“You’re willing to forgo St. George’s and the whole…?” Nick waved his hand in upward spirals.

“My past is scandalous,” Leah reminded him, “and my father unwilling or unable to foot much of the bill for a wedding and the attendant nonsense. You promised your father not a fiancée, but a wife. Then too, should something befall me while we’re engaged, you’d be obliged to start hunting all over again, and there’s no need for that.”

“Suppose not.” Watching Leah move around the kitchen in her nightclothes, Nick abruptly wanted to get the actual wedding over and done with. She was right: the expedient course was the only sensible one.

“Good night.” Leah bent and placed a lingering kiss on Nick’s cheek. “My thanks for your company, Nicholas. You’ll talk Lord Val into playing us some lullabies?”

Lily of the valley, roses, and female warmth wafted momentarily to Nick’s nose.

“I will,” Nick managed, utterly stunned by that innocent little kiss on the cheek. Good heavens, did she have to go and smell so delicious when they were all alone in the damned deserted kitchen?

He watched her disappear up the back steps, let out a gusty breath, and forcibly shifted his thoughts from the view of her retreating derriere.

Nick saw his brother off to Belle Maison, and though Ethan’s errand was sad, the idea that Nick would join him at the family seat in a few days was comforting. Those logistics, however, meant that Darius Lindsey would have to be pressed into service to escort the ladies back to Town. Nick proposed that he and Leah call on her brother in person to request his aid.

“If you were my countess, you would acquire a passel of family,” Nick said as he boosted Leah into the saddle. “I have four sisters and three more brothers besides Ethan. They are placing bets on what kind of woman I will marry.”

“Bets?” Leah asked, frowning as Nick swung up onto his mare.

“Mostly the betting is divided between will she be short, or will she be tall,” Nick said, “but the sisters are more concerned about will she be mature or a simpering little twit from the schoolroom. Della, the youngest, is voting for the twit. She claims any woman of sense would not have me.”

Their talk moved forward on the same lines, with Nick describing each sibling in detail, along with stories of that brother or sister’s childhood, or recent antics. He spoke lovingly of all of them, as well as about his late stepmother, hoping the picture painted with words would increase the attractiveness of his proposal to Leah.

But gradually the talk slowed, until they were ambling along in silence.

“Penny for them?” Nick asked as they approached the gate to Darius Lindsey’s drive.

“Nicholas, I am not at all sure I have the fortitude to be your countess.”

“Fortitude?” Nick’s brow shot up. “I’m not going to pester you for your favors, Leah.”

“And that’s part of the problem,” she said gently. “I will want a kind of intimacy I can never have with you, and I know from experience what it’s like to yearn that way.”

Nick cocked his head in puzzlement, because this was female logic, and thus, a contradiction in terms. “You miss Frommer that much?”

“I miss Aaron, but mostly I feel crushing guilt for his death. I don’t refer to him, though, so much as I do to being raised by a man who cannot abide me. I wanted my papa to love me, Nick, to approve of me. As far back as I can recall, I was consumed with being as good as I could be, as smart, as demure, as clean, as quiet—whatever I could imagine him wanting me to be. I tried to excel at that. And he has never, not once, suggested he’s proud of me or pleased with me or anything but burdened by the fact that I draw breath.”

“I see,” Nick said, bringing his horse to a halt. To keep her safe, he was going to have to break her heart. This was not fair to him, and it was grossly unjust to her.

“I don’t know if you can see.” Leah’s gaze traveled over her brother’s dwelling, a modest edifice some would say was too humble for an earl’s spare. “I could not be what Wilton wanted, and he has grown to hate me.”

“You think I’ll hate you?”

“No, Nicholas,” Leah said as grooms approached to take their horses. “I’m afraid I will learn to hate you.”

Nick said nothing to that, as resentment was something he’d anticipated from her. Resentment not for withholding sexual intimacy, but rather because he was rescuing her from her father. Damsels with backbone, wit, heart, and dreams did not like needing rescue from their distress.

Hatred was a significant remove from resentment though, and the thought gave Nicholas pause. Leah assumed he would not be faithful, and Nick wasn’t going to argue her conclusion, but with her—with this whole business of acquiring a wife—he was at sea, and in too great a hurry to have the uncertainty end and the marriage get under way.

They collected Lindsey’s agreement to escort the ladies back to Town two days hence, and Nick was soon riding around the curve in Lindsey’s lane with Leah perched on the sedate mare at his side.

Nick paused as a noise came to them from the direction of Lindsey’s stables.

“What is that?” Leah asked, patting her mare. “The horses heard it too.”

“Just a child,” Nick decided. “A happy child, based on the glee in that shriek.”

“You know a happy child when you hear one?”

“I do. Or I know if you can’t tell if it’s a happy shriek, then it is, because an unhappy shriek is utterly apparent, painfully so.”

“Hmm.”

Nick slanted her a curious smile. “What does that mean?”

“For a man averse to siring children,” Leah remarked pleasantly, “you are certainly discerning about them.” She nudged her mare into a relaxed canter, sparing Nick the effort of a reply.

Which was a good thing, because he hadn’t one.

“You could stop pacing a hole in Lady Nita’s carpets,” Ethan suggested amiably.

“I can’t help but feel I should have escorted the ladies back to London,” Nick grumbled. “If Wilton means Leah harm, there is a limit to the protection her brothers can offer her.”

“Wilton will not touch a hair on her head,” Ethan replied, “if he thinks she’s about to bring a baby earl up to scratch.”

“And a particularly brawny baby earl at that,” Val added from the piano bench. “Besides, we’re going back to Town tomorrow, so sit you down and stop distracting me.”

“Ethan?” Nick aimed a look at his brother. “You coming with us?”

“I am. Nita is ready to roll us up in a carpet and toss us to the tinkers.”

“Your business with the earl is satisfactorily concluded?” Neither Ethan nor the earl had said a word to Nick, suggesting Ethan had been afflicted with a case of the dithers too.

“It is not. If I make plans to leave, then I’ll see to it.”

“You’ve just made plans to leave.”

Ethan scowled at him. “Nicholas, you are being irksome. Do we conclude you’ve been on your good behavior too long?”

“Not funny, Ethan,” Nick growled, but then he offered a conciliatory smile. “Though perhaps accurate.”

“I’ve made friends with one of the upstairs maids,” Val put in helpfully.

“Tonia.” Nick smiled briefly. “But you are a guest, while I am nominally in charge here. I do not trifle with the help.”

“She is trifling with my helpless young self,” Val said, smiling beatifically. “It’s a novel experience, and I could grow to like it.”

“Time to get young Windham back to Town,” Ethan murmured. “And your randy self too, Nicholas. I’m off to see the earl, and if I don’t emerge whole within the hour, fetch the surgeon and the vicar, for one of us will need same.”

He sauntered off, his casual tone belying the serious nature of his errand.

Val watched as Nick resumed his perambulations about a parlor that was larger than most but felt no bigger than one of the loose boxes in the stable. “I didn’t set out to tumble your maid, Nick. Apologies, if that’s what troubles you, but she was rather… persistent.”