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Violet turned to her daughter and said, “It was quite the to-do.”
“Actually,” Gregory said, growing more irritated by the second, “it was all handled discreetly.”
“There are always whispers,” Hyacinth said.
“Don’t you add to them,” Violet warned her.
“I wo
n’t say a word,” Hyacinth promised, waving her hand as if she had never spoken out of turn in her life.
Gregory let out a snort. “Oh, please.”
“I won’t,” she protested. “I am superb with a secret as long as I know it is a secret.”
“Ah, so what you mean, then, is that you possess no sense of discretion?”
Hyacinth narrowed her eyes.
Gregory lifted his brows.
“How old are you?” Violet interjected. “Goodness, the two of you haven’t changed a bit since you were in leading strings. I half expect you to start pulling each other’s hair right on the spot.”
Gregory clamped his jaw into a line and stared resolutely ahead. There was nothing quite like a rebuke from one’s mother to make one feel three feet tall.
“Oh, don’t be a stuff, Mother,” Hyacinth said, taking the scolding with a smile. “He knows I only tease him so because I love him best.” She smiled up at him, sunny and warm.
Gregory sighed, because it was true, and because he felt the same way, and because it was, nonetheless, exhausting to be her brother. But the two of them were quite a bit younger than the rest of their siblings, and as a result, had always been a bit of a pair.
“He returns the sentiment, by the way,” Hyacinth said to Violet, “but as a man, he would never say as much.”
Violet nodded. “It’s true.”
Hyacinth turned to Gregory. “And just to be perfectly clear, I never pulled your hair.”
Surely his signal to leave. Or lose his sanity. Really, it was up to him.
“Hyacinth,” Gregory said, “I adore you. You know it. Mother, I adore you as well. And now I am leaving.”
“Wait!” Violet called out.
He turned around. He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
“Would you be my escort?”
“To what?”
“Why, to the wedding, of course.”
Gad, what was that awful taste in his mouth? “Whose wedding? Lady Lucinda’s?”
His mother gazed at him with the most innocent blue eyes. “I shouldn’t like to go alone.”
He jerked his head in his sister’s direction. “Take Hyacinth.”
“She’ll wish to go with Gareth,” Violet replied.
Gareth St. Clair was Hyacinth’s husband of nearly four years. Gregory liked him immensely, and the two had developed a rather fine friendship, which was how he knew that Gareth would rather peel his eyelids back (and leave them that way for an indefinite amount of time) than sit through a long, drawn-out, all-day society affair.
