Perhaps it wasn’t quite so unthinkable today.
It wasn’t as if she currently had a job to lose, and a good gallop through the park would undoubtedly help blow some of the cobwebs from her exhausted but overly busy mind. Perhaps it would also help her think of a solution to fill the empty Travers coffers because she had always done her best thinking at speed in the saddle…
No!
Not today, Satan!
She would push that alluring idea aside.
She had to.
There was plenty to loathe about London, but its large, leafy parks weren’t one of them. Especially at this ungodly hour when Guy Harrowby had them all to himself.
With the early morning mist and the unspoiled chirping of the dawn chorus, it reminded him a little of his estate in Kent. Acres of empty green. No clogged roads. No crowds. And best of all, at the hours he chose to use this route, no bloody irritating people who might recognize him either. Which was probably why, whenever business forced him to come to this godforsaken place that he much preferred to avoid like the plague, he only ever ventured in and out of it via the parks where he rode at such a lick that he didn’t have to meet anyone.
It was a constant mystery to him why the residents of overcrowded London never availed themselves of this splendid shortcut either. Because within three minutes of leaving his house on Grosvenor Square, he was in Hyde Park. Which conveniently led into Green Park, which in turn took him directly into St. James’s Park, a mere hop, skip, and jump away from Westminster Bridge. Not twenty minutes after he crossed the river, and he would soon be on the Kent Road, headed home. Then the fetid capital, and most especially the cloying and supposedly polite society contained within it, would be an ugly blot on the horizon behind him. Out of sight and, most especially, out of mind.
Just the way he liked it.
London—and Mayfair specifically—always set his teeth on edge. This place made him feel small. No mean feat when he stood three inches above six feet and, according to his mother, blocked out all her light each time he dared to loiter in a doorway. Yet this city had the power to diminish him until his skeleton shrunk to a withered shell inside his skin.
Although why he allowed this place to do that to him still was a constant mystery, when he had long ago decided that London—and Mayfair specifically—was beneath him. It was filled with petty gossipmongers who had nothing better to do with their day than look down their noses at people in judgment. And warped judgment too, because a man was measured here by his title first and his fortune second and while Guy arguably had both—then and now—he likely still did not possess enough of either to impress them.
Nor did he want to.
No indeed! The days of him dancing to the beat of the snooty ton’s drum were long gone.
Thank goodness!
He was no longer a member of any of the gentlemen’s clubs, refused to attend balls, or soirees, or even the supposedly “intimate” dinners he still occasionally got invited to. And he wouldn’t be caught dead here during the dreadful cattle market the self-proclaimed great and the good called “the season” for all the tea in China. He eschewed them all out of principle nowadays and he was a much happier fellow as a result.
Much happier.
In fact, his life had been positively charmed since he had had the good sense to liberate himself from all that nonsense, and he was beyond fulfilled as a result.
Content in his own skin.
In control of all aspects of his life.
Master of his own destiny.
Happier than he had ever been.
Which, if true, was doubtless why he was still skulking in and out of the city of his birth nine years after he had left it heartbroken and humiliated. And why he knew he wasn’t really that happy at all. Wasn’t, in fact, anywhere near close. Not even in Kent but especially not here. Because here was where all the memories were strongest and always held the power to make him feel ashamed, and he loathed that almost as much as he loathed this place.
This place that suffocated him.
This place that shrunk him.
This place that had weighed him, measured him, and found him sadly wanting.
Even now, all alone in this pretty park after a full year of avoiding this place, the weight of London this fine morning was almost too much to bear. Somehow worse than usual and sadly, he knew why.
It had been that stupid snigger.
The one Guy had heard after he had reluctantly tipped his hat to an old acquaintance and his new wife whom he had collided with yesterday as he had left the infuriating grain merchant’s office. An intimate bubble of laughter which, arguably, had had nothing to do with him whatsoever. It could have simply been a shared joke between a husband and a wife about absolutely anything. The sorts of jokes he had used to swap with his own family once upon a time, back when he’d still possessed a sense of humor. But in his cynical mind nowadays, not ten yards clear of them, the joke had been about him. Or at least the old him. The gullible, naïve, fresh-faced, keen-to-impress, and much too impetuous him that had foolishly allowed himself to be a pawn in a chess game where he had romanticallyfancied himself the knight. The him that had made such a catastrophic error of judgment and had made himself both a laughingstock and an object of pity.
Nine years on and he still wasn’t sure what was worse.
