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Mum’s eyebrows shot up. “Well, that’s your plus one if you don’t find one.”
“The wedding is in a little under three weeks. Where am I supposed to find a plus one in that time?”
“I don’t know, darling, but I’m just warning you what’s going to happen if you don’t find one.”
“Did you try telling her no?”
“Did I try arguing with the two people who hate me? Absolutely not,” she replied, snorting as if I’d asked her the most stupid question ever.
In her defence, it was a stupid question.
Nobody told my grandparents ‘No.’ Especially not my mother.
Their relationship was tempestuous at best, nuclear war at worst.
It generally hovered somewhere in the middle of Roman Empire-esque.
“Fair enough,” I replied. “Seriously. Do you not have any friends whose daughters I can steal for a week?”
“If your sister was getting married in Greece? Absolutely. But no offense, Will, nobody wants to go to the Scottish Highlands in bloody February. Except your sister.”
I grimaced. She was right. My sister’s desire for a snowy wedding—which wasn’t a given, even in the middle of nowhere where the Glenroch estate was—meant our final week of February and first of March would be spent in the cold of northern Scotland.
None of us were happy about it, but my parents were just glad that my grandfather was finally letting my mother in the house.
“Freya is getting married on March first,” I pointed out.
“That’s just February twenty-ninth in disguise.”
I sighed.
I wasn’t going to argue.
“I’ll figure something out,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. “Or I’ll call Grandma and see if she can talk Grandpa out of it.”
“Good luck with that.” She turned around and then paused, looking back at me over her shoulder. “Consider Emily Darlington.”
I frowned. “Lord Hampton’s niece?”
“Yes. She’s not strictly the aristocracy, but she’s got a prestigious enough bloodline that your grandfather might not have a stroke if you brought her. She’s single, and I believe she had an interest in you a couple of years ago.”
She did?
That was news to me.
“Oh,” I replied. “Are you sure? She never mentioned it.”
“You were dating Sylvia at that point.”
That’d be why she didn’t mention it.
I couldn’t say I’d ever been particularly interested in Emily. Not that she was unattractive or a horrible person. She was perfectly lovely, and I was happy to have a conversation with her if our paths happened to cross, but I simply couldn’t remember ever being interested in her as more than a friend.
Which, unfortunately, made her a less than desirable option to be my plus one. I didn’t want to give her any wrong ideas, and it didn’t matter if I told her straight up it was purely as friends.
I would be taking her away for a long weekend to Scotland to my sister’s wedding.
No woman would believe it was just friends.
