Chapter Five #2
Arden had heard of Beldor and knew it was somewhere out west, but he couldn’t so much as pick it out on a map, and he wagered most people were the same. It was a good place to claim to be from, if you didn’t want anyone calling your bluff.
A knock at the parlor door precipitated Hilda wheeling in a tea cart laden with not only scones and a pot of jam but a fresh pot of tea.
As she approached, the front wheels of the cart snagged on the edge of the plush pink rug that stretched beneath the seating area, causing the plates and teapot to clatter.
Hilda tried to pull the cart back, but the front wheel was caught in the carpet.
Arden set down his teacup. “Let me.” He hastened to his feet, grateful for the opportunity to do something other than talk about Delphinia Lindcourt.
“That isn’t necessary,” Hilda said cheerfully, hurrying toward the front of the cart to disentangle the wheel herself.
“I insist.” But in his haste to reach the wheel first, Arden crouched down in front of the cart too quickly, and Hilda’s knee collided with his forehead.
Sparks exploded behind his eyes, and he put a hand out to steady himself on the cart without thinking about the consequences until the cart tipped and Oriana let out a cry of surprise behind him.
Arden rushed to right the cart and himself, but it was too late. When he turned back toward his aunt and Oriana, he found that the pot of jam had careened off the cart, painting both women’s dresses and a swath of the rugs and sofas in splotches of strawberry jam.
He forced himself to meet his aunt’s horrified and furious gaze. If the chances of Oriana Mayles agreeing to marry him this morning seemed slim, they felt nonexistent now.
No sooner had Oriana left Gellis House in her jam-stained dress than Aunt Philomena turned to Arden with the belabored sigh one might expect from someone who had bravely suffered through great pain and suffering—which, given how tea with Oriana had gone, Arden had to admit was not entirely unwarranted.
“I’m beginning to see why you haven’t managed to find a wife in Strall.” Her tone was as dry as the scone she bit into.
Arden wasn’t sure what to say to that—he couldn’t very well deny it.
His past courtship attempts had been similarly disastrous and often just as messy.
He remembered what Arabella said last night.
“From what I’ve heard about Miss Mayles, I could have been charm personified and she would have likely spurned me like every man who has courted her before. ”
His aunt pursed her lips. “From where I sit, the issue isn’t Miss Mayles being . . . selective. The issue is you, who most certainly was not charm personified, even before you assaulted both of us with strawberry jam.”
Arden’s gaze dropped to his aunt’s skirt, the blue cotton dappled in red. She’d gotten far less of it than Oriana, but she still looked like the victim of some gruesome crime. Assaulted, though, seemed a bit dramatic.
“I was taken by surprise.” He dragged his gaze away from the jam stains. “I didn’t expect you to thrust her upon me so quickly.”
Aunt Philomena sniffed. “I expected you to be grateful for that. Time is hardly something we have in abundance.”
“No,” Arden allowed. “But I was wholly unprepared.”
“Unprepared,” his aunt echoed with a snort of laughter. “Gods of Old—you’re attempting to court a woman, not march into battle, Arden.”
In truth, Arden thought he might prefer battle, but he knew better than to say as much. Instead, he tried another approach. “Considering that I don’t have long to convince a woman to marry me, is it absolutely necessary for it to be Miss Mayles?”
His aunt blinked. “Do you find her objectionable?”
“Not at all,” Arden said quickly. “But perhaps, considering how utterly unobjectionable she is and how many men seem to be of the same opinion, not to mention how . . . selective she is—”
“Or the fact that you made an ass of yourself in front of her,” his aunt added wryly.
Arden ignored the jab. “Considering all of that, perhaps it might be in our best interest to cast a wider net.”
“Our best interest?” His aunt arched a single thin eyebrow.
Arden held her gaze. “You’re offering me a boon, Aunt Phi, I won’t deny that, but you wouldn’t have laid down this condition if you didn’t care whether or not I fulfilled it.
You want to see the Ryskamp legacy restored and insured for another generation before you die.
So yes, it would be in our best interest if I could turn my attention to other prospects that might be more . . . receptive.”
“After what I’ve seen today, the eligible women of Garlin should quake in their slippers at such a notion. But believe it or not, Arden, I did not choose Oriana on a whim, and I have the utmost faith that you will manage to triumph.”
“Do you?” Arden couldn’t help the note of skepticism that leaked into his voice.
His aunt paused, considering. “Well, markedly less faith now than an hour ago, I suppose, but I won’t change my mind on this.”
She departed without another word. Alone in the Rose Room, Arden slumped back against the sofa, turning to stare at the ceiling—also painted pink.
Arden was going to fail. He knew it as surely as he knew his own name. This last chance to reclaim his former fortune and former life would slip through his fingers, and he would have no one to blame but himself.
He would hate to sell the house, sell the centuries of heirlooms that filled it, sell the jewels and paintings and whatever else he needed to, but he could do it, if he had to.
He didn’t even resent the idea of finding work—he’d always had a good head for numbers, and he knew that had been their saving grace in the last year.
A smaller house, a reduced staff, a job to finance it all—it might not be the life he was born and raised for, but it was a life he could be happy with.
But, as always happened when his thoughts turned down that path, a seed of guilt sprouted in his stomach at the thought of his parents, his grandfather, the faces of all those centuries of Ryskamps that had watched him grow up from their various paintings throughout the house.
Countless generations had built the Ryskamp legacy brick by brick, and he would forever be known as the one who destroyed it all.
If his parents were still alive, they would weep with shame.
He couldn’t do that to them, or to the long line of ancestors that came before him.
He would not be the end of the Ryskamps’ venerated story, not while there was a single thread of hope to cling to.
Arden groaned, rising to his feet and beginning to pace.
He had two months to convince Oriana Mayles to marry him—an impossible task.
Except it wasn’t, was it? His aunt had said it herself: Delphinia Lindcourt had arrived in Garlin and gotten Thaddeus Mayles to propose in only a fortnight.
True, Delphinia Lindcourt didn’t actually exist, but if anything, that only made the feat more impressive.
Arden could begrudgingly admit that. It wasn’t a fluke either.
When she’d been calling herself Arabella Strickland, he’d proposed to her after a similarly brief courtship.
Last night, she’d claimed there had been eight other fiancés, and Arden would bet that those, too, had been quick engagements.
He needed her help—that was more evident now than it had been before—but he had no card to play. Arden stopped short in his pacing, an idea striking him like a bolt of lightning.
He might not have a card left to play, but Arabella didn’t know that. All he had to do was prove he was a better liar than she believed him to be.