“Harry, what are you going on about?” Margaret demanded.
“You don’t remember Lady Thea?” Harry asked his sister. “Duruset’s daughter. Her family had an estate close to ours. She and Neal were friends one summer until Father cut it off.” He waggled his eyebrows on “friends.”
“How do you know?” Neal demanded. “You weren’t even in the country that summer.”
“Father told me. Said he’d saved you. He told me the story when he explained the curse to me. He didn’t want you near her, Neal.”
“I’m not near her out of attraction,” Neal responded.
“No, now she is a matchmaker. Don’t be naive, brother. About her or yourself.”
Now Margaret was awake. “Lady Thea istheMrs. Martin?” she whispered. “I’ve heard of Mrs. Martin. She’s put together several interesting matches when everyone had given up hope. Please, no, Neal. We discussed this. I thought we had a pact. Let it stop with us.”
“Be like me, brother,” Harry said, obviouslyhappy now that he’d found an ally. “Women are fine. They are adorable, enjoyable, lovable—all the ‘-bles’—but don’t marry. Don’t carry this curse farther.”
“Maybe I’m ending the curse,” Neal muttered, pushing past his brother. “Father almost made it. If the curse doesn’t claim one of us, then perhaps it will be broken. Certainly, I do not want to do as Father did and lose my head over some opera dancer.”
“You poor, sorry soul,” Harry said with his customary disdain. “You are already lost, and you didn’t even realize it this evening. The two of you practically had an invisible cord around each other.”
“That was the concern of old friendship,” Neal shot back. “In your bullheadedness, you are fabricating what is not there.”
Harryha’d his disbelief and took a healthy swig of the port straight from the bottle.
“Neal, what is he saying?” Margaret asked, worry in her tone.
“Nothing that he knows anything about,” Neal replied. “Nothing at all. Don’t worry, Margaret, I will be careful.”
“Men are never careful,” she answered. “Your sex doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”
“I’m not like the others,” Neal said. This was an old argument between them. “And contrary to what my tomcat brother thinks, I’m not the village idiot about women.”
“We can’t beat the curse, Neal,” Margaret said sadly. “It isn’t possible.”
His response was to go to his room and shut the door.
For a moment, he leaned his back against the hard wood, every fiber of his being shouting that she was wrong. There was a way to beat this curse. Therehad tobe.
He could hear Margaret and Harry talking in the hall. They were probably plotting against him and his desire to take a wife, but they were wrong if they thought he didn’t know what he was doing.
Wrong.
And he would keep his distance from Thea ... because his father had been right all those years ago. There was something about her that drew him, something he dared not explore.
But one thing he’d learned this evening is that they were two very different people now. He could keep the attraction at bay, he told himself.
He had to.
And yet he couldn’t wait until he saw her again.
Chapter Five
“He movedyouinto one ofhishouses?” Mirabel, Lady Palmer, said and gave a small, glad squeal of happiness. “Oh, this is wonderful. This is more than I could have ever hoped for you!Lord Lyon.My dear, he is the prize, and you havebaggedthe prize—”
“No, wait, you don’t understand,” Thea protested. She’d been sharing with Mirabel the story of her adventure the other evening with Lord Lyon.
Mirabel brought her finger to her lips. “I understand perfectly and shall keep mum. Mum, mum,mummmm. ...” She drew the last word out with delicious pleasure.
They sat in Mirabel’s morning room, which overlooked the town house’s garden. It was a small plot but done up with Mirabel’s style so that it outshone almost any other garden Thea had ever seen—including her own father’s. Mirabeldid most of the work herself, claiming to adore puttering around in mud and dirt.
