Heat stole up Thea’s neck. “He would not.”
“Of course he would. Thea, I wish you would see yourself as others do. You are an attractive woman ... and if Lord Lyon didn’t fall in love with you, he would fall in love with your sons.”
“There you are correct.” Thea looked out the window to the garden, where the boys were now busy building something out of twigs and leaves and whatever rocks they could find. “He wants children.”
“Most men do. Otherwise they would never settle down,” Mirabel observed.
“You and Palmer didn’t have children,” Thea observed.
“I said ‘most.’ Palmer had me. I was child enough for both of us.”
Thea smiled. “Everyone knows the two of you lived for each other in spite of being opposites—” Her voice broke off with sudden realization. “That’sit.”
“What is it?” Mirabel echoed.
“Lord Lyon needs a regal wife. One with excellent bloodlines.”
“Like yourself?”
“Mirabel, if you insist on speaking this way, I shall leave,” Thea said without any heat in her voice.
“No, don’t go. I’ll behave, at least as much as Ican,” she promised. “What is your brilliant idea?”
Thea tapped the list she had been making. “I have very nice women here, but they are all boringly pleasant. He needs spirit. Vitality. Independence.”
Mirabel stirred her tea pensively. “Yes, independence. One who will go her own way.”
“And independence is also selfish,” Thea pointed out. “And selfishness keeps a man at arm’s length, no?”
“I’m selfish,” Mirabel argued, twisting one of her blonde curls around a finger. “And men have always been after me.”
“You are not. You are the most generous woman I know. And the very best friend. No, the person I’m thinking of is one who has been hard to marry off because she is almost masculine in her manner, and yet she is a woman—”
“Lady Lila Corkindale,” Mirabel said, guessing accurately.
“Exactly. She’s beautiful but a man-eater. However, I’ve heard rumblings that she needs to marry. She is the sort who wants only the best.”
“And Lord Lyon is the best.”
“Furthermore, she is so bold, I can’t imagine any man loving her. She is not that sort of woman.However, no one could call her cold. I hear she has a temper.”
“I think you have hit upon a match,” Mirabel agreed.
“Perhaps,” Thea hedged. Did she really want to see Neal saddled with Lila Corkindale for the rest of his life? A shudder went through her even as she reached for the silver inkstand, dipped the pen nib in ink and wrote Lady Lila’s name to her list. “Now, who would be a tad tamer than Lila Corkindale?”
Before Mirabel could answer, her butler, Osgood, knocked on the morning room door. He held a silver salver in his hand. “My lady, Lady Montvale and Mrs. Harrison Pomfrey have come to call.”
“Vanessa Montvale and Sarah Pomfrey? Here?” Mirabel repeated in disbelief with an incredulous look at Thea. The two women were the most fearsome hostesses of theton. They only associated with “those who mattered.”
“I do not know their given names, my lady,” Osgood answered. “However, here are their cards.”
Mirabel was up in a flash. She read the cards, turned them over as if expecting a hoax. She faced Thea in a panic. “What do they want here? They’vealways turned up their noses at me.” Mirabel had married Lord Palmer, a man decades older than herself, to save her father from debtor’s prison. Since Lord Palmer’s first wife had been very popular and he’d married Mirabel with undue haste, she’d never been truly accepted in many social circles, even after all this time. “When my path crossed Lady Montvale’s last year in Madame Regina’s, she gave me the cut direct. Looked right past me as if I wasn’t there. And neither accepted my invitation to the charity rout I held last year for St. Agnes’s orphanage. I did my best to convince them to come. Oh, the toadying dance I had to jig for them—but they both turned me down flat.”
“They probably didn’t want to offer money to the cause.” Having once been one of the upper echelon, Thea was more jaded about the likes of Lady Montvale and Mrs. Pomfrey. “They are shallow, Mirabel. They are only interested in their own gain.”
“That may be true, but what gain can they have paying a call on me?”
“Go to the receiving room and find out,” Thea suggested. “The boys and I will slip out the back gate.” Thea knew both women were friends of her brother. She had no desire for a meeting.
