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Satrine choked on a bite of sausage.
“Good gods,” Ansley groaned.
Now Loren was grinning.
It died when he pointed out, “Though, I didn’t enjoy Satrine sharing with me how generous you were with the knowledge of my service.”
“Loren.” Now Satrine was admonishing,
And she was correct.
This was not for the breakfast table and should be between him and his father.
Or that was the case yesterday.
She was now theirs, so she’d have to learn to sit through this kind of thing, for his father and he did it often.
“Did your betrothed rush to your side last night?” Ansley asked.
Loren knew were this was going and elected not to reply.
“Is she sitting with us right now, gracing our table?” Ansley pressed on.
Loren spared his fiancée a glance and saw she was grinning into her coffee cup.
She knew where it was heading too.
“Would that you have children who think you’re a fool well into adulthood,” Ansley bid.
“I don’t think you’re a fool,” Loren retorted. “I simply think you have a big mouth.”
“You are recovered. You are yourself. Satrine is here,” Ansley recounted the evidence. “There will be a day you will acknowledge I know what I’m doing. I simply hope that day comes when I’m still breathing.”
“And I never contended you don’t know what you’re doing,” Loren returned. “You’re the wisest man I know, and you are that to me in a manner I know you always will be. This doesn’t mean, from the time I was a child, you being thus wasn’t supremely annoying.”
When he finished, his father’s face was warm, his mouth soft.
But it was Satrine who spoke.
“You two are incredibly cute.”
Both Copeland men turned smiles to her then.
But they again died, and all of them tensed when they heard a woman’s imperious, “Do not! Do…not. No. No. No. I will no longer be denied!”
And then a woman his father’s age with a hat more enormous than any Satrine wore on her head, along with a severe traveling costume encasing her body, all in black, stopped, of a sort, in the doorway.
The “of a sort” bit was that she was batting Eaton with the handle of a black parasol.
Ansley stood and turned to her.
Loren and Satrine followed suit.
“Mary, stop that this instant,” Ansley demanded.
She ceased assaulting Eaton and confronted Loren’s father.
“Well, I never, Ansley Copeland!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been practically buried under your messages delivered by bird telling me, in your inimitable way, that way being polite to the point of painful, which is a skill you possess that has always been impossible for me to fathom. I digress! Messages telling me with the utmost courtesy to mind my own business when the world, it appears, is topsy-turvy!”
She was nearly shouting when she finished.
But no one was able to get a word in because she wasn’t done.
“Who, twenty-six years ago, advised you to approach my nephew?” She jerked her parasol handle to indicate herself. “Me. And who received a bird with the news that contract would not come to fruition.” She leaned forward. “Not me. The birds I received said something else entirely! Now, I demand to know who this Satrine is and what in the dickens is…is…” Her eyes went beyond Ansley, and she whispered, “By the gods.”
“Aunt Mary?” Satrine asked hesitantly.
Mary Livingstone, Baroness of Longdon, dropped her parasol, opened the large bag hanging on her wrist, pulled out an almost equally large fan made of lace, flipped it open, fanned herself, all this while reeling dramatically and calling out, “By Brigid! By the Morigan! By Cerdwin! The glorious gods have wrought a miracle.”
“Mary, calm yourself. This isn’t Maxine,” Ansley clipped. “It’s Satrine. Maxine’s twin.”
Mary shot straight.
“Her what?”
“Edgar abhorred twins,” Ansley told her. “He sent her away at birth. And he staged Corliss’s death after he was responsible for harming Maxine. After that, he sent them both away. The story is long. Fraught. And I will share it with you later. Satrine has lived it. She doesn’t need to go through it with everyone who learns it.”
“Edgar abhorred twins?” she asked breathily.
Loren glanced at Satrine to see her deathly pale.
“By Caylek!” Mary spat, and Loren returned his attention to her. “He was a bad seed. I was but a child myself, but even so, I told his mother. I said, ‘Smother that one, he’s a bad seed.’ Did she? No.”
“Oh my gods,” Satrine whispered.
It was a poor choice of thing to do.
She acquired Mary’s attention again.
As such, Mary stomped to her, lifted a hand high, as the woman was of diminutive stature, grasped Satrine’s chin, and dragged it side to side.
“A great beauty. Like your mother. Your father was a looker too. Unfortunately, the rascal was born with the soul of a knave.” She let Satrine go but didn’t stop talking. “I am unsurprised he sent you away, although I’m sorry for it, for your sake. But you were saved having to be around him, and I daresay in the now, you take my meaning.”
