Wolfgang’s instinct was to ignore Lady Alice, saddle up Imperium and leave them in a cloud of dust, but his instincts had served him badly. All these years, he’d let himself see Charlotte through the lens of one night, ignoring the evidence of his eyes and his own endless yearning.
God save him, he needed all the help he could get.
“If you must know,” he muttered, “I told Lady Charlotte how I felt and asked if I could court her.”
“Excellent, dear boy!”
Miss Marby’s pansy brown eyes went wide. “How did she take it?”
Wolfgang felt his cheeks go dark. “She said no, burst into tears, and ran into her bedchamber.”
The dowager leaned forward on her cane, looking most intrigued. “Did she? That seems promising.”
Wolfgang cast a stern eye at the lot of them. “Do all of you intend to poke your noses in my affairs?”
“Yes,” called Miss Helena from behind them. She was the last up the hill and rather out of breath. “We’re taking bets, you see. I put your chances with Charlotte rather low, even though we can all see how she moons for you.”
A groove carved itself across the bridge of Wolfgang’s nose as his pride went to war with the need to ask a deeply incriminating question. “You think…” Hell, why not? His pride was practically dead already. “You think she moons for me?”
It was never pleasant to get a pitying glance, and Wolfgang got several.
“How do you intend to win my granddaughter, Your Grace?”
Wolfgang had no answer. He didn’t want towinCharlotte, as if she were a prize. He wanted to make her mouth curve in helpless laughter and perhaps not at him, for once. He wanted to listen as she laid her many plans. He wanted her liquid underneath him, as sloppy in love with him as he—
Christ.
It was long past time to admit that his suffering, and strain, and piss-poor decision-making all came down to love.
It felt like a bad case of dysentery.
“Oh! Oh! I’ve an idea.” Georgiana bounced on her toes. “You could give her a puppy. Or a kitten, of course, but a good cuddly puppy would be best.”
Helena considered. “I’d marry any man who presented me with the complete works of the Comte de Buffon.”
Miss Marby smothered a sound that was somewhere between amusement and sympathy. “Lady Alice has been lecturing us all summer on the importance of jewelry. Might your vault have something to catch Charlotte’s eye?”
“No,” said the dowager. “This calls for something even more important than jewelry. Be herfriendagain, Your Grace. Charlotte’s quick to laugh, but she rarely shares her true feelings. Show her she can trust you.”
Lysander jumped down from the fence. “And start living again, Wolfie. No one wants a man who’s buried himself in his brother’s grave.” He picked up a rifle. “Now, can we get back to shooting?”
CHAPTER 36
Clare wasn’t the largest ofEngland’s great houses, but it was certainly big enough to get lost in. As a child, Charlotte had once spent the better part of a day dashing through it and counting rooms, a befuddling process that left her with a tally sheet longer than her arm and a head full of questions. Was a portrait gallery a room or a corridor, and how could one possibly classify the endless rabbit warren of the cellar? The official answer, provided by Lawrence, was that Clare boasted one hundred and eleven separate chambers. Which meant it ought to have been easy for Charlotte to avoid a certain duke.
Even an oversize one.
But while the logistics weren’t hard to manage, her mind was. Ivy brought a breakfast tray and Charlotte couldn’t stomach the chocolate and picked at her croissant, reducing it to a sad pile of flakes, especially because there was a letter from Lady Margot on the tray, and not one that Charlotte was ready to answer. The loud, violent cracks of gunfire out her window were so aligned with her mood that she was slow to realize someone wasactuallyshooting.
Wolfgang, she thought, and her heart contracted, as it did each time she recalled the jagged flash of pain in his eyes when she turned away from him.
Charlotte shook the image away and reached for her sketchbook, but each flower she drew for the new damask was wilted, and theapricots she roughed out on the page were riddled with worms. By noon, the four walls of her bedchamber were driving her mad, so she took the servants’ stairs down to Julian’s study, closing her eyes and leaning back against the door with a sigh of relief when she made it without being seen.
“There you are, darling!” said the dowager, from behind Julian’s desk.
Charlotte screeched like a seagull and spun around, clutching her sketchbook to her chest.
“Don’t have apoplexy, and there’s no need for you to skulk around, either. The Duke of Warrick and Lord Lysander are no longer in residence.”
