Page 52 of The Lady Knows Best

Her head jerked up at the sound. “Who’s there?”

“It’s Miles, Grandmama,” he said, approaching with outstretched hands. “And I’ve brought Lord Ryland with me.”

She turned cloudy eyes, once the mirror of Miles’s own, in his general direction. She looked more fragile each time he saw her, and the skin of her cheek was as cool and dry as paper as he brushed his lips across it in a kiss of greeting.

“About damn time, boy,” she scolded, then chuckled. “Though I might have known you wouldn’t forget an old lady on her birthday.”

“Is it your birthday, ma’am?” asked Alistair, approaching.

She freed one gnarled hand from the tangle of yarn on her lap—she’d not been resting, Miles saw now, but crocheting, the stitches so familiar to her fingers, they had no need of help from her eyes—and offered it to Alistair for a kiss.

“It is indeed. On Sunday.”

Alistair sent Miles a sidelong glance from his position bowed over her hand. “Sunday,” he repeated, releasing her and rising. “The first of July.”

“That’s right,” she said. “And how old do you think I’ll be?”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly guess,” Alistair demurred—or pretended to. “Surely not as old as . . .” His voice dropped to a dramatic stage whisper. “Seventy?”

“Eighty!” she crowed, clapping her hands in delight at having fooled him.

Miles’s father had been the youngest of her four children, and she had outlived them all.

“Impossible,” Alistair declared, which made her beam.

“Well, now, that’s not likely to be the sort of thing a lady would fib about, is it?” she retorted, before tilting her head slyly at Miles. “One might even say such an occasion called for a party.”

Alistair’s stare grew more pointed still. “Indeed, one might,” he said, as much to Miles as to his grandmother.

“As luck would have it,” Miles told her, ignoring him, “you can expect a few more guests shortly. Perhaps as soon as later today.”

“Oh? That will be lovely.”

“And if all goes to plan, I’ve a special celebration planned for the end of the week.”

A choked sound escaped from Alistair’s throat, and Miles was fairly certain that this time, it had nothing to do with roses.

“I do hope it will include dancing,” said his grandmother, her toes beginning to tap beneath her blanket.

“Of course,” he assured her. “Now, I’m certain Lord Ryland would like to freshen up after our journey. Will you excuse me for a few minutes, Grandmama, while I show him to his room?”

“Show him to his room?” she echoed. “What nonsense is that? Hasn’t he the same room as always?” But she tipped her chin up for another kiss from Miles and resumed her needlework, humming a little tune beneath her breath, in time with the tapping of her toes.

“What the devil?” Alistair exclaimed as soon as they were alone in the corridor, and the door to the winter parlor had shut behind them. It was the closest Miles had ever heard Alistair come to uttering an oath.

“Just—” Impatient himself, he gestured his friend toward the stairs, and eventually to a familiar suite of rooms on the back side of the house, comparatively dim and entirely free of flowers. Once inside, Miles sank into a chair and waited for the barrage of questions.

But Alistair, clever Alistair, had worked it all out on his own.

“You promised yourself you’d get married by the end of the month as a birthday gift to your grandmother,” he said, incredulous. “That was the other wager you referred to last night.”

Miles, who had been poised to explain and make an excuse, found himself with parted lips and nothing to say. Snapping shut his mouth, he simply nodded.

Grandmama worried when he was “alone.” That was how she phrased it, always. He might have corrected her: away from Lyneham Park, he was almost never alone. He made a point of surrounding himself with companions, male and female, though rarely the sort one could discuss with—to say nothing of introduce to—one’s grandmother.

He had understood, without either of them saying it, that what concerned her most was what would become of him after her death. Would he let himself go, too, content to be only the man he was away from this place? Would this place, which was everything to him because she had made it so, cease to be his comfortable home?

And so, he’d gone to Town in May with the vaguest notion rattling around in his head: wouldn’t it make Grandmama pleased if he found himself a wife, so he wouldn’t be alone when she was gone?