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‘I think it must be, although she is a very gentle dictator. So—will you recommend that the place is restored?’
‘I do not think so.’ Giles shook his head. ‘It was badly built in the first place and then neglected for too long. But I am working up the costing for the earl so he has a fair comparison to set against Repton’s ambitious schemes.’
‘But that would be such a pity—and you like the place, do you not?’
‘It is not my money. My job is to give the earl a professional opinion. I am not an amateur, Isobel. I am a professional, called in like the doctor or the lawyer to deliver the hard truths.’
‘But surely you are different? You are, after all, a gentleman—’
Giles turned on his heel and faced her, his expression mocking. ‘Do you recall what you called me when I kissed you?’
‘A…bastard,’ she faltered, ashamed. She should never had said it. It was a word she had never used in cold blood. A word she loathed.
‘And that is exactly, and precisely, what I am. Not a gentleman at all.’
‘But you are,’ Isobel protested. He was born out of wedlock? ‘You speak like a gentleman, you dress like one, your manner in society, your education—’
‘I was brought up as one, certainly,’ Giles agreed. He did not appear at all embarrassed about discussing his parentage. Isobel had never heard illegitimacy mentioned in anything but hushed whispers as a deep shame. How could he be so open about it? ‘But my father was a common soldier, my grandfather a head gardener.’
‘Then how on earth…? Oh.’ Light dawned. His eccentric mother. ‘Your mother?’ His mother had kept him. What courage that must have taken. What love. Isobel bit her lip.
‘My mother is the Dowager Marchioness of Faversham.’ Isobel felt her jaw drop and closed her mouth. An aristocratic lady openly keeping a love child? It was unheard of. ‘She scorns convention and gossip and the opinion of the world. She has gone her own way and she took her son with her.’ He strolled back into the large chamber and began to gather up the papers on the table.
‘Until you left university,’ Isobel stated, suddenly sure. A wealthy dowager would have the money and the power, perhaps, to insist on keeping her baby. Not everyone had that choice, she told herself. Sometimes there was none. ‘She did not want you to study a profession, did she?’ She made herself focus on the man in front of her and his situation. ‘That was when you went your own way.’
‘Perceptive of you. She expected me to enliven society, just as she does.’ He shrugged. ‘I am accepted widely—I know most of the men of my age from school and university, after all. I am not received at Court, of course, and not in the homes of the starchier matrons with marriageable girls on their hands.’
Isobel felt the colour mount in her cheeks. No wonder he was wary of female attention. If his mother was notorious, then he, with his looks, would be irresistible to the foolish girls who wanted adventure or a dangerous flirtation. Giles Harker was the most tempting kind of forbidden fruit.
‘Of course,’ she said steadily, determined not to be missish. ‘You are not at all eligible. I can quite see that might make for some…awkwardness at times. It will be difficult for you to find a suitable bride, I imagine.’
‘Again, you see very clearly. I cannot marry within society. If I wed the daughter of a Cit or some country squire, then she will not be accepted in the circles in which I am tolerated now. There is a careful balance to be struck in homes such as this—and I spend a lot of my time in aristocratic households. We all pretend I am a gentleman. A wife who is not from the same world will not fit in, will spoil the illusion.’
‘It will be easier as your practice grows and your wealth with it.’ Isobel bit her lip as she pondered the problem. ‘You could wed the daughter of another successful professional man, one who has the education and upbringing to fit in as you do.’
Giles stopped in the act of rapping a handful of papers on the desk to align them. Isobel’s reaction to his parentage was undeniably startling—it was almost as though she understood and sympathised. ‘Do you plot all your friends’ lives so carefully for them? Set them all to partners?’
‘Of course not. It is just that you are a rather different case. Unusual.’ She put her head on one side and contemplated him as though trying to decide where to place an exotic plant in a flower border or a new ornament on a shelf. ‘I would never dream of actually matchmaking.’
‘Why not? It seems to be a popular female preoccupation.’
Now, why that tight-lipped look again, this time accompanied by colour on her cheekbones? ‘Marriage is enough of a lottery as it is, without one’s acquaintances interfering in it for amusement or mischief,’ she said with a tartness that seemed entirely genuine.
‘You are the victim of that?’ Giles stuffed his papers into the saddlebag he had brought up with him.
‘Oh, yes, of course. I am single and dangerously close to dwindling into a spinster. It is the duty of every right-thinking lady of my acquaintance to find me a husband.’
There was something more than irritation over being the target of well-meaning matchmaking, although he could not put his finger on what it was. Anger, certainly, but beneath that he sensed a deep unhappiness that Isobel was too proud to show.
‘Ah, well,’ Giles said peaceably, ‘we are both safe here, it seems. The Yorke girls are well behaved and well chaperoned and there are no eligible gentlemen for the countess to foist upon you.’
‘Thank goodness,’ Isobel said with real feeling. ‘But I am disturbing you when you have work to do. I will go on with my walk now I have admired the view from up here.’
‘I do not mind being disturbed.’ He thought he had kept the double meaning out of his voice—he was finding her unaccountably disturbing on a number of levels—but she bit her lower lip as though she was controlling a sharp retort. Or just possibly a smile, although she turned abruptly before he could be quite certain. ‘Where are you going to go now?’
‘I do not know.’ Isobel stood looking out of the window.
‘The avenue running north from here is pleasant. It skirts the wood.’
