“And how many have you botched.”
“Imogen!” the other twin swatted her sister’s arm.
“It’s a fair question,” Lady Helston insisted. “We need to know if she’s made more matches than failed.”
“It is a fair question, and one I am happy to answer.” With the men gone, Emma didn’t feel quite so disorganized. The sisters offered her their intense attention, but there were fewer names to remember. And she was good at singing her own praises. “It is only smart to inquire after my odds of offering Lady Felicity a good match. I have failed three times.”
“Three,” the twins said together.
“Excellent odds.” Lady Noble considered the leaping flames in the grate. “How do you do it?”
“I search for compatibility. Does the man provide what the lady needs and vice versa. But it is more complicated than that, often. Because sometimes what we say we need is not what we actually need. So, I search more deeply. For the unsaid thing. Once that is discovered…” She lifted her palms to the ceiling. “Everything falls into place.”
Lady Norton joined Emma at the fire, warming her hands. “It sounds thorough.”
“What about attraction?” Mrs. Trent asked.
Attraction was often inconvenient. Best if Emma left that unsaid. “It is important. But there are many different ways of being attracted to someone.”
“What about love?” Lady Felicity whispered.
Emma groped for the right words. Here was a room of women clearly in love or lust or both with their husbands. If she misspoke, they would not trust her.
“For some, love is a potent and crucial component of any match. For others, it is not. That is one of the needs I keep in mind when making my suggestions.”
“Sounds wise.” One of the twins ran her thumb down the length of the book in her lap.
Mrs. Kingston walked the perimeter of the room. “Would you have recommended an earl’s bastard for a duke’s daughter? In those basic ways you mention, no one would claim my husband and I are compatible, and yet…” She shrugged. “He is everything I need.”
Emma would not be flustered. “That is what I mean by looking deeper. There are needs more fundamental than social standing, than accidents of birth.”
That seemed to appease Mrs. Kingston, who nodded, a small smile on her lips.
June bounced on the couch, tucking her legs beneath her. “I’m curious. What kind of wife would you seek out for my brother?”
“The duke?” Emma’s heart beat fast as the hooves of a racing horse. “I am not here to match him.”
Gertrude elbowed her youngest sister in the ribs. “And he already has a lady lined up to wed.”
Emma’s horse-racing heart stopped. Had he a lady in the wings, then? And he’d kissed her! The cad. No wonder he’d been so eager to forget last night. He didn’t want anyone toknow. Well, neither did she. She needed another scandal like she needed scalding water poured in her lap.
“It is not set in stone yet,” Lady Noble said. “We’ll see what happens with Lady Huxley.”
“But couldn’t Lady Emma help make sure Samuel makes the right choice?” Lady June wrinkled her nose. “I saw him leave the drawing room earlier, after meeting with Lady Huxley, and he did not seem struck down by love. Lady Emma, you must help him.”
“I cannot help where I am not asked to.” Emma softened the rejection with a smile.
Lady Noble snapped to her feet. “Lady Emma does not have to help with anything if she does not desire. Come along, June, all of you. I think it’s time we leave Felicity alone with her matchmaker.”
The departing ladies took every sound but the crackling in the fireplace with them, and Emma sat on the sofa beside the young woman. Lady Felicity appeared overwhelmed. Close to tears, even. Little wisps of hair surrounded her ears, trailed along her neck, just like Glenna’s did. Sisters.
A veritable plague.But one Emma would catch over and over again. Willingly.
She picked each word carefully. “I do not have to be here if you do not wish it. I understand your brother is eager to see you wed, but he also told me, quite firmly, that who and when is your choice. It is cold in Scotland this time of year, but I will return if you say the word, and I’ll never bother you again.”
Lady Felicity shook her head. “Do not go. You are hope to me.” She clutched her hands in her lap, the knuckles turning white. “I tried to choose a man on my own, and I-I chose wrong. I do not trust myself to try again. Alone. And I do not wish to wait. He… the man I… he’s engaged to marry another.”
And clearly, she wished to follow suit, to show the world and possibly herself she was not some man’s reject.
