instead said, “I know it’s ridiculous, and petty, and childish—”

“Your feelings are what they are,” Ernest said simply. “You deny yourself to deny them.”

It was the sort of thing Lord Ravenshurst would never say.

Gwen forced aside the thought. She certainly could not allow herself to start thinking like that. Where would it lead?

Certainly not down the aisle at St. George’s in Hanover Square.

“It’s just… I know a child is a joy and a blessing, and I wish them well,” Gwen said in a hurry, “but my wedding, it will be the very first day in the family that is all about me, and I had hoped—”

“Don’t let it melt.”

Gwen blinked as they turned a corner. “I beg your pardon?”

Ernest gestured with his now-empty tub. “Your ice—it’s your favorite flavor. Don’t let it melt.”

He remembered.

She glanced down at her ice, swallowed, and thrust it toward him. “I can’t. You eat it.”

How could she eat anything, with this roiling discomfort that she had offended her brother, and her simultaneous fury that he had created the perfect circumstances within which to do so?

“He’s family,” Ernest said quietly, halting and dropping onto a bench nestled into a garden in the square they were walking along. “Family is designed to irritate.”