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God. How pathetic he was, mooning over a woman who had thrown him over and then visited his sister for tea. If Phee had wanted to see him, all she would have needed to do was send word. He would have been at her town house in the next blink.

And yet, she had not written to him. Nary a word. No, he needed to salvage what remained of his pride and remember he wasn’t the one she had called upon today. Ro was. Perhaps Phee had not even expected he would be at home.

“Am I one of your favoritest peoples, Auntie?”

The girlish voice of Catherine broke in, and he turned to find the child had wandered to his elbow. She was an inquisitive thing, bold and bright. Just like her mama.

“But of course you are,” Ro responded at once with a soft smile.

She did love children. He had oft wondered at her refusal to marry and start a family of her own. His sister would have made an excellent mother, but her future was her own concern. He wouldn’t interfere.

“Do you know what I used to call Auntie Aphrodite when we were children?” he asked the girl.

Catherine’s big eyes settled upon him, curious. “No, Your Face. What was it?”

“Your Grace, darling,” Phee quietly corrected again.

He bit his lip to keep from chuckling at the child’s adorable confusion of his honorific. “Well, you see, since Auntie’s name is Aphrodite, which is a very difficult word for a small lad’s tongue to wrap around properly, I called her, quite simply, goose.”

“Goose!” Lady Catherine laughed delightedly. “Oh, how silly!”

“Yes, it was rather silly of me, was it not?” He resisted the urge to pat the child’s head. “I’m afraid I have done quite a lot of silly things in my life.”

Like falling in love with your mama, for instance, he thought grimly. Which has perhaps proven my greatest folly.

But naturally, he kept all that to himself.

“What else have you done that’s silly?” Phee’s daughter asked, clearly intrigued by the notion.

“Hmm.” He tapped at his chin, making a great show of thinking. “Let me see. There was the time I bit my sister’s big toe.”

Lady Catherine gasped. “You bited her toe?”

“I did,” he confirmed with a solemn nod. “She is my older sister, and until I was large enough to prevent such a thing from happening, she was often quite mercilessly thrashing me in the nursery.”

“I did no such thing,” Ro interrupted, her tone one of sisterly outrage. “I was an excellent sister to you.”

“On the occasion in question,” he continued to Lady Catherine in a conspiratorial fashion, “I was napping and woke to something tickling my hair. I thought it was a spider and screamed, which made my sister laugh uproariously. As it turned out, she was using her bare foot to play with my hair. That was when I took revenge by biting her big toe.”

“It hurt quite fiercely,” Ro said. “He had sharp teeth for such a small boy.”

“And you had big feet for such a small girl,” he countered.

“I did not have big feet,” his sister countered.

“It’s astonishing you didn’t trip upon them everywhere you went, until you grew into them,” he continued, enjoying teasing her for Lady Catherine’s wide-eyed benefit.

“Your Grace,” Phee intervened. “You mustn’t tell such tales to the children, lest you give them ideas of their own.”

He chuckled and glanced in her direction. “A little childish mischief never hurt anyone.”

“It certainly hurt my toe,” Ro pointed out.

“I wouldn’t bite my brother’s toe,” Lady Catherine confided. “Not never. His feets are stinky.”

“Lady Catherine,” Phee chided. “One mustn’t speak of such things at tea, and the plural is feet, not feets.”

“I’m sorry, Mama,” Lady Catherine said dutifully.