“And if you’re worried about your father, you needn’t be.” Lady Harcourt rolled her eyes. “I can handle him.”
“I have come to understand,” Archie started slowly, “that trying to gain Father’s approval has always been a futile endeavor.” He let the hand float down and rest on her arm. “I’m more concerned about you. That you approve. For I love you so tremendously, Mother.”
“And I love you, my boy. You have always been my greatest joy.”
Archie made a kind of indistinct noise then and let his head fall to his mother’s lap. Lady Harcourt’s eyes grew startled, then confused. They were losing her. Clementine had to get her back.
“I think your mother is right, Archie. She always is. We should marry.”
Archie’s head whipped up.
“I can’t imagine why we’ve waited so long, what with . . .”
Clementine had been trying to recapture the light, almost glib tone she’d used before, the one that seemed to have amused Lady Harcourt—to have reached her—but she found she could not continue in that vein. A lump rose in her throat, and she finished her sentence in a whisper, “. . . all that has passed between us.”
He was studying her so intensely, it almost felt as if they were back in his bedchamber at Quintrell Castle.
“Young man,” Lady Harcourt said sharply, drawing both their attention, “I believe this young lady is about to propose to you! How extraordinary.” She narrowed her eyes at Archie. “What is your name, young man?”
Clementine’s heart sank.
“Archie,” Archie said.
“What is your surname? Who are your people?”
“I’m Archibald Fielding-Burton, Earl of Harcourt.” He waited for recognition. There was none.
“Well, Archibald Fielding-Burton, Earl of Harcourt,” Lady Harcourt said, “in my day . . .” She trailed off and looked around, the agitation from before reappearing. “In my day, we . . .” She picked up her teacup, looked at it in dismay, and let it clatter to its saucer. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. “I think I need to repose.” She looked around, as the tears began to fall. “Is my mother here?”
Miss Brown, about whom Clementine had entirely forgotten, appeared out of nowhere, murmuring soothing words and giving Lady Harcourt her arm. Archie leapt to his feet and made to escort the women back to the house, but Miss Brown shook her head at him—not unkindly, but firmly. “You’ve had quite an exciting afternoon, Lady Harcourt, perhaps you would care to lie down?” She spoke resolutely, articulating the question as if it were not a question at all but a foregone conclusion. Lady Harcourt seemed to accept it as such, and allowed herself to be led away. When the women were halfway back to the house, Miss Brown called over her shoulder, “I find myself rather tired, my lord, and if you will excuse me, I think I shall rest in a chair by your mother while she sleeps.”
And suddenly Clementine had what she had wanted for so long: a private audience with Archie.
Too bad she had no earthly idea what to say.
* * *
Archie was not the kind of person who believed in fate. He had not, after all, done anything to deserve the good fortune of being born heir to an earldom. Neither had he done anything to deserve the ill fortune of being born to a father who didn’t respect him, or even love him, probably. It was all an accident, the result of a roll of the dice of the fates. If Archie believed in anything, it was honest work and good friends. Loyalty.
But at this moment, it did not feel like an accident that Clementine Morgan was standing before him in his garden, that they were alone together at last. That she had, for one brief, glorious moment, reached his mother.
He burst out laughing.
Which was entirely the wrong thing to do, judging by the war that broke out between confusion and hurt on Clementine’s face.
He grabbed her hand and started towing her out of the garden. “I’m laughing because you’re here.”
No, that wasn’t right, either.
“I’m laughing because if you knew the inane plot I’d cooked up to try to get you alone in London so I could talk to you, you would laugh, too. At the plot, and at how absurdly simple my goal turned out to be in the end. You simply appeared in my garden.”
Her lovely, high laughter rang out across the blue afternoon. “It wasn’t that simple. There was, in fact, a great deal of inane plotting required onmyend.”
“Well, then I should thank you.” They had reached the edge of the manicured gardens. He kept going, steering them onto a gravel path that would shortly give way to dirt as it entered the forest. “For your plotting, and for what you did back there. For giving me my mother back.”
“I think she gave herself back.”
“Whatever the source of that interlude of lucidity, it was a gift.”
